Today's Stichomancy for Simon Bolivar

minister of war; they are going to see the King, and after that they dine together, and we are to fetch him at ten o'clock. There's a Council this evening."

Rabourdin walked slowly home, in a state of despondency not difficult to imagine. It was seven o'clock, and he had barely time to dress.

"Well, you are appointed?" cried his wife, joyously, as he entered the salon.

Rabourdin raised his head with a grievous motion of distress and answered, "I fear I shall never again set foot in the ministry."

"What?" said his wife, quivering with sudden anxiety.

"My memorandum on the officials is known in all the offices; and I

difficult roads, and that whenever they had been followed they had shown the way to victory, and that therefore, though there was much in the Central Committee's theses that was hard to digest, he was for giving them complete support, confident that, as Comrades Lenin and Trotsky were in favor of them, they were likely to be right this time, as so often heretofore. But for the most part the speeches were directly concerned with the problem under discussion, and showed a political consciousness which would have been almost incredible three years ago. The Red Army served as a text for many, who said that the methods which

though the singers with their loud voices were hitting her on the head with a hammer. Her boots and the stays, which she had put on for the first time in her life, pinched her, and her face looked as though she had only just come to herself after fainting; she gazed about without understanding. Anisim, in his black coat with a red cord instead of a tie, stared at the same spot lost in thought, and when the singers shouted loudly he hurriedly crossed himself. He felt touched and disposed to weep. This church was familiar to him from earliest childhood; at one time his dead mother used to bring him here to take the sacrament; at one time he used to sing in the choir; every ikon he remembered so well,

rush of black smoke belching suddenly out of the funnel, and a mad swirl of paddle-wheels provoking a burst of weird and precipitated clapping, the tug shot out of the desolate arena. The rocky islets lay on the sea like the heaps of a cyclopean ruin on a plain; the centipedes and scorpions lurked un- der the stones; there was not a single blade of grass in sight anywhere, not a single lizard sunning him- self on a boulder by the shore. When I looked again at Hermann's ship the girl had disappeared. I could not detect the smallest dot of a bird on the

Falk