" Then, very solemnly, did my Beltane kneel him beside the way and lifting the cross hilt of his sword to heaven kissed it, and thereafter rose.

He reeled and fell, but before he had fairly touched the ground I was upon him, knife in hand, and had driven the keen-edged weapon to its hilt in his heart.

So saying, the stranger sprang nimbly to his feet and catching up one of the swords took it by the blade and gave its massy hilt to Beltane's hand.

With spirit sword bound at his side, And his hand the hilt on, Brave FULTON smote at hip and thigh Of our little TILTON; Then TILTON took a mighty quill, Called FULTON a liar, FULTON took that to his church, Will he take it higher?

" He stood motionless, however, even when his dark cloak was adjusted to his shoulders, as though some matters were disturbing him; and then he tapped his sword hilt with a precise, even motion of his fingers.

Again, "The liar drives the point into a friend's heart, and puts the hilt into a foe's hand."

This matter of potential is comparable to the factor of reserve power or margin of safety demonstrated up to the hilt for such organs as the heart and kidney as varying from individual to individual.

There were turkeys innocent of a bone, into which you might plunge your knife to the very hilt without coming in contact with a splinterturkeys from which cunning cooks had extracted every bone leaving the meat alone behind, with the skin not perceptibly broken.

As the fellow became outrageously insolent, the Captain drew his sword, which the desperado snatched out of his hand, broke in two pieces, threw the hilt at him, and made off for the barrack, where, taking his gun, which was loaded, and crying out "One and all!"

As he plunged into the crowd that checked and surged immediately in front of the line of Sikhs, a small man in Arab costume with the lower part of his face well covered by the kaffiyi,* rushed out from the corner behind the bootblacks and drove a long knife home to the hilt between the policeman's shoulder-blades.

There was more to admire in the workmanship of the hilt than in a thousand such blades, but a Westerner would have his eye on the useful part of a thing.

There is my kinsman Ernest's," he said, throwing on the ground the weapon which he carried, with the hilt towards the young Englishman.

But II drove my sword through his midriff with such frantic force, that the mere blow of the hilt against the end of his breast-bone sent him six paces before he fell, and left my reeking blade ready for the other.