On the fifth day, Vetch, creeping behind a tree, takes off his belt, and makes a noose. He will hang himself. He gets one end of the belt over a bough, and then his cowardice bids him pause. Gabbett approaches; he tries to evade him, and steal away into the bush. In vain. The insatiable giant, ravenous with famine and sustained by madness, is not to be shaken off. Vetch tries to run, but his legs bend under him. The axe that has tried to drink so much blood feels heavy as lead. He will fling it away. No--he dares not. Night falls again. He must rest, or go mad. His limbs are powerless. His eyelids are glued together. He sleeps as he stands. This horrible thing must be a dream. He is at Port Arthur, or will wake on his pallet in the penny lodging-house he slept at when a boy. Is that the deputy come to wake him to the torment of living? It is not time--surely not time yet. He sleeps--and the giant, grinning with ferocious joy, approaches on clumsy tiptoe and seizes the coveted axe. On the northeast coast of Van Diemen's Land is a place called St. Helen's Point, and a certain skipper, being in want of fresh water, landing there with a boat's crew, found on the banks of the creek a gaunt and blood-stained man, clad in tattered yellow, who carried on his back an axe and a bundle. When the sailors came within sight of him he made signs to them to approach, and opening his bundle with much ceremony, offered them some of its contents. Filled with horror at what the maniac displayed, they seized and bound him. At Hobart Town he was recognized as the only survivor of the nine desperadoes who had escaped from Colonel Arthur's "natural penitentiary." MATTHIAS CLAUDIUS (1740-1815) [Illustration: MATTHIAS CLAUDIUS] Matthias Claudius, best known as "the Wandsbecker Bote" (the Messenger from Wandsbeck), was born at Reinfeld in Holstein, August 15th, 1740. He was of excellent stock, coming from a long line of clergymen. It was said that scarcely another family in Schleswig-Holstein had given to the church so many sons.