him one day, holding up the clothes provided by the Government for her, as for the other female prisoners. She refused them on the ground that it was not her custom to accept presents from her enemies. The result was that, when the cold region was reached, and everything was frozen, she was walking about bare-foot. The captain, who was in great distress on her account, took some warm shoes to M. Rochefort and begged him to give them to her. "If I offer them, she will refuse them point blank," he said. From M. Rochefort she accepted the present with many thanks. Three days later, however, she was again walking about bare-foot: she had given away her shoes to some one who, she was sure, felt the cold more than she did.

Mdlle. Michel spent eight years in New Caledonia, years full of keen interests and hard work. Within a week of her landing she had already organized a school, and was holding classes for all sorts and conditions. Later she organized a special school for Kanakas -one in which algebra was taught before arithmetic, owing to some peculiarity in the Kanaka brain-and threw herself with passionate zeal into the task of civilizing them. They rallied around her with the most touching devotion; there was nothing they would not do for her. So great, indeed, was her influence among them, that the officials viewed it with anxiety. Meanwhile she was trying some curious experiments, vaccinating trees, for one, and that years before the Koch theory had been heard of. Then she hunted up an old piano, and gave musical entertainments. She strove to provide recreation for her fellow-prisoners, many of whom were dying of ennui; she strove, too, to help them in other ways to shield them from the petty tyranny of the officials; and, above all, to enable them to make both ends meet financially. She even tried to play the

conspirator for their sake, a role for which she was just about as well fitted as she was for flying. She devised a plot to escape to Sydney, and there persuade some English captain to take his ship to Noumea, embark the political prisoners, and sail away with them to some free land or other. The scheme failed, of course, and all because, as she maintained, an obstinate old sailor refused to let her have his boat in which to escape one day when a terrible storm was raging.

At length, in 1880, an amnesty was granted, and Louise hastened back to France, for she had just heard that her mother was ill. She travelled by way of London, where she Was much touched by the cordial reception she met with-as her train steamed into Victoria the "Marseillaise" was sung. When she stepped out of the carriage, she was seen to be carrying with infinite care something under her long black cloak; and this was enough, of course, to cause great excitement among the French detectives, whose thoughts turn to dynamite, as ducks to water. The "something." however, proved to be only five much be-battered old cats, which she had brought to Europe with her, because they were so ugly that she was afraid no one would care for them if she left them behind. In Paris she was treated at first with the greatest consideration, even by her political opponents; she was invited to give evidence with regard to the Kanakas before a Parliamentary Commission; her portrait in the salon was one of the pictures of the year; and to hear her lecture was quite the fashion. She travelled through France and Belgium, giving addresses, and then came to London, where, to her sur prise and delight, as she naïvely confesses, all the newspapers, "même l'aristocratique Pall Mall Gazette," treated her with "une courtoisie parfaite." "Les journaux anglais, même

les plus réactionnaires," she tells us, "rendirent compte avec une grande impartialité de mes conférences."

As time passed, however, the French Government began to look on her askance; and little wonder, for she denounced them and their doings in a strain that would have ruffled the temper of even the least susceptible. They were not one whit better, she told them roundly, than Napoleon's ministers had been; there was no more liberty, no more equality, under the Republic, than there had been under the Empire; and, as for fraternity, the term had become a byword. What stirred up her wrath against them most of all was their neglect of the poor. It was a time of great distress; Paris was crowded with unemployed; men, women, and children were going about with hungry faces; and when she appealed for help on their behalf, she was told that the feeding of beggars was no concern of the Government. Her reply was to organize a demonstration in the hope of arousing the rich to a sense of their duty to the poor. At the head of a crowd of half-starved children, she marched through the streets of Paris, carrying a black flag in her hand. For this she was brought to trial on a charge of inciting to violence and robbery. Some of the children, it seems, had entered a baker's shop and stolen some loaves, or, as they always averred, had had some loaves given to them. M. Quesnay de Beaurepaire, who was at that time Avocat-Général, depicted her, of course, as a most dangerous character, a stirrer-up of sedition, the sworn foe not only of law and order, but of property; and so skilfully did he play on bourgeois fears that she was condemned to six years' imprisonment. Six years' imprisonment for a proceeding which, although certainly most indiscreet, was at worst a misdemeanor, not a crime! In England, in the circumstances, the sentence VOL. XXVII. 1402

LIVING AGE.

might have been fourteen days' imprisonment, though probably it would have been only a fine.

The French Government had soon good reason to regret the severity with which Mdlle. Michel was treated; for, if when at liberty she had been an annoyance to them, in prison she was a source of danger, as her name served as a rallying cry for all who wished to attack them. For peace sake they would no doubt have released her gladly if she would have appealed to them, but this nothing would induce her to do; although, when she heard there was cholera in Paris, she did ask to be allowed to go to nurse the sufferers. In 1885, however, her mother was taken ill, and then she availed herself gratefully of the permission to go to her; and although a prison official was sent with her, he proved a help rather than a hindrance, as he installed himself as assistant nurse, and did all the fetching and carrying. When the end came, she was broken-hearted; so terrible indeed was her grief that her friends feared for her life. Thanks to M. Rochefort, the funeral was made the occasion of a great political demonstration; but she was not there to witness it, as the very day her mother died she insisted on returning to prison. She did not stay there long, however, as the Government, at the suggestion of M. Waldeck-Rousseau, ordered her release, whereupon her gaolers had practically to turn her out, as she refused to go unless she might take with her all the other political prisoners.

When Mdlle. Michel left prison she was for a time a changed woman; her mother's death seemed to have robbed her of all her old joie de vivre; and although in her dealings with the poor she was as gentle and pitiful as ever, in her attacks on the rich she waxed at once more violent and more bitter. She was broken in health, and not only sorely troubled but overwrought; and:

unfortunately agents-provocateurs were very busy around her just then. The result was she made speeches at Lyons and elsewhere which no Government could be expected to tolerate. She was arrested, and sent, not to prison, but to a lunatic asylum. Four days later, however, she was released by M. Constant, as no doctor would pronounce her insane. She then came to London, a town for which she had long cherished a special affection. "Eh, bien, oui, j'aime Londres," she writes, "Londres, où la vieille Angleterre est encore plus libéral à l'ombre des potences que ne le sont des bourgeois soi-disant Républicains." In her infinite charity towards things English, she even lavished praise on workhouses.

After a time she opened a school for The Fortnightly Review.

the foreign waifs and strays in London; and, depending the while for her own daily bread on her writings, carried on almost to the end a very useful work among them, trying not only to teach them, but to civilize them, and put them in the way of earning their own living. To the day of her death she was just as eager as ever to give away all that she had, just as bent on bearing the burdens of others; for she had lost none of her old devoted love of the poor, none of her passionate craving to help them. She was an anarchist, of course; a heathen, too-so at least the world says; none the less, were the Sermon on the Mount the rule of life, a claim for her to rank as saint might not, perhaps, be altogether beyond argument.

Edith Sellers.

I.

At last, after days of work, the excavation has been done. The actual tunnel, the mine-gallery-is but a replica, life-size, of the mine-chart kept with such precautions and jealous care by the Lieutenant-Colonel of Engineers, in his little straw shanty down in the lodgement whence the gallery started. This chart is plotted out on a largescale parchment map of the fort in front, dog's-eared and dirty because it was made by a Japanese Engineer officer, when working, before the war, as a coolie on this very defence work.

Degree for degree, foot for foot, with the help of theodolite, level, and plumbbob, has the gallery followed its miniature prototype on the greasy parchment. If plumb-bob and measure, level and theodolite have not lied, the desired point underneath the main parapet of Fort-shan has been reached.

The chambers excavated at right angles to contain the explosive were cut, as soon as the main gallery was estimated to have crossed below the deep ditch and to be well beneath the great parapet of the fort, the object to be blown up.

Into these chambers tons and tons of dynamite have been carefully carried and closely packed. The men, who have stood for hours along the gallery, passing the cases from one to the other like water-buckets at a fire, have now trooped out. The means of firing the charge have been put into position and connected. The charge is sealed up by the mass of rock, shale, and earth which has been placed for some fifty yards back in the gallery as "tamping." This has been done to cork up the mine, so as to prevent the force of the explosion being dispersed down the gallery, as a blank charge in the barrel of a gun. The ceaseless scurry to and

fro of the mining trucks has ended,-those little trucks which have run forwards empty and back again full, their badly greased wheels often shrieking a horror-struck protest at their task, and the mole-like miners have come up from underground. After days of burrowing they are now entirely brown, clothes, hands, faces, and hair full of crumbs of soil.

As usual no chances have been taken. As far as possible, in every case, the means of firing the charge have been duplicated. Firstly, there is electricity: for this there are two entirely separate circuits, each connected to its own set of detonators in the charge. To prerent possible damage from clumsy foot or falling stone the wires have been carried in split bamboos along the gallery. The circuits have been tested several times, and each time the little kick of the galvanometer-needle has shown that there was no break in the line. Besides the electricity there is the ordinary fuse, also in duplicate. Each is made up of three different links in the chain of ignition; the detonators in the charge, the length of instantaneousfuse from them to a point some yards outside the tamping, and lastly the short piece of slow burning safetyfuse joined on,-safety-fuse, in order to allow time for escape to the person Igniting the charge. Weak spots in the train of fire always are these joints. difficult to make, and easily deranged by a jerk or a falling stone. The fuses, however, are after all only a second string; much neater, cleaner, quicker and more certain is the electric current.

Far away, at varying distances, lie the guns, every one already laid on the doomed fort. Some will fire direct, some from behind hills, whence one cannot see the target.

So soon as the smoke of the explosion shoots up, and mushroom-like spreads into the sky, all will concentrate their

fire on this work. A veritable squall of bursting steel and shrapnel bullets will it be, and under its cover the assaulting columns will storm the breach.

The stormers are now ready, crouching under cover in the different lodgements and parallels closest to the work. They are waiting the moment to charge forward on the bewildered and shaken survivors of the explosion, who will be subjected simultaneously to this inferno of artillery fire.

All is ready, but not a moment too soon, for have not the listeners, lying prone in their branch listening-galleries, heard coming from somewhere in the womb of Mother Earth thud thud,-the strokes of the Russians countermining? Has not the pebble placed on the manycolored captured Russian drum danced to the same vibrations? Hard it is to locate, harder still to estimate their distance; but without doubt they are working, working near at hand too. Even now they may have burrowed right up to the charge, and be busy in cutting the electric leads and fuses, Dynamite, luckily, cannot be drowned out by water.

Far down the hill-side is the lodgement, that hole which looks like a distorted volcanic crater. Such, in fact, it is, being the result of exploding a few small mines, so spaced that their resulting craters intersect, and by overlapping form one elongated pit, a broad and very deep trench. The soil vomited up by the explosion has formed a parapet all round as it fell back. It was when the attackers found that they could advance no closer over the open, that this pit was made. A tunnel had been made up to its position, this was the commencement of the mole's work,-and the mines exploded. At once, even while the sky was still raining rocks and clods of earth, the Sappers and Infantry advanced with a cat-like rush from the

parallel behind and seized this point of vantage. Without delay they started with pick and shovel to improve on the work of the explosives. Cat-like too, with tooth and nail have they hung on to their newly won position against all counter attacks. In vain have the desperate Russians surpassed themselves in their mighty attempts to try and turn out the Japanese by bayonet, bomb, or bullet. A foothold once established, the men of Nippon have hung on to the spot, steadily strengthening it the while.

From this lodgement was started the gallery for the great mine that is just about to be exploded and is to give them a road into the fortress, and it is here that all interest is now centred.

Down at the bottom of the hollow is a small group intently waiting. At the telephone in the straw shanty kneels the operator. Over the top of the parapet, above which bullets and shells sing their way, peers the Lieutenant-Colonel. Close by, in charge of a heavily-built Sergeant, lies a curious innocent-looking box with a handle; it is the dynamo-exploder. Near it two men are standing, each holding one end of an electric wire in either hand. The ends of these wires, where the metal protruding from its black insulation is scraped bright, give four points of light in the picture.

The telephone orderly speaks; the Colonel gives an order. Quickly and silently the two ends of wire held by one man are placed in the clamps of the dynamo, which are screwed down to grip them. The moment is fateful, and dead silence reigns among the little group, whose drawn and dirty faces wear if possible a more anxious expression than usual. The orderly speaks again. The Colonel turns to the Sergeant,-"Fire!"

Prrr-t,-the Sergeant throws his whole weight on the handle, forcing it down with a purring rattle, while all

involuntarily cower down, holding their breath. . .

Nothing happens!

Again, once more is the handle jerked up and forced down. Nothing happens! The man holding the second circuit steps forward, and the exploder is quickly connected to it. Once, twice, three times does the handle purr as it is forced down, by two men now. Again, nothing!

"Who connected this charge?"

Captain Yamatogo of the Imperial Japanese Engineers steps forward and salutes; a small saturnine-looking man, so coated with dried sweat and earth that he might again be well taken for the coolie. He is responsible: he was in charge; but, he happens to be the one chosen among many volunteers to go down and light the fuse, if necessary, and to go down and relight it, should it not act the first time. The matter of the failure of the electricity can wait till later. A word, and he turns round, picks up a small portable electric lamp which he straps round his forehead, and slings a thick coil of safety-fuse over his shoulder. A salute, and he has gone down the gallery, picking his way carefully. There is for the moment no danger, for no fuse has been lit and none can therefore smoulder to flame up again suddenly.

As he strides along, his thoughts run over the possible causes of failure. He ponders over a dull boom which he fancied he had heard proceed from the direction of the tunnel some five minutes ago, just before they connected with the dynamo. No one else had noticed it, apparently, amid the storm of noise. He had decided that his ears must be playing him tricks, for he had done much under ground listening recently, and they were strained; but now, down there alone, his thoughts again revert to this sound.

After walking for some two minutes, he almost stumbles into an obstruction;