No More Learning

Some of it must go; the public are fools and prudish fools. I was their
servant once. But do your mangling gently--very gently. It is a great
work, and I have paid for it in seven years' damnation. "

His voice stopped for ten or twelve breaths, and then he began mumbling
a prayer of some kind in Greek. The native woman cried very bitterly.
Lastly, he rose in bed and said, as loudly as slowly:--"Not guilty, my
Lord! "

Then he fell back, and the stupor held him till he died. The native
woman ran into the Serai among the horses and screamed and beat her
breasts; for she had loved him.

Perhaps his last sentence in life told what McIntosh had once gone
through; but, saving the big bundle of old sheets in the cloth, there
was nothing in his room to say who or what he had been.

The papers were in a hopeless muddle.

Strickland helped me to sort them, and he said that the writer was
either an extreme liar or a most wonderful person. He thought the
former. One of these days, you may be able to judge for yourself.

The bundle needed much expurgation and was full of Greek nonsense, at
the head of the chapters, which has all been cut out.
If the things are ever published some one may perhaps remember this
story, now printed as a safeguard to prove that McIntosh Jellaludin and
not I myself wrote the Book of Mother Maturin.

I don't want the Giant's Robe to come true in my case.





VOLUME VI THE LIGHT THAT FAILED




THE LIGHT THAT FAILED



CHAPTER I

So we settled it all when the storm was done
As comf'y as comf'y could be;
And I was to wait in the barn, my dears,
Because I was only three;
And Teddy would run to the rainbow's foot,
Because he was five and a man;
And that's how it all began, my dears,
And that's how it all began.
--Big Barn Stories.

"WHAT do you think she'd do if she caught us? We oughtn't to have it,
you know," said Maisie.

"Beat me, and lock you up in your bedroom," Dick answered, without
hesitation. "Have you got the cartridges? "

"Yes; they're in my pocket, but they are joggling horribly. Do pin-fire
cartridges go off of their own accord? "

"Don't know. Take the revolver, if you are afraid, and let me carry
them. "

"I'm not afraid. " Maisie strode forward swiftly, a hand in her pocket
and her chin in the air. Dick followed with a small pin-fire revolver.

The children had discovered that their lives would be unendurable
without pistol-practice.