Mrs. Loyette agreed, shaking her sleek black head a great many times in emphasis. "Zose pipple," she added, "zose lucky pipple who have all zere old pipple wiz zem, they can not know how hard is eet to be a mozzer, wizout a one grand'mere, or oncle."

So J.M. at the end of his first fortnight in Woodville found himself undisputed umpire in all the games, discussions, quarrels, and undertakings of seven young, Irish-Americans and more French-Canadian-Americans than he could count. He never did find out exactly how many Loyettes there were. The untidy front yard, littered with boxes and barrels, assumed a strangely different aspect to him as he learned its infinite possibilities, for games and buildings and imaginations generally. Sometimes it was a village with a box as house for each child, ranged in streets and lanes, and then Uncle Jerry was the mayor and had to make the laws. Sometimes the yard foamed and heaved in salt waves as, embarked in caravels, the expedition for the discovery of America (out of the older children's history-books) dashed over the Atlantic. It is needless to state that Uncle Jerry was Christopher Columbus.

Both the grateful mothers whom he was relieving cried out that never had there been such peace as since he came, not only because the children could appeal to him for decisions instead of running to their mothers, but because, the spectacular character in every game belonging to him as "company," there were no more quarrels between Mike and Pierre about the leadership. J.M. could not seem to find his old formal personality for weeks after Mike's baseball had knocked it out of him, and in the meantime he submitted, meekly at first and later with an absurd readiness, to being an Indian chieftain, and the head of the fire department, and the principal of a big public school, and the colonel of a regiment, and the owner of a cotton factory, and the leader of Arctic expeditions, and all the other characters which the fertile minds inhabiting the front yard forced upon him. He realized that he was a changed soul when he found himself rejoicing as the boys came tugging yet another big crate, obtained from the factory, to add to the collection before him. They needed it for the car for the elephant as the circus they were then performing moved from one end of the yard to the other.

He was often very, very tired when night came, but he surprised himself by never having a touch of his old enemy, insomnia. At first he went to bed when the children did, but as he progressed out of convalescence, he sat out on the porch with Pat and Bridget, as they insisted he should call them. It was very quiet then, when the cool summer dusk had hushed all the young life which made each day such an absorbing series of unexpected events. The puppies and kittens slept in their boxes, the hens had gathered the chickens under their wings, the children were sound asleep, and the great elms cast kindly shadows on the porch where the older people sat. The Loyettes often came out and joined them, and J.M. listened with an interest which surprised him as they told stories about hard times in their old homes, rejoiced in their present prosperity, and made humbly aspiring plans for their children.

For the first time in his life J.M. felt himself to be a person of almost unlimited resources, both of knowledge and wealth, as the pitiful meagerness of his hosts supply of these commodities was revealed to him in these talks, more intimate than any he had known, more vitally human than any he had ever heard. The acquisition of rare first edition, perhaps the most stirring event in his life in Middletown, had never aroused him to anything like the eagerness with which he heard the Loyettes helplessly bemoaning their inability to do anything for their oldest child, Rosalie, a slim girl of seventeen. Her drawing-teacher at school had said that the child had an unusual gift for designing, and a manufacturer of wallpaper, who had seen some of her work on a visit to the Woodville factory, had confirmed this judgment and said that "something ought to be done for her."

"But what?" her parents wondered with an utter ignorance of the world outside of Woodville which astonished J.M.

"Why don't you send her to a school of design?" he asked.

"Vat is zat?" asked Papa Loyette blankly, and "We have no money," sighed Maman.

J.M. stirred himself, wrote to the director of a school of design in Albany, consulted the priest of the parish, sent some of Rosalie's work, and asked about scholarships. When a favorable answer came, he hurried to explain the matter to the Loyettes and offered to provide the four dollars a week necessary for her board at the Catholic Home for Working Girls, of which the priest had told him. He went to bed that night with his heart beating faster from the reflection of their agitated joy than it had done for years. He could not get to sleep for a long time, such a thrill of emotion did he get from each recollection of Maman Loyette's broad face bathed in tears of gratitude.

After this they fell into the way of asking him about all their problems, from the management of difficult children to what to do about an unjust foreman and whether to join the union. The childless, unpractical, academic old bachelor, forced to meditate on these new subjects, gave utterance to advice whose sagacity amazed himself. He had not known it was in him to have such sensible ideas about how to interest a growing boy in athletics to keep him from drinking; and as for the question of unions, he boiled at the memory of some of the half-baked, pedantic theories he had heard promulgated by the professor of political economy in Middletown.

On the other hand, he stood in wonder at the unconscious but profound wisdom which these ignorant people showed as to the fundamentals of life.

"No, we're not much for clothes!" said Mrs. McCartey, comfortably tucking up her worn and faded sleeves. "Haven't we all of us enough good clothes to go to Mass in, and that's a'plenty! The rest of Pat's money goes to gettin' lots of good food for the children, bless their red faces and fat little bellies! and laying by a dollar or so a week against the rainy day. Children can play better, anyhow, with only overalls and shirts. The best times for kids is the cheapest!"

J.M. thought of the heavy-eyed, harassed professors of his acquaintance, working nights and Sundays at hack work to satisfy the nervous ambitions of their wives to keep up appearances, and gave a sudden swift embrace to the ragged child on his lap, little Molly, who had developed an especial cult for him, following him everywhere with great pansy eyes of adoring admiration.

On his first expedition out of the yard since his illness, he was touched by the enthusiastic interest which all Main Street took in his progress. Women with babies came down to nearly every gate to pass the time of day with Rosalie, on whose arm he leaned, and to say in their varying foreign accents that they were glad to see the sick gentleman able to be out. Since J.M. had had a chance at first-hand observation of the variety of occupation forced upon the mother of seven, he was not surprised that they wore more or less dilapidated wrappers and did not Marcel-wave their hair. Now he noticed the motherly look in their eyes, and the exuberant health of the children laughing and swarming about them. When he returned to the house he sat down on the porch to consider a number of new ideas which were springing up in his mind, beginning to return to its old vigor. Mrs. McCartey came out to see how he had stood the fatigue and said: "Sure you look smarter than before you went! It interested you now, didn't it, to have a chance really to see the old place?"

"Yes," said J.M., "it did, very much."

Mrs. McCartey went on: "I've been thinkin' so many times since you come how much luckier you are than most Yankees that come back to their old homes. It must seem so good to you to see the houses just swarmin' with young life and to know that the trees and yards and rocks and brooks that give you such a good time when you was a boy, are goin' on givin' good times to a string of other boys."

J.M. looked at her with attentive, surprised eyes. "Why, do you know," he cried, "it does seem good, to be sure!"

The other did not notice the oddness of his accent as she ended meditatively: "You can never get me to believe that it don't make old Yankees feel low in their minds to go back to their old homes and find just a few white-headed rheumatickers potterin' around, an' the grass growing over everything as though it was a molderin' graveyard that nobody iver walked in, and sorra sign of life anyway you look up and down the street."

J.M.'s mind flew back to the summer home of the president of Middletown. "Good gracious," he exclaimed, "you're right!"

Mrs. McCartey did not take in to the full this compliment, her mind being suddenly diverted by the appearance of a tall figure at the door of the farther wing of the house. "Say, Uncle Jerry," she said, lowering her voice, "Stefan Petrofsky asked me the other day if I thought you would let him talk to you about Ivan some evening?"

"Why, who are they, anyhow?" asked J.M. "I've often wondered why they kept themselves so separate from the rest of us." As he spoke he noticed the turn of his phrase and almost laughed aloud.

"Petrofsky's wife, poor thing, died since they come here, and now there's only Stefan, he's the father, and Ivan, he's the boy. He's awful smart they say, and Stefan, he's about kilt himself to get the boy through the high school. He graduated this spring and now Stefan he says he wants him to get some more education. He says their family, back in Russia, was real gentry and he wants Ivan to learn a lot so that he can help the poor Roosians who come here to do the right thing by the government—"

" What?" asked J.M. "I don't seem to catch his idea."

"Well, no more do I, sorra bit," confessed Mrs. McCartey serenely. "Not a breath of what he meant got to me, but what he said was that Ivan's schoolin' had put queer ideas in his head to be an anarchist or somethin' and he thought that maybe more schoolin' would drive out thim ideas and put in other ones yet. Hasn't it a foolish sound, now?" She appealed to J .M. for a sympathy she did not get.

"It sounds like the most interesting case I ever heard of," he cried, with a generous looseness of superlative new to him. "Is Ivan that tall, shy, sad-looking boy who goes with his father to work?"

"That's him. An' plays the fiddle fit to tear the heart out of your body, and reads big books till God knows what hour in the mornin'. His father, he says he don't know what to do with him ... There's a big, bad devil of a Polack down to the works that wants him to join the anarchists in the fall and go to——"

J.M. rose to his feet and hurried down the porch toward the Petrofsky wing of the house, addressing himself to the tall, grave-faced figure in the doorway. "Oh, Mr. Petrofsky, may I have a few minutes' talk with you about your son?" he said.



III

The registrar of Middletown College, being a newcomer, saw nothing unusual in the fact that the librarian came to his office on matriculation day to enroll as a freshman a shy, dark-eyed lad with a foreign name; but the president and older professors were petrified into speechlessness by the news that old J.M. had returned from parts unknown with a queer-looking boy, who called the old man uncle. Their amazement rose to positive incredulity when they heard that the fastidious, finical old bachelor had actually installed a raw freshman in one of his precious tower-rooms, always before inexorably guarded from the mildest and most passing intrusion on their hallowed quiet.

The president made all haste to call on J.M. and see the phenomenon with his own eyes. As discreetly as his raging curiosity would allow him, he fell to questioning the former recluse. When he learned that J.M. had spent six weeks in Woodville, no more explanation seemed needed. "Oh, of course, your old home?"

"Yes," said J.M., "my old home."

"And you had a warm welcome there, I dare say?"

"Yes, indeed," said J.M.

"Found the old town in good condition?"

"Excellent!" this with emphasis.

The president saw it all, explaining it competently to himself. "Yes, yes, I see it from here—vacation spent in renewing your youth playing with the children—promised to go back at Christmas, I suppose."

"Oh, yes, of course," said J.M.

"Children cried when you came away, and gave you dotty little things they'd made themselves?"

"Just like that," with a reminiscent smile.

"Well, well," the president got to his feet. "Of course, most natural thing in the world to take an interest in your brothers' and sisters' children."

J.M. did not contradict the president. He never contradicted the presidents. He outlasted them so consistently that it was not necessary. This time he took off his glasses and rubbed them on an awkwardly fashioned chamois spectacle-wiper made for him by little Molly McCartey. He noticed the pattern of the silk in his visitor's necktie and it made him think of one of Rosalie Loyette's designs. He smiled a little.

The president regarded this smiling silence with suspicion. He cocked his eye penetratingly upon his librarian. "But it is very queer, J.M., that as long as I have known you, I never heard that you had any family at all."

J.M. put his clean and polished spectacles back on his nose and looked through them into the next room, where Ivan Petrofsky sat devouring his first lesson in political economy. Then he turned, beaming like an amiable sphinx upon his interrogator. "Do you know—I never realized it myself until just lately," he said.



BY ABANA AND PHARPAR

Fields, green fields of Shining River, Lightly left too soon In the stormy equinoctial, In the hunter's moon,—

Snow-blown fields of Shining River I shall once more tread; I shall walk their crested hollows, Living or dead.



FINIS

To old Mrs. Prentiss, watching apprehensively each low mountain dawn, the long, golden days of the warm autumn formed a series of blessed reprieves from the loom which hung over her. With her inherited and trained sense of reality, she could not cheat herself into forgetting, even for a moment, that her fate was certain, but, nevertheless, she took a breathless enjoyment in each day, as it passed and did not bring the dreaded change in her life. She spoke to her husband about this feeling as they sat on the front step one October evening, when the air was as mild as in late May, breaking the calm silence, in which they usually sat, by saying, "Seems as though this weather was just made for us, don't it, father?"

The old man stirred uneasily in his chair. "I dun'no'—seems sometimes to me as though I'd ruther have winter come and be done with it. If we've got to go as soon as cold weather sets in, we might as well go and have it over with. As 'tis, I keep on saying good-by in my mind to things and folks every minute, and then get up in the morning to begin it all again. This afternoon I was down the river where I saved Hiram's life when he was a little fellow—the old black whirl-hole. I got to thinking about that time, I never was real sure till then I wouldn't be a coward if it come right down to it. Seems as though I'd been more of a man ever since. It's been a real comfort to me to look at that whirl-hole, and that afternoon it come over me that after this there wouldn't be a single thing any more to remind us of anything good or bad, we've ever done. It'll be most as if we hadn't lived at all. I just felt as though I couldn't go away from everything and everybody I've ever known down to Hiram's stuffy little flat. And yet I suppose we are real lucky to have such a good son as Hiram now the others are all gone. I dun'no' what we'd do if 'tweren't for him."

"Do!" cried his wife bitterly. "We could go on living right in this valley where we belong, if 'twas only in the poor-house!"

The old man answered reasonably, as though trying to convince himself, "Well, I suppose it's really flying in the face of Providence to feel so. The doctor says your lungs ain't strong enough to stand another of our winters in the mountains, fussing over stove fires, and zero weather and all, and I'm so ailing I probably wouldn't last through, either. He says it's a special dispensation that we've got such a nice place to go where there's steam heat, and warm as summer, day and night."

"Nathaniel!" exclaimed his wife, attempting to turn her bulky body toward him in the energy of her protest, "how can you talk so! We've visited Hiram and we know what an awful place he lives in. I keep a-seeing that little narrow room that's to be all the place you and I'll have, with the one window that gets flapped by the wash of the Lord knows who, and that kitchen as big as the closet to my bedroom here, and that long narrow hall—why, it's as much as ever I can walk down that all without sticking fast—and Hiram's queer Dutch wife—"

She stopped, silenced by the scantiness of her vocabulary, but through her mind still whirled wordless outcries of rebellion. Her one brief visit to the city rose before her with all the horror of the inexplicable, strange, and repellent life which it had revealed to her. The very conveniences of the compact city apartment were included in her revulsion from all that it meant. The very kindnesses of the pretty, plump German woman who was her daughter-in-law startled and repelled her, as did the familiar, easy, loud-voiced affection of the blond young German-Americans who were her grandchildren. Even her own son, Hiram, become half Teutonic through the influence of his business and social relations among the Germans, seemed alien and remote to her. The stout, beer-drinking, good-natured and easygoing man seemed another person from the shy, stiff lad who had gone away from them many years ago, looking so like his father at nineteen that his mother choked to see him.

She passed in review all the small rooms of her son's home, "strung along the hall like buttons on a string," and thought of the three flights of stairs which were the only escape from them—three long, steep flights, which left her breathless, her knees trembling under her great weight, and which led out on the narrow side street, full of noisy, impertinent children and clattering traffic. Beyond that, nothing—a city full of strangers whose every thought and way of life were foreign to her, whose very breath came in hurried, feverish gasps, who exhaled, as they passed her, an almost palpable emanation of hostile indifference to her and her existence. It was no new vision to her. Ever since the doctor's verdict had made it impossible longer to resist her son's dutiful urging of his parents to make his home theirs she had spent scarcely an hour without a sudden sick wave of dread of what lay before her; but the picture was the none the less horrifying because of familiarity, and she struck her hands together with a sharp indrawn breath.

The gaunt old man turned toward her, a helpless sympathy twisting his seamed and weather-marked face. "It's too bad, mother," he said. "I know just how you feel about it. But Hiram's a good son, and"—he hesitated, casting about for a redeeming feature—"there's always the Natural History Museum and the birds."

"That's just it, Nathaniel," returned the old rebel against fate. "You have something there that's going on with one thing you've done here. You've always noticed birds and studied 'em in the woods, and you can go on doing it in a museum. But there ain't a thing for me! All I've ever done is to live right here in this house ever since I was born, and look out at the mountains and the big meadows and the river and the churchyard, and keep house and take care of you and the children.

"Now the children are all gone, and I haven't the strength to take care of you the way you need; my life is all done—there ain't no more to it!

"It's like a book—there's still a chapter you can write, or one you can finish up; but me—I've come right down to Finis, only the Lord won't write it for me. It's as if somebody wanted to scrawl on the back flyleaf something that hasn't a thing to do with the rest of the book, some scratching stuff in a furrin' language that I can't even understand."

Her husband did not contradict her. He sighed heavily and they both fell again into a cheerless silence. The moon rose with a strange, eerie swiftness over the wall of mountain before them, and its wavering reflection sprang at once to life in the swirling waters of the black hole in the Necronsett on the other side of the meadow. The old woman's heart gave a painful leap in her breast at the sight. It was probably one of the last times she would see it. Numberless occasions when she had noted it before hurried through her mind.

She felt herself again the little girl who had sat in summer evenings, miles away from the talk of her elders in a happy child's reverie, and who had grown dizzy with watching the swimming reflection in the whirlpool. She had a strange fleeting hallucination that she was again sitting in the moonlight, her cheeks flushed and her strong young pulse beating high to hear Nathaniel's footfall draw nearer down the road. She felt again the warm, soft weight of her little son, the first-born, the one who had died young, as she remembered how proud she and Nathaniel had been when he first noticed the moon.

An odd passion of recollection possessed her. As the moon rose higher she seemed to be living over at one time a thousand hours of her busy, ardent life. She looked at the high, drooping line of the mountains with her childhood's delight in its clear outline against the sky; she saw the white stones of the old graveyard, next door, glimmer through the shadow cast by the church tower, with the half uneasy, fearful pleasure of her romantic girlhood; she felt about her the solidity and permanency of the old house, her father's and her grandfather's home, with the joy in protected security of her young married life; and through it all there ran a heavy sick realization that she was, in fact, a helpless old woman, grown too feeble to conduct her own life, and who was to be forced to die two deaths, one of the spirit and one of the body.

"Come, mother," said Nathaniel, rising, "we'd better go to bed. We both of us get notiony sitting here in the moonlight."

He helped her raise her weighty body with the deftness of long practice and they both went dully into the house.

The knowledge of the sky and of the signs of weather which was almost an instinct with the descendant of generations of farmers, was put to an anxious use during the days which followed.

Not since the days when, as a young girl, she had roamed the mountains, as much a part of the forest and fields as any wild inhabitant, had she so scanned the face of the valley which was her world.

She had stopped hoping for any release from her sentence. She only prayed now for one more day of grace, and into each day she crowded a fullness of life which was like a renewal of her vigorous youth.

Of late years, existence had flowed so uniform a passage through the channels of habit that it had become but half sentient. The two old people had lived in almost as harmoniously vacant and vital a silence as the old trees in the forest back of the house. In the surroundings which generations of human use had worn to an exquisite fitness for their needs, and to which a long lifetime had adjusted their every action, they convicted their life with the unthinking sureness of a process of Nature. But now the old woman, feeling exile close upon her, drew from every moment of the familiar life an essential savor.

She knew there was no hope for her; the repeated visits of the doctor and his decided judgments left her no illusions as to the possibility of escape. "The very first cold snap you must certainly go," he said, with the inflexibility of the young. "Mr. Prentiss is likely to have one of his bad turns and you simply cannot give him the are he must have. Besides, when he is sick, you will have to look after the fires, and the slightest exposure would mean pneumonia. I've just written your son so." He drew on his overcoat. He was so recently from the hospital that it was still of a fashionable cut and texture. "I can't see anyway why you object to going. Your son can't afford to keep you both here, and hire somebody to look after you into the bargain. Think of the advantages you have there, theaters and museums and the like."

Mrs. Prentiss spoke sharply. "I've never been in a theater in my life and I hope I'll go to my grave without being; and as for museums and things, look at me! I'm so big I can hardly get into the cars, and my city grandchildren are ashamed to go out with me and have all the folks looking at the fat old woman from the country."

The doctor laughed involuntarily at this picture as he turned away.

"Do you think you are so big it takes the whole Necronsett valley to hold you?" he called lightly over his shoulder.

Mrs. Prentiss looked after him with burning eyes What did he know about the continuity of human life He had told her himself that he had never lived more than four years in one place. What did he know of ordering your life, not only for yourself, but for your parents and grandparents? She felt often as she looked upon the unchanging line of the mountains guarding the valley, as in her great-grandfather's time, that she saw with the eyes of her ancestors as well as her own. The room in which she stood had been her grandmother's bedroom, and her father had been born there, as she had been herself, and as her children had been. In her childhood she had looked up to the top of the tall chest of drawers as to a mountain peak, and her children had, after her. Every inequality in the floor was as familiar to her feet as to those of her great-grandmother. The big chest, where she had always kept her children's clothes, had guarded hers and her mother's, and as often as she had knelt by it, she had so vivid a recollection of seeing her mother and her grandmother in the same attitude, that she seemed to lose for a moment the small and confining sense of individual personality, and to become merged in a noble procession of mothers of the race.

She had been an undisciplined girl, called a tomboy in those days, whose farmer forbears had given to her a pagan passion for the soil and the open sky. Although brought up with a rigid training in theology, religion had never meant more to her than a certainty of hell as a punishment for misdeeds which neither she nor any of the valley people were likely to commit—murder, suicide, false swearing, and the like. Of definite religious feeling, she had none, although the discipline of a hard if happy life had brought her spiritual life in an unconsciously profound form. She had shrunk from that discipline with all the force of her nature, and in her girl's heart had vowed that she would never marry and lead the slave's life of a New England farmer's wife. But then had arrived Nathaniel, the big, handsome lad who had taken her wild, shy heart and lost his own when they first met.

So, half rebellious, she had begun the life of a wife in the old house from which her mother had just gone to the churchyard next door, and which was yet filled with her brave and gentle spirit. The old woman, looking miserably about her, remembered how at every crisis of her life the old house had spoken to her of the line of submissive wives and mothers which lay back of her, and had tamed her to a happy resignation in the common fate of women. On her mother's bed she had borne the agony of childbirth without a murmur, she whose strong young body had never known pain of any kind. She had been a joyful prisoner to her little children, she who had always roamed so foot-free in her girlhood, and with a patience inspired by the thought of her place in the pilgrimage of her race, she had turned the great strength of her love for her husband toward a contented acceptance of the narrow life which was all he could give her.

Each smallest detail in the room had a significance running back over years. The ragged cuts in the window-sill moved her to a sudden recollection of how naughty little Hiram had cut them with his first knife. With what a repressed intensity she had loved the child while she had reproved him! How could she go away and leave every reminder of her children! With a quick and characteristic turn she caught herself in the flagrant contradiction involved in her reluctance to leave behind her mere senseless reminders of her son when she was going to his actual self. And then, with the despairing clear sight of one in a crisis of life, she knew that, in very fact, Hiram was no longer the boy who had left them years ago. Away from all that made up her life, under influences utterly foreign and alien, he had spent almost twice as many years as he had with her. Not only had the reaction from his severe training carried him to another extreme of laxness, but as result of his continued absence he had lost all contact with her world. He no longer consciously repudiated it, he had crossed the deeper gulf of forgetting it. He was a stranger to her.

Always before the memories which clung about every corner of the dark old house had helped her, but now she was forced to face a crisis which none of her people had known. It was not one of the hardships of life which were to be accepted, and the hot rebellion of her girlhood burned in her aching old heart. She thought resentfully of the doctor's blind and stony lack of understanding. His last ironic sentence came to her mind and she flamed at the recollection. Yes, it did take the whole valley to hold her, the valley which was as much a part of her as her eyes which beheld it. There were moments when she stood under the hazy autumn sky, so acutely conscious of every line and color of the great wall of mountains surrounding her that she grew in very fact to be an indivisible portion of the whole—felt herself as actually rooted to that soil and as permanent under that sky as the great elm before the door.

She made no more outcries against fate to her husband, partly because of the anguish which came upon his gentle old face at the sight of her suffering, and partly because she felt herself to have no tangible reason for rebellion. During the last years they had gone drearily around and around the circle which they felt closing so inexorably upon them, and there was no longer any use to wear themselves out in futile discussions of impossible plans. They had both been trained to regard reasonableness as one of the cardinal virtues, and to the mild nature of the old man it was a natural one, so they tried conscientiously to force themselves not only to act, but to feel, "like sensible folks," as they put it bravely to themselves.

"Other folks have gone to live with their children, and not near such good sons as Hiram either, and they didn't make such a fuss about it," said Mr. Prentiss one evening, out of a long silence, as they sat in front of the hearth. He looked at his wife, hoping for a cheerful response, but her lips were set in a quivering line of pain, and the flickering light showed her fair broad face glistening with tears. "Oh, mother!" he cried, in a helpless misery of sympathy. "Oh, mother, don't! I can't stand it! If I could only do it for you! But we can't stay, you know."

The other nodded dumbly, although after a moment she said, "Every day I live all my life over again, and my mother's, and all my folks. It has never seemed as though they really died as long as we lived here same as they did. It's like killing them all again to go away and sell the house to strangers."

There was a silence and then, "Oh, Nathaniel, what was that?" she cried, her voice rising in a quaver of apprehension.

"The wind," said her husband, stirring the fire.

"I know. But what wind? It sounds like the first beginning of the wind over Eagle Rock, and that means snow!"

She hastened heavily to the window, and raised the shade. "There's a ring around the moon as plain as my wedding ring!" And then as she looked there clung to the window-pane a single flake of snow, showing ghastly white in the instant before it melted.

"Nathaniel, the end has come," she said solemnly. "Help me get to bed."

The next morning there was a foot of snow and the thermometer was going steadily down. When the doctor arrived, red-nosed and gasping from the knife-like thrusts of the wind over Eagle Rock, he announced that it was only eight above zero, and he brought a kindly telegram from Hiram, saying that he had started for the mountains to accompany his parents back to the city. "I envy you!" said the doctor, blowing on his stiff fingers. "Think of the bliss of being where you have only to turn a screw in your steam-radiator to escape from this beastly cold. Your son will be here on the evening train, and I'll bring him right over. You'll be ready to start tomorrow, won't you? You've had all the autumn to get packed up in."

Mrs. Prentiss did not answer. She was so irrationally angry with him that she could not trust herself to speak. She stood looking out of the low window at the Necronsett, running swift and black between the white banks. She felt a wave of her old obsession that in her still lived the bygone dwellers in the old house, that through her eyes they still saw the infinitely dear and familiar scenes, something in her own attitude reminded her of how her father had looked as he stood every morning at that same window and speculated on the weather. For a moment she had an almost dizzy conviction that he did in all reality stand there again.

Then she heard the doctor saying, "I'm coming over there myself when you start for the station, to see that you're well wrapped up. The least exposure——" He looked at Mrs. Prentiss's broad and obstinate back, turned, to her husband, and tapped his chest significantly.

After he had gone the room was intensely quiet. Mr. Prentiss sat by the fire, looking vacantly at his withered old hands on his knees, and his wife did not stir from the window. Her heavy, wide figure was immovable, but a veritable whirlwind of despair raged within her. She had supposed she knew all along how bad it was going to be, but it had been a foolish child's play, like shutting your eyes to pretend you were blind. Now that utter darkness was upon her, it was as great a shock as though it came with the most extreme and cruel surprise. A thousand furious fancies went through her mind, although she continued to gaze out of the window with the same blank look of stunned incredulity. The whirlpool in the river caught her eye and she had a wild impulse to throw herself into it. Even in her frenzy, however, there came the thought, instantly dissuading, of the scandal in the village and family which such an action would cause.

No, there was no escape at all, since that simple and obvious one was closed.

The valley lay about her, the mountain walls iridescent with snow in sunshine, the river gleaming with its curious, rapid, serpentine life, in all the peaceful death of winter; everything was as it always had been. Her mind refused to accept the possibility of her living under other conditions with as irresistible and final a certainty as if she had been called upon to believe she could live with her head separated from her body.

And yet, battering at that instinctive feeling, came the knowledge that she was to start for New York the next day. She felt suddenly that she could not. "I can't! I can't!" she cried dumbly. "I can't, even if I have to!"

An instant later, like an echo, a fiercer gust than usual swept down off the ledge of rock above the little house, rattled the loose old window, and sent a sharp blade of icy air full in the old woman's eyes. She gasped and started back. And then, all in a breath, her face grew calm and smooth, and her eyes bright with a sudden resolve. Without a moment's hesitation, she turned to her husband and said in a tone more like her old self than he had heard for some time, "Father, I wish you'd go over to Mrs. Warner's and take back that pattern. If we're going to leave to-morrow, you know——"

The old man rose obediently, and began putting on his wraps. His wife helped him, and hurried him eagerly off. When she was alone, she tore at the fastening of her gown in a fury of haste, baring her wrinkled old throat widely. Then without a glance about her, she opened the door to the woodshed, stepped out, and closed it behind her. The cold clutched at her throat like a palpable hand of ice, and her first involuntary gasp set her into a fit of coughing.

She sat down on the stump where kindlings were always split and opened her gown wider. She noticed how fair and smooth the skin on her shoulders still was and remembered that her husband had always been proud of her pretty neck. She had worn a low-necked dress when he had told her he loved her. That had been in the garden, into which she could now look as she sat on the stump. She had been picking currants for tea, and he had gone out to see her. The scene came up before her so vividly that she heard his voice, and felt herself turn to him with the light grace of her girlhood and cry again, in an ecstasy of surprised joy, "Oh, Nathaniel!"

A gust of wind whirled a handful of snow against her and some of it settled on her bare shoulders. She watched it melt and felt the icy little trickle with a curious aloofness. Suddenly she began to shiver, gripped by a dreadful chill, which shook her like a strong hand. After that she was very still again, the death-like cold penetrating deeper and deeper until her breath came in constricted gasps. She did not stir until she heard the front door bang to her husband's return. Then she rose with infinite effort and struggled back into the kitchen. When he came in, she was standing by the sink, fumbling idly with the dishes. Already her head was whirling, and she scarcely knew what she was doing.

In the nightmare of horror which his wife's sudden sickness brought upon him, old Mr. Prentiss felt that he could bear everything except the sight and sound of his wife's struggles for breath. He hardly saw the neighbor women who filled the house, taking advantage of this opportunity to inspect the furniture with an eye to the auction which would follow the removal of the old people to the city. He hardly heeded the doctor's desperate attempts with all varieties of new-fangled scientific contrivances to stay the hand of death. He hardly knew that his son had come, and in his competent, prosperous way was managing everything for him. He sat in one corner of the sick-room, and agonized over the unconscious sick woman, fighting for every breath.

On the third day he was left alone with her, by some chance, and suddenly the dreadful, heaving gasp was still. He sprang to the bedside, sick with apprehension, but his wife looked up at him with recognition in her eyes. "This is the end, Nathaniel," she said in so low a whisper that he laid his ear to her lips to hear. "Don't let anybody in till I'm gone. I don't want 'em to see how happy I look." Her face wore, indeed, an unearthly look of beatitude.

"Nathaniel," she went on, "I hope there's no life after this—for me anyway. I don't think I ever had very much soul. It was always enough for me to live in the valley with you. When I go back into the ground I'll be where I belong. I ain't fit for heaven, and, anyway, I'm tired. We've lived hard, you and I, Nathaniel; we loved hard when we were young, and we've lived all our lives right out to the end. Now I want to rest."

The old man sat down heavily in a chair by the bed. His lips quivered, but he said nothing. His wife's brief respite from pain had passed as suddenly as it came, and her huge frame began again to shake in the agony of straining breath. She managed to speak between gasps.

"Don't let a soul in here, Nathaniel. I'll be gone in a few minutes. I don't want 'em to see——"

The old man stepped to the door and locked it. As he came back, the sick woman motioned him to come closer.

"Natty, I thought I could keep it, but I never did have a secret from you, and I can't die without telling you, if there is a heaven and hell——Oh, Natty, I've done a wicked thing and I'm dying without repenting. I'd do it again. That time you went to Mrs. Warner's with the pattern—this cold I got that day I went out——"

Her husband interrupted her. For the first time in years he did not call her "mother," but used the pet name of their courtship. The long years of their parenthood had vanished. They had gone back to the days when each had made up all the world to the other. "I know, Matey," he said. "I met young Warner out in the road and give the pattern to him, and I come right back, and see you sitting out there. I knew what 'twas for."

His wife stared at him, amazement silencing her.

"I thought it was the only thing left I could do for you, Matey, to let you stay there. You know I never wished for anything but that you should have what you wanted." He had spoken in a steady, even tone, which now broke into an irrepressible wail of selfish, human anguish. "But you leave me all alone, Matey! How can I get on without you! I thought I'd die myself as I sat inside the house watching you. You're all I ever had, Matey! All there has ever been in the world for me!"

The old woman stopped her gasping by a superhuman effort. "Why, Natty, I never supposed you thought so much of me still. I thought that had gone when we got old. But, oh, my dear! I'm afraid I've dragged you down with me to destruction. It wa'n't any matter about me, but I'm afraid you've lost your soul. That was a wicked thing for us to do!"

Her husband lifted his tear-stained, old face and laid it on the pillow beside her. He did not put his arms about her, as a younger lover or one of another country might have done, but because he was a man who had loved deeply all his life, his answer came with the solemn significance and sincerity of a speech before the Judgment Seat. "I ain't afraid of hell if you're there, Matey," he said.

His wife turned her head and looked at him, her whole face transfigured. She was no longer a fat old woman on her deathbed. Before his very eyes she grew again to be the girl among the currant bushes, and with the same amazed intonation of incredulous joy she cried his name aloud. "Oh, Nathaniel!" she said, and with the word the longed for Finis was written to her life.



A VILLAGE MUNCHAUSEN

I

When I was a little girl, and lived in Hillsboro with my grandparents, there were two Decoration Days in every year. One was when all we school-children took flowers put to the cemetery and decorated the graves of the soldiers; and the other was when the peonies and syringas bloomed, and grandfather and I went alone to put a bouquet on the grave of old Jedediah Chillingworth.

Grandfather did this as a sort of penance for a great mistake he had made, and I think it was with the idea of making an atonement by confession that he used always to tell me the story of his relations with the old man. At any rate, he started his narrative when we left the house and began to walk out to the cemetery, and ended it as he laid the flowers on the neglected grave. I trotted along beside him, faster and faster as he grew more and more interested, and then stood breathless on the other side of the grave as he finished, in his cracked old voice, harsh with emotion.

The first part of his story happened a very long time ago, even before grandfather was born, when Jedediah Chillingworth first began to win for himself the combination title of town-fool and town-liar. By the time grandfather was a half-grown boy, big enough to join in the rough crowd of village lads who tormented Jed, the old dizzard had been for years the local butt. Of course I never saw him, but I have keard so much about him from all the gossips in the village, and grandfather used to describe him so vividly, that I feel as if I know all about him.

For about ten years of his youth Jedediah had been way from our little Vermont town, wandering in the great world. From his stories, he had been everywhere on he map. In the evening, around the stove in the village post-office, when somebody read aloud from the newspaper a remarkable event, all the loafers turned to Jed with wide, malicious grins, to hear him cap it with a yet ore marvelous tale of what had happened to him. They gathered around the simple-minded little old man, their tongues in their cheeks, and drew from him one silly, impossible, boastful story after another. They made him amplify circumstantially by clumsily artful questions, and poked one another in the ribs with delight over his deluded joy in their sympathetic interest.

As he grew older, his yarns solidified like folk-lore, into a consecrated and legendary form, which he repeated endlessly without variation. There were many of them—"How I drove a team of four horses over a falling bridge," "How I interviewed the King of Portugal," "How I saved big Sam Harden's life in the forest fire." But the favorite one was, "How I rode the moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts." This was the particular flaunting, sumptuous yarn which everybody made old Jed bring out for company. If a stranger remarked, "Old man Chillingworth can tell a tale or two, can't he?" everybody started up eagerly with the cry: "Oh, but have you heard him tell the story of how he rode the moose into Kennettown, Massachusetts?"

If the answer was negative; all business was laid aside until the withered little old man was found, pottering bout some of the odd jobs by which he earned his living. He was always as pleased as Punch to be asked to perform, and laid aside his tools with a foolish, bragging grin on his face, of which grandfather has told me so many times that it seems as if I had really seen it.

This is how he told the story, always word for word the same way:

"Wa'al, sir, I've had queer things happen to me in my time, hain't I, boys?"—at which the surrounding crowd always wagged mocking heads—"but nothin' to beat that. When I was ashore wunst, from one of my long v'y'ges on the sea, I was to Kennettown, Massachusetts."

"How'd ye come to go there, Jed?" This was a question never to be omitted.

"Oh, I had a great sight of money to take to some folks that lived there. The captain of our ship had died at sea, and he give me nine thousand five hundred and seventy-two English gold guineas, to take to his brother and sister."

Here he always stared around at the company, and accepted credulously the counterfeit coin of grotesquely exaggerated amazement which was given him.

"Wa'al, sir, I done it. I give the gold to them as it belonged to, and I was to leave town on the noon stagecoach. I was stayin' in the captain's brother's house. It was spang up against the woods, on the edge of town; and, I tell ye, woods was woods in them days.

"The mornin' I was to leave I was up early, lookin' out of my window, when what should I see with these mortial eyes but a gre't bull moose, as big as two yoke o' oxen, comin' along toward the house. He sort o' staggered along, and then give a gre't sigh I could hear from my room—I was on the ground floor—fell down on his knees, and laid his head on the ground 's if he was too beat out to go another step. Wa'al, sir, I never waited not long enough even to fetch a holler to wake the folks I just dove out o' the window, and made for him as fast as I could lick in. As I went by the wood-pile, I grabbed up a big stick of wood——"

"What kind of wood?" everybody asked in chorus.

"'Twas a big stick of birch-wood, with the white bark on it as clean as writin'-paper. I grabbed that up for a club—'twas the only thing in sight—and when I got to the moose I hit him a clip on the side of the head as hard as I could lay on. He didn't so much as open an eye, but I saw he was still breathing and I climbed up on his back so's to get a good whack at the top of his head. And then, sir, by Jupiter! he riz right up like a earthquake under me, and started off at forty miles an hour. He throwed his head back as he run, and ketched me right between his horns, like a nut in a nutcracker. I couldn't have got out of them horns—no, sir, a charge of powder couldn't scarcely have loosened me."

There was another pause at this place for the outcries of astonishment and marvel which were never lacking. Then Jed went on, mumbling his toothless gums in delight over his importance.

"Wa'al, sir, I dassent tell ye how long we careered around them woods and pastures, for, after a while, he got so plumb crazy that he run right out into the open country. I'd hit him a whack over the head with my stick of wood every chanst I got and he was awful weak anyhow, so he'd kind o' stagger whenever he made a sharp turn. By an' by we got to goin' toward town. Somehow he'd landed himself in the road; an', sir, we rid up to the hotel like a coach and four, and he drapped dead in front of the steps, me stickin' as fast between his horns as if I'd 'a' growed to him. Yes, sir, they ackchally had to saw one of them horns off'n his head before they got me out."

He came to a full stop here, but this was not the end.

"What became of the horns, Jed? Why didn't ye bring 'em along?"

"I did take the one they sawed off, to give to my partner, big Sam Harden. He was the biggest man I ever see, Sam Harden was. I left th' other horn in Kennettown for the captain's sister. She was as smart an' handsome a widow-woman as ever I see, an' I wanted for her to have a keepsake from me."

This was really the end. The circle of inquisitors left their unconscious victim nodding and grinning to himself, and went on down the road. Grandfather said he still felt mean all over to remember how they laughed among themselves, and how they pointed out to the stranger the high lights in the story.

"Not only ain't there never been seen a moose in the State of Massachusetts, and not only are a moose's horns set too wide to catch a little squinch of a man like Jed, but what do you think?—there ain't no Kennettown in Massachusetts! No, nor in any other State. No, nor never was. Old Jed just made the town up out of his head, like the moose, an' the money, and the birch-bark and the handsome widow. Don't he beat all?"



II

My grandfather was one of these boys; in fact, he always used to say he was the ringleader, but that may have been another form of his penance. As he grew up he began to work into his father's business of tanning leather, and by and by, when a man grown, he traveled down to a big tannery at Newtonville, in Massachusetts, to learn some new processes in leather-curing.

When grandfather got along to this part of the story he began stretching his long legs faster and faster, until I was obliged to trot along, panting. He always lived the hurried last part over again, and so did I, although it happened so long before I was born.

One evening he was asked to tea by the mother of the prettiest girl in the village—she afterward became my grandmother—and was taken into the "best room" to see all the family curiosities. There were wax flowers and silhouettes and relics of every description. Mrs. Hamilton spared him not one of these wonders.

"This," she said, "is the chain that was made of my grandfather's hair. It was finished and brought home on a Wednesday, and Thursday, the next day, grandfather was burned up in the great tannery fire, and this was all my grandmother had to remember him by. These are the front teeth of a savage that my uncle Josiah Abijah killed in the South Sea Islands. Uncle Josiah Abijah always said it was either him or the black man, but I have always felt that it was murder, just the same, and this is the stick of birch-wood that a sailor-man, who came here once to see my mother, killed a bull moose with."

My grandmother has told me that never before or since did she see a human face change as did grandfather's.

"What?" he shouted, and his voice cracked.

"Yes, it sounds queer, but it's so. It's the only time a moose was ever seen here, and folks thought the wolves must have chased it till it was crazy or tired out. This sailor-man, who happened to be here, saw it, ran out, snatched up a stick from the wood-pile, and went at that great animal all alone. Folks say he was the bravest man this town ever saw. He got right up on its back—"

Grandmother said grandfather had turned so pale by this time that she thought he was going to faint and he sat down as if somebody had knocked him down. On the dusty road to the cemetery, however, he only strode along the faster, half forgetting the little girl who dragged at his hand, and turned a sympathetically agitated face up to his narrative.

Mrs. Hamilton went on through the whole incident, telling every single thing just the way old Jed did. She showed the dark places on the birch-bark where the blood had stained it, and she said the skull of the animal, with its one horn sawed off, was over among the relics in her aunt's home.

"My Aunt Maria was accounted a very good-looking woman in her day, and there were those that thought she might have taken a second husband, if the sailor had been so disposed. He was so brave and so honest, bringing all that money from my uncle, the sea-captain, when goodness knows, he might have run off with every cent of it, and nobody been any the wiser!"

At this grandfather gave a loud exclamation and stood up, shaking his head as if he had the ague. He just couldn't believe his ears, he said.

"No! No! No! It can't be the same!" he said over and over. "Why, he said it happened in Kennettown."

"Well, now!" said Mrs. Hamilton, surprised. "Where did you ever get hold of that old name? I didn't suppose a soul but some of our old folks remembered that. Why, Newtonville wasn't named that but six months. Folks got mad at the Kennetts for being so highfalutin' over having the town named after them, and so 'twas changed back."

Grandfather said he'd no notion of another word she said after that. When he went back to his room, he found a letter from home, telling him all the news, and mentioning, among other things, that old Jedediah Chillingworth wasn't expected to live much longer. Age had withered the little old man until there wasn't enough of him left to go on living. Grandfather usually reached this part of the story just as we arrived under the big maples that stand on each side of the cemetery gate, and always stopped short to say solemnly:

"Thank the Lord! I've two things to my credit. I never waited one minute to start back to Hillsboro, and from that time on I wanted to do what was right by the old man, even if it did turn out so different."

Then we went on into the cemetery, and paced slowly along the winding paths as he continued:

"I got to Hillsboro late one night, and I'd 'most killed my horse to do it. They said Jedediah was still alive, but wasn't expected to last till morning. I went right up to his little old shack, without waiting to see my folks or to get a mouthful to eat. A whole lot of the neighbors had come in to watch with him, and even then, with the old dizzard actually dying, they were making a fool of him.

"He was half propped up in bed—he wasn't bigger than my fist by that time—with red spots in his cheeks, and his eyes like glass, and he was just ending up that moose story. The folks were laughing and winking and nudging one another in the ribs, just the way I used to. I was done up with my long, hard ride, and some nervous, I guess, for it fair turned my stomach to see them.

"I waited till they were all through laughing, and then I broke loose. I just gave them a piece of my mind! 'Look-a-here, you fellows!' I said. 'You think you're awful smart, don't you, making fun of poor old Jed as he lies a-dying? Now, listen to me. I've ridden forty miles over the mountains to get here before he goes, and make every man jack of you beg the old man's pardon. That story's true. I've just found out that every word of it is absolutely, literally the way it happened. Newtonville, where I'm staying in Massachusetts, used to be called Kennettown, and Jedediah did take the money there—yes, that exact sum we've laughed at all these years. They call him the honestest man in the world over there. They've got the stick of birch-wood, with the bloodstains on it, and the moose's skull, with the horn sawed off, and there are lots of old people who remember all about it. And I'm here to say I believe old Jed's been telling the truth, not only about that, but about all his adventures. I don't believe he's ever lied to us!'

"I felt so grand and magnanimous," grandfather went on, "to think how I was making it up to the poor old man, and so set up over bringing a piece of news that just paralyzed everybody with astonishment. They all jumped up, yelling and carrying on. 'What? That story true! Well, did you ever! Wouldn't that beat all? To think old Jed's been telling—"

"And then we all thought of him, and started toward the bed to say how bad we felt.

"I'll never forget how he looked. His eyes were fairly coming out of his head, and his face was as white as paper. But that wasn't the dreadful thing. What always comes back to me whenever I think of him is the expression on his face. You could just see his heart breaking. He was so hurt, so surprised, so ashamed, that it wasn't decent to look at him. But we couldn't look away. We stood there, hanging our heads—I never felt so mean in my life—while he tried to get breath enough to say something. And then he screamed out—'twas dreadful to hear:

"'Why, didn't you fellers believe me? Did you think I was lyin?'"

Here grandfather stopped and blew his nose, and I choked.

"Those were his last words. He had some kind of a spasm, and never came to enough to know anything before he died. Those were the last words he said; and though they told us that in the coffin he looked just as he always had, only more quiet, with the foolish look gone, we were all of us ashamed to look the dead man in the face."

Here grandfather laid the flowers on the unkempt grave, as if to serve as an "Amen" to his confession.

After this I always went around and held his hand tightly, and we stood very still. It was the solemnest time of the year.



III

All this used to happen, as I said, when I was a little girl; but I, too, grew up, as grandfather grew bent and feeble. When he was an old, old man of eighty-five, and when I had been away from Hillsboro several years teaching school, the last of my grandmother's relatives in Newtonville died. I was sent for to decide what should be done with the few family relics, and one Saturday and Sunday I went all through the little old house, looking over the things.

In the garret I came across the moose-skull with one horn. It made me feel queer to think what a part it had played in the development of my grandfather's honorable and tender old soul. There were a few sticks of furniture, some daguerrotypes and silhouettes, and a drawerful of yellow papers. The first I sent home to Hillsboro to grandmother. I took the papers back to the town where I was teaching, to look over them.

Among other things was a quaint old diary of my grandmother's great-aunt, she that was the buxom widow of Jed's story. It was full of homely items of her rustic occupations; what day she had "sett the broune hen," and how much butter was made the first month she had the "party-colored cowe from over the mount'n." I glanced idly at these faded bits of insignificant news, when I was electrified by seeing the following entry:

This day came to my Bro. Amos and Me, a sea-man, bringeing news of my Bro. Elijah's the capt'n's dethe, and allso mutch monie in gold, sent to us by our Bro. The sea-man is the greatest in size aver I saw. No man in towne his bed can reach so mutch as to his sholder. And comely withal.

The words fairly whirled on the page before my astonished eyes. Where was the image of the ill-favored little old Jed, so present to my imagination? I read on breathlessly, skipping news of the hen-house and barnyard, until I came upon this, the only other reference, but quite sufficient:

This day the sea-man, Samuel Harden, left us.

The self-restrained woman had said nothing of any disappointment she might have felt. The item stood quite alone, however, in a significant isolation. At least on that day she had not noticed the number of eggs.

I doubt if grandfather himself had been more excited when he saw the birch-wood club than I was to read those few words. I could hardly wait till the next Saturday to rush back to Hillsboro, and relieve the poor old man of the burden of remorse he had carried so faithfully and so mistakenly all these years, and to snatch the specious crown of martyrdom from that shameless thief of another man's exploits.

And yet, when I finally arrived at Hillsboro, I found it not so easy to begin. Some strange spell, exhaled from the unchanging aspect of the old house and the old people, fell on me, and, though I tried several times, I could not find a suitable opening. On Sunday morning grandfather asked me if I would help him to get out to Jed's grave. The peonies and syringas were in bloom, and grandmother had the bouquet made up ready. Drawing me aside, she to me that grandfather was really too infirm to try to make the expedition at all, and certainly could not go alone. Even then I could find no words to tell her. I thought it might be easier to do so out of doors.

It was the middle of a bright spring morning, when we started off, grandfather leaning on his cane and holding to my arm, while I carried the great clump of red peonies and white syringas. The sun was warm, but a cool breeze blew down from the mountains, and grandfather hobbled along bravely.

It made me feel like a little girl again to have him begin the story of the moose, and tell it word for word as he always had. He was forced to stop often now, and wait for breath to come back to him. At each of these halts beside the road, which was white in the clear spring sunshine, it was harder and harder to think of breaking in on him with my discovery.

As he finally told about Jedediah's wounded virtue on his deathbed—that outcry which seemed to me the most brazen part of the whole imposture—suddenly my heart softened, and I, too, believed that by that time of his life old Jed was—I really don't know just what it was that I believed, but it was something as comforting as the quiet warmth of the sunshine.

We were standing by the sunken old grave when grandfather finished. I looked at him, the sun shining down on his bent figure and bared white head, the flowers reflecting their brightness up into his withered old face, and a lump came into my throat. I could not have told him if I had wished to.

"We were ashamed to look the dead man in the face," he said humbly, and laid the flowers down on the young grass.

Then I went around and held his dear old hand tightly in mine; and we stood very still for a long, long time.



THE ARTIST

"After the sickening stench of personality in theatrical life," the great Madame Orloff told the doctor with her usual free-handed use of language, "it is like breathing a thin, pure air to be here again with our dear inhuman old Vieyra. He hypnotizes me into his own belief that nothing matters—not broken hearts, nor death, nor success, nor first love, nor old age—-nothing but the chiaroscuro of his latest acquisition."

The picture-dealer looked at her in silence, bringing the point of his white beard up to his chin with a meditative fist. The big surgeon gazed about him with appreciative eyes, touched his mustache to his gold-lined coffee-cup, and sighed contentedly. "You're not the only one, my dear Olga," he said, "who finds Vieyra's hard heart a blessing. When I am here in his magnificent old den, listening to one of his frank accounts of his own artistic acumen and rejoicing in his beautiful possessions, why the rest of the world—real humanity—seems in retrospect like one great hospital full of shrieking incurables."

"Oh, humanity——!" The actress thrust it away with one of her startling, vivid gestures.

"You think it very clever, my distinguished friends, to discuss me before my face," commented the old picture-dealer indifferently. He fingered the bright-colored decorations on his breast, looking down at them with absent eyes. After a moment he added, "and to show your in-ti-mate knowledge of my character." Only its careful correctness betrayed the foreignness of his speech.

There was a pause in which the three gazed idly at the fire's reflection in the brass of the superb old andirons Then, "Haven't you something new to show us?" asked the woman. "Some genuine Masaccio, picked up in a hill-town monastery—a real Ribera?"

The small old Jew drew a long breath. "Yes, I have something new." He hesitated, opened his lips, closed them again and, looking at the fire, "Oh yes, very new indeed—new to me."

"Is it here?" The great surgeon looked about the picture-covered walls.

"No; I have it in—you know what you call the inner sanctuary—the light here is not good enough."

The actress stood up, her glittering dress flashing a thousand eyes at the fire. "Let me see it," she commanded. "Certainly I would like to see anything that was new to you!"

"You shall amuse yourself by identifying the artist without my aid," said old Vieyra.

He opened a door, held back a portiere, let his guests pass through into a darkened room, turned on a softly brilliant light, and: "Whom do you make the artist?" he said. He did not look at the picture. He looked at the faces of his guests, and after a long silent pause, he smiled faintly into his beard. "Let us go back to the fire," he said, and clicked them into darkness again.

"And what do you say?" he asked as they sat down.

"By Jove!" cried the doctor. "By Jove!"

Madame Orloff turned on the collector the somber glow of her deep-set eyes. "I have dreamed it," she said.

"It is real," said Vieyra. "You are the first to see it. I wished to observe how——"

"It's an unknown Vermeer!" The doctor brought his big white hand down loudly on this discovery. "Nobody but Vermeer could have done the plaster wall in the sunlight. And the girl's strange gray head-dress must be seventeenth-century Dutch of some province I don't——"

"I am a rich man, for a picture-dealer," said Vieyra, "but only national governments can afford to buy Vermeers nowadays."

"But you picked it up from some corner, some attic, some stable——"

"Yes, I picked it up from a stable," said the collector.

The actress laid her slender, burning fingers on his cool old hand. "Tell us—tell us," she urged. "There is something different here."

"Yes, there is something different," he stirred in his chair and thrust out his lips. "So different that I don't know if you——"

"Try me! try me!" she assured him ardently. "You have educated me well to your own hard standards all these years."

At this he looked at her, startled, frowning, attentive, and ended by shaking off her hand. "No, I will not tell you."

"You shall——" her eyes commanded, adjured him. There was a silence. "I will understand," she said under her breath.

"You will not understand," he said in the same tone; but aloud he began: "I heard of it first from an American picture-dealer over here scraping up a mock-Barbizon collection for a new millionaire. He wanted to get my judgment, he said, on a canvas that had been brought to him by a cousin of his children's governess. I was to be sure to see it when I went to New York—you knew did you not, that I had been called to New York to testify in the prosecution of Paullsen for selling a signed copy?"

"Did you really go?" asked the doctor. "I thought you swore that nothing could take you to America."

"I went," said the old man grimly. "Paullsen did me a bad turn once, thirty years ago. And while I was there I went to see the unknown canvas. The dealer half apologized for taking my time—said he did not as a rule pay any attention to freak things brought in from country holes by amateurs, but—I remember his wording—this thing, some ways he looked at it, didn't seem bad somehow."

The collector paused, passed his tongue over his lips, and said briefly: "Then he showed it to me. It was the young girl and kitten in there."

"By Jove!" cried the doctor.

"You have too exciting a profession, my good old dear," said the actress. "Some day you will die of a heart failure."

"Not after living through that!"

"What did you tell him?"

"I asked for the address of the cousin of his children's governess, of course. When I had it, I bought a ticket to the place, and when I reached there, I found myself at the end of all things—an abomination of desolation, a parched place in the wilderness. Do you know America, either of you?"

The doctor shook his head.

"I have toured there, three times," said the actress.

"Did you ever hear of a place called Vermont?"

Madame Orloff looked blank. "It sounds French, not English. Perhaps you do not pronounce it as they do."

"Heaven forbid that I should do anything as 'they' do! This place, then, call it what you will, is inhabited by a lean, tall, sullenly silent race who live in preposterously ugly little wooden houses of the most naked cleanliness ... God of my Fathers! the hideousness of the huddle of those huts where I finally found the cousin! He was a seller of letter-paper and cheap chromos and he knew nothing of the picture except that it was brought to him to sell by the countryman who sold him butter. So I found the address of the butter-maker and drove endless miles over an execrable road to his house, and encountered at last a person who could tell me something of what I wanted to know. It was the butter-maker's mother, a stolid, middle-aged woman, who looked at me out of the most uncanny quiet eyes ... all the people in that valley have extraordinary piercing and quiet eyes ... and asked, 'Is it about the picture? For if it is, I don't want you should let on about it to anybody but me. Nobody but the family knows he paints 'em!"

At this the doctor burst out, "Gracious powers! You don't mean to say that the man who painted that picture is alive now ... in 1915!"

The actress frowned at the interruption and turned with a lithe petulance on the big Briton. "If you want to know, let him alone!" she commanded.

"And soon I had it all," the narrator went on. "Almost more than I could bear. The old woman could tell me what I wished to know, she said. He was her uncle, the only brother of her mother, and he had brought up her and her brothers and sisters. She knew... oh, she knew with good reason, all of his life. All, that is, but the beginning. She had heard from the older people in the valley that he had been wild in his youth (he has always been, she told me gravely, 'queer') and she knew that he had traveled far in his young days, very, very far."

"'To New York?' I ventured.

"'Oh, no, beyond that. Across the water.'

"'To Paris?'

"That she didn't know. It was a foreign country at least, and he had stayed there two, three years, until he was called back by her father's death—his brother-in-law's—to take care of his mother, and his sister and the children. Here her mind went back to my question, and she said she had something perhaps I could tell from, where he had been. She kept it in her Bible. He had given it to her when she was a child as a reward the day she had kept her little brother from falling in the fire. She brought it out. It was a sketch, hasty, vigorous, suggestive, haunting as the original itself, of the Leonardo da Vinci Ste. Anne.

"Yes, I told her, now I knew where he had been. And they had called him back from there—here?

"'When my father died,' she repeated, 'my uncle was all my grandmother and my mother had. We were five little children, and the oldest not seven, and we were all very poor,'

"'How old was your uncle then?' I asked.

"'A young man—he was younger than my mother. Perhaps he was twenty-five,'

"I looked at the sketch in my hand. Twenty-five, and called back from Paris—here!

"'When did he go back to Paris?'

"'Oh, he never went back,' She told me this quite placidly, as she said everything else. 'He never went back at all.'

"He had stayed there the rest of his life, and worked the little farm that was all his sister had, and made a living for them—not large, the farm being poor and he not a first-class farmer, but still enough. He had always been kind to them—if he was quite queer and absent. She had heard her grandmother say that at first, the first ten years, perhaps, he had had strange, gloomy savage fits like a person possessed that you read of in the Bible; but she herself could never remember him as anything but quiet and smiling. He had a very queer smile unlike anyone else, as I would notice for myself when I went to see him about the picture. You could tell him by that, and by his being very lame.

"That brought me back with a start. I rushed at her with questions. 'How about the picture? Were there others? Were there many? Had he always painted? Had he never shown them to anyone? Was he painting now?

"She could not tell me much. It had been a detail of their common life she had but absently remarked, as though she had lived with a man who collected snail-shells, or studied the post-marks on letters. She 'had never noticed'—that was the answer to most of my questions. No, she did not think there were very many now, though he must have painted 'most a million. He was always at it, every minute he could spare from farming. But they had been so poor he had not felt he could afford many canvases. The paints cost a good deal too. So he painted them over and over, first one thing and then another, as he happened to fancy. He painted in the horse-barn. 'Had a place rigged up,' in her phrase, in one corner of the room where the hay was stored, and had cut a big window in the roof that was apt to let in water on the hay if the rain came from the north.

"'What did he paint?' 'Oh, anything. He was queer about that. He'd paint anything! He did one picture of nothing but the corner of the barnyard, with a big white sow and some little pigs in the straw, early in the morning, when the dew was on everything. He had thought quite a lot of that, but he had had to paint over it to make the picture of her little sister with the yellow kittie—the one she'd sent down to the village to try to sell, the one—'

"'Yes, yes,' I told her, 'the one I saw. But did he never try to sell any himself? Did he never even show them to anyone?'

"She hesitated, tried to remember, and said that once when they were very poor, and there was a big doctor's bill to pay, he had sent a picture down to New York. But it was sent back. They had made a good deal of fun of it, the people down there, because it wasn't finished off enough. She thought her uncle's feelings had been hurt by their letter. The express down and back had cost a good deal too, and the only frame he had got broken. Altogether, she guessed that discouraged him. Anyhow, he'd never tried again. He seemed to get so after a while that he didn't care whether anybody liked them or even saw them or not—he just painted them to amuse himself, she guessed. He seemed to get a good real of comfort out of it. It made his face very still and smiling to paint. Nobody around there so much as knew he did it, the farm was so far from neighbors.

"'Twas a real lonely place, she told me, and she had been glad to marry and come down in the valley to live closer to folks. Her uncle had given her her wedding outfit. He had done real well by them all, and they were grateful; and now he was getting feeble and had trouble with his heart, they wanted to do something for him. They had thought, perhaps, they could sell some of his pictures for enough to hire a man to help him with the farm work. She had heard that pictures were coming into fashion more than they had been, and she had borrowed that one of her little sister and the kittie, and without her uncle's knowing anything about it, had sent it off. She was about discouraged waiting for somebody down in the city to make up his mind whether he'd buy it or not.

"I asked her a thousand other questions but she could answer none of them. The only detail I could get from her being an account of her uncle's habit of 'staring' for sometimes a half an hour at something, without once looking away. She'd seen him stop that way, when he'd be husking corn maybe, and stare at a place where a sunbeam came in on a pile of corn. It put him back quite considerable in his work, that habit, but they had nothing to complain of. He'd done well by them, when you considered they weren't his own children.

"'Hadn't he ever tried to break away?' I asked her amazed. 'To leave them? To go back?'

"She told me: 'Oh, no, he was the only support his mother and his sister had, and there were all the little children. He had to stay.'"

The actress broke in fiercely: "Oh, stop! stop! it makes me sick to hear. I could boil them in oil, that family! Quick! You saw him? You brought him away? You—"

"I saw him," said Vieyra, "yes, I saw him."

Madame Orloff leaned toward him, her eyebrows a line of painful attention.

"I drove that afternoon up to a still tinier village in the mountains near where he lived, and there I slept that night—or, at least, I lay in a bed."

"Of course, you could not sleep," broke in the listening woman; "I shall not to-night."

"When dawn came I dressed and went out to wander until people should be awake. I walked far, through fields, and then through a wood as red as red-gold—like nothing I ever saw. It was in October, and the sun was late to rise. When I came out on an uplying heath, the mists were just beginning to roll away from the valley below. As I stood there, leaning against a tree in the edge of the wood, some cows came by, little, pinched, lean cows and a young dog bounding along, and then, after them, slowly, an old man in gray—very lame."

The actress closed her eyes.

"He did not see me. He whistled to the dog and stroked his head, and then as the cows went through a gate, he turned and faced the rising sun, the light full on his face. He looked at the valley coming into sight through the mists. He was so close to me I could have tossed a stone to him—I shall never know how long he stood there—how long I had that face before me."

The narrator was silent. Madame Orloff opened her eyes and looked at him piercingly.

"I cannot tell you—I cannot!" he answered her. 'Who can tell of life and death and a new birth? It was as though I were thinking with my finger-nails, or the hair of my head—a part of me I had never before dreamed had feeling. My eyes were dazzled. I could have bowed myself to the earth like Moses before the burning bush. How can I tell you—? How can I tell you?"

"He was—?" breathed the woman.

"Hubert van Eyck might have painted God the Father with those eyes—that mouth—that face of patient power—of selfless, still beatitude.—Once the dog, nestling by his side, whimpered and licked his hand. He looked down, he turned his eyes away from his vision, and looked down at the animal and smiled. Jehovah! What a smile. It seemed to me then that if God loves humanity, he can have no kinder smile for us. And then he looked back across the valley—at the sky, at the mountains, at the smoke rising from the houses below us—he looked at the world—at some vision, some knowledge—what he saw—what he saw—!

"I did not know when he went. I was alone in that crimson wood.

"I went back to the village. I went back to the city. I would not speak to him till I had some honor worthy to offer him. I tried to think what would mean most to him. I remembered the drawing of the Ste. Anne. I remembered his years in Paris, and I knew what would seem most honor to him. I cabled Drouot of the Luxembourg Gallery. I waited in New York till he came. I showed him the picture. I told him the story. He was on fire!

"We were to go back to the mountains together, to tell him that his picture would hang in the Luxembourg, and then in the Louvre—that in all probability he would be decorated by the French government, that other pictures of his would live for all time in Paris, in London, in Brussels—a letter came from the woman, his niece. He was dead."

The actress fell back in her chair, her hands over her face.

The surgeon stirred wrathfully. "Heavens and earth, Vieyra, what beastly, ghastly, brutally tragic horror are you telling us, anyhow?"

The old Jew moistened his lips and was silent. After a moment he said: "I should not have told you. I knew you could not understand."

Madame Orloff looked up sharply. "Do you mean—is it possible that you mean that if we had seen him—had seen that look—we would—that he had had all that an artist—"

The picture-dealer addressed himself to her, turning his back on the doctor. "I went back to the funeral, to the mountains. The niece told me that before he died he smiled suddenly on them all and said: 'I have had a happy life,' I had taken a palm to lay on his coffin, and after I had looked long at his dead face, I put aside the palm. I felt that if he had lived I could never have spoken to him—-could never have told him."

The old Jew looked down at the decorations on his breast, and around at the picture-covered walls. He made a sweeping gesture.

"What had I to offer him?" he said.



WHO ELSE HEARD IT?

A lady walking through the square With steamship tickets in her hand, To spend her summer in the Alps, Her winter in the Holy Land,

Heard (or else dreamed), as she passed by The Orphan Home across the way, A small and clear and wondering voice From out a dormer window say,

"And would you really rather climb Mont Blanc alone, than walk with me Out hunting Mayflowers in the woods Of Westerburn and Cloverlea?

"Alas! And would you rather hear Cathedral choirs in cities far Than one at bedtime, on your lap, Say 'Twinkle, twinkle, little star'?"

"A lonely Christmas would you spend By Galilee or Jordan's tide When a child's stocking you might fill And hang it by your own fireside?"



A DROP IN THE BUCKET

There is no need to describe in detail the heroine of this tale, because she represents a type familiar to all readers of the conventional New-England-village dialect story. She was for a long time the sole inhabitant of Hillsboro, who came up to the expectations of our visiting friends from the city, on the lookout for Mary Wilkins characters. We always used to take such people directly to see Cousin Tryphena, as dwellers in an Italian city always take their foreign friends to see their one bit of ruined city wall or the heap of stones which was once an Inquisitorial torture chamber, never to see the new water-works or the modern, sanitary hospital.

On the way to the other end of the street, where Cousin Tryphena's tiny, two-roomed house stood, we always laid bare the secrets of her somnolent, respectable, unprofitable life; we always informed our visitors that she lived and kept up a social position on two hundred and fifteen dollars a year, and that she had never been further from home than to the next village. We always drew attention to her one treasure, the fine Sheraton sideboard that had belonged to her great-grandfather, old Priest Perkins; and, when we walked away from the orderly and empty house, we were sure that our friends from the city would always exclaim with great insight into character, "What a charmingly picturesque life! Isn't she perfectly delicious!"

Next door to Cousin Tryphena's minute, snow-white house is a forlorn old building, one of the few places for rent in our village, where nearly everyone owns his own shelter. It stood desolately idle for some time, tumbling to pieces almost visibly, until, one day, two years ago, a burly, white-bearded tramp stopped in front of it, laid down his stick and bundle, and went to inquire at the neighbor's if the place were for rent, then moved in with his stick and bundle and sent away for the rest of his belongings, that is to say, an outfit for cobbling shoes. He cut a big wooden boot out of the side of an empty box, painted it black with axle-grease and soot, hung it up over the door, and announced himself as ready to do all the cobbling and harness-repairing he could get ... and a fine workman he showed himself to be.

We were all rather glad to have this odd new member of our community settle down among us ... all, that is, except Cousin Tryphena, who was sure, for months afterward, that he would cut her throat some night and steal away her Sheraton sideboard. It was an open secret that Putnam, the antique-furniture dealer in Troy, had offered her two hundred and fifty dollars for it. The other women of the village, however, not living alone in such dangerous proximity to the formidable stranger, felt reassured by his long, white beard, and by his great liking for little children.

Although, from his name, as from his strong accent, it was evident that old Jombatiste belonged, by birth, to our French-Canadian colony, he never associated himself with that easy-going, devoutly Catholic, law-abiding, and rather unlettered group of our citizens. He allied himself with quite another class, making no secret of the fact that he was an out-and-out Socialist, Anti-clerical, Syndicalist, Anarchist, Nihilist. ... We in Hillsboro are not acute in distinguishing between the different shades of radicalism, and never have been able exactly to place him, except that, beside his smashing, loudly-voiced theories, young Arthur Robbins' Progressivism sounds like old Martin Pelham's continued jubilation over the Hayes campaign.

The central article of Jombatiste's passionately held creed seemed to be that everything was exactly wrong, and that, while the Socialist party was not nearly sweeping enough in its ideas, it was, as yet, the best means for accomplishing the inevitable, righteous overturning of society. Accordingly, he worked incessantly, not only at his cobbling, but at any odd job he could find to do, lived the life of an anchorite, went in rags, ate mainly crackers and milk, and sent every penny he could save to the Socialist Headquarters. We knew about this not only through his own trumpeting of the programme of his life, but because Phil Latimer, the postmaster, is cousin to us all and often told us about the money-orders, so large that they must have represented almost all the earnings of the fanatical old shoemaker.

And yet he was never willing to join in any of our charitable enterprises, although his ardent old heart was evidently as tender as it was hot. Nothing threw him into such bellowing fury as cruelty. He became the terror of all our boys who trapped rabbits, and, indeed, by the sole influence of his whirlwind descents upon them, and his highly illegal destruction of their traps, he practically made that boyish pastime a thing of the past in Hillsboro. Somehow, though the boys talked mightily about how they'd have the law of dirty, hot-tempered old Jombatiste, nobody cared really to face him. He had on tap a stream of red-hot vituperation astonishingly varied for a man of his evident lack of early education. Perhaps it came from his incessant reading and absorption of Socialist and incendiary literature.

He took two Socialist newspapers, and nobody knows how many queer little inflammatory magazines from which he read aloud selections to anyone who did not run away.

Naturally enough, from his point of view, he began with his neighbor, fastidious Cousin Tryphena.

What Cousin Tryphena did not know about the way the world outside of Hillsboro was run would have made a complete treatise on modern civilization. She never took a newspaper, only borrowing, once in a while, the local sheet to read the news items from Greenford, where she had some distant cousins; and, though she occasionally looked at one of the illustrated magazines, it was only at the pictures.

It is therefore plain that old Jombatiste could not have found a worse listener for his bellowed statements that ninety per cent. of the money of this country was in the hands of two per cent. of the population; that the franchise was a farce because the government was controlled by a Wall Street clique; and that any man who could not earn a good living for his family had a moral right to shoot a millionaire. For the most part, Cousin Tryphena counted her tatting stitches and paid not the least attention to her malcontent neighbor. When she did listen, she did not believe a word he said. She had lived in Hillsboro for fifty-five years and she knew what made people poor. It was shiftlessness. There was always plenty of work to be had at the brush-back factory for any man who had the sense and backbone to keep at it. If they would stop work in deer-week to go hunting, or go on a spree Town-meeting day, or run away to fish, she'd like to know what business they had blaming millionaires because they lost their jobs. She did not expound her opinions of these points to Jombatiste because, in the first place, she despised him for a dirty Canuck, and, secondly, because opinions seemed shadowy and unsubstantial things to her. The important matters were to make your starch clear and not to be late to church.

It is proverbial that people who are mostly silent often keep for some time a reputation for more wisdom than is theirs. Cousin Tryphena unconsciously profited in the estimation of her neighbor by this fact of psychology. Old Jombatiste had thundered his per cents. of the distribution of capital for many months before he discovered that he was on the wrong track.

Then, one winter day, as Cousin Tryphena was hanging out her washing, he ran over to her, waving his favorite magazine. He read her a paragraph from it, striking the paper occasionally for emphasis with his horny, blackened, shoemaker's hand, and following her as she moved along the clothes-lines——

"And it is thus definitely proved," he shouted in conclusion, "that Senator Burlingame was in the pay of J.D. Darby, when he held up the Rouse Workingman's Bill in the Senate Committee...." He stopped and glared triumphantly at his neighbor. A rare impulse of perversity rose in Cousin Tryphena's unawakened heart. She took a clothes-pin out of her mouth and asked with some exasperation, "Well, what of it!" a comment on his information which sent the old man reeling back as though she had struck him.

In the conversation which followed, old Jombatiste, exploring at last Cousin Tryphena's mind, leaned giddily over the abyss of her ignorance of political economy and sociology, dropping one exploring plummet after another into its depths, only to find them fathomless. He went shakily back to his own house, silenced for once.

But, although for the first time he neglected work to do it, he returned to the attack the next day with a new weapon. He made no more remarks about industrial slavery, nor did he begin, as was his wont, with the solemnly enunciated axiom, "Wealth comes from labor alone!" He laid down, on the Sheraton sideboard, an armful of his little magazines, and settled himself in a chair, observing with a new comprehension how instinctively Cousin Tryphena reached for her tatting as he began to read aloud. He read the story of a man who was burned to death in molten steel because his employers did not install a rather expensive safety device, and who left a young widow and three children. These tried to earn their livings by making artificial flowers. They could earn, all of them working together, three cents an hour. When the last dollar of the dead father's savings was used up, and there was talk of separating the family so that the children could be put in an asylum, the mother drowned the three little ones and herself after them. Cousin Tryphena dropped her tatting, her country-bred mind reeling. "Didn't she have any folks to help her out?"

Jombatiste explained that she came from East Poland, so that her folks, if indeed she had any, were too far away to be of use. He struck one fist inside his palm with a fierce gesture, such as he used when he caught a boy trapping, and cried, "... and that in a country that produces three times the food it consumes." For the first time, a statistical statement awoke an echo in Cousin Tryphena's atrophied brain.

Old Jombatiste read on, this time about a girl of seventeen, left by her parents' death in charge of a small brother. She had been paid twenty cents for making crocheted lace which sold for a dollar and a half. By working twelve hours a day, she had been able to make forty-seven cents. Seeing her little brother grow pale from lack of food, she had, in desperation, taken the first, the awfully decisive first step downward, and had almost at once thereafter vanished, drawn down by the maelstrom of vice. The little brother, wild with grief over his sister's disappearance, had been taken to an orphan asylum where he had since twice tried to commit suicide.

Cousin Tryphena sat rigid, her tatting fallen to the floor, her breath coming with difficulty. It is impossible for the average modern mind, calloused by promiscuous reading, to conceive the effect upon her primitive organism of this attack from the printed page. She not only did not dream that these stories might not be true, they seemed as real to her as though she had seen the people. There was not a particle of blood in her haggard face.

Jombatiste read on—the story of a decent, ambitious man, employed in a sweatshop tailoring establishment, who contracted tuberculosis from the foul air, and who dragged down with him, in his agonizing descent to the very depths of misery, a wife and two children. He was now dead, and his wife was living in a corner of a moldy, damp basement, a pile of rags the only bed for her and her children, their only heat what fire the mother could make out of paper and rubbish picked up on the streets.

Cousin Tryphena's horrified eyes fell on her well-blacked stove, sending out the aromatic breath of burning white-birch sticks. She recoiled from it with a shudder.

Jombatiste read on, the story of the woman who, when her three sons died in an accident due to negligence on their employer's part ... he read no more that day, for Cousin Tryphena put her gray head down on the center-table and wept as she never had done in her life. Jombatiste rose softly and tiptoed out of the room.

The tap-tap-tap of his hammer rang loud and fast the rest of that day. He was exulting over having aroused another bourgeois from the sleep of greasy complacency. He had made a convert. To his dire and utter pennilessness, Cousin Tryphena's tiny income seemed a fortune. He had a happy dream of persuading her to join him in his weekly contributions to the sacred funds! As he stood at midnight, in the open door, for the long draught of fresh air he always took before turning in on his pile of hay, he heard in the wood on the hill back of the house the shrill shriek of a trapped rabbit. He plowed furiously out through the deep snow to find it, gave the tortured animal a merciful death, carried the trap back to the river and threw it in with a furious splash. He strode home under the frosty stars, his dirty shirt open over his corded, old neck, his burning heart almost content. He had done a good day's work.

Early the next morning, his neighbor came to his door, very white, very hollow-eyed, evidently with a sleepless night back of her, and asked him for the papers he had read from. Jombatiste gave them to her in a tactful silence. She took them in one shaking hand, drawing her shawl around her wrinkled face with the other, and went back through the snow to her own house.

By noon that day, everyone in the village was thrilling with wild surmise. Cousin Tryphena had gone over to Graham and Sanders', asked to use their long-distance telephone and had telephoned to Putnam to come and get her sideboard. After this strange act, she had passed Albert Graham, then by chance alone in the store, with so wild a mien that he had not ventured to make any inquiries. But he took pains to mention the matter, to everyone who happened to come in, that morning; and, by dinner-time, every family in Hillsboro was discussing over its pie the possibility that the well-known queer streak, which had sent several of Cousin Tryphena's ancestors to the asylum, was suddenly making its appearance in her.

I was detained, that afternoon, and did not reach her house until nearly four; and I was almost the last to arrive. I found Cousin Tryphena very silent, her usually pale face very red, the center of a group of neighbors who all at once began to tell me what had happened. I could make nothing out of their incoherent explanations. ... "Trypheny was crazy ... she'd ought to have a guardeen ... that Canuck shoemaker had addled her brains ... there'd ought to be a law against that kind of newspaper. ... Trypheny was goin' like her great-aunt, Lucilly, that died in the asylum. ..." I appealed directly to Cousin Tryphena for information as to what the trouble was.