for about two minutes, and a lighted candle. The French law concerning auctions is to the effect that a bid, to be successful, must survive the remainder of the wick during which it is made, and the complete burning of a second, the extinction of the second corresponding to the fall of the hammer. If a new bid is call during the life of the second wick, that wick is treated as the first, and when it goes out another is lit; and so on until a whole wick has burnt through without a bid being called.

The President announces the price at which bidding is to start, but the amount of each step' is apparently in the discretion of the wooden-visaged caller. As the bidding starts the first wick is lit from the candle. The bids are called, in quick succession at first, and are repeated by the caller. When they begin to slow off and the second wick is nearing extinction without a fresh call, the caller cries Deuxième et dernier feu !' (going!-going!'), the wick goes out, and that lot is sold. The purchaser hands up his card; his name, address, and the price are announced by the President, and they start again on the next lot.

And so on for some five hours. But the proceedings are far from dull. Somebody suddenly announces, after the close of a sale, that the caller raised the price during the bidding by 500 francs when no such bid had been made. The President points out that the objection was not then taken; but the conditions of sale carefully omit any such provision as 'the auctioneer's decision shall be final,' and there is instant pandemonium. The President and his supporters, privatim et seriatim, discuss the point with the public at large; friend shouts to friend across the tent; spectatorsfor the majority of the crowd have no intention of purchasing or even of bidding-join in and twit the combatants, and the President plays a fantasia on the cow-bell. Order being in some measure restored, he announces that the bidding will be reopened-'on va rallumer le feu'—at the last undisputed figure. This starts a new discussion, but at last the wooden jaw begins to slide up and down again and the incident is closed.

A little later there is another disturbance; for on the President announcing Adjudgé,' the official declaration of the completion of a sale, two people hand up their cards. The President appeals to the caller, who points to one of them as the last bidder. The second immediately protests that he too called the same bid at the same time, and believed himself alone in the field. Renewed hubbub, during which they apparently agree to abide by the

President's decision. One of the bidders is a local dealer and, to judge by the shouts, popular; his opponent is not without support; and the President, faced, like Mr. Pickwick, with two crowds of opposite sympathies, takes the advice of that student of human nature and shouts with the larger.

At last all is over, the year's income for the Hospices is realised. The Board and as many distinguished people as can be accommodated in the Mairie adjourn to a Grand Banquet d'honneur'; the rest to dinner at the inn. Next day Beaune resumes the placid life of a small country town-and begins to look forward to the Fêtes Vinicoles next year.

R. J. H. T.-R.

A HORROR OF DARKNESS.

'I DIFFER entirely,' pronounced the Bug-Hunter. On the contrary, the entire animal creation, man included, has been, and is, physically deteriorating.'

Those who know Sgurrpenfell know that it is one of the few patches of earthly Paradise that remain in this thrice happy realm of ours, that it is advisable to write and book rooms three months in advance so as to make sure of getting an answer, that the telegram announcing your advent generally comes to hand two days after your arrival, that even the hardiest of those H-born (the filling in of the hiatus is optional), pass-storming motorists turn disconsolately away from surface and gradient. You are more alone than on the wide, wide sea, because the wireless knows not the existence of S.P.F., as its admirers call it. You can ramble, scramble, paint, or fish to your heart's content.

It is needless to say that those who frequent this delectable spot are of the elect, men of brains, muscle, and taste. On the occasion under consideration the little hostel was wellnigh full.

gregation consisted of almost a dozen men of brains, muscle, and taste. Opportunity of using the two latter was denied them as the rain was coming down in sheets and the wind howling like the Ride of the Valkyrie on a Salvation Army band. Wherefore they betook themselves to the consumption of tobacco and the discussion of matters they did not understand. This proved their brains, because, as Dennis O'Hara, the poet (the only poet of the S.P.F. community), observed: The man who talks about things he understandssupposing he does understand anything, which he doesn't-is a wet blanket who ought to be put to instant death by slow torture.'

It was the Professor of Comparative Astronomy, or words to that effect, who had teed off with a thesis that man was going on from strength to strength, supporting his argument with Channel swims and records, and it was the Bug-Hunter who took him up. [N.B.It must be understood that the Bug-Hunter was not a professional shikari of domesticated insects. Nay! He was a practical naturalist, the kind of man who cheerfully mingles with crocodiles and cobras, cannibals and man-eaters, if by good fortune he may hit off the trail of a new beetle the size of a threepenny bit.]

The audience listened with a semblance of reverent attention that thinly veiled an eager anticipation of rotting as occasion offered. The Bug-Hunter warmed to his work.

'Now, look here,' he argued, 'what does it say? There were giants in those days. Quite. Now in the time of Goliath, the typical giant of all time, they were rare. And then he was not so much of a giant after all. David borrowed his sword later on for personal use, so he can't have been so very much smaller. Probably men were bigger all round then. And even to-day! Talk of a man twice my size. Rubbish! That would make him twelve feet high and eighty inches round the chest. Rot!'

He challenged the room with a glance. The room was puzzled. Could it be that in defiance of all the rules of the game the man was talking sense? Before a decision had been reached the BugHunter had got his second wind.

'Then there's the animal kingdom. The mastodon and mammoth were bigger than the elephant. You meet pigmy elephants to-day, but giants never.'

'But surely,' broke in the Professor, 'in your explorations you have met some giants, some abnormally big things.'

He spoke seriously, in fact the whole room had become serious. There was something serious in the atmosphere, indefinable but existent, and the men knew it.

'Abnormally big, yes. Little giants, so to speak, but I have never met, say, a tiger six feet high at the shoulder, nor heard of one, or anything of that sort.'

6 Are you quite sure-sure, I mean, that you have never even heard of a creature more than ordinarily large?'

The audience looked at each other, and then at the speaker. That swift glance was an interchange of tacit recognition that in him, or rather, from him, existed that singular atmosphere. The man himself was one of those hard, fleshless, mahogany individuals you can neither hurt nor tire. There was more than seriousness in his question, there was anxiety.

'Ye-es,' came the reply. I admit I have. I don't mean any of the ordinary bogeys of the were-wolf, bunyip type, but something more or less authentic. It was in the hinterland of French Cochin China. Indeed, so convinced did I become that there was something in it that I went, under French protection, to look into the matter myself.'

'Well ? '

to

'The terror was genuine enough, but that was all there was it." The creature only came out at night: no one had ever seen it ; and so forth, and so forth. So I came to the conclusion that it was a bogey after all. All the same all the same,' he ended, 'I could not help feeling they were keeping something back, lying, in fact-that there was a real something after all.'

'Is that all you know? Have you heard nothing more?'

'Ye-es. Let me see. I did hear of some missionary chap going up that way on some such trail. I should like to know if he found out anything, but I have not heard of him since. By the way, his name was something like yours. Let me see, Cotton, was it?'

'Yes. Cotton it was. He was my brother. The bogey killed him, and I saw it happen.' Then, looking rather pitifully round the room. 'I'll tell you fellows about it if you don't mind. I have never spoken of it before, and it may be a relief.'

The men saw the pain in his eyes and acquiesced. Nevertheless, there was not one who had far rather not hear the story, including the naturalist. Then Cotton commenced.

At first he spoke as one constrained, constrained by torture. In a short time, however, he had his emotion in hand and the story became less painful-less painful in the manner of telling, at least.

'My brother,' he began, was not exactly a missionary. He was a Mission Pioneer, something after the manner of Livingstone, a prospector whose job was to fossick out places where a Mission might be planted with some reasonable chance of development. Physically and intellectually he was splendidly equipped for the work-he was a perfect genius at picking up languages, and what was of most consequence, his whole heart was in the enterprise. Now, as these ventures took him into the wildest of wild parts, and as I am something of an explorer and big-game shot'-the hum of recognition from the room disconcerted him for a moment; he checked, then stumbled on- well, he had no difficulty in persuading me to accompany him.

'The East was his hunting-ground, especially Malaya. “ Africa,” he would say," was well in hand, and China was opening up," and the upshot was that our last expedition found us poking about along the southern frontier of French Cochin China. There, in an evil hour, we heard of a tribe, or rather community, known as the Well-Meaning Ones.'