one of them, whom Labédoyère soon discovered to be the capobrigante. Towards the following afternoon the band arrived with their captive at a mountain cave which was evidently their lair, and where they had tolerably comfortable quarters. They set food and wine before their prisoner, of which he partook with an appetite sharpened by his long fast and fatiguing walk. He was then requested to send a note to the Marchese for a handsome ransom, on receipt of which by the brigands he would be conducted in safety to the neighbourhood of Taormina. It was in vain that Labédoyère explained that he had no claim whatever on the generosity of the Marchese ; equally in vain that he defied them to shoot him. The chief told him in the blandest tones that they never shot a captive. After the * ransom became due they sent a piece of his body at intervals, while life lasted, to quicken the zeal of his family and friends. Labédoyère shuddered. He could face death, but not by piecemeal mutilation. He wrote the note to the Marchese, and awaited the issue with all the stoicism at his command.

In the course of the day the band was augmented by the arrival of four more brigands who had been on an expedition-an unsuccessful one-in another direction. Labédoyère did not at first take any particular notice of the new arrivals. By-and-by he becaine conscious that he was apparently an object of curiosity or interest to one of them, whose eyes he found steadily fixed on him whenever he looked in that direction. At last he returned the man's gaze, and was at once convinced that he had seen the face before. All at once it flashed on him that the man was a Genoese soldier who had been badly wounded on the field of Arcola. Labédoyère happened to be passing at the moment that the wounded man was about to be thrown into a pit among a number of dead bodies, and, finding that his pulse was going, he had him carried to his tent. The man recovered, thanks to Labédoyère's care, and was set at liberty by Labédoyère's influence. In the course of the day he managed to slip a paper into Labédoyère's hands on which were scrawled these words: I shall be one of your guard to-night, and will help you to escape. But beware of the hound.' And so it fell out. In the afternoon the chief departed with the band, leaving two of them, of whom the Genoese was one, to guard the prisoner. The guards' orders were that neither of them was to allow the other to sleep for a moment. That night one of them—not the Genoese-fell fast asleep. The Genoese proposed to kill him; but Labédoyère would not consent. He agreed, however, to the proposal of the Genoese that they should bind and gag the sleeping brigand, and then make their escape. For the Genoese had made up his mind to flee with Labédoyère, since he would certainly be put to death for conniving at the prisoner's escape. Besides, he had got disgusted with brigand life.

The sleeping brigand was soon overpowered, and the two fugitives fled for their lives. It was lucky for Labédoyère that he was not

His companion, however, knew the way to Taormina, and they hurried on as fast as their feet could carry them, in the hope of being beyond the reach of capture by daybreak. For the Genoese did not think it safe to pursue their journey after dawn, since he did not know what direction the band had taken, and wished to avoid the risk of meeting it. He took the further precaution, whenever they came to a stream, to wade through it for a considerable distance and get his companion to do the same, in order to throw the hound off the scent in the event of their being pursued. Towards daybreak they found themselves following the course of a wide but shallow mountain stream, whose banks were covered with brushwood. By the advice of the Genoese they walked into the stream and waded back through the midst of it for about a quarter of a mile till they came to a rock standing in the middle of a deep pool, and covered with long grass and dense jungle. To this rock they both swam, and then hid themselves, all dripping as they were, in the middle of the thicket. They were just in time, for the quick ear of the Genoese caught in the distance the deep baying of the bloodhound.

The hound was then so close that they could see the swaying of the bushes on the bank of the stream as he made his way through them. At length he reached the place where they had entered the water. He plunged at once into the stream and ran up and down the opposite bank. He had lost the scent, and after sundry desperate efforts to recover it, he stood stock still and bayed aloud his disappointment.

Labédoyère and his companion were interested witnesses of all this, and also of the arrival on the scene, half an hour later, of the capobrigante and four of his band. They searched diligently both sides of the stream, and passed and re-passed within a few yards of the hiding-place of the men they were in search of. Fortunately it never occurred to them to think of searching that. At last, with some curses at the dog, they appeared to give up the pursuit. But the fugitives did not think it safe to leave their place of concealment till it was quite dark. Then they resumed their flight with a will, and found themselves in the early morning at the Villa San Juliano.

Labédoyère was greeted as one risen from the dead. The Marchese had sent to his banker in Catania for the ransom money. But that, of course, was no longer necessary. The mail had arrived during Labédoyère's absence, and he found among his letters, to his great surprise, a missive from the old priest summoning him at once to Paris. His friends tried hard to dissuade him from obeying the summons. But the old priest had obtained an ascendency over him which he could not shake off, and he started the following day for Paris, taking the Genoese ex-brigand with him.

On arriving in Paris, he went without delay to the address which the old priest had given him, but found the old man had gone out of town. He had, however, left a note behind him for Labédoyère

of June. It was now the 17th of June, and Labédoyère sent out that evening an invitation to two of his most intimate and most seriousminded friends to dine with him on the fatal night. He added in a postscript that they would oblige him by retiring at ten o'clock. They knew what that meant, for the story of his mysterious doom had got abroad among his friends. The fatal twenty-third arrived, and Labédoyère and his two friends dined quietly together.

6

At ten he was left alone, as he thought. He placed himself in an arm-chair in the room in which they had just dined, and began to read Pascal's Pensées,' his eyes meanwhile glancing occasionally off the page of the book to the face of the clock on the mantelpiece opposite. Eleven o'clock struck, and Labédoyère fancied that a clammy numbness was creeping over him. But he tried to persuade himself that it was only nervousness, and made an effort to go on reading. Half-past eleven struck, and Labédoyère felt his pulse. It was certainly going more slowly than it ought. Still it might be only nervousness. A quarter to twelve struck, and Labédoyère closed his book and sat with his eyes fixed on the clock and his finger on his pulse. There was no doubt now: the pulse had almost stopped, and a deadly chill had taken possession of Labédoyère's frame. And then the great clock of Notre-Dame began to toll out on the silence of the midnight air the hour of midnight-the hour of doom for Labédoyère if the old priest was a true prophet. As the echo of the last stroke of the hammer was dying away on his ear, he fell back in his chair in a state of semi-consciousness. How long he remained in that state we happen to know, for a pair of keen eyes, unknown to him, were earnestly watching him. And before life had quite departed, and while his mind still hovered, as it were, on the border-land of the material world and the world unseen, the pressure of a heavy hand was laid upon his shoulder, and a hollow voice, as from the tomb, sounded in his ear the startling summons, Awake, for I am going to-shut up the church. The doomed man opened his eyes slowly, and saw standing before him, key in hand, the beadle of Notre-Dame!

6

MALCOLM MACCOLL.

THE IRISH LAND ACT OF 1881: ITS ORIGIN AND ITS CONSEQUENCES.'

TWE

I.

WELVE years have now elapsed since a great measure, designed to settle the Irish Land Question for ever, was prepared by Mr. Gladstone during his first Administration. The ground had been cleared for it by the most exhaustive inquiries, and the longest series of tentative bills, which had ever formed the basis of agrarian legislation in this country. The report of the Devon Commission, published just before the great Irish famine of 1847, had furnished a most comprehensive body of evidence on the conditions of Irish landtenure, which subsequent investigations, official and unofficial, had illustrated rather than superseded. Eight tenant-right bills, founded on this report, or those of Parliamentary Committees, were introduced by Mr. Sharman Crawford alone; six more were introduced by other private members before 1858, and several others after that year; seven more were introduced on behalf of Liberal or Conservative Ministries; and one bill, which sometimes bears the name of Lord Cardwell and sometimes of Lord Justice Deasy, had actually passed into law, in the year 1860. The admitted failure of Lord Cardwell's Act, which embodied the strict principles of contract, induced the Legislature to import the perilously vague idea of tenure by custom into the Anglo-Irish law of landlord and tenant. Though it is now the fashion to ignore the Irish Land Act of 1870 almost as completely as that of 1860, it may not be amiss to remind ourselves of the benefits which it conferred on the Irish tenant, at the expense of the Irish landlord-benefits which no English tenant enjoys, and for which no parallel can be found in the agrarian codes of Europe.

By the Irish Land Act of 1870, Ulster tenant-right, and like customs in other parts of Ireland, obtained legal validity. It was enacted that all improvements should be presumed to have been made by the tenant or his predecessors, and compensation was guaranteed to him, not only for buildings or drainage, but for tillages, manures, and crops. Moreover, it was provided that he should not forfeit thiz right, even when ejected for non-payment of rent. Irish tenants were further endowed, for the first time, not, indeed, with an actual property in their holdings, but with a beneficial right of occupancy, secured by a heavy fine on disturbance, which might amount to seven

An address delivered in the Hall of Merton College, Oxford, on December 5.

of June. It was now the 17th of June, and Labédoyère sent out that evening an invitation to two of his most intimate and most seriousminded friends to dine with him on the fatal night. He added in a postscript that they would oblige him by retiring at ten o'clock. They knew what that meant, for the story of his mysterious doom had got abroad among his friends. The fatal twenty-third arrived, and Labédoyère and his two friends dined quietly together.

At ten he was left alone, as he thought. He placed himself in an arm-chair in the room in which they had just dined, and began to read Pascal's 'Pensées,' his eyes meanwhile glancing occasionally off the page of the book to the face of the clock on the mantelpiece opposite. Eleven o'clock struck, and Labédoyère fancied that a clammy numbness was creeping over him. But he tried to persuade himself that it was only nervousness, and made an effort to go on reading. Half-past eleven struck, and Labédoyère felt his pulse. It was certainly going more slowly than it ought. Still it might be only nervousness. A quarter to twelve struck, and Labédoyère closed his book and sat with his eyes fixed on the clock and his finger on his pulse. There was no doubt now: the pulse had almost stopped, and a deadly chill had taken possession of Labédoyère's frame. And then the great clock of Notre-Dame began to toll out on the silence of the midnight air the hour of midnight-the hour of doom for Labédoyère if the old priest was a true prophet. As the echo of the last stroke of the hammer was dying away on his ear, he fell back in his chair in a state of semi-consciousness. How long he remained in that state we happen to know, for a pair of keen eyes, unknown to him, were earnestly watching him. And before life had quite departed, and while his mind still hovered, as it were, on the border-land of the material world and the world unseen, the pressure of a heavy hand was laid upon his shoulder, and a hollow voice, as from the tomb, sounded in his ear the startling summons, Awake, for I am going to-shut up the church. The doomed man opened his eyes slowly, and saw standing before him, key in hand, the beadle of Notre-Dame!

MALCOLM MACCOLL.