was all. The event is confused in the minds of everybody present, and no one can wholly account for it. It seemed fatality. He simply went down, and his body was not recovered. The men in the sailboat, shocked into soberness, put about, and left the steamer in all possible haste; and the passenger who told me the story dried the little dog in her shawl and promised him a home. But of this thing every one is convinced. Francis Hume must have gone willingly to his death, but he did not choose it. The sailors of the rescuing boat say that his face showed a strange bewilderment, but no refusal of their efforts; he did not mean to drown. There must have been, said the ship's doctor, some lesion of the heart. Much as I know of the reality of his life (and it ended not so long ago), it never seems to me to belong to this actual world, this "city by the sea." For me, its mirror lies, strangely enough, in another life of noble ends and uncompleted action: Beauchamp's Career. There is your only parallel, even to the splendid futility of its close. Read this from Meredith's novel, which is, after all, nothing less than vivid biography, and fit it to the end of Francis Hume. "An old man volunteered the information. 'That's the boy. That boy was in his father's boat out there, with two of his brothers, larking; and he and another, older than him, fell overboard; and just then Commander Beauchamp was rowing by, and I saw him from off here, where I stood, jump up and dive, and he swam to his boat with one of them, and got him in safe: that boy; and he dived again after the other, and was down a long time. Either he burst a vessel or he got cramp, for he'd been rowing himself from the schooner grounded down at the river-mouth, and must have been hot when he jumped in; either way, he fetched the second up, and sank with him. Down he went.' "A fisherman said: ... 'Do you hear that voice thundering? That's the great Lord Romfrey. He's been directing the dragging since five o' the evening, and will till he drops or drowns, or up comes the body.' "'O God, let's find the body!' the woman with the little boy called out. "'... My lord! my lord!' sobbed the woman, and dropped on her knees. "'What's this?' the earl said, drawing his hand away from the woman's clutch at it. "'She's the mother, my lord,' several explained to him. "'Mother of what?' "'My boy,' the woman cried, and dragged the urchin to Lord Romfrey's feet, cleaning her boy's face with her apron. "'It's the boy Commander Beauchamp drowned to save,' said a man. "All the lights of the ring were turned on the head of the boy.... The boy struck out both arms to get his fists against his eyelids. "This is what we have in exchange for Beauchamp. "It was not uttered, but it was visible in the blank stare at one another of the two men who loved Beauchamp, after they had examined the insignificant bit of mud-bank life remaining in this world in the place of him."