the precipice arched and its own great purple shadow darkened its base. At first it seemed that the enormous bulk of stone would cross the breadth of the quarry to assail the galleries on the other side, and many beholders struggled back in unreasoning panic; but a moment later, as it sank and fell headfirst into the gulf below, the mass appeared to recede again and shrink into the depths that yawned to swallow it. For a few tremendous seconds the whole quarry face writhed and opened with rents and fissures all bursting downward. Light streamed upon it and no explosions or detonations marked the fall. It uttered the long-drawn and deepening growl of a stormy sea beard afar off. The quarry was skinned to the bone and grit its teeth in agony. More cliff fell than any man had expected to fall, and the very bases of the world seemed shaken before such irresistible might. The earth lifted its murmur to heaven and the desolation was swiftly concealed by enormous volumes of dust that billowed upward and ascended high above the beholders in a gray volume. The folds of it gleamed as the sun shone upon them, and the quarry was quite hidden, as an active volcano crater is concealed with smoke. The watchers could see no more, but through the murk there still came the murmur and groan of earth falling and settling and readjusting itself.

There was no rush into the quarries now. The men feared the strange noises and invisible movements beneath them. They understood the ways of falling stone and knew that the pant and hiss and whistling from below meant a battle of rock masses beating and crushing and hurtling down upon each other, crashing together, rending and grinding each other's faces, splitting and tearing and tumbling with increased speed where the splintered slopes were smoothed and ground clear by the downrush from above. The pant and growl of all this movement died slowly, and sometimes moments of profound stillness broke it. Then again it began and lifted and lulled, now dying, now deepening. It was as though in a great theatre, made dark for a moment, one heard the hurryings and tramplings of many feet changing the scene before light should again be thrown upon the stage.

None of the thousand people who beheld this scene had witnessed or dreamed of such an event. It affected them differently and they increased its solemnity and grandeur by their presence. Some wept and here and there a woman clung to a man for comfort and found

none.

The majority of the men remained quite dumb before the spectacle. None cared to speak first. Then apprehension and understanding returned; they came to themselves gradually as the solemn sounds died away beneath.

They looked into each other's faces, and some laughed foolishly and some bragged that it was a poor show after all and they were going home to dinner. Hundreds prepared to rush into the quarry as soon as they could see their way and the clouds had thinned; then, by a sort of simultaneous instinct, their eyes were turned upon Tom Hawkey, where he stood alone regarding the new face of the quarry now for the first time slowly limning through the sunlit dust. Everybody began to regard him; everybody began to suspend interest in the fall and to awake interest in him. This excitement increased magnetically; pent feeling was poured into it; his attitude suddenly became a matter of profoundest interest. How was he looking? What was he feeling? In what direction, sanguine or hopeless, might opinion be guided by the spectacle of the manager and his view of the terrific thing that had happened?

Such a wave of emotion could not be directed upon the man without his becoming conscious of it. It struck him home and he knew, without turning his head, that the people were regarding him. He must indicate something to them, inspire them, if possible, with an impulse of self-control, a message that all was not lost. He felt profoundly moved himself at the immensity of the event and could not as yet judge its full significance better than another. But apart from all that the catastrophe might mean, there was the actual, stupendous phenomenon itself. He had often pictured it and wondered what it would be like. And now it had come and transcended imagination and presented a spectacle of quickened natural forces that struck him as dumb as the rest. He contrasted the downfall of the north face with the dismay running through the midgets that beheld it; and for a moment the immensity of moving matter and the awful disaster to the rocks swelled largest in his mind. So doubtless the earth was smitten in still mightier scale at times of earthquake and the eruption of her inner fires. Then he looked at the people and felt that not the chaos of rent stones, but the chaos of their hearts was the weighty matter; not the new quarry presently to be revealed, but the men he led, who now, by some impulse that ran like a fire through their hearts, stared upon him and strove if possible to glean reflection of

their fate from his bearing at this supreme moment. He stood for more than he guessed, yet knew that the eyes of many waited upon him in hope to win a spark of confidence, or in dread to be further cast down. The cloud had risen above all their heads from the quarry, and whereas before the sunshine lighted it, now it dimmed the sunshine.

Hawkey's thoughts flashed quickly. There was no time to delay, and he felt called upon for some simple action or gesture. More than indifference was demanded. His inspiration took a shape so trifling that in narration it is almost ridiculous, though in fact it was not so. He drew a tobacco pipe and pouch from his pocket, loaded the pipe, lighted it, and cheered five hundred hearts.

A wave of human feeling broke over the people. They cheered Tom Hawkey. Not a man knew why he expressed himself in this fashion; there existed no reason for doing so; but the act liberated breath and relaxed tension; so they did it and meant it. But he laughed and shook his head.

"'Tis for me to cheer you chaps!" he shouted.

Then he joined them and the men began to pour down into the quarry. Soon only the old and women and children were left above. They gazed upon a new world as the dust-clouds slowly thinned away. The" Grey Abbey " seams had vanished under a million tons of earth. Perhaps no living eye would ever look upon them again.

THE INCOMPARABLE ONION

BY ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL

Too often the poet sees but the tears that live in an onion; not the smiles. And yet the smiles are there, broad and genial, or subtle and tender. "Rose among roots," its very name revives memories of pleasant feasting; its fragrance is rich forecast of delights to come. Without it, there would be no gastronomic art. Banish it from the kitchen, and all pleasure of eating flies with it. Its presence lends color and enchantment to the most modest dish; its absence reduces the rarest dainty to hopeless insipidity, and the diner to despair.

The secret of good cooking lies in the discreet and sympathetic treatment of the onion. For what culinary masterpiece is there that may not be improved by it? It gives vivacity to soup, life to sauce; it is the "poetic soul" of the salad bowl; the touch of romance in the well-cooked vegetable. To it, sturdiest joint and lightest stew, crisp rissole and stimulating stuffing look for inspiration and charm-and never are they disappointed! But woe betide the unwary woman who would approach it for sacrilegious ends. If life holds nothing better than the onion in the right hand, it offers nothing sadder and more degrading than the onion brutalized. Wide is the gulf fixed between the delicate sauce of a Prince de Soubise, and the coarse, unsavory sausage and onion mess of the Strand. Let the perfection of the first be your ideal; the horrid coarseness of the latter shun as you would the devil.

The fragrance of this "wine-scented" esculent not only whets the appetite; it abounds in associations glad and picturesque. All Italy is in the fine, penetrating smell; and all Provence; and all Spain. An onion or garlic-scented atmosphere hovers alike over the narrow calli of Venice, the cool courts of Cordova, and the thronged amphitheatre of Arles. It is the only atmosphere breathed by the Latin peoples of the South, so that ever must it suggest blue skies and endless sunshine, cypress groves and olive orchards. For the traveler it is interwoven with memories of the golden canvases of Titian, the song of Dante, the music of Mascagni. The violet may not work a sweeter spell, nor the carnation yield a more intoxicating perfume.

And some men there have been in the past to rank the onion as a root sacred to Aphrodite: food for lovers. To the poetry of it none but the dull and brutal can long remain indifferent.

Needless, then, to dwell upon its more prosaic side: upon its power as a tonic, its value as a medicine. Medicinal properties it has, as the drunkard knows full well. But why consider the drunkard? Leave him to the tender mercies of the doctor. Gourmandise, or the love of good eating, here the one and only concern, is opposed to excess. "Every man who eats to indigestion, or makes himself drunk, runs the risk of being erased from the list of its votaries."

The onion is but the name for a large family, of which shallots, garlic, and chives are chief and most honored varieties. Moreover, country and climate work upon it changes many and strange. In the south it becomes larger and more opulent, like the women. And yet, as it increases in size, it loses in strength-who shall say why? And the loss truly is an improvement. Our own onion often is strong even unto rankness. Therefore, as all good housewives understand, the Spanish species for most purposes may be used instead, and great will be the gain thereby. Still further south, still further east, you will journey but to find the onion fainter in flavor, until in India it seems but a pale parody of its English prototype. And again, at different seasons, very different are its most salient qualities. In great gladness of heart everyone must look forward to the dainty little spring onion: adorable as vegetable cooked in good white sauce, inscrutable as guardian spirit of fresh green salad, irreproachable as pickle in vinegar and mustard.

Garlic is one of the most gracious gifts of the gods to men—a gift, alas! too frequently abused. In the vegetable world, it has something of the value of scarlet among colors, of the clarionet's call in music. Brazen, and crude, and screaming, when dragged into undue prominence, it may yet be made to harmonize divinely with fish and fowl, with meat, and other greens. Thrown wholesale into a salad, it is odious and insupportable; but used to rub the salad bowl, and then cast aside, its virtue may not be exaggerated. For it, as for lovers, the season of seasons is the happy springtime. Its true home is Provence. What would be the land of the troubadour and the Félibre without the ail that festoons every green grocer's shop, that adorns every dish at every banquet of rich and poor alike? As well rid bouillabaisse of its saffron as of its ail; as well forget the pomme