denounced one of our friends at this moment would have been to play into the hands of your friend Attwood and all the party of panic and slavery. Besides, it may be that a man over forty has a subconscious desire to die as he has lived, and that I wanted, in a sense, to carry my secrets to the grave. Perhaps a hobby hardens with age; and my hobby has been silence. Perhaps I feel that I have killed my mother's brother, but I have saved my mother's name. Anyhow, I chose a time when I knew you were all asleep and he was walking alone in the garden. I saw all the stone statues standing in the moonlight; and I myself was like one of those stone statues walking. In a voice that was not my own I told him of his treason and demanded the papers, and when he refused I forced him to take one of the two swords. The swords were among some specimens sent down here for the Prime Minister's inspection; he is a collector, you know; they were the only equal weapons I could find. To cut an ugly tale short, we fought there on the path in front of the Britannia statue; he was a man of great strength, but I had somewhat the advantage in skill. His sword grazed my forehead almost at the moment when mine sank into the joint in his neck. He fell against the statue, like Cæsar against Pompey's, hanging on to the iron rail; his sword was already broken. When I saw the blood from that deadly wound, everything else went from me; I dropped my sword and ran as if to lift him up. As I bent toward him something happened too quick for me to follow. I do not know whether the iron bar was rotted with rust and came away in his hand, or whether he rent it out of the rock with his apelike strength; but the thing was in his hand, and with his dying energies he swung it over my head as I knelt there unarmed beside him. I looked up wildly to avoid the blow, and saw above us the great bulk of Britannia leaning outward like the figurehead of a ship. The next instant

I saw it was leaning an inch or two more than usual, and all the skies with their outstanding stars seemed to be leaning with it. For the third second it was as if the skies fell; and in the fourth I was standing in the quiet garden, looking down on that flat ruin of stone and bone at which you were looking down to-day. He had plucked out the last prop that held up the British goddess, and she had fallen, and crushed the traitor in her fall. I turned and darted for the coat which I knew to contain the package, ripped it up with my sword, and raced away up the garden path to where my motor bike was waiting on the road above. I had every reason for haste; but I fled without looking back at the statue and the body; and I think the thing I fled from was the sight of that appalling allegory.

"Then I did the rest of what I had to do. All through the night and into the daybreak and the daylight I went humming through the villages and markets of South England like a traveling bullet, till I came to the headquarters in the West where the trouble was. I was just in time. I was able to placard the place, so to speak, with the news that the Government had not betrayed them and that they would find supports if they pushed eastward against the enemy. There's no time to tell you all that happened; but I tell you it was the day of my life. A triumph like a torchlight procession, with torchlights that might have been firebrands. The mutinies simmered down; the men of Somerset and the western counties came pouring in to the market places-the men who died with Arthur and stood firm with Alfred. The Irish regiments rallied to them, after a scene like a riot, and marched eastward out of the town, singing Fenian songs. There was all that is not understood, about the dark laughter of that people, in the delight with which, even when marching with the English to the defense of England, they shouted at the top of their voices, 'High upon the gallows tree stood the

noble-hearted three . . . With England's cruel cord about them cast.' However, the chorus was 'God save Ireland,' and we could all have sung that just then, in one sense or another.

"But there was another side to my mission. I carried the plans of the defense; and to a great extent, luckily, the plans of the invasion also. I won't worry you with strategics; but we knew where the enemy had pushed forward the great battery that covered all his movements; and though our friends from the West could hardly arrive in time to intercept the main movement, they might get within long artillery range of the battery and shell it, if they only knew exactly where it was. They could hardly tell that unless somebody round about here sent up some sort of signal. But, somehow, I rather fancy that somebody will."

With that he got up from the table, and they remounted their machines and went eastward into the advancing twilight of evening. The levels of the landscape were repeated in flat strips of floating cloud and the last colors of day clung to the circle of the horizon. Receding farther and farther behind them was the semicircle of the last hills; and it was quite suddenly that they saw afar off the dim line of the sea. It was not a strip of bright blue as they had seen it from the sunny veranda, but of a sinister and smoky violet, a tint that seemed ominous and dark. Here Horne Fisher dismounted once

more.

"We must walk the rest of the way," he said, "and the last bit of all I must walk alone."

He bent down and began to unstrap something from his bicycle. It was something that had puzzled his companion all the way in spite of what held him to more interesting riddles; it appeared to be several lengths of pole strapped together and wrapped up in paper. Fisher took it under his arm and began to pick his way across the turf. The ground was growing more

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tumbled and irregular and he was walking toward a mass of thickets and small woods; night grew darker every moment. "We must not talk any more,' said Fisher. "I shall whisper to you when you are to halt. Don't try to follow me then, for it will only spoil the show; one man can barely crawl safely to the spot, and two would certainly be caught."

"I would follow you anywhere," replied March, "but I would halt, too, if that is better."

"I know you would," said his friend,

in a low voice. in a low voice. "Perhaps you're the only man I ever quite trusted in this world."

A few paces farther on they came to the end of a great ridge or mound looking monstrous against the dim sky, and Fisher stopped with a gesture. He caught his companion's hand and wrung it with a violent tenderness, and then darted forward into the darkness. March could faintly see his figure crawling along under the shadow of the ridge, then he lost sight of it, and then he saw it again standing on another mound two hundred yards away. Beside him stood a singular erection made apparently of two rods. He bent over it and there was the flare of a light; all March's schoolboy memories woke in him and he knew what it was. It was the stand of a rocket. The confused, incongruous memories still possessed him up to the very moment of a fierce but familiar sound; and an instant after the rocket left its perch and went up into endless space like a starry arrow aimed at the stars. March thought suddenly of the signs of the last days and knew he was looking at the apocalyptic meteor of something like a Day of Judgment. Far up in the infinite heavens the rocket stooped and sprang into scarlet stars. For a moment the whole landscape out to the sea and back to the crescent of the wooded hills was like a lake of ruby light, of a red strangely rich and glorious, as if the world were steeped in wine rather than blood, or

the earth were an earthly paradise, over which paused forever the sanguine moment of morning.

"God save England!" cried Fisher,

with a tongue like the peal of a trumpet. "And now it is for God to save."

As darkness sank again over land and sea there came another sound; far away in the passes of the hills behind them the guns spoke like the baying of great hounds. Something that was not a rocket, that came not hissing, but screaming, went over Harold March's head and expanded beyond the mound into light and deafening din, staggering the brain with unbearable brutalities of noise. Another came, and then another, and the world was full of uproar and volcanic vapor and chaotic

light. The artillery of the West Country and the Irish had located the great enemy battery and were pounding it to pieces.

In the mad excitement of that moment March peered through the storm, looking again for the long lean figure that stood beside the stand of the rocket. Then another flash lit up the whole ridge. The figure was not there.

Before the fires of the rocket had faded from the sky, long before the first gun had sounded from the distant hills, a splutter of rifle fire had flashed and flickered all around from the hidden trenches of the enemy. Something lay in the shadow at the foot of the ridge, as stiff as the stick of the fallen rocket; and the man who knew too much knew what is worth knowing.

THE

HE story of the good-roads movement in the United States reads like romance. Ten years ago there were a few excellent graveled and macadam roads in favored sections of the country, but practically none of concrete or brick except in the East, and there was no organized sentiment in favor of good roads or proper appreciation of their economic value.

A decade has passed. Like a rolling snowball, the good-roads movement, still in its infancy, has grown, until to-day it is estimated there are a billion and a half dollars available for road construction in the United States, of which a billion dollars probably will be expended during 1922. Road building has become the greatest construction industry in the country. The Townsend highway bill, which recently became a law, makes $150,000,000 available for road building during the next few months, providing employment for 275,000 men. Federalaid roads completed and to be built as a result of the federal appropriation, if placed end to end, would more than reach around the earth.

These are principal roads only, to be built in co-operation with the states, many of which have issued road bonds for fifty and sixty million dollars. Hardly a county is without its road bonds. A single county in Texas (Dallas) has authorized such bonds to the extent of $6,000,000. Countless townships have their own funds to be expended on local roads. Great transcontinental "trails" have been laid out across the country, from east to west and from north to south, which are being put in shape for year-round traffic, according to organized programs. In the meantime "Detour," written on countless signs

a

across the continent, has become synonym of progress, although exasperating on account of the temporary inconvenience it occasions.

First of all, what is meant by federalaid roads? For a number of years the national government has been aiding states in the construction of certain selected roads. The Townsend highway bill appropriates $75,000,000 for such road construction, allotted to the various states in accordance with certain government requirements. To obtain its allotted share of this fund, the state must maintain a highway department and build the roads with the approval of government engineers, and, except where there are public lands, must expend approximately a like amount of its own funds. Roads so built are called federal-aid roads. The federal appropriation of $75,000,000, therefore, makes immediately available for road construction $150,000,000, a great part of which will be expended for hard-surfaced roads.

Federal-aid roads are limited to a certain percentage of the total mileage of the state roads supposed to be of federal importance, such as interstate highways. In addition to federal-aid roads, most states are building state systems of primary roads, to be the main arteries of the state, the object being to connect practically all important cities and towns in the state by good highways. In most states also there are systems of secondary roads, built by counties; in some cases, as in Arkansas, by districts. These roads are supposed to be of first importance to the several counties, supplementing the primary highways of the state. Finally, there are tertiary roads, built and maintained by

the townships. These constitute by far the largest mileage. A large percentage of them are merely graded roads of unsurfaced earth, and so will remain for years to come, although some wealthy townships are building hard roads. The system is much like that which prevails in France.

The federal government requires the several states to maintain federal-aid roads after they have been built. This is leading inevitably to a general adoption by the states of the patrol system of maintenance, which has been brought to great perfection in France. The patrol system is intensified maintenance. A section of from five to ten miles is

VOL. CXLV.-No. 865.-4

allotted to one man, who constantly watches for defects and repairs a break at once, instead of waiting for the entire road to go to pieces before doing anything, which, until recently, was the American plan. Eternal vigilance is the price of other things besides liberty.

The federal government has been assisting road construction in still another way. Enormous amounts of war equipment and supplies have been turned over to the states, which have organized departments and shops for salvage and repair. Sometimes lists of equipment and material have been furnished in advance, for selection; often