As a rule he walked to church between his father and his mother, like a little child, although he was now a tall lad of sixteen, but to-day he was sent back for a psalm-book, forgotten in the hurry of their early start. When he set out again the rest of the village folk were all in the meeting-house. The sight of the deserted street, walled in by the forest, lying drowsily in the spring sunshine, was like balm to him. He loitered along, free from observation, his eyes shining. A fat, old negro woman sat on a doorstep in the sun, the only other person not in meeting. She was a worn-out slave, from a Connecticut seaport, who had been thrown in for good measure in a sharp bargain driven by the leading man of Hillsboro. A red turban-like cloth was bound above her black face, she rested her puffy black arms across her knees and crooned a monotonous refrain. Although the villagers regarded her as imbecile, they thought her harmless, and Nathaniel nodded to her as he passed. She gave him a rich laugh and a "Good morrow, Marse Natty, good morrow!"

A hen clucking to her chicks went across the road before him. The little yellow balls ran briskly forward on their wiry legs, darting at invisible insects, turning their shiny black eyes about alertly and filling the air with their sweet, thin pipings. Nathaniel stopped to watch them, and as he noticed the pompously important air with which one of the tiny creatures scratched the ground with his ineffectual little feet, cocking his eye upon the spot afterward as if to estimate the amount of progress made, the boy laughed out loud. He started at the sound and glanced around him hurriedly, moving on to the meeting-house from which there now burst forth a harshly intoned psalm. He lingered for a moment at the door, gazing back at the translucent greens of the distant birches gleaming against the black pines. A gust of air perfumed with shad-blossom blew past him, and with this in his nostrils he entered the whitewashed interior and made his way on tiptoe up the bare boards of the aisle.



II

After meeting the women and children walked home to set out the cold viands for the Sabbath dinner, while the men stood in a group on the green before the door for a few minutes' conversation.

"Verily, Master Everett, the breath of the Almighty was in your words this day as never before," said one of them. "One more such visitation of the anger of God and your son will be saved."

"How looked he when they bore him out?" asked the minister faintly. His face was very white.

The other continued, "Truly, reverend sir, your setting forth of the devil lying in wait for the thoughtless, and the lake burning with brimstone, did almost affright me who for many years now have known myself to be of the elect. I could not wonder that terrors melted the soul of your son."

"How looked he when they bore him out?" repeated the minister impatiently.

The other answered encouragingly, "More like death than life, so the women say." The minister waved the men aside and went swiftly down the street. The hen and chickens fled with shrill cries at his approach, and the old negress stopped her song. After he had passed she chuckled slowly to herself, thrust her head up sideways to get the sun in a new place, and began her crooning chant afresh.

"How is the boy?" asked the minister of his wife as he stepped inside the door. "Not still screaming out and——"

Mistress Everett shook her head reassuringly. "Nay, he is quiet now, up in his room."

Nathaniel lay on his trundle bed, his eyes fixed on the rafters, his pale lips drawn back. At the sight his father sat down heavily on the edge of the bed. The boy sprang upon him with a cry, "Oh, father, I see fire always there—last winter when I burned my finger—oh, always such pain!"

The minister's voice broke as he said, "Oh, Nathaniel, the blessed ease when all this travail is gone by and thou knowest thyself to be of the elect."

Nathaniel screamed out at this, a fleck of froth showing on his lips. "That is the horrible thing—I know I am not one of the saved. My heart is all full of carnal pleasures and desires. To look at the sun on the hillside—why I love it so that I forget my soul—hell—God—"

His father gave a deep shocked groan and put his hand over the quivering lips. "Be not a bitterness to him that begot you. Hush!"

The fever of excitement left the boy and he fell down with his face in the pillow to lie there motionless until his parents went out for second meeting, leaving him alone in the house. "Confidence must be rooted out of his tabernacle," said his father sternly. "The spirit of God is surely working in his heart in which I see many of my own besetting sins."

Nathaniel sprang up, when he heard the door shut, with a distracted idea of escape, now that his jailers were away, and felt an icy stirring in the roots of his hair at the realization that his misery lay within, that the walls of his own flesh and blood shut it inexorably into his heart forever. He threw open the window and leaned out.

The old negress came out of the woods at the other end of the street, her turban gleaming red. She moved in a cautious silence past the meeting-house, but when she came opposite the minister's house, thinking herself alone, she burst into a gay, rapid song, the words of which she so mutilated in her barbarous accent that only a final "Oh, Molly-oh!" could be distinguished. She carried an herb-basket on her arm now, into which, from time to time, she looked with great satisfaction.

Nathaniel ran down the stairs and out of the door calling. She paused, startled. "How can you sing and laugh and walk so lightly?" he cried out.

She cocked her head on one side with her turtle-like motion. "Why should she not sing?" she asked in her thick, sweet voice. She had never learned the difference between the pronouns. "She's be'n gatherin' yarbs in the wood, an' th' sun is warm," she blinked at it rapidly, "an' the winter it is pas', Marse Natty, no mo' winter!"

Nathaniel came close up to her, laying his thin fingers on her fat, black arm. His voice quivered. "But they say if you love those things and if they make you glad you are damned to everlasting brimstone fire. Tell me how you dare to laugh, so that I will dare too."

The old woman laughed, opening her mouth so widely that the red lining to her throat showed moistly, and all her fat shook on her bones. "Lord love ye, chile, dat's white folks' talk. Dat don't scare a old black woman!" She shifted her basket to the other arm and prepared to go on. "You're bleeged to be keerful 'bout losin' yo' soul. Black folks ain't got no souls, bless de Lord! When dey dies dey dies!"

She shuffled along, laughing, and began to sing again. Nathaniel looked after her with burning eyes. After she had disappeared between the tree trunks of the forest, the breeze bore back to him a last joyous whoop of "Oh, Molly-oh!" He burst into sobs, and shivering, made his way back into his father's darkening, empty house.



III

At the breakfast table the next morning his father looked at him neutrally. "This day you shall go to salt the sheep in the Miller lot," he announced, "and you may have until the hour before sundown to walk in the wood."

"Oh, father, really!"

"That is what I said," repeated the minister dryly, pushing away from the table.

After the boy had gone, carrying the bag of salt and the little package of his noonday meal, the minister sighed heavily. "I fear my weak heart inclines me to too great softness to our son." To his wife he cried out a moment later, "Oh, that some instance of the wrath of Jehovah could come before us now, while our son's spirit is softened. Deacon Truitt said yesterday that one more visitation would save him."

Nathaniel walked along soberly, his eyes on the road at his feet, his face quite pale, a sleepless night evidently behind him. He came into the birches without noticing them at first, and when he looked up he was for a moment so taken by surprise that he was transfigured. The valley at his feet shimmered like an opal through the slender white pillars of the trees. The wood was like a many-columned chapel, unroofed and open to the sunlight. Nathaniel gave a cry of rapture, and dropped the bag of salt. "Oh!" he cried, stretching out his arms, and then again, "Oh!"

For a moment he stood so, caught into a joy that was almost anguish, and then at a sudden thought he shrank together, his arm crooked over his eyes. He sank forward, still covering his eyes, into a great bed of fern, just beginning to unroll their whitey-green balls into long, pale plumes. There he lay as still as if he were dead.

Two men came riding through the lane, their horses treading noiselessly over the leaf-mold. They had almost passed the motionless, prostrate figure when the older reined in and pointed with his whip. "What is that, LeMaury?"

At the unexpected sound the boy half rose, showing a face so convulsed that the other horseman cried out alarmed, "It ees a man crazed! Ride on, mon colonel!" He put spurs to his horse and sprang forward as he spoke.

The old soldier laughed a little, and turned to Nathaniel. "Why, 'tis the minister his son. I know you by the look of your father in you. What bad dream have we waked you from, you pretty boy?"

"You have not waked me from it," cried Nathaniel. "I will never wake as long as I live, and when I die—!"

"Why, LeMaury is right. The poor lad is crazed. We must see to this."

He swung himself stiffly from the saddle and came limping up to Nathaniel. Kneeling by the boy he brought him up to a sitting position, and at the sight of the ashen face and white, turned-back eyeballs he sat down hastily, drawing the young head upon his shoulder with a rough tenderness. "Why, so lads look under their first fire, when they die of fear. What frights you so?"

Nathaniel opened great solemn eyes upon him. "I suppose it is the conviction of sin. That is what they call it."

For an instant the old man's face was blank with astonishment, and then it wrinkled into a thousand lines of mirth. He began to laugh as though he would never stop. Nathaniel had never heard anyone laugh like that. He clutched at the old man.

"How dare you laugh!"

The other wiped his eyes and rocked to and fro, "I laugh—who would not—that such a witless baby should talk of his sin. You know not what sin is, you silly innocent!"

At the kindliness of the tone an aching knot in the boy's throat relaxed. He began to talk hurriedly, in a desperate whisper, his hands like little birds' claws gripping the other's great gauntleted fist. "You do not know how wicked I am—I am so wholly forward the wonder is the devil does not take me at once. I live only in what my father calls the lust of the eye. I—I would rather look at a haw-tree in bloom than meditate on the Almighty!" He brought out this awful confession with a gasp at its enormity, but hurried on to a yet more terrible climax. "I cannot be righteous, but many times there are those who cannot—but oh, worse than that, I cannot even wish to be! I can only wish to be a painter."

At this unexpected ending the old man gave an exclamation of extreme amazement.

"But, boy, lad, what's your name? However did you learn that there are painters in the world, here in this prison-house of sanctity?"

Nathaniel had burrowed into his protector's coat as though hiding from the imminent wrath of God. He now spoke in muffled tones. "Two years ago, when I was but a little child, there came a man to our town, a Frenchman, they said, and his horse fell lame, and he stopped two days at my Uncle Elzaphan's. My Uncle Elzaphan asked him what business did he in the world, and he said he put down on cloth or paper with brushes and colors all the fair and comely things he saw. And he showed a piece of paper with on it painted the row of willows along our brook. I sat in the chimney-corner and no one heeded me. I saw—oh, then I knew! I have no paint, but ever since I have made pictures with burnt sticks on birchbark—though my father says that of all the evil ways of evil men none lead down more swift to the chambers of death and the gates of hell than that. Every night I make a vow unto the Lord that I will sin no more; but in the morning the devil whispers in my ear and I rise up and sin again—no man knows this—and I am never glad unless I think I have done well with my pictures, and I hate the meeting-house and—" His voice died away miserably.

"Two years ago, was't?" asked the old man. "And the man was French?"

"Aye."

The old soldier shifted his position, stretched out a stiff knee with a grimace of pain, and pulled the tall lad bodily into his lap like a child. For some time the two were silent, the sun shining down warmly on them through the faint, vaporous green of the tiny leaves. The old horse cropped the young shoots with a contented, ruminative air, once in a while pausing to hang his head drowsily, and bask motionless in the warmth.

Then the old man began to speak in a serious tone, quite different from his gentle laughter. "Young Everett, of all the people you have seen, is there one whom you would wish to have even a moment of the tortures of hell?"

Nathaniel looked at him horrified. "Why, no!" he cried indignantly.

"Then do you think your God less merciful than you?"

Nathaniel stared long into the steady eyes. "Oh, do you mean it is not true?" He leaned close in an agony of hope. "Sometimes I have thought it could not be true!"

The old soldier struck him on the shoulder inspiritingly, his weather-beaten face very grave. "Aye, lad, I mean it is not true. I am an old man and I have learned that they lie who say it is true. There is no hell but in our own hearts when we do evil; and we can escape a way out of that by repenting and doing good. There is no devil but our evil desires, and God gives to every man strength to fight with those. There is only good in your love for the fair things God made and put into the world for us to love. No man but only your own heart can tell you what is wrong and what is right. Only do not fear, for all is well."

The scene was never to fade from Nathaniel Everett's eyes. In all the after crises of his life the solemn words rang in his ears.

The old man suddenly smiled at him, all quaint drollery again. "And now wait." He put hand to mouth and hallooed down the lane. "Ho there! LeMaury!"

As the Frenchman came into sight, the old man turned to Nathaniel, "Is this the gentleman who painted your willows?"

"Oh, aye!" cried Nathaniel.

The Frenchman dismounted near them with sparkling glances of inquiry. "See, LeMaury, this is young Master Everett, whom you have bewitched with your paint-pots. He would fain be an artist—de gustibus—! Perhaps you have in him an apprentice for your return to France."

The artist looked sharply at Nathaniel. "Eh, so? Can young master draw? Doth he know aught of chiaroscuro?"

Nathaniel blushed at his ignorance and looked timidly at his protector.

"Nay, he knows naught of your painter's gibberish. Give him a crayon and a bit of white bark and see can he make my picture. I'll lean my head back and fold my hands to sleep."

In the long sunny quiet that followed, the old man really slipped away into a light doze, from which he was awakened by a loud shout from LeMaury. The Frenchman had sprung upon Nathaniel and was kissing his cheeks, which were now crimson with excitement. "Oh, it is Giotto come back again. He shall be anything—Watteau."

Nathaniel broke away and ran toward the old man, his eyes blazing with hope.

"What does he mean?" he demanded.

"He means that you're to be a painter and naught else, though how a man can choose to daub paint when there are swords to be carried—well, well," he pulled himself painfully to his feet, wincing at gouty twinges, "I will go and see your father about—"

"Mais, Colonel Hall, dites! How can I arrange not to lose this pearl among artists?"

At the name, for he had not understood the title before, pronounced as it was in French, the boy fell back in horrified recognition. "Oh! you are Colonel Gideon Hall!"

"Aye, lad, who else?" The old soldier swung himself up to the saddle, groaning, "Oh, damn that wet ground! I fear I cannot sit the nag home."

"But then you are the enemy of God—the chosen one of Beelzebub——"

"Do they call me that in polite and pious Hillsboro?"

The Frenchman broke in, impatient of this incomprehensible talk. "See, boy, you—Everett—I go back to France now soon. I lie next Friday night at Woodburn. If you come to me there we will go together to France—to Paris—you will be the great artist——"

He was silenced by a gesture from the colonel, who now sat very straight on his horse and beckoned to Nathaniel. The boy came timorously. "You have heard lies about me, Everett. Be man enough to trust your own heart." He broke into a half-sad little laugh at Nathaniel's face of fascinated repulsion.

"You can laugh now," whispered the boy, close at his knee, "but when you come to die? Why, even my father trembles at the thought of death. Oh, if I could but believe you!"

"Faugh! To fear death when one has done his best!"

He had turned his horse's head, but Nathaniel called after him, bringing out the awful words with an effort. "But they say—that you do not believe in God."

The colonel laughed again. "Why, lad, I'm the only man in this damn town who does." He put his horse into a trot and left Nathaniel under the birch-trees, the sun high over his head, the bag of salt forgotten at his feet.



IV

A little before sundown the next day the minister strode into his house, caught up his Bible, and called to his wife, "Deborah, the Lord hath answered me in my trouble. Call Nathaniel and bring him after me to the house of Gideon Hall."

Mistress Everett fell back, her hand at her heart, "To that house?"

"Aye, even there. He lieth at the point of death. So are the wicked brought into desolation. Yesterday, as he rode in the wood, his horse cast him down so that it is thought he may not live till dark. I am sent for by his pious sisters to wrestle with him in prayer. Oh, Deborah, now is the time to strike the last blow for the salvation of our son. Let him see how the devil carries off the transgressor into the fires of hell, or let him see how, at the last, the proudest must make confession of his wicked unbelief——"

He hurled himself through the door like a javelin, while his wife turned to explain to Nathaniel the reason for the minister's putting on his Sabbath voice of a week-day morning. He cried out miserably, "Oh, mother, don't make me go there!"

"Nay, Nathaniel, there is naught new. You have been with us before to many a sickbed and seen many a righteous death. This is an ill man, whose terrors at the reward of his unbelief will be like goodly medicine to your sick soul, and teach you to lay hold on righteousness while there is yet time."

"But, mother, my Uncle Elzaphan said—I asked him this morning about Colonel Hall—that he had done naught but good to all men, that he had fought bravely with French and Indians, that the poor had half of his goods, that—"

She took him by the hand and dragged him relentlessly out upon the street. "Your Uncle Elzaphan is a man of no understanding, and does not know that the devil has no more subtile lure than a man who does good works but who is not of the true faith. Aye, he maketh a worse confusion to the simple than he who worketh iniquity by noonday."

She led him through the village street, through a long curving lane where he had never been before, and down an avenue of maple-trees to a house at which he had always been forbidden even to look. Various of the neighbor women were hurrying along in the same direction. As they filed up the stairs he trembled to hear his father's voice already raised in the terrible tones of one of his inspired hours. At the entrance to the sick chamber he clung for a moment to the door, gazing at the wild-eyed women who knelt about the room, their frightened eyes fixed on his father. His knees shook under him. He had a qualm of nausea at the slimy images of corruption and decay which the minister was trumpeting forth as the end to all earthly pride.

His mother pushed him inexorably forward into the room, and then, across the nightmare of frenzy, he met the calm gaze of the dying man. It was the turning-point of his life.

He ran to the bed, falling on his knees, clasping the great knotty hand and searching the eyes which were turned upon him, gently smiling. The minister, well pleased with this evidence of his son's emotion, caught his breath for another flight of eloquence which should sear and blast the pretensions of good works as opposed to the true faith. "See how low the Lord layeth the man who thinks to bargain with the Almighty, and to ransom his soul from hell by deeds which are like dust and ashes to Jehovah."

Nathaniel crept closer and whispered under cover of his father's thunderings, "Oh, you are truly not afraid?"

The dying man looked at him, his eyes as steady as when they were in the woods. "Nay, little comrade, it is all a part of life."

After that he seemed to sink into partial unconsciousness. Nathaniel felt his hand grow colder, but he still held it, grasping it more tightly when he felt the fumes of his father's reeking eloquence mount to his brain. The women were all sobbing aloud. A young girl was writhing on the floor, her groans stifled by her mother's hand. The air of the room was stifling with hysteria. The old sister of the dying man called out, "Oh, quick, Master Everett. He is going. Exhort him now to give us some token that at the last he repents of his unbelief."

The minister whirled about, shaking with his own violence. The sweat was running down his face. "Gideon Hall, I charge you to say if you repent of your sins."

There was a pause. The silence was suffocating.

The old man gradually aroused himself from his torpor, although he did not open his eyes. "Aye, truly I repent me of my sins," he whispered mildly, "for any unkindness done to any man, or——"

The minister broke in, his voice mounting shrilly, "Nay, not so, thou subtle mocker. Dost thou repent thee of thy unbelief in the true faith?"

Colonel Gideon Hall opened his eyes. He turned his head slowly on the pillow until he faced the preacher, and at the sight of his terrible eyes and ecstatic pallor he began to laugh whimsically, as he had laughed in the wood with Nathaniel. "Why, man, I thought you did but frighten women with it—not yourself too. Nay, do not trouble about me. I don't believe in your damned little hell."

The smile on his face gradually died away into a still serenity, which was there later, when the minister lifted his son away from the dead man's bed.



V

The four old men walked sturdily forward with their burden, although at intervals they slipped their tall staves under the corners and rested, wiping their foreheads and breathing hard. As they stood thus silent, where the road passed through a thicket of sumac, a boy came rapidly around the curve and was upon them before he saw that he was not alone. He stopped short and made a guilty motion to hide a bundle that he carried. The old men stared at him, and reassured by this absence of recognition he advanced slowly, looking curiously at the great scarlet flag which hung in heavy folds from their burden.

"Is this the road to Woodburn?" he asked them.

"Aye," they answered briefly.

He had almost passed them when he stopped again, drawing in his breath.

"Oh, are you—is this Colonel—"

"Aye, lad," said the oldest of the bearers, "this is the funeral procession of the best commander and truest man who ever lived."

"But why—" began the boy, looking at the flag.

"He's wrapped in the flag of the king that he was a loyal servant to, because the damned psalm-singing hypocrites in the town where he lived of late would not make a coffin for him—no, nor allow ground to bury him—no, nor men to bear him out to his grave! We be men who have served under him in three wars, and we come from over the mountain to do the last service for him. He saved our lives for us more than once—brave Colonel Gid!"

They all uncovered at the name, and the boy shyly and awkwardly took his cap off.

"May I—may I see him once again?" he asked, dropping his bundle. "He saved my life too."

Two men put their gnarled old hands to the flag and drew it down from the head of the bier. The boy did not speak, but he went nearer and nearer with an expression on his face which one of the old men answered aloud. "Aye, is he not at peace! God grant we may all look so when the time comes."

They let the flag fall over the dead face again, set their shoulders to the bier, and moved forward, bringing down their great staves rhythmically as they walked. The boy stood still looking after them. When they passed out into the sunshine of the open hillside he ran to the edge of the thicket so that he could still follow them with his eyes. They plodded on, growing smaller and smaller in the distance, until as they paused on the crest of the hill only a spot of red could be seen, brilliant against the brilliant sky.

The boy went back and picked up his bundle. When he returned to the edge of the thicket the spot of red was disappearing over the hill. He took off his cap and stood there until there was nothing before him but the sun shining on the hillside.

Then he turned about, and walking steadily, Nathaniel Everett entered into his own world.



NOCTES AMBROSIANAE

From Hemlock Mountain's barren crest The roaring gale flies down the west And drifts the snow on Redmount's breast In hollows dark with pine.

Full in its path from hill to hill There stands, beside a ruined mill, A lonely house, above whose sill A brace of candles shine.

And there an ancient bachelor And maiden sister, full three-score, Sit all forgetful of the roar Of wind and mountain stream;

Forgot the wind, forgot the snow, What magic airs about them blow? They read, in wondering voices low, The Midsummer Night's Dream!

And, reading, past their frozen hill In charmed woods they range at will And hear the horns of Oberon shrill Above the plunging Tam;—

Yea, long beyond the cock's first crow In dreams they walk where windflowers blow; Late do they dream, and liker grow To Charles and Mary Lamb.



HILLSBORO'S GOOD LUCK

When the news of Hillsboro's good fortune swept along the highroad there was not a person in the other three villages of the valley who did not admit that Hillsboro deserved it. Everyone said that in this case Providence had rewarded true merit, Providence being represented by Mr. Josiah Camden, king of the Chicago wheat pit, whose carelessly bestowed bounty meant the happy termination of Hillsboro's long and arduous struggles.

The memory of man could not go back to the time when that town had not had a public library. It was the pride of the remote village, lost among the Green Mountains, that long before Carnegie ever left Scotland there had been a collection of books free to all in the wing of Deacon Bradlaugh's house. Then as now the feat was achieved by the united efforts of all inhabitants. They boasted that the town had never been taxed a cent to keep up the library, that not a person had contributed a single penny except of his own free will; and it was true that the public spirit of the village concentrated itself most harmoniously upon this favorite feature of their common life. Political strife might rage in the grocery-stores, religious differences flame high in the vestibule of the church, and social distinctions embitter the Ladies' Club, but the library was a neutral ground where all parties met, united by a common and disinterested effort.

Like all disinterested and generous actions it brought its own reward. The great social event of the year, not only for Hillsboro, but for all the outlying towns of Woodville, Greenford, and Windfield, was the annual "Entertainment for buying new books," as it was named on the handbills which were welcomed so eagerly by the snow-bound, monotony-ridden inhabitants of the Necronsett Valley. It usually "ran" three nights so that every one could get there, the people from over Hemlock Mountain driving twenty miles. There was no theater for forty miles, and many a dweller on the Hemlock slopes had never seen a nearer approach to one than the town hall of Hillsboro on the great nights of the "Library Show."

As for Hillsboro itself, the excitement of one effort was scarcely over before plans for the next year's were begun. Although the date was fixed by tradition on the three days after Candlemas (known as "Woodchuck Day" in the valley), they had often decided what the affair should be and had begun rehearsals before the leaves had turned in the autumn. There was no corner of the great world of dramatic art they had not explored, borne up to the loftiest regions of endeavor by their touchingly unworldly ignorance of their limitations. As often happens in such cases they believed so ingenuously in their own capacities that their faith wrought miracles.

Sometimes they gave a cantata, sometimes a nigger-minstrel show. The year the interior of the town hall was changed, they took advantage of the time before either the first or second floor was laid, and attempted and achieved an indoor circus. And the year that an orchestra conductor from Albany had to spend the winter in the mountains for his lungs, they presented Il Trovatore. Everybody sang, as a matter of course, and those whose best efforts in this direction brought them no glory had their innings the year it was decided to give a play.

They had done East Lynne and Hamlet, Uncle Tom's Cabin and Macbeth, and every once in a while the local literary man, who was also the undertaker, wrote a play based on local traditions. Of course they gave The Village School and Memory's Garland, and if you don't remember those delectable home-made entertainments, so much the worse for you. It is true that in the allegorical tableau at the end of Memory's Garland the wreath, which was of large artificial roses, had been made of such generous proportions that when the Muses placed it on the head of slender Elnathan Pritchett, representing "The Poet," it slipped over his ears, down over his narrow shoulders, and sliding rapidly toward the floor was only caught by him in time to hold it in place upon his stomach. That happened only on the first night, of course. The other performances it was perfect, lodging on his ears with the greatest precision.

It must not be supposed, however, that the responsibilities of Hillsboro for the library ended with the triumphant counting out of the money after the entertainment. This sum, the only actual cash ever handled by the committee, was exclusively devoted to the purchase of new books. It was the pride of the village that everything else was cared for without price, by their own enterprise, public spirit, and ingenuity. When the books, had overflowed the wing of Deacon Bradlaugh's house, back in 1869, they were given free lodging in the rooms of the then newly established and flourishing Post of the G.A.R. In 1896 they burst from this chrysalis into the whole lower floor of the town hall, newly done over for the purpose. From their shelves here the books looked down benignly on church suppers and sociables, and even an occasional dance. It was the center of village life, the big, low-ceilinged room, its windows curtained with white muslin, its walls bright with fresh paper and colored pictures, like any sitting-room in a village home. The firewood was contributed, a load apiece, by the farmers of the country about, and the oil for the lamps was the common gift of the three grocery-stores. There was no carpet, but bright-colored rag rugs lay about on the bare floor, and it was a point of honor with the Ladies' Aid Society of the church to keep these renewed.

The expense of a librarian's salary was obviated by the expedient of having no librarian. The ladies of Hillsboro took turns in presiding over the librarian's table, each one's day coming about once in three weeks. "Library Day" was as fixed an institution in Hillsboro as "wash day," and there was not a busy housewife who did not look forward to the long quiet morning spent in dusting and caring for the worn old books, which were like the faces of friends to her, familiar from childhood. The afternoon and evening were more animated, since the library had become a sort of common meeting-ground. The big, cheerful, sunlighted room full of grown-ups and children, talking together, even laughing out loud at times, did not look like any sophisticated idea of a library, for Hillsboro was as benighted on the subject of the need for silence in a reading-room as on all other up-to-date library theories. If you were so weak-nerved and sickly that the noise kept you from reading, you could take your book, go into Elzaphan Hall's room and shut the door, or you could take your book and go home, but you could not object to people being sociable.

Elzaphan Hall was the janitor, and the town's only pauper. He was an old G.A.R. man who had come back from the war minus an arm and a foot, and otherwise so shattered that steady work was impossible. In order not to wound him by making him feel that he was dependent on public charity, it had been at once settled that he should keep the fire going in the library, scrub the floor, and keep the room clean in return for his food and lodging. He "boarded round" like the school-teacher, and slept in a little room off the library. In the course of years he had grown pathetically and exasperatingly convinced of his own importance, but he had been there so long that his dictatorial airs and humors were regarded with the unsurprised tolerance granted to things of long standing, and were forgiven in view of his devotion to the best interests of the library, which took the place of a family to him.

As for the expenses of cataloguing, no one ever thought of such a thing. Catalogue the books? Why, as soon hang up a list of the family so that you wouldn't forget how many children you had; as soon draw a plan of the village so that people should not lose their way about. Everybody knew what and where the books were, as well as they knew what and where the fields on their farms were, or where the dishes were on the pantry shelves. The money from the entertainment was in hand by the middle of February; by April the new books, usually about a hundred in number, had arrived; and by June any wide-awake, intelligent resident of Hillsboro would have been ashamed to confess that he did not know the location of every one.

The system of placing on the shelves was simplicity itself. Each year's new acquisitions were kept together, regardless of subject, and located by the name of the entertainment which had bought them. Thus, if you wished to consult a certain book on geology, in which subject the library was rich, owing to the scientific tastes of Squire Pritchett, you were told by the librarian for the day, as she looked up from her darning with a friendly smile, that it was in the "Uncle Tom's Cabin section." The Shakespeare set, honorably worn and dog's-eared, dated back to the unnamed mass coming from early days before things were so well systematized, and was said to be in the "Old Times section"; whereas Ibsen (for some of Hillsboro young people go away to college) was bright and fresh in the "East Lynne section."

The books were a visible and sincere symbol of Hillsboro's past and present. The honest, unpretending people had bought the books they wished to read, and everyone's taste was represented, even a few French legends and pious tales being present as a concession to the Roman Catholic element among the French Canadians. There was a great deal of E.P. Roe, there was all of Mrs. Southworth—is it possible that anywhere else in the world there is a complete collection of that lady's voluminous productions?—but beside them stood the Elizabethan dramatists and a translation of Dante. The men of the town, who after they were grown up did not care much for fiction, cast their votes for scientific treatises on agriculture, forestry, and the like; and there was an informal history club, consisting of the postmaster, the doctor, and the druggist, who bore down heavily on history books. The school-teacher, the minister, and the priest had each, ex officio, the choice of ten books with nobody to object, and the children in school were allowed another ten with no advice from elders.

It would have made a scientific librarian faint, the Hillsboro system, but the result was that not a book was bought which did not find readers eager to welcome it. A stranger would have turned dizzy trying to find his way about, but there are no strangers in Hillsboro. The arrival even of a new French-Canadian lumberman is a subject of endless discussion.

It can be imagined, therefore, how electrified was the village by the apparition, on a bright June day, of an automobile creaking and wheezing its slow way to the old tavern. The irritated elderly gentleman who stepped out and began blaming the chauffeur for the delay announced himself to Zadok Foster, the tavern-keeper, as Josiah Camden, of Chicago, and was electrified in his turn by the calmness with which that mighty name was received.

During the two days he waited in Hillsboro for the repair of his machine he amused himself first by making sure of the incredible fact that nobody in the village had ever heard of him, and second by learning with an astounded and insatiable curiosity all the details of life in this forgotten corner of the mountains. It was newer and stranger to him than anything he had seen during his celebrated motor-car trip through the Soudan. He was stricken speechless by hearing that you could rent a whole house (of only five rooms, to be sure) and a garden for thirty-six dollars a year, and that the wealthiest man in the place was supposed to have inherited and accumulated the vast sum of ten thousand dollars. When he heard of the public library he inquired quickly how much it cost to run that? Mr. Camden knew from experience something about the cost of public libraries.

"Not a cent," said Zadok Foster proudly.

Mr. Camden came from Chicago and not from Missouri, but the involuntary exclamation of amazed incredulity which burst from his lips was, "Show me!"

So they showed him. The denizen of the great world entered the poor, low-ceilinged room, looked around at the dreadful chromos on the walls, at the cheap, darned muslin curtains, at the gaudy rag rugs, at the shabby, worn books in inextricable confusion on the shelves, and listened with gleaming eyes to the account given by the librarian for the day of the years of patient and uncomplaining struggles by which these poverty-stricken mountaineers had secured this meager result. He struck one hand into the other with a clap. "It's a chance in a million!" he cried aloud.

When his momentous letter came back from Chicago, this was still the recurrent note, that nowadays it is so hard for a poor millionaire to find a deserving object for his gifts, that it is the rarest opportunity possible when he really with his own eyes can make sure of placing his money where it will carry on a work already begun in the right spirit. He spoke in such glowing terms of Hillsboro's pathetic endeavors to keep their poor little enterprise going, that Hillsboro, very unconscious indeed of being pathetic, was bewildered. He said that owing to the unusual conditions he would break the usual rules governing his benefactions and ask no guarantee from the town. He begged, therefore, to have the honor to announce that he had already dispatched an architect and a contractor to Hillsboro, who would look the ground over, and put up a thoroughly modern library building with no expense spared to make it complete in equipment; that he had already placed to the credit of the "Hillsboro Camden Public Library" a sufficient sum to maintain in perpetuity a well-paid librarian, and to cover all expenses of fuel, lights, purchase of books, cataloguing, etc.; and that the Library School in Albany had already an order to select a perfectly well-balanced library of thirty thousand books to begin with.

Reason recoils from any attempt to portray the excitement of Hillsboro after this letter arrived. To say that it was as if a gold mine had been discovered under the village green is the feeblest of metaphors. For an entire week the town went to bed at night tired out with exclaiming, woke in the morning sure it had dreamed it all, rushed with a common impulse to the post-office where the letter was posted on the wall, and fell to exclaiming again.

Then the architect and contractor arrived, and Hillsboro drew back into its shell of somber taciturnity, and acted, the contractor told the architect, as though they were in the habit of having libraries given them three times a week regularly.

The architect replied that these mountaineers were like Indians. You couldn't throw a shock into them that would make them loosen up any.

Indeed, this characterization seemed just enough, in view of the passive way in which Hillsboro received what was done for it during the months which followed.

It was the passivity of stupefaction, however, as one marvel after another was revealed to them. The first evening the architect sketched the plans of a picturesque building in the old Norse style, to match the romantic scenery of the lovely valley. The next morning he located it upon a knoll cooled by a steady breeze. The contractor made hasty inquiries about lumber, labor, and houses for his men, found that none of these essentials were at hand, decided to import everything from Albany; and by noon of the day after they arrived these two brisk young gentlemen had departed, leaving Hillsboro still incredulous of its good fortune.

When they returned, ten days later, however, they brought solid and visible proof in the shape of a trainload of building materials and a crowd of Italian laborers, who established themselves in a boarding-car on a sidetrack near the station.

"We are going," remarked the contractor to the architect, "to make the dirt fly."

"We will make things hum," answered the architect, "as they've never hummed before in this benighted spot."

And indeed, as up to this time they had never hummed at all, it is not surprising that Hillsboro caught its breath as the work went forward like Aladdin's palace. The corner-stone was laid on the third of July and on the first of October the building stood complete. By the first of November the books had come already catalogued by the Library School and arranged in boxes so that they could be put at once upon the shelves; and the last details of the interior decoration were complete. The architect was in the most naive ecstasy of admiration for his own taste. The outside was deliciously unhackneyed in design, the only reproduction of a Norwegian Stave-Kirke in America, he reported to Mr. Camden; and while that made the interior a little dark, the quaint wooden building was exquisitely in harmony with the landscape. As for the interior it was a dream! The reading-room was like the most beautiful drawing-room, an education in itself, done in dark oak, with oriental rugs, mission furniture, and reproductions of old masters on the walls. Lace sash-curtains hung at the windows, covered by rich draperies in oriental design, which subdued the light to a delightful soberness. The lamps came from Tiffany's.

When the young-lady librarian arrived from Albany and approved enthusiastically of the stack-room and cataloguing, the architect's cup of satisfaction fairly ran over; and when he went away, leaving her installed in her handsome oak-finished office, he could hardly refrain from embracing her, so exactly the right touch did she add to the whole thing with her fresh white shirt-waist and pretty, business-like airs. There had been no ceremony of opening, because Mr. Camden was so absorbed in an exciting wheat deal that he could not think of coming East, and indeed the whole transaction had been almost blotted from his mind by a month's flurried, unsteady market. So one day in November the pretty librarian walked into her office, and the Hillsboro Camden Public Library was open.

She was a very pretty librarian indeed, and she wore her tailor suits with an air which made the village girls look uneasily into their mirrors and made the village boys look after her as she passed. She was moreover as permeated with the missionary fervor instilled into her at the Library School as she was pretty, and she began at once to practice all the latest devices for automatically turning a benighted community into the latest thing in culture. When Mrs. Bradlaugh, wife of the deacon, and president of the Ladies' Aid Society, was confined to the house with a cold, she sent over to the library, as was her wont in such cases, for some entertaining story to while away her tedious convalescence. Miss Martin sent back one of Henry James's novels, and was surprised that Mrs. Bradlaugh made no second attempt to use the library. When the little girls in school asked for the Elsie books, she answered with a glow of pride that the library did not possess one of those silly stories, and offered as substitute, "Greek Myths for Children."

Squire Pritchett came, in a great hurry, one morning, and asked for his favorite condensed handbook of geology, in order to identify a stone. He was told that it was entirely out of date and very incomplete, and the library did not own it, and he was referred to the drawer in the card catalogue relating to geology. For a time his stubbed old fingers rambled among the cards, with an ever-rising flood of baffled exasperation. How could he tell by looking at a strange name on a little piece of paper whether the book it represented would tell him about a stone out of his gravel-pit! Finally he appealed to the librarian, who proclaimed on all occasions her eagerness to help inquirers, and she referred him to a handsome great Encyclopedia of Geology in forty-seven volumes. He wandered around hopelessly in this for about an hour, and in the end retreated unenlightened. Miss Martin tried to help him in his search, but, half amused by his rustic ignorance, she asked him finally, with an air of gentle patience, "how, if he didn't know any of the scientific names, he expected to be able to look up a subject in an alphabetically arranged book?" Squire Pritchett never entered the library again. His son Elnathan might be caught by her airs and graces, he said rudely enough in the post-office, but he was "too old to be talked down to by a chit who didn't know granite from marble."

When the schoolboys asked for "Nick Carter" she gave them those classics, "The Rollo Books"; and to the French-Canadians she gave, reasonably enough, the acknowledged masters of their language, Voltaire, Balzac, and Flaubert, till the horrified priest forbade from the pulpit any of his simple-minded flock to enter "that temple of sin, the public library." She had little classes in art-criticism for the young ladies in town, explaining to them with sweet lucidity why the Botticellis and Rembrandts and Duerers were better than the chromos which still hung on the walls of the old library, now cold and deserted except for church suppers and sociables. These were never held in the new reading-room, the oriental rugs being much too fine to have doughnut crumbs and coffee spilled on them. After a time, however, the young ladies told her that they found themselves too busy getting the missionary barrels ready to continue absorbing information about Botticelli's rhythm and Duerer's line.

Miss Martin was not only pretty and competent, but she was firm of purpose, as was shown by her encounter with Elzaphan Hall, who had domineered over two generations of amateur librarians. The old man had received strict orders to preserve silence in the reading-room when the librarian could not be there, and yet one day she returned from the stack-room to find the place in a most shocking state of confusion. Everybody was laughing, Elzaphan himself most of all, and they did not stop when she brought her severe young face among them. Elzaphan explained, waving his hand at a dark Rembrandt looking gloomily down upon them, that Elnathan Pritchett had said that if he had such a dirty face as that he'd wash it, if he had to go as far as from here to the Eagle Rock Spring to get the water! This seemed the dullest of bucolic wit to Miss Martin, and she chilled Elnathan to the marrow by her sad gaze of disappointment in him. Jennie Foster was very jealous of Miss Martin (as were all the girls in town), and she rejoiced openly in Elnathan's witticism, continuing to laugh at intervals after the rest of the room had cowered into silence under the librarian's eye.

Miss Martin took the old janitor aside and told him sternly that if such a thing happened again she would dismiss him; and when the old man, crazily trying to show his spirit, allowed a spelling-match to go on, full blast, right in library hours, she did dismiss him, drawing on the endless funds at her disposal to import a young Irishman from Albany, who was soon playing havoc with the pretty French-Canadian girls. Elzaphan Hall, stunned by the blow, fell into bad company and began to drink heavily, paying for his liquor by exceedingly comic and disrespectful imitations of Miss Martin's talks on art.

It was now about the middle of the winter, and the knoll which in June had been the center of gratefully cool breezes was raked by piercing north winds which penetrated the picturesquely unplastered, wood-finished walls as though they had been paper. The steam-heating plant did not work very well, and the new janitor, seeing fewer and fewer people come to the reading-room, spent less and less time in struggling with the boilers, or in keeping the long path up the hill shoveled clear of snow. Miss Martin, positively frightened by the ferocity with which winter flings itself upon the high narrow valley, was helpless before the problem of the new conditions, and could think of nothing to do except to buy more fuel and yet more, and to beseech the elusive Celt, city-trained in plausible excuses for not doing his duty, to burn more wood. Once she remarked plaintively to Elnathan Pritchett, as she sat beside him at a church supper (for she made a great point of "mingling with the people"), that it seemed to her there must be something the matter with the wood in Hillsboro.

Everybody within earshot laughed, and the saying was repeated the next day with shameless mirth as the best joke of the season. For the wood for the library had had a history distinctly discreditable and as distinctly ludicrous, at which Hillsboro people laughed with a conscious lowering of their standards of honesty. The beginning had been an accident, but the long sequence was not. For the first time in the history of the library, the farmer who brought the first load of wood presented a bill for this service. He charged two dollars a cord on the scrawled memorandum, but Miss Martin mistook this figure for a seven, corrected his total with the kindest tolerance for his faulty arithmetic, and gave the countryman a check which reduced him for a time to a paralyzed silence. It was only on telling the first person he met outside the library that the richness of a grown person knowing no more than that about the price of wood came over him, and the two screamed with laughter over the lady's beautifully formed figures on the dirty sheet of paper.

Miss Martin took the hesitating awkwardness of the next man presenting himself before her, not daring to ask the higher price and not willing to take the lower, for rustic bashfulness, and put him at his ease by saying airily, "Five cords? That makes thirty-five dollars. I always pay seven dollars a cord." After that, the procession of grinning men driving lumber-sleds toward the library became incessant. The minister attempted to remonstrate with the respectable men of his church for cheating a poor young lady, but they answered roughly that it wasn't her money but Camden's, who had tossed them the library as a man would toss a penny to a beggar, who had now quite forgotten about them, and, finally, who had made his money none too honestly.

Since he had become of so much importance to them they had looked up his successful career in the Chicago wheat pit, and, undazzled by the millions involved, had penetrated shrewdly to the significance of his operations. The record of his colossal and unpunished frauds had put to sleep, so far as he was concerned, their old minute honesty. It was considered the best of satires that the man who had fooled all the West should be fooled in his turn by a handful of forgotten mountaineers, that they should be fleecing him in little things as he had fleeced Chicago in great. There was, however, an element which frowned on this shifting of standards, and, before long, neighbors and old friends were divided into cliques, calling each other, respectively, cheats and hypocrites. Hillsboro was intolerably dull that winter because of the absence of the usual excitement over the entertainment, and in that stagnation all attention was directed to the new joke on the wheat king. It was turned over and over, forward and back, and refurbished and made to do duty again and again, after the fashion of rustic jokes. This one had the additional advantage of lining the pockets of the perpetrators. They egged one another on to fresh inventions and variations, until even the children, not to be left out, began to have exploits of their own to tell. The grocers raised the price of kerosene, groaning all the time at the extortions of the oil trust, till the guileless guardian of Mr. Camden's funds was paying fifty cents a gallon for it. The boys charged a quarter for every bouquet of pine-boughs they brought to decorate the cold, empty reading-room. The washer-woman charged five dollars for "doing-up" the lace sash-curtains. As spring came on, and the damages wrought by the winter winds must be repaired, the carpenters asked wages which made the sellers of firewood tear their hair at wasted opportunities. They might have raised the price per cord! The new janitor, hearing the talk about town, demanded a raise in salary and threatened to leave without warning if it were not granted.

It was on the fifth of June, a year to a day after the arrival of Mr. Camden in his automobile, that Miss Martin yielded to this last extortion, and her action made the day as memorable as that of the year before. The janitor, carried away by his victory, celebrated his good fortune in so many glasses of hard cider that he was finally carried home and deposited limply on the veranda of his boarding-house. Here he slept till the cold of dawn awoke him to a knowledge of his whereabouts, so inverted and tipsy that he rose, staggered to the library, cursing the intolerable length of these damn Vermont winters, and proceeded to build a roaring fire on the floor of the reading-room. As the varnished wood of the beautiful fittings took light like a well-constructed bonfire, realization of his act came to him, and he ran down the valley road, screaming and giving the alarm at the top of his lungs, and so passed out of Hillsboro forever.

The village looked out of its windows, saw the wooden building blazing like a great torch, hurried on its clothes and collected around the fire. No effort was made to save the library. People stood around in the chilly morning air, looking silently at the mountain of flame which burned as though it would never stop. They thought of a great many things in that silent hour as the sun rose over Hemlock Mountain, and there were no smiles or their faces. They are ignorant and narrow people in Hillsboro, but they have an inborn capacity unsparingly to look facts in the face.

When the last beam had fallen in with a crash to the blackened cellar-hole Miss Martin, very pale and shaken, stepped bravely forward. "I know how terribly you must be feeling about this," she began in her carefully modulated voice, "but I want to assure you that I know Mr. Camden will rebuild the library for you if—"

She was interrupted by the chief man of the town, Squire Pritchett, who began speaking with a sort of bellow only heard before in exciting moments in town-meeting. "May I never live to see the day!" he shouted; and from all the tongue-tied villagers there rose a murmur of relief at having found a voice. They pressed about him closely and drank in his dry, curt announcement: "As selectman I shall write Mr. Camden, tell him of the fire, thank him for his kindness, and inform him that we don't want any more of it" Everybody nodded. "I don't know whether his money is what they call tainted or not, but there's one thing sure, it ain't done us any good." He passed his hand over his unshaven jaw with a rasping wipe and smiled grimly as he concluded, "I'm no hand to stir up lawbreakin' and disorder, but I want to say right here that I'll never inform against any Hillsboro man who keeps the next automobile out of town, if he has to take a ax to it!"

People laughed, and neighbors who had not spoken to one another since the quarrel over the price of wood fell into murmured, approving talk.

Elnathan Pritchett, blushing and hesitating, twitched at his father's sleeve. "But, father—Miss Martin—We're keeping her out of a position."

That young lady made one more effort to reach these impenetrable people. "I was about to resign," she said with dignity. "I am going to marry the assistant to the head of the Department of Bibliography at Albany."

The only answer to this imposing announcement was a giggle from Jennie Foster, to whose side Elnathan now fell back, silenced.

People began to move away in little knots, talking as they went. Elzaphan Hall stumped hastily down the street to the town hall and was standing in the open door as the first group passed him.

"Here, Mis' Foster, you're forgittin' somethin'," he said roughly, with his old surly, dictatorial air. "This is your day to the library."

Mrs. Foster hesitated, laughing at the old man's manner.

"It seems foolish, but I don't know why not!" she said. "Jennie, you run on over home and bring a broom for Elzaphan. The book must be in an awful state!"

When Jennie came back, a knot of women stood before the door, talking to her mother and looking back at the smoldering ruins. The girl followed the direction of their eyes and of their thoughts. "I don't believe but what we can plant woodbine and things around it so that in a month's time you won't know there's been anything there!" she said hopefully.



SALEM HILLS TO ELLIS ISLAND

A single sleighbell, tinkling down The virgin road that skirts the wood, Makes poignant to the lonely town Its silence and its solitude.

A single taper's feeble flare Makes darker by its lonely light The cold and empty farmsteads square That blackly loom to left and tight;

And she who sews, by that dim flame, The patient quilt spread on her knees, Hears from her heirloom quilting-frame The frolic of forgotten bees.

Yea, all the dying village thrills With echoes of its cheerful past, The golden days of Salem Hills; Its only golden days? Its last?



II

From Salem Hills a voiceless cry Along the darkened valley rolls. Hear it, great ship, and forward ply With thy rich freight of venturous souls.

Hear it, O thronging lower deck, Brave homestead-seekers come from far; And crowd the rail, and crane the neck; In Salem Hills your homesteads are!

Where flourish now the brier and thorn, The barley and the wheat shall spring, And valleys standing thick with corn (Praise God, my heart!), shall laugh and sing.



AVUNCULUS

I

The library of Middletown College had been founded, like the college itself, in 1818, and it was a firm article of undergraduate belief that the librarian, Mr. J.M. Atterworthy, had sat behind his battered desk from that date on to the present time. As a matter of fact, he was but just gliding down-hill from middle age, having behind him the same number of years as the active and high-spirited president of the college. And yet there was ground for the undergraduate conviction that "Old J.M." as he was always called, was an institution whose beginnings dated back into the mists of antiquity, for of his sixty years he had spent forty-four in Middletown, and forty as librarian of the college.

He had come down, a shy, lanky freshman of sixteen, from a little village in the Green Mountains, and had found the only consolation for his homesick soul in the reading-room of the library. During his sophomore and junior years, there had sprung up in the bookish lad, shrinking from the rough fun of his fellows, the first shoots of that passionate attachment to the library which was later to bind him so irrevocably to the old building. In those early days there was no regular librarian, the professors taking turn and turn about in keeping the reading-room open for a few hours, three or four days a week. In his senior year, "J.M." (even at that time his real name was sunk in the initials, the significance of which he jealously concealed) petitioned the faculty to be allowed to take charge of the reading-room. They gave a shrug of surprise at his eccentricity, investigated briefly his eminently sober-minded college career, and heaved a sigh of relief as they granted his extraordinary request.

On the evening of Commencement day, J.M. went to the president and made the following statement: He said that his father and his mother had both died during his senior year, leaving him entirely alone in the world, with a small inheritance yielding about fifty dollars a month. He had no leaning to any profession, he shrank with all his being from the savage struggles of the business world, and he could not bear to return to Woodville, to find himself lonely and bereaved in the spot where he had had such a cloudlessly happy childhood. In short, Middletown was the only place he knew and liked, except Woodville, which he loved too poignantly to live there with the soul gone out of things; and the library was the only home he now had. If the president could get the trustees, at their next meeting, to allow him the use of the three rooms in the library tower, and if they would vote him a small nominal salary, say thirty dollars a month, enough to make him a regular member of the college corps, he would like nothing better than to settle down and be the librarian of his alma mater for the rest of his life.

The president of that date was, like all the other presidents of Middletown College, a florid, hearty old gentleman with more red blood than he knew what to do with, in spite of his seventy years. He was vastly amused at the inexperienced young fellow's simple-minded notion, and, clapping him on the shoulder, said with his cheerfully Johnsonian rotundity: "Why, my dear young sir, your recent sad bereavement must have temporarily deranged your mental faculties, that at your age you can contemplate adopting such a desiccated mode of existence. Your proposition is, however, a highly advantageous one to your college, and I shall see that it is accepted. However, I am willing to lay a wager with you that a year will not be out before you are asking to be freed from your contract."

J.M., trembling in suspense, took in nothing of the president's speech beyond the acceptance of his offer, and, pale with relief, he tried to stammer his thanks and his devotion to his chosen cause. He made no attempt to contradict the president's confident prophecies; he only made the greatest possible haste to the tower-rooms which were to be his home. His eyes filled with thankfulness at his lot as he paced about them, and, looking out of the windows upon the campus, he had a prophetic vision of his future, of the simple, harmless, innocent life which was to be his.

Of the two prophets he proved himself the truer. The head of his college and one generation after another of similar presidents laughed and joked him about the Wanderlust which would some day sweep him away from his old moorings, or the sensible girl who would some day get hold of him and make a man of him. He outlasted all these wiseacres, however, watching through mild, spectacled eyes the shifting changes of the college world, which always left him as immovable as the old elms before the library door. He never went away from Middletown, except on the most necessary trips to New York or Boston on business connected with book-buying for the library.

He explained this unheard-of stagnation by saying that the utter metamorphosis of the village after the college life stopped gave him change enough. Only once had he gone farther and, to one of the younger professors who had acquired an odd taste for old J.M.'s society, confessed hesitatingly that he did not go away because he had no place to which he could go, except to his childhood home. He said he couldn't bear to go there lest he find it so changed that the sight of it would rob him of his old memories, the dearest—in fact the only possessions of his heart. After a pause he had added to his young listener, who found the little old secular monk a tremendously pathetic figure: "Do you know, Layton, I sometimes feel that I have missed a great deal in life—and yet not at all what everybody thought I would miss, the stir of active life or the vulgar excitement of being in love. All that kind of thing seems as distasteful to me now as ever."

There he stopped and poked the fire until the young professor, overcome with sympathetic curiosity, urged him to go on. He sighed at this, and said: "Why, fortune ought not to have made me an only child, although I can't say that I've ever longed for brothers or sisters.... But now I feel that I should like very much to have some nephews and nieces. I never could have stood having children of my own—I should have been crushed under the responsibility; but a nephew, now—a young creature with a brain and soul developing—to whom I could be a help ... I find as I get older that I have an empty feeling as the college year draws to a close. I have kept myself so remote from human life, for fear of being dragged into that feverish center of it which has always so repelled me, that now I do not touch it at all." He ended with a gentle resignation, taking off his glasses and rubbing them sadly: "I suppose I do not deserve anything more, because I was not willing to bear the burdens of common life ... and yet it almost seems that there should be some place for such as I—?"

The heart of his young friend had melted within him at this revelation of the submissive isolation of the sweet-tempered, cool-blooded old scholar. Carelessly confident, like all the young, that any amount or variety of human affection could be his for the asking, he promised himself to make the dear old recluse a sharer in his own wealth; but the next year he married a handsome, ambitious girl who made him accept an advantageous offer in the commercial world. With his disappearance, the solitary door in the prison walls which kept J.M. remote from his fellows swung shut.

He looked so hopelessly dull and becalmed after this that the president was moved to force on him a little outing. Stopping one day with his touring-car at the door of the library, he fairly swept the sedentary little man off his feet and out to the machine. J.M. did not catch his breath during the swift flight to the president's summer home in a trim, green, elm-shaded village in the Berkshires. When he recovered a little he was startled by the resemblance of the place to his old recollections of Woodville. There were the same white houses with green shutters, and big white pillars to the porches, the same green lawns and clumps of peonies and carefully tended rose-gardens, and the same old-New-England air of distance from the hurry and smoky energy of modern commercial life.

He spoke of this to the president's wife and she explained that it was no wonder. The village was virtually owned by a summer colony of oldish people who had lived there in their youth and who devoted themselves to keeping the old place just as it had been. "We haven't any children to bother about any more," she said, laughing, "so we take it out in putting knockers on the doors instead of bells and in keeping the grocery-stores out of sight so that the looks of the village green shan't be spoiled."

After J.M. returned to deserted Middletown, he could not keep out of his mind the vision of the village he had just left, and the thought of the village like it which he had loved so well in his boyhood. It seemed to him that if Woodville kept its old aspect at all, he would find it a comfort to try to inspire the people now living there to preserve the old-timey look of it, as the president was doing for his old home. There was positively a thrill for J.M. in the thought of his possibly influencing other people, and before he knew it the plan had made itself the main interest of the interminably long, empty days of the summer vacation. His vague feeling of a lack in his life crystallized about a definite attempt at filling it. He was stirred from his inertia and, leaving word with the registrar of the college, a newcomer who was not at all surprised that the librarian should follow the example of all the rest of the faculty, J.M. made the three hours' journey which had separated him for so many years from the home of his youth.

As the train wound along the valley beside the river, and as the familiar outlines of the mountains rose up like the faces of dear, unforgotten friends, J.M. expanded and bloomed with delight in his new idea; but it was a very shriveled and dusty little old scholar who finally arrived at the farther end of the Main Street of Woodville and stood, in the hush of the noon hour, gazing back with a stricken face at the row of slovenly unlovely front yards separating the wretched old houses from the street.

He stood before the house that had been his home, and when he looked at it he turned very pale and sat down quickly as though his knees had failed him. Apparently the house had not been painted since his childhood, and certainly it had not been repaired. Broken, dangling shutters gave it a blear-eyed look which it made him sick to see, and swarms of untidily pin-feathered chickens wandered about over the hard-beaten earth of the yard, which was without a spear of grass, littered with old boxes and crates and unsightly rags, and hung with a flapping, many-legged wash. From the three rural mail-delivery boxes at the gate, he gathered that three families were crowded into the house which had seemed none too large for his father, his mother, and himself. He put on his glasses and read the names shudderingly—Jean-Baptiste Loyette, Patrick McCartey, and S. Petrofsky.

"Good heavens!" he observed feebly to the vacant, dusty road beside him, and in answer a whistle from the big, barrack-like building at the other end of the street screamed so stridently that the heavy August air seemed to vibrate about him in hot waves.

At once, as if all the houses on the street were toy barometers, every door swung open and a stream of men and boys in dirty shirts and overalls flowed out through the squalid yards along the sidewalks toward the factory. From the house before which the librarian of Middletown College sat in a crushed heap of resentment came three men to correspond to the three mail-boxes: one short and red-haired; one dark, thick-set, and grizzle-bearded; and the third tall, clumsily built, with an impassive face and dark, smoldering eyes. They stared at the woebegone old stranger before their gate, but evidently had no time to lose, as their house was the last on the street, and hurried away toward the hideous, many-windowed factory.

J.M. gazed after them, shaking his head droopingly, until a second eruption from the house made him look back. The cause of the hard-beaten bare ground of the yard was apparent at once, even to his inexperienced eyes. The old house seemed to be exuding children from a thousand pores—children red-haired and black-haired, and tow-headed, boys and girls, little and big, and apparently yelling on a wager about who owned the loudest voice, all dirty-faced, barelegged, and scantily clothed. J.M. mechanically set himself to counting them, but when he got as high as seventeen, he thought he must have counted some of them twice, and left off.

A draggle-tailed woman stepped to a door and threw out a pan of dish-water. J.M. resolved to overcome his squeamish disgust and make a few inquiries before he fled back to the blessed cleanliness and quiet of Middletown Library. Picking his way gingerly through the chickens and puppies and cats and children, the last now smitten into astonished silence by his appearance, he knocked on the door. The woman who came to answer him was dressed in what had been a black and purple percale, wrapper, she had a baby on her arm, and was making vain attempts to fasten up a great coil of hair at the back of her head. No, she told him volubly, she couldn't remember the town when it was any different, though she and Pat had lived there ever since they were married and came over from Ireland, and that was the whole of sixteen years ago.

"Oh!" with a sudden gush of sympathy, "and so it was your old home! Isn't that interring now! You must come in and sit awhile. Pat, git a chair for the gentleman, and Molly, take the baby so I can talk better. Oh, won't you come in? You'd better, now, and have a bite to eat and a sup of tea. I've some ready made." Of course, she went on, she knew the house didn't look so nice as in his day.... "It's all along of the children! Irish people can't kape so tidy, now, can they, with siven or eight, as Yankees can with one—" But it certainly was a grand house, she didn't wonder he came back to look at it. Wasn't it fairly like a palace, now, compared with anything her kin back in Ireland had, and such a fine big place for the children to play an' all.

J.M. broke in to ask a final question, which she answered, making vain attempts to button her buttonless collar about a fat white neck, and following him as he retreated toward the street, through a lively game of baseball among the older boys. No, so far as she knew there wasn't one of the Yankees left that had lived here in old times. They had gone away when the factory had come in, she'd heard said. J.M. had expected this answer, but when it came, he turned a little sick for an instant, and felt giddy with the heat of the sun and lack of food and a desolation in his heart sharper and more searching than any emotion he had known since his boyhood. Through a mist before his eyes, he saw his hostess make a wild warning gesture, and heard a yell of dismay from the crowd of boys, but before he could turn his head, something cruelly hard struck him in the side. In the instant before he fell, his clearest impression was utter amazement that anything in the world could cause him such incredible pain, but then his head struck heavily against a stone, and he lay quite still in a little crumpled heap under the old elm which had sheltered his boyhood.



II

For an instant after he opened his eyes again, all his life after leaving Woodville seemed to have melted away, for there at the foot of his bed was the little, many-paned window out of which he had watched the seasons change all through his boyhood, and close above him hung the familiar slanting roof of his own little, old room. However, when he stirred, it was not his mother but a rosy-faced Irish woman who stopped her sewing and asked him in a thick, sweet brogue if he needed anything. As he stared at her, recollecting but dimly having seen her glossy brown hair and fair, matronly face before, she exclaimed: "Ah, I'm Bridget McCartey, you know, an' you were hurted by the lads throwin' a baseball into your ribs. It's lyin' here a week sick you've been, and, savin' your pardon, the sooner you tell me where your folks live the better. They'll be fair wild about you."

The sick man closed his eyes again. "I have no family at all," he said. It was the first time in years that the thoroughgoing extent of that fact had been brought home to him.

His nurse was moved to sympathy over so awful a fate. "Sure an' don't I know how 'tis. Pat an' I left every one of our kith behind us, mostly, when we come away, and it's that hungry for thim that I get. I dare say it ill becomes me to say it, but the first thing I says to myself when I see you was how like you are to one of my father's brothers in County Kerry. It's been a real comfort to have you here sick, as though I had some of my own kin near. His name was Jerry. It's not possible, is't, that the J. on your handkerchief stands for Jerry, too?"

For the first time since he had left Woodville J.M. disclosed the grotesque secret of his initials. In the flaccid indifference of convalescence it flowed from him painlessly. "My name is Jeroboam Mordecai."

"Exactly to a hair like Uncle Jerry's!" cried Mrs. McCartey, overjoyed by the coincidence. "Except that his J. stood for Jeremiah and his M. for Michael. If you will tell me your last name, too, I'll try and lambaste the children into callin' you proper. Not havin' sorra name to speak of you by, and hearin' me say to Pat how you favored my father's brother, haven't they taken to callin' you Uncle Jerry—more shame to them!"

The mention of the children awoke to life J.M.'s old punctilious habits. He tried to sit up. "But you have so little space for all your family—you should not have taken me in; where can the children sleep?"

Mrs. McCartey pushed him back on the pillow with an affectionate firmness born of "the bringin' up of sivin." "Now lay still, Uncle Jerry, and kape yourself cool." The name slipped out unnoticed in her hospitable fervor "Wasn't it the least we could do when 'twas our own Mike's ball that came near killin' you? An' the children—the boys, that is, that this is their room—isn't it out in the barn they're sleepin' on the hay? An' that pleased with it. Pat and I were thinkin' that now was a good chance to teach them to give up things—when you've no old folks about you, the children are so apt to grow up selfish-like—but they think the barn's better nor the house, bless them, so don't you worry."

She pulled the bedclothes straight (J.M. noticed that they were quite clean), settled the pillow, and drew down the shade. "Now thin, you've talked enough," she said. "Take a sup of sleep for a while." And to J.M.'s feeble surprise he found himself doing exactly as he was told, dozing off with a curious weak-headed feeling of comfort.

He came to his strength slowly, the doctor forbidding him to think of taking a journey for a month at least. Indeed, J.M., thinking of his isolated tower-rooms in the deserted college town, was in no haste to leave Mrs. McCartey's kindly, dictatorial care. He had been very sick indeed, the doctor told him seriously, and he felt it in the trembling weakness of his first attempts at sitting up, and in the blank vacancy of his mind.

At first he could not seem to remember for more than an instant at a time how he came to be there, and later, as his capacity for thought came back, he found his surroundings grown insensibly familiar to him. He felt himself somehow to have slipped so completely into the inside of things that it was impossible to recover the remote, hostile point of view which had been his as he had looked over the gate a fortnight ago. For instance, knowing now, not only that the children's faces were scrubbed to a polished redness every morning, but being: cognizant through his window of most of the palpably unavoidable accidents of play which made them dirty half an hour later, he would have resented as unreasonable intolerance any undue emphasis on this phase of their appearance.

The first day that he was well enough to sit out on the porch was a great event. The children, who before had made only shy, fleeting visits to his room with "little handfuls of bokays," as their mother said, were as excited and elated over his appearance as though it reflected some credit on themselves. Indeed, J.M. found that he was the subject of unaccountable pride to all the family, and one of the first of those decisions of his between McCartey and Loyette occurred that very morning. The Loyette children insisted on being included in the rejoicing over the convalescent's step forward, and soon Pierre, the oldest boy, was haled before J.M. himself to account for his having dared to use the McCartey name for the sick man.

"You're not his Uncle Jerry, are you?" demanded Mike McCartey.

J.M. thought that now was the time to repress the too exuberant McCartey familiarity. "I'm his Uncle Jerry just as much as I am yours!" he said severely.

It took him a whole day to understand the jubilant triumph of the French-Canadians and to realize that he had apparently not only upheld the McCarteys in their preposterous nickname, but that he had added all the black-eyed Loyettes to his new family. Mrs. McCartey said to him that evening, with an innocent misconception of the situation, "Sure an' mustn't it sound fine to you, that name, when you've no kith of your own." J.M. realized that that speech broke down the last bridge of retreat into his forsaken dignity. It is worthy of note that as he lay in bed that evening, meditating upon it, he suddenly broke into a little laugh of utter amusement, such as the assistants at Middletown Library had never heard from his lips.

The rapidity with which he was fitted into the routine of the place took his breath away. At first when he sat on the porch, which was the common ground of all the families, either Mrs. McCartey or Mrs. Loyette sewed near him to keep an eye on the children, but, as his strength came back, they made him, with a sigh of relief, their substitute, and disappeared into the house about neglected housework. "Oh, ain't it lovely now!" cried Mrs. McCartey to Mrs. Loyette, "to have an old person of your own about the place that you can leave the children with a half-minute, while you snatch the wash-boiler off the fire or keep the baby from cuttin' her throat with the butcher-knife."