evidently entertaining with animated reminiscences. This was the scrap of his talk that reached my ears through the hubbub—

"Yes, my comrades, it was I—moi qui vous parle—who made the revolution of 1848! It is not in the histories, you tell me? Then so much the worse for the histories, I answer."

"'Yes, my comrades, it was I who made the revolution of 1848!'"

One naturally desired the better acquaintance of an old man who talked like that. My Milanese friend presented me to him with ceremony, as though he were introducing two rival potentates. I bowed low, with a due sense of the honour done to me, and was received with grave condescension; and then I told Stromboli that I fancied that I had heard his name before.

"In connection, if I am not mistaken," I added, "with some revolutionary movement."

Stromboli's face lighted with a smile.

Whether it was a smile of vanity, or a smile of scorn for the ignorance of the man who was not quite sure whether he had ever heard of him or not, I cannot altogether determine; but there the smile was, and it lasted through several sentences.

"It is not impossible," he said, "for I have done things—aye, and I have suffered things! I have been condemned to death by Spaniards at Santiago de Cuba! I checked the worst excesses of the Paris Commune! And there are other stories. The revolutions, in short, have kept me very busy."

"You speak," I protested, "as though to be a revolutionist were a calling, a profession, a métier."

The last word seemed to please him; he smiled again as he rolled it over on his tongue.

"Un métier? Je le crois bien. And why not? Is there no need for 'skilled labour' in the making of a revolution? No less, I take it, than in the building of a battleship. Why, yes, then, if you choose to put it so, I am a revolutionist by métier."

"But still——"

The eyes flashed, and the smile changed its character.

"A poor métier, do you think? Then think again. It has its hazards? Granted. It is less safe than your métier of writing for the newspapers? Granted also. But at least it quickens the pulse and stirs the blood. At the end of it, if one is still alive, one can at least boast that one has lived. To have gambled with death in one's youth—that is something worth remembering in one's old age. And I have gambled with death wherever I could find a worthy stake to play for. If I should ever tell my stories——"

But when a man talks in that way it needs little pressure to get the stories told, and I had not pursued my acquaintance with Stromboli very far before the pressure was applied.

"Voyons!" he said to me one day. "I have creditors; they ask for money, a thing which I have had little leisure to amass. If there were a way of turning stories into money!"

To his astonishment I answered that with some stories, at all events, there was a way; and he forthwith told me the following, in order that the experiment might be tried. I give it in his own words, and call it—

THE GUNS OF THE DUC DE MONTPENSIER.

"Let me begin at the beginning.

"Though I am an old man, you cannot expect my memory to go further back than 1848. But it was I who made the French Revolution of that year. Without me there would have been a revolt; but it was thanks to me—it was thanks to Jean Antoine Stromboli Kosnapulski—that the revolt became a revolution.

"I was a young man in those days, twenty years old, a student at the University of Paris. I was tall, with long black hair that flowed over my collar; strong as though my muscles were of whip-cord; a swordsman who, at the salle d'armes, could as often as not disarm the fencing master. And when I was not studying—which was often—I talked politics in the cafés of the Latin quarter. There were those who said—behind my back—that I talked nonsense. They would not have dared to say it to my face; and they knew better afterwards.

"One of my comrades, however, seemed to understand me better than the others. His name was Jacques Durand; and he came to me one day with a proposal.

"'Stromboli,' he whispered in my ear. 'You know that we're trying to get up a revolution?'

"I nodded.

"'You ought to be one of us, Stromboli. You ought to join the Society of the Friends of Revolution.'

"'I never heard of that Society,' I answered.

"'That's because it's a secret society,' Jacques explained. 'You can't expect to hear about secret societies before you're asked to join them. The more secret they are the better. You can understand that, can't you?'

"Of course I could understand that.

"'I was asked to get you into it,' Jacques continued. 'A man like you——'

"One ought not, of course, to be susceptible to that sort of flattery. But one is as one is made; and I had spoken in favour of the revolution in the cafés. So it was agreed, and an appointment was arranged.

"'Next Sunday evening,' Jacques whispered.

"'Next Sunday evening,' I replied.

"And now picture me at this important turning point of my career. Observe me guided by my comrade through many dark and dangerous streets, where it seemed to me that a man would carry his life in his hands, unless he were, like myself, of formidable appearance. Our destination was a cellar, underneath a café, and we reached it by a flight of narrow, winding, slimy stairs. Jacques gave the secret signal; three slow, loud knocks upon the panel of the door, and then the humming of two lines of the Carmagnole—

'Vive le son

Du canon.'

There was a rattling of chains, and then the door was opened and we were admitted.

"'Sit down, comrade,' said one who seemed to be the President, and I took the place that had been kept vacant for me, and, as my eyes became used to the gloom, gradually surveyed the scene.

"There were some twenty of us, grouped round a plain deal table. Red flags were draped