"They _both_ were, you idiot! How can I tell for certain whether you are my son or not? It all comes to the same. Of course I wrote the letter. Come on, you cowardly assassin, you bastard parricide!" ... and he advanced on me with his creese low down in his right hand, the point upward, and made a thrust, shrieking out, "Break open the door! quick!" They did; but too late! [Illustration: "BASTARD! PARRICIDE!"] I saw crimson! He missed me, and I brought down my stick on his left arm, which he held over his head, and then on his head, and he fell, crying: "O my God! O Christ!" I struck him again on his head as he was falling, and once again when he was on the ground. It seemed to crash right in. That is why and how I killed Uncle Ibbetson. Part Five [Illustration] "_Grouille, greve, greve, grouille, File, file, ma quenouille! File sa corde au bourreau Qui siffle dans le preau..._" So sang the old hag in _Notre Dame de Paris!_ So sang to me night and day, for many nights and days, the thin small voice that always went piping inside me, now to one tune, now to another, but always the same words--that terrible refrain that used to haunt me so when I was a school-boy at Bluefriars! Oh, to be a school-boy again in a long gray coat and ridiculous pink stockings--innocent and free--with Esmeralda for my only love, and Athos and Porthos and D'Artagnan for my bosom friends, and no worse tribulation than to be told on a Saturday afternoon that the third volume was in hand--_volume trois en lecture_'. * * * * * Sometimes, I remember, I could hardly sleep on a Sunday night, for pity of the poor wretch who was to be hanged close by on Monday morning, and it has come to that with _me_! * * * * * Oh, Mary, Mary, Duchess of Towers, sweet friend of my childhood, and love of my life, what must you think of me now? * * * * * How blessed are the faithful! How good it must be to trust in God and heaven, and the forgiveness of sin, and be as a little child in all but innocence! A whole career of crime wiped out in a moment by just one cheap little mental act of faith at the eleventh hour, in the extreme terror of well-merited dissolution; and all the evil one has worked through life (that goes on breeding evil for ages to come) taken off one's shoulders like a filthy garment, and just cast aside, anywhere, anyhow, for the infecting of others--who do not count. What matter if it be a fool's paradise? Paradise is paradise, for whoever owns it! * * * * * They say a Sicilian drum-major, during the French occupation of Palermo, was sentenced to be shot. He was a well-known coward, and it was feared he would disgrace his country at the last moment in the presence of the French soldiers, who had a way of being shot with a good grace and a light heart: they had grown accustomed to it.