I stood awe-stricken in an outbuilding of a little inn that gave us shelter, whither they had borne the poor shattered body, and I wept over it as it lay there covered with the fragment of a sail. My husband was by my side, and his voice was hushed and broken, as he said to me:-- "Minnie, I believe that, under God, our lives were saved by Kenneth Moore. Did you not hear that cry of his when we were about to crash into the face of the cliff?" "Yes, Phillip," I answered, sobbing, "and I missed him suddenly as the balloon rose." "You heard the words of that parting cry?" "Yes, oh, yes! He said: '_A Wedding Gift! Minnie! A Wedding Gift!_'" "And then?" "He left us together." [Illustration] HANDS BY BECKLES WILSON The hand, like the face, is indicative or representative of character. Even those who find the path to belief in the doctrines of the palmist and chirognomist paved with innumerable thorns, cannot fail to be interested in the illustrious manual examples, collected from the studios of various sculptors, which accompany this article. Mr. Adams-Acton, a distinguished sculptor, tells me his belief that there is as great expression in the hand as in the face; and another great artist, Mr. Alfred Gilbert, R.A., goes even a step further: he invests the bare knee with expression and vital identity. There would, indeed, appear to be no portion of the human frame which is incapable of giving forth some measure of the inherent distinctiveness of its owner. This is, I think, especially true of the hand. No one who was fortunate enough to observe the slender, tapering fingers and singular grace of the hand of the deceased Poet Laureate could possibly believe it the extremity of a coarse or narrow-minded person. In the accompanying photographs, the hand of a cool, yet enthusiastic, ratiocinative spirit will be found to bear a palpable affinity to others whose possessors come under this head, and yet be utterly antagonistic to Carlyle's, or to another type, Cardinal Manning's. [Illustration: QUEEN VICTORIA'S HANDS.] We have here spread out for our edification hands of majesty, hands of power; of artistic creativeness; of cunning; hands of the ruler, the statesman, the soldier, the author, and the artist. To philosophers disposed to resolve a science from representative examples here is surely no lack of matter. It would, on the whole, be difficult to garner from the century's history a more glittering array of celebrities in all the various departments of endeavour than is here presented. [Illustration: PRINCESS ALICE'S HAND.]