There is an awful story of his about the last time a glove was thrown down in an English court-room. It is a story in which Holmes is all mixed up with a marvellous series of impossibilities, such as would make Mr. Clemens's hair grow gray, and add a new chapter to his studies of telepathy. I will not enter on it now, with the detail of the book that fell from the ninth shelf of a book-case, and opened at the exact passage where the challenge story was to be described. No, I will not tell another word of it; for if I am started upon it, it will take up the whole of this number of Mr. McClure's Magazine. But sometime, when Mr. McClure wants to make the whole magazine thrill with excitement, he will write to Doctor Holmes, and ask him for that story of the "challenge of battle." [Illustration: O. W. HOLMES IN HIS FAVORITE SEAT AT BEVERLY.] As for the story of his hearing Doctor Phinney at Rome, and the other story of Mr. Emerson's hearing Doctor Phinney at Rome, I never tell that excepting to confidential friends who know that I cannot tell a lie. For if I tell it to any one else, he looks at me with a quizzical air, as much as to say, "This is as bad as the story of the 'Man Without a Country;' and I do not know how much to believe, and how much to disbelieve." [1] Also called the Peter Butler house. Sewall in his diary speaks of it as Mr. Quincy's new house (1680-85). There Dorothy was born and married. IN THE NAME OF THE LAW! BY STANLEY J. WEYMAN. On the moorland above the old gray village of Carbaix, in Finistere--Finistere, the most westerly province of Brittany--stands a cottage, built, as all the cottages in that country are, of rough-hewn stones. It is a poor, rude place to-day, but it wore an aspect far more rude and primitive a hundred years ago--say on an August day in the year 1793, when a man issued from the doorway, and, shading his eyes from the noonday sun, gazed long and fixedly in the direction of a narrow rift which a few score paces away breaks the monotony of the upland level. This man was tall and thin and unkempt, his features expressing a mixture of cunning and simplicity. He gazed a while in silence, but at length uttered a grunt of satisfaction as the figure of a woman rose gradually into sight. She came on slowly, in a stooping posture, dragging behind her a great load of straw, which completely hid the little sledge on which it rested, and which was attached to her waist by a rope of twisted hay.