I've got to pay for it-that is, I thought it was fun at the time. I am not going to cry any baby act and beg off, or anything, if that's what you mean. But there is something I'd like to say if I thought you would believe me." He frowned down at the green table as though the words he wanted would not come, and his eyes wandered from one face to another, until they rested upon the bowed head of the only woman in the room. They remained there for some short time, and then Barrow drew in his breath more quickly, and turned with something like a show of confidence to the jury. "All that man said of me is true," he said. He gave a toss of his hands as a man throws away the reins. "I admit all he says. I am a back number; I am out of date; I was a loafer and a blackguard. I never shot any man in the back, nor I never assassinated no one; but that's neither here nor there. I'm not in a place where I can expect people to pick out their words; but, as he says, I am a bad lot. He says I have enjoyed a reputation as a desperado. I am not bragging of that; I just ask you to remember that he said it. Remember it of I was not the sort to back down to man or beast, and I am not now. I am not backing down now; I am taking my punishment. Whatever you please to make it, I'll take it; and that," he went on, more slowly, "makes it harder for me to ask what I want to ask, and make you all believe I am not asking it for myself." me. He stopped, and the silence in the room seemed to give him some faint encouragement of sympathy, though it was rather the silence of curiosity. Colonel Stogart gave a stern look up wards, and asked the prisoner's wife, in a whisper, if she knew what her husband meant to say, but she shook her head. She did not know. The District Attorney smiled indulgently at the prisoner and at the men about him, but they were watching the prisoner. "That man there," said Barrow at last, pointing with one gaunt hand at the boy attorney, "told you I had no part or parcel in this city or in this world; that I belonged to the past; that I had ought to be dead. Now that's not so. I have just one thing that belongs to this city and this world-and to me; one thing that I couldn't take to jail with me, and that I'll have to leave behind me when I go back to it. I mean my wife." The prisoner stopped, and looked so steadily at one place below him that those in the back of the court guessed for the first time that Mrs. Barrow was in the room, and craned forward to look at her, and there was a moment of confusion and a murmur of “Get back there! Sit still!" The prisoner turned to Judge Truax again and squared his broad shoulders, making the more conspicuous his narrow and sunken chest. 66 "You, sir," he said, quietly, with a change from the tone of braggadocio with which he had begun to speak, remember her, sir, when I married her, twelve years ago. She was Henry Holman's daughter, he who owned the San Iago Ranch and the triangle brand. I took her from the home she had with her father against that gentleman's wishes, sir, to live with me over my dance-hall at the Silver Star. You may remember her as she was then. She gave up everything a woman ought to have to come to me. She thought she was going to be happy with me; that's why she come, I guess. Maybe she was happy for about two weeks. After that first two weeks her life, sir, was a hell, and I made it a hell. I was drunk most of the time, or sleeping it off, and ugly -tempered when I was sober. There was shooting and carrying on all day and night down-stairs, and she didn't dare to leave her room. Besides that, she cared for me, and she was afraid every minute I was going to get killed. That's the way she lived for two years. Respectable women wouldn't speak to her because she was my wife; even them that were friends of hers when she lived on the ranch wouldn't speak to her on the street-and she had no children. That was her life; she lived alone over the dance-hall; and sometimes when I was drunk-I beat her." The man's white face reddened slowly as he said this; and he stopped, and then continued more quickly, with his eyes still fixed on those of the Judge: "At the end of two years I killed Welsh, and they sent me to the penitentiary for ten years, and she was free. She could have gone back to her folks and got a divorce if she'd wanted to, and never seen me again. It was an escape most women 'd gone down on their knees and thanked their Maker for, and blessed the day they'd been freed from a blackguard- gered me. And now, when I want to do ly drunken brute. "But what did this woman do-my wife, the woman I misused and beat and dragged down in the mud with me? She was too mighty proud to go back to her people or to the friends who shook her when she was in trouble; and she sold out the place, and bought a ranch with the money, and worked it by herself, worked it day and night, until in ten years she had made herself an old woman, as you see she is to-day. "And for what? To get me free again; to bring me things to eat in jail, and picture papers and tobacco-when she was living on bacon and potatoes, and drinking alkali water-working to pay for a lawyer to fight for me-to pay for the best lawyer! She worked in the fields with her own hands, planting and ploughing, working as I never worked for myself in my whole lazy, rotten life. That's what that woman there did for me." The man stopped suddenly, and turned with a puzzled look towards where his wife sat, for she had dropped her head on the table in front of her, and he had heard her sobbing. "And what I want to ask of you, sir, is to let me have two years out of jail to show her how I feel about it. I ask you not to send me back for life, sir. Give me just two years-two years of my life while I have some strength left to work for her as she worked for me. I only want to show her how I care for her now. I had the chance, and I wouldn't take it; and now, sir, I want to show her that I know and understand-now when it's too late. It's all I've thought of when I was in jail, to be able to see her sitting in her own kitchen with her hands folded, and me working and sweating in the fields for her, working till every bone ached, trying to make it up to her. "And I can't," the man cried, suddenly, losing the control he had forced upon himself, and tossing his hands up above his head, and with his eyes fixed hopelessly on the bowed head below him. can't! It's too late! It's too late!" "I He turned and faced the crowd and the District Attorney defiantly. "I am not crying for the men I killed. They're dead. I can't bring them back. But she's not dead, and I treated her worse than I treated them. She never harmed me, nor got in my way, nor an what I can for her in the little time that's left, he tells you I'm a 'relic of the past,' that civilization is too good for me, that you must bury me until it's time to bury me for good. Just when I've got something I must live for, something I've got to do. Don't you believe me? Don't you understand?" He turned again towards the Judge, and beat the rail before him impotently with his wasted hand. "Don't send me back for life," he cried. "Give me a few years to work for her-two years, one year-to show her what I feel here, what I never felt for her before. Look at her, gentlemen. Look how worn she is and poorly, and look at her hands, and you men must feel how I feel. I don't ask you for myself. I don't want to go free on my own account. I am asking it for that woman-yes, and for myself too. I am playing to 'get back,' gentlemen. I've lost what I had, and I want to get back; and," he cried, querulously, "the game keeps going against me. It's only a few years' freedom I want. Send me back for thirty years, but not for life. My God! Judge, don't bury me alive, as that man asked you to. I'm not civilized, maybe; ways have changed. not the man I knew; you are gers to me. But I could learn. I would not bother you in the old way. I only want to live with her. I won't harm the rest of you. Give me this last chance. Let me prove that what I'm saying is true." You are all stran The man stopped and stood, opening and shutting his hands upon the rail, and searching with desperate eagerness from face to face, as one who has staked all he has watches the wheel spinning his fortune away. The gentlemen of the jury sat quite motionless, looking straight ahead at the blinding sun, which came through the high uncurtained windows opposite. Outside, the wind banged the shutters against the wall, and whistled up the street and round the tin corners of the building, but inside, the room was very silent. The Mexicans at the door, who could not understand, looked curiously at the faces of the men around them, and made sure that they had missed something of much importance. For a moment no one moved, until there was a sudden stir around the District Attorney's table, and the men stepped aside THERE, NOW, DON'T YOU TAKE ON SO." and let the woman pass them and throw herself against the prisoner's box. The prisoner bent his tall gaunt figure over the rail, and as the woman pressed his one hand against her face, touched her shoulders with the other awkwardly. "There, now," he whispered, soothingly, "don't you take on so. Now you know how I feel, it's all right; don't take on." Judge Truax looked at the paper on his desk for some seconds, and raised his head, coughing as he did so. "It lies-" Judge Truax began, and then stopped, and began again in a more certain tone: "It lies at the discretion of this court to sentence the prisoner to a term of imprisonment of two years, or for an indefinite period, or for life. Owing to-- On accircumstances which were-have arisen-this sentence is suspended. This court stands adjourned." count of certain As he finished he sprang out of his chair impulsively, and with a quick authoritative nod to the young District Attorney,came quickly down the steps of the platform. Young Harvey met him at the foot with wide-open eyes. The older man hesitated, and placed his hand upon the District Attorney's shoulder. "Harry," he said. His voice was shaken, and his hand trembled on the arm of his protégé, for he was an old man and easily moved. "Harry, my boy," he said, "could you go to Austin and repeat the speech that man has just made to the Governor?" The boy orator laughed, and took one of the older man's hands in both of his and pressed it quickly. "I'd like d-d well to try," he said. THAT admirable prototype of modern Prussian, Heinrich Heine, likened France to a great garden where the finest flowers have been culled to make a bouquet, and that bouquet is called Paris. All that is great in love or in hatred, in sentiment or in thought, in knowledge or in power, in happiness or in misfortune, tends to become concentrated in Paris, insomuch that when we consider the great assembly of distinguished or celebrated men who are found there, the city seems like a veritable Pantheon of living glory. It was Heine, too, who explained so daintily why French actors are superior to all others, and the reason is that all French people are born comedians. They have the talent of learning their parts so well in all the situations of life, and of draping themselves so advantageously, that it is a pleasure to watch them. Among the French, alike in life, in liter-, ature, and in the plastic arts, the theatrical element dominates, and that, too, so pre-eminently that Heine was inclined to look upon the whole history of France as a grand comedy represented for the benefit of humanity in general. perfect pavements of flag-stones, wood, and bitumen, the feet of the Parisians shiny. Indeed, the streets of Paris are so nicely washed, swabbed, and swept that the shoeblacks cannot live by their unaided profession, any more than lyric poets, and therefore, unless they happen to possess independent means, they are obliged to eke out a modest existence by carrying love-letters or shaving poodles. With its great boulevards, its urban parks, squares, and gardens, its avenues lined with stupendous architecture, its vast hotels and gorgeous cafés, its trees and flowers and great promenades, its shops and its restaurants, Paris, the Paris of Baron Haussmann, has become the headquarters of the luxury of Europe. and of the whole civilized world. For luxury invites luxury, and if Paris had remained the picturesque, miserable, and prodigious city which Victor Hugo has described in his novel Notre Dame de Paris - the city whose narrow streets and mysterious gables were impressed with the tragedies and struggles of ten centuries of history and with the souvenirs of twenty revolutions—it would never have attracted those countless visitors In the "huge magazin of men and ren- from the Old World and the New, who are, dezvous of forreners," as old James Howell as a rule, neither poets nor thinkers nor called Paris nearly three centuries ago, artists, but who, nevertheless, contribute one may always see an amusing comedy to the wealth and splendor which make being played in beautiful scenery. The Paris what it is, the modern Athens, or spectacle of Parisian life is as excellently the modern Byzantium. organized as the city itself. Everything is neatly and precisely arranged by times and seasons; the succession of incidents is fixed with a certain suave monotony; and from year's end to year's end the whole play is so lucid that the visitor may drop in at any moment during the performance and immediately catch the thread of the argument. During the spring days, when the sunshine seems real once more, and when the air has that tepid quality which the imaginative poet Thomson has celebrated in his "Seasons," there is no city more beautiful than Paris, or more appropriate for the enjoyment of curious and meditative lounging. Gray Paris has the first of all material conditions requisite for pleasant loitering-it is well paved. Thanks to More completely than any other city, Paris realizes the conception of the Athenian Republic, full of light and joyous hum, sung by the poets, sculptured by the statuaries, idealized by the painters, employing for the happiness of its children all the resources of the sciences and the arts, offering to all feet alike its staircases of white marble, and presenting against the background of a tranquil blue sky the pediments of its palaces and its temples. The illusion is all the more complete because Paris seems at first sight to be wholly given up to pleasure. The number of people of leisure in Paris is so great that unless we made a very thorough and minute examination of the facts, we might be tempted to imagine that the emancipation of humanity had |