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tank.'

'Only a short piece down the track, after you pass the

"When I reached the street, I saw no one but the figure of an old man, I think a negro, who was walking away. He limped and carried a bundle on the end of a stick thrown over his shoulder. I was so startled and impressed by the fancied sound of a voice once familiar to me, that I walked on down. the track, but could see no one. Soon the 'freight' came along; I stood aside until it passed, then returned to the station, and found the agent standing in the door. When he questioned me about my movements, I deemed him impertinent; but having nothing to conceal, stated the facts I have just recapitulated. You have been told that I intentionally missed the train; that when seen at 10 p.m. in the pine woods, I was stealing back to my mother's old home; that I entered at midnight the bedroom where her father slept, stupefied him with chloroform, broke open his vault, robbed it of money, jewels and will; and that when General Darrington awoke and attempted to rescue his property, I deliberately killed him. You are asked to believe that I am 'the incarnate fiend' who planned and committed that horrible crime, and, alas for me! every circumstance seems like a bloodhound to bay me. My handkerchief was found, tainted with chloroform. It was my handkerchief; but how it came there, on General Darrington's head, only God witnessed. I saw among the papers taken from the tin box and laid on the table, a large envelope marked in red ink, 'Last Will and Testament of Robert Luke Darrington'; but I never saw it afterward. I was never in that room but once; and the last and only time I ever saw General Darrington was when I passed out of the glass door, and left him standing in the middle of the room, with the tin box in his hand.

"I can call no witnesses; for it is one of the terrible fatalities of my situation that I stand alone, with none to corroborate my assertions. Strange, inexplicable coincidences drag me down; not the malice of men, but the throttling grasp of circumstances. I am the victim of some diabolical fate, which only innocent blood will appease; but though I am slaughtered for crimes I did not commit, I know, oh! I know, that behind fate, stands God!-the just and eternal God, whom I trust,

even in this my hour of extremest peril. Alone in the world, orphaned, reviled, wrecked for all time, without a ray of hope, I, Beryl Brentano, deny every accusation brought against me in this cruel arraignment; and I call my only witness, the righteous God above us, to hear my solemn asseveration: I am innocent of this crime; and when you judicially murder me in the name of Justice, your hands will be dyed in blood that an avenging God will one day require of you. Appearances, circumstances, coincidences of time and place, each, all, conspire to hunt me into a convict's grave; but remember, my twelve judges, remember that a hopeless, forsaken, brokenhearted woman, expecting to die at your hands, stood before you, and pleaded first and last-Not Guilty! Not Guilty!-"

A moment she paused, then raised her arms toward heaven and added, with a sudden exultant ring in her thrilling voice, and a strange rapt splendor in her uplifted eyes:

"Innocent! Innocent! Thou God knowest! Innocent of this sin, as the angels that see Thy face."

OBERT BURNS WILSON was born away from home. He is

RoVirginiau, born in Pennsylvania; but as all his life, except the

past six years, has been passed in Virginia and Kentucky, he can certainly be classed among Southern writers. His paternal grandfather, Robert Wilson, came from the north of Ireland and made his home in Washington County, Pennsylvania, and it was there our author first saw the light. His father, an architect and builder, took a Virginia bride, and made his home there after his marriage. His maternal grandmother, Lucy Alice Nelson, of Hanover County, Virginia, married a MacLean, of the old Scotch family of that name. His mother, Elizabeth Anne MacLean, died when he was barely ten years old; the following dedication in his first volume of poetry shows his deep sense of debt and devotion to her:

"TO ELIZABETH, MY MOTHER."

"The green Virginian hills were blithe in May,
And we were plucking violets, thou and I.
A transient gladness flooded earth and sky;
Thy fading strength seemed to return that day,
And I was mad with hope that God would stay

Death's pale approach-Oh! all hath long passed by!
Long years! Long years! and now, I well know why
Thine eyes, quick filled with tears, were turned away.
First loved-first lost, my mother!-Time must still
Leave my soul's debt uncancelled. All that's best,
In me, and in my art, is thine-Meseems,

Even now, we walk afield. Through good and ill
My sorrowing heart forgets not, and in dreams,

I see thee, in the sun lands of the blest."

He writes of his childhood's home in Virginia: "My first recollection of life is of an old orchard in full bloom, with the blossoms falling on the dark, newly ploughed ground. The ploughing was going on, and the man allowed me to ride on the tram of the plough,

sitting between the handles. I remember the blackbirds following in the furrows, feeding on the worms." This first consciousness of life was a fitting beginning for a poet-spring, and birds, and apple-blossoms.

He also writes: "I seem to have been born with a pencil in my hand-the fated symbol of my life!-For my whole life has been bound up with it. I have lived always, it seems to me, by drawing, and painting, and writing. This bent I inherited largely from my mother, who painted flowers beautifully. I suppose I wrote in my youth some ten thousand poems more or less, which were laid away somewhere on the planet, but were certainly never published."

He moved to Kentucky when a young man, and lived in Frankfort, the capital, until he went to New York City, about six years ago. There could have been no happier environment for so loving a student of nature as Mr. Wilson than this quaint old town, surrounded by hills, and cleft in twain by the beautiful Kentucky River. His appreciation of its charm is shown in his sonnet, "Away from my Loved Hills," written when he left Frankfort for New York. He was married in 1901 to Anne Hendrick, daughter of William Jackson Hendrick, Attorney-general of Kentucky. His only child, Elizabeth, was born in Frankfort, and is now seven years old.

Robert Burns Wilson is painter as well as poet. It is strange that one so rarely sees the union of these closely allied arts in a single person. It was found in Dante Gabriel Rossetti, and it is hard to say in which calling he excelled. Sidney Lanier was poet and musician, and we cannot but think his exquisite ear for harmonies of sound added new depth and richness to his poetry. So, Mr. Wilson's work in one line of art has not detracted from his whole-hearted pursuit of the other.

He is his own master in painting, and follows his own ideals. He says: "Painting, to me, is not an imitation merely, but an interpretation of Nature. There is, in fact, but one art-the interpreting of nature; music, poetry, painting, sculpture and architecture are forms of expression of the same art. To me, every landscape has its mood and its soul. While one should never fail to know, and to present the actual, yet this intangible soul is what the artist should strive for. I seek to catch the passing and illusive things in nature, which do not 'sit' for their pictures-the drift of clouds, the transient effect of light and shadow, early morning and twilight, which vanish while you look. These things must be recalled and re-developed by the imagination, and painted from memory."

With such ideals in art, reënforced by his mastery of line, and color, and grouping, it is not strange that his landscapes have an

original charm; they possess in a high degree that difficult thing we call atmosphere, and in addition a soul and a sentiment that make them painted poesy. The limits of this sketch permit but brief mention of Mr. Wilson as a painter. He has painted many pictures, portraits as well as landscapes. His work has received recognition from various societies. Since he has been in New York, his pictures have been shown at the annual exhibitions of the American Water-color Society, and the Water-color Society of New York. Some of his subjects show the poet as well as the painter; for instance: "The Elegy Plowman," illustrating lines from Gray's "Elegy," "The Quiet Fields," "The Marsh," "The Land of the Sky," "The Dreaming Trees," "Omar's Rose," illustrating lines from Omar Khayyam.

Mr. Wilson believes that the two arts, poetry and painting, are mutually helpful. He writes that he is painting a picture, "The Cedars of Culmer's Hill," and as he worked the deep meaning of it came to him as a poem on which he has also begun work.

He says of this relation of the two arts: "A poem may so paint a picture that one may receive the impress of color and form, of mood and of feeling. So, also, a painting may be so much a poem, that one can catch the music and the thought and seem to hear the numbers as they speak."

No careful reader of Mr. Wilson's poems can fail to find this pictorial quality in his verse. In one of his most beautiful pieces, "When Evening Cometh On," the first five stanzas are as perfect pictures, as if they had been drawn with pencil and brush.

While Mr. Wilson had been writing verses ever since he could remember, it was not until some time in the 'seventies of the last century that he began to publish them in various papers and periodicals. His first appearance in the great magazines was "The Death of Winter" in Harper's Magazine, soon followed by "When Evening Cometh On," "The Song of the Wind," and many others. His first poem in the Century Magazine was "Keats"; then appeared "Sonnets of the Sun," "Would We Return," "I Shall Find Rest," and "The Angel of Sleep." At the time of the Spanish-American War he wrote many stirring martial poems. His "Remember the Maine" was given a full front page in the New York Herald. "Such is the Death the Soldier Dies" was published in the Atlantic Monthly, and many of the great dailies gladly published his patriotic verse.

Among his best poems might be mentioned: "The Shadows of the Trees," "Lines to a Child," "A Walk With a Child," "Sonnets of Sunshine and Rain," "Sonnets of Similitude," "Sonnets on the Winter Hill," "The Angel of Sleep," "When Evening Cometh On,"