saluted Dante on the bridge. Are you indeed that Archer, O Archer, and did you give each one of us his Vita Nuova?"

"No, sir," said Mr. Archer.

*⁠*⁠*⁠*⁠*

Thus does the chronicler of the League of the Long Bow come to the end or his singularly unproductive and unprofitable labours, without, perhaps, having yet come to the beginning. The reader may have once hoped, perhaps, that the story would be like the universe; which when it ends, will explain why it ever began. But the reader has long been sleeping, after the toils and trials of his part in the affair; and the writer is too tactful to ask at how early a stage of his story-telling that generally satisfactory solution of all our troubles was found. He knows not if the sleep has been undisturbed, or in that sleep what dreams may come, if there has been cast upon it any shadow of the shapes in his own very private and comfortable nightmare; turrets clad with the wings of morning or temples marching. over dim meadows as living monsters, or swine plumed like cherubin or forests bent like bows, or a fiery river winding through a dark land. Images are in their nature indefensible, if they miss the imagination of