"There ain't any trouble 's I know of," she answered in a shaking voice. "I've just heard of a widow-woman, down in the city, who's bringin' up her two children in the corner of a basement where the green mold stands out on the wall, and I'm goin' down to fetch her an' the children up here to live with me ... them an' a little orphan boy as don't like the 'sylum where they've put him——"

Somebody broke in on her to cry, "Why, Trypheny, you simple old critter, that's four people! Where you goin' to put 'em in this little tucked-up place?"

Cousin Tryphena answered doggedly and pointedly, "Your own grandmother, Rebecca Mason, brought up a family of seven in a house no bigger than this, and no cellar."

"But how, ..." another voice exclaimed, "air you goin' to get enough for 'em to eat? You ain't got but barely enough for yourself!"

Cousin Tryphena paled a little, "I'm a good sewer, I could make money sewing ... and I could do washings for city-folks, summer-times...." Her set mouth told what a price she paid for this voluntary abandonment of the social standing that had been hers by virtue of her idleness. She went on with sudden spirit, "You all act as though I was doin' it to spite you and to amuse myself! I don't want to! When I think of my things I've kept so nice always, I'm wild ... but how can I help it, now I know about 'em! I didn't sleep a wink last night. I'll go clean crazy if I don't do something! I saw those three children strugglin' in the water and their mother a-holdin' on 'em down, and then jumpin' in herself——Why, I give enough milk to the cat to keep a baby ... what else can I do?"

I was touched, as I think we all were, by her helpless simplicity and ignorance, and by her defenselessness against this first vision of life, the vision which had been spared her so long, only to burst upon her like a forest-fire. I hid an odd fancy that she had just awakened after a sleep of half a century.

"Dear Cousin Tryphena," I said as gently as I could, "you haven't had a very wide experience of modern industrial or city conditions and there are some phases of this matter which you don't take into consideration." Then I brought out the old, wordy, eminently reasonable arguments we all use to stifle the thrust of self-questioning: I told her that it was very likely that the editor of that newspaper had invented, or at least greatly exaggerated those stories, and that she would find on investigation that no such family existed.

"I don't see how that lets me out of lookin' for them," said Cousin Tryphena.

"Well, at least," I urged, "don't be in such a hurry about it. Take time to think it over! Wait till—"

"Wait!" cried Cousin Tryphena. "Why, another one may be jumpin' in the river this minute! If I'd ha' had the money, I'd ha' gone on the noon train!"

At this point, the man from Putnam's came with a team from our livery to carry away the Sheraton sideboard. Cousin Tryphena bore herself like a martyr at the stake, watching, with dry eyes, the departure of her one certificate to dear gentility and receiving with proud indifference the crisp bills of a denomination most of us had never seen before.

"You won't need all that just to go down to the city," I remonstrated.

She stopped watching the men load her shining old treasure into the wagon and turned her anguished eyes to me. "They'll likely be needing clothes and things."

I gave up. She had indeed thought it all out.

It was time for us to go home to prepare our several suppers and we went our different ways, shaking our heads over Tryphena's queerness. I stopped a moment before the cobbler's open door, watched him briskly sewing a broken halter and telling a folk-tale to some children by his knee. When he finished, I said with some acerbity, "Well, Jombatiste, I hope you're satisfied with what you've done to poor old Miss Tryphena ... spoiling the rest of her life for her!"

"Such a life, Madame," said Jombatiste dryly, "ought to be spoiled, the sooner the better."

"She's going to start for the city to-morrow," I said, supposing of course that he had heard the news.

Jombatiste looked up very quickly. "For what goes she to the city?"

"Why ... she's gone daft over those bogie-stories of yours ... she's looked the list over and picked out the survivors, the widow of the man who died of tuberculosis, and so on, and she's going to bring them back here to share her luxurious life."

Jombatiste bounded into the air as if a bomb had exploded under him, scattering his tools and the children, rushing past me out of the house and toward Cousin Tryphena's. ... As he ran, he did what I have never seen anyone do, out of a book; he tore at his bushy hair and scattered handfuls in the air. It seemed to me that some sudden madness had struck our dull little village, and I hastened after him to protect Cousin Tryphena.

She opened the door in answer to his battering knocks, frowned, and began to say something to him, but was fairly swept off her feet by the torrent of his reproaches.... "How dare you take the information I give you and use it to betray your fellow-man! How do you dare stand there, so mealy-mouthed, and face me, when you are planning a cowardly attack on the liberty of your country! You call yourself a nurse ... what would you think of a mother who hid an ulcer in her child's side from the doctor because it did not look pretty! What else are you planning to do? What would you think of a nurse who put paint and powder on her patient's face, to cover up a filthy skin disease? What else are you planning to do ... you with your plan to put court-plaster over one pustule in ten million and thinking you are helping cure the patient! You are planning simply to please yourself, you cowardly ... and you are an idiot too ..." he beat his hands on the door-jambs, "... if you had the money of forty millionaires, you couldn't do anything in that way ... how many people are you thinking to help ... two, three ... maybe four! But there are hundreds of others ... why, I could read you a thousand stories of worse—"

Cousin Tryphena's limit had been reached. She advanced upon the intruder with a face as excited as his own. ... "Jombatiste Ramotte, if you ever dare to read me another such story, I'll go right out and jump in the Necronsett River!"

The mania which had haunted earlier generations of her family looked out luridly from her eyes.

I felt the goose-flesh stand out on my arms, and even Jombatiste's hot blood was cooled. He stood silent an instant.

Cousin Tryphena slammed the door in his face.

He turned to me with a bewilderment almost pathetic so tremendous was it—"Did you hear that ... what sort of logic do you call—"

"Jombatiste," I counseled him, "if you take my advice you'll leave Miss Tryphena alone after this."

Cousin Tryphena started off on her crack-brained expedition, the very next morning, on the six-thirty train. I happened to be looking out sleepily and saw her trudging wearily past our house in the bleak gray of our mountain dawn, the inadequate little, yellow flame of her old fashioned lantern like a glowworm at her side. It seemed somehow symbolical of something, I did not know what.

It was a full week before we heard from her, and we had begun really to fear that we would never see her again, thinking that perhaps, while she was among strangers, her unsettled mind might have taken some new fancy which would be her destruction.

That week Jombatiste shut the door to his house. The children reported that he would not even let them in, and that they could see him through the window stitching away in ominous silence, muttering to himself.

Eight days after Cousin Tryphena had gone away, I had a telegram from her, which read, "Build fires in both my stoves to-morrow afternoon."

The dark comes early in the mountains, and so, although I dare say there was not a house in the village without a face at the pane after the late evening train came up, none of us saw anything but our usual impenetrable December darkness. That, too, seemed, to my perhaps overwrought consciousness of the problem, highly suggestive of the usual course of our lives. At least, I told myself, Cousin Tryphena had taken her absurd little lantern and gone forth.

The next morning, soon after breakfast, I set off for the other end of the street. Cousin Tryphena saw me coming and opened the door. She did not smile, and she was still very pale, but I saw that she had regained her self-control, "Come right in," she said, in rather a tense voice, and, as I entered she added, in our rustic phrase for introduction, "Make you 'quainted with my friend, Mrs. Lindstrom. She's come up from the city to stay with me. And this is her little boy, Sigurd, and this is the baby."

Blinking somewhat, I shook hands with a small, stoop-shouldered woman, in a new, ready-made dress, with abundant yellow hair drawn back from the thinnest, palest, saddest little face I had ever seen. She was holding an immaculately clean baby, asleep, its long golden lashes lying on cheeks as white and sunken as her own. A sturdily built boy of about six scrambled up from where he lay on the floor, playing with the cat, and gave me a hand shyly, hanging down his head. His mother had glanced up at me with a quick, shrinking look of fright, the tears starting to her eyes.

Cousin Tryphena was evidently afraid that I would not take her cue and sound the right note, for she went on hastily, "Mrs. Lindstrom has been real sick and kind o' worried over the baby, so's she's some nervous. I tell her Hillsboro air is thought very good for people's nerves. Lots of city folks come here in summer time, just for that. Don't you think Sigurd is a real big boy for only six and a half? He knows his letters too! He's goin' to school as soon as we get settled down. I want you should bring over those alphabet blocks that your Peggy doesn't use any more—"

The other woman was openly crying now, clinging to her benefactress' hand and holding it against her cheek as she sobbed.

My heroic old cousin patted her hair awkwardly, but kept on talking in her matter-of-fact manner, looking at me sternly as though defying me to show, by look or word, any consciousness of anything unusual in the situation; and we fell at once, she and I, into a commonplace conversation about the incidents of the trip up.

When I came away, half an hour later, Cousin Tryphena slipped a shawl over her head and came down the walk with me to the gate. I was much affected by what seemed to me the dramatically fitting outcome of my old kinswoman's Quixotism. I saw Cousin Tryphena picturesquely as the Happy Fool of old folk-lore, the character who, through his very lack of worldly wisdom, attains without effort all that self-seeking folks try for in vain. The happy ending of her adventure filled me with a cheerful wonder at the ways of Providence, which I tried to pass on to her in the exclamation, "Why, Cousin Tryphena, it's like a story-book? You're going to enjoy having those people. The woman is as nice as she can be, and that's the brightest little boy! He's as smart as a whip!"

I was aware that the oddness of Cousin Tryphena's manner still persisted even now that we were alone. She sighed heavily and said, "I don't sleep much better nights now I've done it!" Then facing me, "I hadn't ought to have brought them up here! I just did it to please myself! Once I saw 'em ... I wanted 'em!"

This seemed to me the wildest possible perversion of the Puritan instinct for self-condemnation and, half-vexed, I attempted some expostulation.

She stopped me with a look and gesture Dante might have had, "You ain't seen what I've seen."

I was half-frightened by her expression but tried to speak coolly. "Why, was it as bad as that paper said?" I asked.

She laid her hand on my arm, "Child, it was nothing like what the paper said...it was so much worse!"

"Oh ..." I commented inadequately.

"I was five days looking for her...they'd moved from the address the paper give. And, in those five days, I saw so many others...so many others..." her face twitched. She put one lean old hand before her eyes. Then, quite unexpectedly, she cast out at me an exclamation which made my notion of the pretty picturesqueness of her adventure seem cheap and trivial and superficial. "Jombatiste is right!" she cried to me with a bitter fierceness: "Everything is wrong! Everything is wrong! If I can do anything, I'd ought to do it to help them as want to smash everything up and start over! What good does it do for me to bring up here just these three out of all I saw ..." Her voice broke into pitiful, self-excusing quavers, "but when I saw them ...the baby was so sick ... and little Sigurd is so cunning ... he took to me right away, came to me the first thing ... this morning he wouldn't pick up his new rubbers off the floor for his mother, but, when I asked him, he did, right off ... you ought to have seen what he had on ... such rags ... such dirt ... and 'twan't her fault either! She's ... why she's like anybody ... like a person's cousin they never happened to see before ...why, they were all folks!" she cried out, her tired old mind wandering fitfully from one thing to another.

"You didn't find the little boy in the asylum?" I asked.

"He was dead before I got there," she answered.

"Oh ... !" I said again, shocked, and then tentatively, "Had he ...?"

"I don't know whether he had or not," said Cousin Tryphena, "I didn't ask. I didn't want to know. I know too much now!" She looked up fixedly at the mountain line, high and keen against the winter sky. "Jombatiste is right," she said again unsparingly, "I hadn't ought to be enjoying them ... their father ought to be alive and with them. He was willing to work all he could, and yet he ... here I've lived for fifty-five years and never airned my salt a single day. What was I livin' on? The stuff these folks ought to ha' had to eat ... them and the Lord only knows how many more besides! Jombatiste is right ... what I'm doin' now is only a drop in the bucket!"

She started from her somber reverie at the sound of a childish wail from the house. ... "That's Sigurd ...I knew that cat would scratch him!" she told me with instant, breathless agitation, as though the skies were falling, and darted back. After a moment's hesitation I too, went back and watched her bind up with stiff, unaccustomed old fingers the little scratched hand, watched the frightened little boy sob himself quiet on her old knees that had never before known a child's soft weight saw the expression in her eyes as she looked down at the sleeping baby and gazed about the untidy room so full of mire, which had always been so orderly and so empty.

She lifted the little boy up higher so that his tousled yellow hair rested against her bosom. He put an arm around her neck and she flushed with pleasure like a girl; but, although she held him close to her with a sudden wistful tenderness, there was in her eyes a gloomy austerity which forbade me to sentimentalize over the picture she made.

"But, Cousin Tryphena," I urged, "it is a drop in the bucket, you know, and that's something!"

She looked down at the child on her knee, she laid her cheek against his bright hair, but she told me with harsh, self-accusing rigor, "Tain't right for me to be here alive enjoying that dead man's little boy."

* * * * *

That was eighteen months ago. Mrs. Lindstrom is dead of consumption; but the two children are rosy and hearty and not to be distinguished from the other little Yankees of the village. They are devotedly attached to their Aunt Tryphena and rule her despotically.

And so we live along, like a symbol of the great world, bewildered Cousin Tryphena toiling lovingly for her adopted children, with the memory of her descent into hell still darkening and confusing her kind eyes; Jomatiste clothing his old body in rags and his soul in flaming indignation as he batters hopefully at the ramparts of intrenched unrighteousness ... and the rest of us doing nothing at all.



THE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND

Tongue of spice and salt and wine and honey, Magic, mystic, sweet, intemperate tongue! Flower of lavish love and lyric fury, Mixed on lips forever rash and young, Wildly droll and quaintly tender;—

Hark, the hidden melodies of Elfland In the under, in the over tone; Clear faint wailing of the far-heard banshee, Out of lands where never the sun shone, Calling doom on chieftains dying....



PIPER TIM

I

When Moira O'Donnell was born, Timothy Moran was thirty-three years old, a faery number, as he often told himself afterward. When he was forty and she was seven, another mystic number, he dedicated his life to her and she gave him back his lost kingdom of enchantment. It was on the evening of her seventh birthday that she led him to the Land of Heart's Desire he thought he had left forever in green and desolate Donegal, and her birthday fell on the seventh of October, and October is the month when the little people are busiest. He never forgot what she did for him that evening, although her part in it was so brief.

His own birthday was on the thirteenth of the month, and he often laid his sorrows to that unchancy date. On the seventh he sat on the old Round Stone, his pipes lying silent beside him, and brooded on his heavy ill. Father Delancey had just left him and had told him flatly that he had no ills at all. Hence he sat, his heart heavier than ever, drooping, under the great maple tree, the road white before him, leading away into the empty, half-translucent shadows of starlight. Father Delancey had said it was only the faery nonsense in his head that made him miserable, and had marshaled before him the irrefutable blessings of his life. Had he not been cared for from the first minute of his landing from Ireland, a penniless piper of nineteen, as though the holy saints themselves were about him? Had he not gone direct to Father Delancey, sent by the priest in Donegal, and had not Father Delancey at once placed him in the Wilcox family, kindliest, heartiest, and most stirring of New England farmers? And had he not lived in prosperity with them ever since?

Timothy started at the faery number. "Twinty-one years? So 'tis, Father—an' more! 'Tis twinty-one years to-day since I came, aven and true—the seventh day of October. Sure, somethin' ought to happen on such a day—oughtn't it?"

"Happen?" queried Father Delancey.

"The seventh day of October, the twinty-first year and October bein' the month for thim," said Timothy, elucidating confidently.

Father Delancey frowned and broke into an angry exclamation, "'Tis simple mad ye are, Timothy Moran, with your faery foolishness, and I've a half a mind to take your pipes away from you as a penance for your ignorant superstition!"

"But, Father, I'm the seventh son and sure ye must admit 'tis a lonesome country, all this, that looks so like Donegal and Killarney mountains, an' is so dead-like, wi' no little people to fill up the big gap between the dead an' the livin', an' the good an' the bad. 'Tis empty, all this valley."

"Timothy Moran, that are my sister's husband's cousin's son, I'm ashamed of ye, an' I bid ye note that 'twas the hand of the Blessed Virgin herself that sent ye out o' Ireland, for if you'd 'a' stayed in th' ould country you'd 'a' been bewitched long before now—not, savin' us all th' blessed saints, that I belave in any of your nonsense!"

Timothy smiled at this with an innocent malice. "You see how 'tis, Father. You cannot kape yourself from belivin' in thim and you a man o' God."

"I do not, Timothy! Tis but a way of speech that I learned in my childhood. An' 'tis lucky for you that I have a knowledge of thim, for any other priest would have driven you out of the parish, you and your stubborn pipes that do naught but play faery music. An' you a man of forty in a trifle of six days, and no wife an' childer to keep you from foolish notions. If ye had, now, you could be livin' in the proper tenant's house for the Wilcox's man, instead of Michael O'Donnell, who has no business livin' up here on the hill so far from his work that he can come home but once a week to look after his poor motherless child. I will say for you, Tim, that you do your duty by that bit of a slip of a girl baby, keepin' her so neat and clean an' all, times when Mike's not here."

Timothy did not raise his drooping head at this praise, and something about his attitude struck sharp across the priest's trained observation. The big, shambling, red-headed man looked like a guilty child. There was a moment's silence, while Father Delancey speculated, and then his experienced instinct sped him to the bull's-eye. "Timothy Moran, you're not putting your foolish notions in the head of that innocent child o' God, Moira O'Donnell, are you?"

The red head sank lower.

"Answer me, man! Are ye fillin' her mind with your sidhe[A] and your red-hatted little people an' your stories of 'gentle places' an' the leprechaun?"

[Footnote A: Pronounced shee (as in Banshee), the fairies.]

Timothy arose suddenly and flung his long arms abroad in a gesture of revolt. "I am that, Father Delancey, 'tis th' only comfort of my life, livin' it, as I do, in a dead country—a valley where folks have lived and died for two hundred years such lumps of clay that they niver had wan man sharp enough to see the counts in between heaven and earth." He lapsed again into his listless position on the Round Stone. "But ye needn't be a-fearin' for her soul, Father—her wid th' black hair an' the big gray eyes like wan that cud see thim if she wud! She's as dead a lump as anny of th' rest—as thim meat-eatin' Protestants, the Wilcoxes, heaven save the kindly bodies, for they've no souls at all, at all." From the stone he picked up a curiously shaped willow whistle with white lines carved on it in an odd criss-cross pattern. "To-day's her seventh birthday, an' I showed her how to make the cruachan whistle, an' when I'd finished she blew on it a loud note that wud ha' wakened the sidhe for miles around in Donegal. An' then she looked at me as dumb as a fish, her big gray eyes blank as a plowed field wid nothin' sown in it. She niver has a word to show that she hears me, even, when I tell o' the gentle people." He added in a whisper to himself, "But maybe she's only waiting."

"'Tis the Virgin protectin' her from yer foolishness, Tim," returned the priest, rising with a relieved air. "She'll soon be goin' to district school along with all the other hard-headed little Yankees, and then your tales can't give her notions." With which triumphant meditation he walked briskly away, leaving Timothy to sit alone with his pipes under the maple-tree, flaming with a still heat of burning autumn red, like a faery fire.

His head sank heavily in his hands as his heart grew intolerably sad with the lack he felt in all the world, most of all in himself. He had often tried to tell himself what made the world so dully repellant, but he never could get beyond, "'Tis as though I was aslape an' yet not quite aslape—just half wakin', an' somethin' lovely is goin' on in the next room, an' I can't wake up to see what 'tis. The trouble's with th' people. They're all dead aslape here, an' there's nobody to wake me up."

"Piper Tim! Piper Tim!" was breathed close to his ear. He sprang up, with wide, startled eyes.

"Piper Tim," said the little girl gravely, "I've seen them."

The man stared at her in a breathless silence.

"A little wee woman with a red hat and kerchief around her neck, an' she said, 'Go straight to Piper Tim an' tell him to play "The Call o' the Sidhe" as he sits on the Round Stone, for this is th' day of the Cruachan Whistle.'"

The child put out her hand, and drew him to the pipes, still keeping her deep eyes fixed on him, "Play, Piper Tim, an' shut your eyes an' I'll see what you should see an' tell you what 'tis."

The first notes were quavering as the man's big frame shook, but the little hands across his eyes seemed to steady him, and the final flourish was like a call of triumph. In the silence which followed the child spoke in her high little treble with a grave elation. "They're here, Piper Tim, all the river fog in the valley is full of them, dancin' and singin' so gay-like to cheer up the poor hills. An' whist! Here they come up the road, troops and troops of them, all so bright in the ferlie green; an' sure," with a little catch of merriment, "sure, they've no toes on their feet at all! They've danced them all away. And now, Piper Tim, hold your breath, for they'll be after comin' by, but all so still, so still! so you won't hear them and maybe think to open your eyes and see them—for that 'ud mean—sh! sh! Piper Tim, don't stir! They're here! They're here!"

His eyes ached with the pressure of the strong little hands across them, his ears ached with straining them into the silence which lay about them. His heart beat fast with hope and then with certainty. Yes, it was no longer the thin, dead silence of the New England woods he knew so unhappily well. It was the still that comes with activity suspended. It was like the quivering quiet of a dancer, suddenly stricken motionless to listen for the sound of intruding footsteps. There was not the faintest sound, but the silence was full of that rich consciousness of life which marks the first awakening of a profound sleeper.

The hands were withdrawn from before his eyes, but he did not open them. He reached blindly for his pipes, and played "The Song of Angus to the Stars," tears of joy running from between his closed eyelids, to recognize in his own music the quality he had been starving for; the sense of the futile, poignant beauty, of the lovely and harmless tragedy, of the sweet, moving, gay sad meaning of things.

When he looked about him he was quite alone. Moira was gone, and the road lay white and still before him.



II

He did not see her all the next day, although he went down to the little house to do the household tasks his big hands performed with so curious a skill. He wished to see her and clear his mind of a weight which the morning's light had put upon him; but she did not come in answer to his call. The little house seemed full of her in its apparent emptiness, and several times he had swung sharply about, feeling her back of him, but always the room had turned a blank face.

That evening he was returning late from the upland pastures where he had been searching vainly for a lost cow. His path lay through a thick copse of maple saplings where it was quite dark. As he emerged into a stony pasture, he saw the child standing still in the center of a ring of fern, brown and crumpled by the early frosts. When he appeared she held him motionless by the sudden passion of her gestured appeal for silence. She did not stir after this, her hands laid along her cheeks as though to hold her head quite still, her eyes directed with a smiling eagerness toward a huge rock, looming dimly in the transparent twilight. The silence was oppressive. Timothy's blood ran chill as the expectancy grew more and more strained in the child's eyes. He did not dare look at the rock himself. He stared only at the elfin creature before him, and when her hands were finally flung out in a gesture of welcoming ardor, he broke the unearthly silence by crying out loud in a rapid whirl, "God save us. Christ save us! The Holy Virgin guard us! St. Patrick defend us! St. Columba—"

The little girl burst into a storm of tears and sank down on the ferns. Timothy stopped his hysterical litany and ran toward her. "Don't you come a-near me, bad Piper Tim!" she sobbed. "You don't dare step on the magic circle anyhow. It 'ud burn your wicked foot!"

The big farm laborer drew back in a terror he instantly disguised. "I was just lookin' for you, Moira aroon," he said propitiatingly. "I was wishin' to tell you—to tell you—why, that it's all pretend. There aren't any little people really, you know. Tis just old Tim's nonsense." He shivered at the blasphemy and crossed himself. "Or, if there are any, 'tis only in th' ould country." The child rose to her feet, eying him strangely, her eyes like deep pools.

He went on conscientiously, with a mental eye on Father Delancey, "An' if there are any, which they aren't, they're bad things for Christians to have aught to do with, because they know neither right nor wrong, and 'tisn't fit that mortals should iver be light an' gay wi' that burden gone! So they're bad for us—an' we shouldn't think of thim, and just cross ourselves wheniver—"

The unspoken protest in the child's face was grown so passionate that he interrupted himself to answer it in a burst of sympathy. "Och, Moira, acushla, sure an' I know how 'tis to ye—" And then with a reaction to virtue, he said sternly, "An' if they're not bad, why do they go when you call on the blessed saints?"

At this the child's face twisted again for tears. "Och, bad Piper Tim, to scare them away from me! It's not that they're bad—only that good's too heavy for them. They're such little people! It's too heavy! It's too heavy." She ran away through the dusk, sobbing and calling this over her shoulder reproachfully.

In the weeks which followed, old Timothy Moran, as he was called, could scarcely complain that he was but half awake. He seemed to be making up for the dull apathy of his long exile by the storminess of his days and nights. Mrs. Wilcox, bustling housewife, hastening about the kitchen, engaged in some late evening task, was moved to a sudden burst of hysterical tears, by the faint sound of Tim's pipes, dropping down to her from the Round Stone in a whirling roulade of ever-ascending merriness. "You, Ralph!" she cried angrily through her sobs, to her oldest boy, stricken open-mouthed and silent by his mother's amazing outburst, "you, Ralph, run up to the Round Stone and tell the Irishman to stop playing that jig over and over. I'm that tired to-night it drives me wild with nerves!" As she brushed away the tears she said fretfully, "My sakes! When my liver gets to tormenting me so I have the megrims like a girl, it's time to do something."

The boy came back to say that Old Tim had stopped playing "the jig" before he reached him, and was lying sobbing on the stone.

Moira was as approachable as a barn swallow, swooping into the house for a mouthful of food and off again to the sky apparently. Timothy's child-heart was guiltily heavy within him, for all his excitement, and when he finally caught her in the pine woods he spoke briefly and firmly, almost like Father Delancey himself. "Moira, Tim was a big fool to tell you lies. There aren't really any little people. Tis only a way of talkin'-like, to say how lovely the woods and stars an' all are."

"Why do you sit on the Round Stone evenings?" asked Moira defiantly.

"That's just it! I pretend all kind o' things, but it's really because the moon is like gold, and the white fog comes up in puffs like incense in the church, an' the valley's all bright wi' lamps like the sky wi' stars. That's all anybody means by fairies—just how lovely things are if we can but open our eyes to see thim, an' take time from th' ugly business o' livin' to hear thim, and get a place quiet enough to half see what everything means. I didn't know before, in Ireland, but now I'm like one born again to the ferie country, and now I think I know. There aren't any Little People really but just in your own head—"

Moira shook off his hand and faced him, laughing mockingly, her dark eyes wide with an elfin merriment. "Are there not, Piper Tim? Are there not? Listen! You'll see!" She held up a tiny forefinger to the great man towering above her. As he looked down on her, so pixy-like in the twilight of the pines, he felt his flesh creep. She seemed to be waiting for something infinitely comic which yet should startle her. She was poised, half turned as though for flight, yet hung so, without a quiver in an endless listening pause. The man tried in vain to remember the name of a single saint, so held was he by the breathless expectancy in the eyes of the little hobgoblin. His nerves gave way with a loud snap when she suddenly leaped up at him with snapping fingers and some whispered, half-heard exclamation of "Now! Now!" and turning he plunged down the hill in panic-stricken flight. And the next day Father Delancey took her down to the valley to begin her schooling.



III

Upon her return she had adopted the attitude which she never changed during all the years until Timothy went away. She would not speak openly, nor allow Tim to discuss "their" existence. "They mind their business and we should mind ours," she said, eying him hard; but she made his world over for him. Every spring she came back from the valley school and every autumn she went away; and the months in between were golden. After Timothy's work was done in the evenings, he left the hot kitchen, redolent of food and fire and kindly human life, took his pipes up on the Round Stone and played one after another of the songs of the sidhe, until the child's white face shone suddenly from the dusk.

Then their entertainment varied. Sometimes they sat and watched the white river fog rise toward them, translucent and distant at first, and then blowing upon them in gusty, impalpable billows. Timothy's tongue was loosened by the understanding in the little girl's eyes and he poured out to her the wise foolishness of his inconsequent and profound faery lore. He told her what was in the fog for him, the souls of mountain people long dead, who came back to their home heights thus. He related long tales of the doings of the leprechaun, with lovely, irrelevant episodes, and told her what he thought was their meaning.

Some nights the moon rode high and the air was clear and those were not the times for words—only for sitting quite still and playing every air in all the world on the pipes. Moira lay beside him, her strange, wide eyes fixed intently on the road and the shadows until she peopled them almost visibly to the musician with the folk of his melodies—with Angus, the beautiful and strong, with Maive, the sad, the happy, with Congal of the frightful Vision of War, and Mananan, strange wanderer on these mountain tops.

Sometimes it rained, the long steady downpour of summer nights, and they sat on the steps of Michael O'Donnell's little cabin, Timothy's pipes sounding sweet and shrill against the deep note of the rushing rain. This was the time of the wildest stories, when sheltering walls were close about them; of newly wed wives carried off by the fairies to live happy always, always without a moment of pain, and then to perish utterly on the Day of Judgment, like a last year's butterfly, for souls cannot live without sorrow; of newly born babes whose souls were carried away by the sidhe because a cock was not killed on the night of their birth, and of the mystic meaning of vicarious sacrifice; of people who had lain down to sleep unaware in a fairy ring and were foolish ever afterward—that is, as people say, foolish, but really wise, for they saw how things are; of homes built unknowingly across a fairy path where the sidhe take their journeys, and how ill luck followed the inhabitants until they moved, and of the strange penalties for living out of harmony with the little-known currents of the soul's life; of how blind men see more than others; of how a fool is one whose mind is so cleared of all futile commonplace traffic that it reflects untroubled and serene the stars and their courses; of how wisdom is folly, and life, death. All these things and many more did Timothy say in words and play in music on his pipes, and to all of them Moira gave her wide comprehending silence.

The best of all was on evenings when the stars came out first, and then as the two sat watching them from the Round Stone they suddenly began to pale, and the moon flashed into sight, rising swiftly over the mountain Moira called "The Hill o' Delights," because it was from a wide, white door in it that the rushing, light-footed little people came out every evening when the twilight fell and the harsh endeavor of human life was stilled to peace. There was neither talk nor music on those evenings, but a silence full, like the lovely world about them, of unsaid, quivering joy. Sometimes Timothy would turn after such a long time of deep and cheering mutual knowledge of how fair were all things, and find Moira slipped away from beside him; but so impalpable was the companionship she gave him in the strange and sweet confusion of his thoughts that he did not feel himself alone, though she might be already deep in the pines behind him.

The girl grew taller, but the cool whiteness of her face was untinged by any flush of young maidenhood. At seventeen she was a slender sprite of a girl, to reach whose unearthly aloofness the warm human hands of her companions strained unavailing. Each winter she descended to the valley and to school and church, a silent, remote child, moving like one in a dream. And every spring she came back to the hill, to Timothy and his pipes, to the pines and the uplands, to the Round Stone and the white road in front of it. Ralph Wilcox, hearty, kindly son of his hearty, kindly parents, tried to speak to her long enough to make her seem real, but she was rarely in the house except during the day and a half of each week when her father was there; and on their casual encounters out of doors she melted from before his eyes like a pixie, knowing the hiding places and turns of his own land better than he. Sometimes he caught a glimpse of her afterward, regarding him steadily and curiously from a nook in a hillside, and once as she darted away she had dropped a handkerchief and turned her head in time to see him pick it up; but she did not slacken her pace, or speak to him then or at all.

She rarely spoke, even to Timothy, but this was no barrier between them. All the winter Timothy lived on the thoughts of the spring, and when the arbutus and Moira came back he poured out to her the strange treasures he had found in his heart. Scarcely to her, for she only gazed silent at the stars as he talked. Rather she seemed to unlock in him the rich stores of his own understanding and emotion. He marveled that he could ever have found the valley empty. He felt within him a swelling flood, ever renewed, of significance to fill all his world with a sweet and comforting meaning.

And so his red hair grew threaded with white, and his foolish, idle heart happier and happier as the years went on. Then, one midwinter day, Father Delancey climbed the hill to say that Timothy's sister's husband was dead, and that Timothy was sent for to take his place, hold the Nebraska claim, work the land, and be a father to his sister's children. Timothy was stunned with horror, but the unbending will of the never-contradicted parish priest bore him along without question.

"Sure, Tim, go! I tell you to! 'Tis the only thing to do! And 'twill be a man's work and earn ye many hours out of purgatory. An' 'twill be grand for ye, ye that never would have a family o' your own—here's the Blessed Virgin pushin' ye into one, ready-made. 'Twill be the makin' o' ye, 'twill make ye rale human, an' ye'll have no more time for star-gazin' an' such foolishness. Ye can find out what people are in the world for, instead keepin' yerself so outside o' things. Sure, yes, man, yes, I'll tell Moira ye said good-by to her, an'—yes, I give ye my word, and promise true and true, I'll lave ye now if she moves away or if any harm comes to her."



IV

His grizzled hair was turned quite white when his sister kissed him good-by, fresh tears in her eyes, scarcely dry from the excitement of her youngest daughter's wedding. She had a moment of divination like his, and said sadly, "There's no use trying to thank ye, Timmy, words can't do it. If ye'd been anybody else, I cud ha' said ye got ye'r pay for all these long, hard years in the love the childer bear ye. That's the pay folks get for workin' an' livin' for others—but ye're not folks. Is't that ye're the seventh son? Is't that ye've second sight? Is't that—what is't that makes ye so far away? An' what is ye'r pay, Tim? Now that it's over and the children all safe and grown up, ye look yerself like a child that's done its lesson an' run out to play. Is't all just work or play with ye? Can't ye niver just live?"

In truth her brother's eagerness to be away was scarcely concealed at all from the grateful, wistful Irish eyes about him. He was breathless with haste to be off. The long trip to New England was a never-ending nightmare of delay to him, and although he had planned for years to walk up the hill, his trembling old legs dragged in a slow progress maddening to his impatience. A farmer, driving by, offered him a lift, which he accepted gratefully, sitting strained far forward on the high seat. At a turn of the road he looked back and saw that he had passed the cluster of pines where Moira had laughed at him, and where he had felt so thick about him the thronging rush of his newly awakened perceptions of the finer meaning of things, the gay, sweet crowd of gentle little people.

He stopped the farmer and, leaping down from the high seat, he took his pipes under his arm and fairly ran up the little path. His rheumatic knee creaked a little, but the color came up hard in his tired old face as the twilight of the pines and their pungent, welcoming breath fell about him. He cast him down and buried his face in the rust-red dried needles. He did not weep, but from time to time a long sigh heaved his shoulders. Then he turned over and lay on his back, looking at the sunset-yellow sky through the green, thick-clustered needles, noticing how the light made each one glisten as though dipped in molten gold. His hand strayed out to his pipes, lying beside him with mute, gaping mouths. "The Gold o' the Glamour," he murmured to himself, and as he broke the silence with the old tune faintly blown, he felt the wood peopled about him as of yore with twilight forms. Unseen bright eyes gazed at him from behind tree-trunks, and the branches were populous with invisible, kindly listeners. The very hush was symbolic of the consciousness of the wood that he was there again. There was none of the careless commonplace of rustling leaves, and snapping twigs, and indifferent, fearless bird-song. In the death-like still he felt life quivering and observant with a thousand innocent, curious, welcoming eyes.

When he had quavered through the last note he let the pipes fall and gazed about him with a smile, like a happy old child. The sun sank behind the mountain as he looked, and he pulled himself heavily up. His way to the farm lay over bare upland pastures where his feet, accustomed for years to the yielding prarie levels, stumbled and tripped among the loose stones. Twilight came on rapidly, so that he found himself several times walking blindly through fairy rings of fern. He crossed himself and bowed his head three times to the west, where the evening star now shone pale in the radiance of the glowing sky. Between two of the ridges he wandered into a bog where his feet, hot in their heavy boots, felt gratefully the oozing, cool brown water.

And then, as he stepped into the lane, dark with dense maple-trees and echoing faintly with the notes of the hermit thrush, he saw the light of the little house glimmer through the trees in so exactly the spot where his hungering eyes sought it that his heart gave a great hammering leap in his breast.

He knocked at the door, half doubtfully, for all his eagerness. It might be she lived elsewhere in the parish now. He had schooled himself to this thought so that it was no surprise, although a heavy disappointment, when the door was opened by a small dark man holding a sleeping baby on his arm. Timothy lowered his voice and the man gave a brief and hushed answer. He spoke in a strong French-Canadian accent. "Moira O'Donnell? I nevaire heard before. Go to ze house on ze hill—mebbe zey know—"

He closed the door, and, through the open window, Timothy saw him sit down, still holding the baby and looking at it as though the interrupting episode were already forgotten. The old man shivered with a passing eerie sense of being like a ghost knocking vainly at the doors of the living. He limped up the hill, and knocked on the kitchen door of the old Wilcox house. To his eyes, dilated with the wide dusk of the early evening, the windows seemed to blaze with light, and when the door was opened to him he shaded his eyes, blinking fast against the rays of a lamp held high in the hand of a round, little woman who looked at him with an impersonal kindness. His heart beat so he could not speak.

Suddenly from the past rang out his old name, the one he had almost lost in the dreary years of "Uncle Tim" which lay behind him.

"Why, Piper Tim!" cried the woman in a voice of exceeding warmth and affection. "Why, it's dear, dear, darling old Piper Tim come back to visit his old home. I knew ye in a minute by the pipes. Come in! Come in! There's not a soul livin' or dead that's welcomer in th' house of Moira Wilcox."

The name blazed high through all the confusion of his swimming senses. To his blank look she returned a mellow laugh. "Why sure, Timmy darlint, hasn't anybody; iver told ye I was married? I'd have written ye myself, only that I knew you couldn't read it, and 'twas hard to tell through other people. Though, saints preserve us, 'tis long since I thought anything about it, one way or th' other. 'Tis as nat'ral as breathing now."

She was pulling him into the warm, light room, taking his cap and pipes from him, and at the last she pushed him affectionately into a chair, and stood looking kindly at his pale agitation, her arms wide in a soft angle as she placed her hands on her rounded hips. "Oh, Timothy Moran, you darlint! Moira's that glad to see you! You mind me of the times when I was young and that's comin' to be long ago."

She turned and stepped hastily to the stove from which rose an appetizing smell of frying ham. As she bent her plump, flushed face over this, the door opened and two dark-eyed little girls darted in. On seeing a stranger, they were frozen in mid-flight with the shy gaze of country children.

"Here, childer, 'tis Piper Tim come back to visit us. Piper Tim that I've told ye so many tales about—an' the gran' tunes he can play on his pipes. He can play with ye better nor I—he niver has aught else to do!" She smiled a wide, friendly smile on the old man as she said this, to show she meant no harm, and turned the slices of ham deftly so that they sent a puff of blue savory smoke up to her face. "Don't th' ham smell good, ye spalpeens, fresh from runnin' th' hills? Go an' wash ye'r faces an' hands and call ye'r father an' brothers. I've four," she added proudly to the man by the table watching her with horrified eyes.

The fumes of the cooking made him sick, the close air suffocated him. He felt as though he were in some oppressive nightmare, and the talk at the supper-table penetrated but dully to his mind. The cordiality of Moira's husband, the shy, curious looks of the children at his pipes, even Moira's face rosy from brow to rounded chin, and beaming with indulgent, affectionate interest all melted together into a sort of indistinguishable confusion. This dull distress was rendered acute anguish by Moira's talk. In that hot, indoor place, with all those ignorant blank faces about her, she spoke of the pines and the upland bogs, of the fog and the Round Stone, and desecrated a sacred thing with every word.

It would have been a comfort to him if she had even talked with an apostate's yearning bitterness for his betrayed religion, if she had spoken harshly of their old, sweet folly; but she was all kindness and eager, willing reminiscence. Just as she spoke his name, his faery name of "Piper Tim," in a tone that made it worse than "Uncle Tim," so she blighted one after another of the old memories as she held them up in her firm, assured hands, and laughed gently at their oddity.

After supper as Tim sat again in the kitchen watching her do the evening work, the tides of revulsion rose strong within him. "We were a queer lot, an' no mistake, Piper Tim," she said, scraping at a frying pan with a vigorous knife. "An' the childer are just like us. I've thried to tell them some of our old tales, but—I dun'no'—they've kind o' gone from me, now I've such a lot to do. I suppose you were up to the same always, with your nephews an' nieces out West. 'Twas fine for ye to have a family of your own that way, you that was always so lonely like."

Timothy's shuddering horror of protest rose into words at this, incoherent words and bursts of indignation that took his breath away in gasps. "Moira! Moira! What are ye sayin' to me? Me wid a family! Anyone who's iver had th' quiet to listen to th' blessed little people—him to fill up his ears wid th' clatter of mortial tongues. No? Since I lift here I've had no minute o' peace—oh, Moira, th' country there—th' great flat hidjious country of thim—an' th' people like it—flat an' fruitful. An' oh, Moira, aroon, it's my heart breakin' in me, that now I've worked and worked there and done my mortial task an' had my purgatory before my time, an' I've come back to live again—that ye've no single welcomin' word to bid me stay."

The loving Irish heart of the woman melted in a misunderstanding sympathy and remorse. "Why, poor Piper Tim, I didn't mean ye should go back to them or their country if ye like it better here. Ye're welcome every day of the year from now till judgment tramp. I only meant—why—seem' they were your own folks—and all, that ye'd sort o' taken to thim—the way most do, when it's their own blood."

She flowed on in a stream of fumbling, warm-hearted, mistaken apology that sickened the old man's soul. When he finally rose for his great adventure, he spoke timidly, with a wretched foreknowledge of what her answer would be.

"Och, Piper Tim, 'tis real sweet of ye to think of it and ask me, an' I'd like fine to go. Sure, I've not been on the Round Stone of an evening—why, not since you went away I do believe! But Ralph's goin' to the grange meetin' to-night, an' one of th' childer is restless with a cough, and I think I'll not go. My feet get sort of sore-like, too, after bein' on them all day."



V.

As he stepped out from the warm, brightly lighted room, the night seemed chill and black, but after a moment his eyes dilated and he saw the stars shining through the densely hanging maple leaves.

Up by the Round Stone the valley opened out beneath him. Restlessly he looked up and down the road and across the valley with a questing glance which did not show him what he sought. The night for all its dark corners had nothing in it for him beyond what lay openly before him. He put out his hand instinctively for his pipes, remembered that he had left them at the house, and sprang to his feet to return for them. Perhaps Moira would come out with him now. Perhaps the child had gone to sleep. The brief stay in the ample twilight of the hillside had given him a faint, momentary courage to appeal again to her against the narrow brightness of her prison.

Moira sat by the kitchen table, sewing, her smooth round face blooming like a rose in the light from the open door of the stove. Her kindly eyes beamed sweetly on the old man. "Ah, Piper Tim, ye're wise. 'Tis a damp night out for ye'r rheumatis. The fog risin' too, likely?"

The old piper went to her chair and stood looking at her with a fixed gaze, "Moira!" he said vehemently, "Moira O'Donnell that was, the stars are bright over the Round Stone, an' th' moon is risin' behind th' Hill o' Delights, and the first white puffs of incense are risin' from th' whirl-hole of th' river. I've come back for my pipes, and I'm goin' out to play to th' little people—an' oh, shall old Piper Tim go without Moira?"

He spoke with a glowing fervor like the leaping up of a dying candle. From the inexorably kind woman who smiled so friendly on him his heart recoiled and puffed itself out into darkness. She surveyed him with the wise, tender pity of a mother for a foolish, much-loved child. "Sure, 'tis th' same Piper Tim ye are!" she said cheerfully, laying down her work, "but, Lord save ye, Timmy darlint, Moira's grown up! There's no need for my pretendin' to play any more, is there, when I've got proper childer o' my own to keep it up. They are my little people—an' I don't have to have a quiet place to fancy them up out o' nothin'. They're real! An' they're takin' my place all over again. There's one—the youngest girl—the one that looks so like me as ye noticed—she's just such a one as I was. To-day only (she's seven to-morrow), she minded me of some old tales I had told her about the cruachan whistle for the sidhe on the seventh birthday, an' she'd been tryin' to make one, but I'd clean forgot how the criss-cross lines go. It made me think back on that evening when I was seven—maybe you've forgot, but you was sittin' on the Round Stone in th'——"

Timothy's sore heart rebelled at this last rifling of the shrine, and he made for the door. Moira's sweet solicitude held him for an instant in check. "Oh, Tim, ye'd best stay in an' warm your knee by the good fire. I've a pile of mendin' to do, and you'll tell me all about your family in th' West and how you farmed there. It'll be real cozy-like."

Timothy uttered an outraged sound and snatching up his pipes fled out of the pleasant, low-ceilinged room, up the road, now white as chalk beneath the newly risen moon. At the Round Stone he sat down and, putting his pipes to his lips, he played resolutely through to the end "The Song of Angus to the Stars." As the last, high, confident note died, he put his pipes down hastily, and dropped his face in his hands with a broken murmur of Gaelic lament.

When he looked abroad again, the valley was like a great opal, where the moon shot its rays into the transparent fog far below him. The road was white and the shadows black and one was no more devoid of mystery than the other.

The sky for all its stars hung above the valley like an empty bowl above an empty vessel, and in his heart he felt no swelling possibilities to fill this void. To the haggard old eyes the face of the world was like a dead thing, which did not return his gaze even with hostility, but blankly—a smooth, thin mask which hid behind it nothing at all.

He was startled by the sudden appearance of a dog from out of the shadows, a shaggy collie who trotted briskly down the road, stopping to roll a friendly, inquiring eye on his bent figure. His eyes followed the animal until it vanished in the shadows on the other side. After the sound of its padding footsteps was still, the old man's heart died within him at the silence.

He tried vainly to exorcise this anguish by naming it What was it? Why did he droop dully now that he was where he had so longed to be? Everything was as it had been, the valley, the clean white fog, tossing its waves up to him as he had dreamed of it in the arid days of Nebraska; the mountains closing in on him with the line of drooping peace he had never lost from before his eyes during the long, dreary years of exile. Only he was changed. His eye fell on his mud-caked boots, and his face contracted. "Oh, my! Oh, my!" he said aloud, like an anxious old child. "She couldn't ha' liked my tracking bog durt on to her clane kitchen floor!"

But as he sat brooding, his hand dropped heavily to the Round Stone and encountered a small object which he held up to view. It was a willow whistle of curious construction, with white lines criss-cross on it; and beside it lay a jackknife with a broken blade. The old man looked at it, absently at first, then with a start, and finally with a rush of joyful and exultant exclamations.

And afterward, quite tranquilly, with a shining face of peace, he played softly on his pipes, "The Call of the Sidhe to the Children."



ADESTE FIDELES!

I.

The persuasive agent sought old Miss Abigail out among her flower-beds and held up to her a tiny chair with roses painted on the back. "I was told to see you about these. They're only four dollars a dozen, and the smallest school children love 'em." Miss Abigail straightened herself with difficulty. She had been weeding the gladiolus bed. "Four dollars," she mused, "I was going to put four dollars into rose-bushes this fall." She put out a strong, earth-stained old hand and took the chair. Her affection for her native Greenford began to rise through her life-long thrift, a mental ferment not unusual with her. Finally, "All right," she said; "send 'em to the schoolhouse, and say they're in memory of all my grandfathers and grandmothers that learned their letters in that schoolhouse."

She went back to her digging and the agent clicked the gate back of his retreat. Suddenly she stood up without remembering to ease her back. She heard the first shot from the enemy who was to advance so rapidly upon her thereafter. "Wait a minute," she called to the agent. As he paused, she made a swift calculation. "I don't believe I want a dozen," she said, much surprised. "I can't think of that many little ones." The agent took his notebook. "How many?" he asked.

The ponderous old woman stared at him absently, while she made a mental canvass of the town. She spoke with a gasp. "We don't need any!" she cried. "There ain't a child in school under eleven."

"Take some now and have them handy," urged the agent.

Miss Abigail's gaze again narrowed in silent calculation. When she spoke her exclamation was not for her listener. She had forgotten him. "Good Lord of Love!" she cried. "There ain't a single one comin' up to sit on those chairs if I should buy 'em!"

The agent was utterly blotted from her mind. She did not know when he left her garden. She only knew that there were no children in Greenford. There were no children in her town! "Why, what's comin' to Greenford!" she cried.

And yet, even as she cried out, she was aware that she had had a warning, definite, ominous, a few days before, from the lips of Molly Leonard. At that time she had put away her startled uneasiness with a masterful hand, burying it resolutely where she had laid away all the other emotions of her life, under the brown loam of her garden. But it all came back to her now.

Her thin, fluttering, little old friend had begun with tragic emphasis, "The roof to the library leaks!"

Miss Abigail had laughed as usual at Molly's habit of taking small events with bated breath. "What of it?" she asked. "That roof never was good, even back in the days when 'twas a private house and my great-uncle lived in it."

Miss Molly fluttered still more before the awfulness of her next announcement.

"Well, the talk is that the town won't vote a cent toward repairs."

"They'll have to! You can't get along without a library!"

"No, they won't. The talk is that the men won't vote to have the town give a bit of money for shingles. No, nor to pay somebody to take the place of Ellen Monroe as librarian. She's got work in the print mill at Johnsonville and is going to move down there to be near her mother's family."

"Oh, talk!" said Miss Abigail with the easy contempt she had for things outside her garden hedge. "Haven't you heard men talk before?"

"But they say really they won't! They say nobody ever goes into it any more when the summer folks go away in the autumn."

Miss Abigail's gesture indicated that the thing was unthinkable. "What's the matter with young folks nowadays, anyhow? They always used to run there and chatter till you couldn't hear yourself think."

Miss Molly lowered her voice like a person coming to the frightening climax of a ghost story. "Miss Abigail, they ain't any young folks here any more!"

"What do you call the Pitkin girls!" demanded the other.

"They were the very last ones and they and their mother have decided they'll move to Johnsonville this fall."

Miss Abigail cried out in energetic disapproval, "What in the Lord's world are the Pitkinses going to move away from Greenford for! They belong here!"

Miss Molly marshaled the reasons with a sad swiftness, "There aren't any music pupils left for the oldest one, the two next have got positions in the print mill and little Sarah is too old for the school here any more."

Miss Abigail shook her head impatiently as though to brush away a troublesome gnat. "How about the Leavitts? There ought to be enough young ones in that or family to—"

"They moved to Johnsonville last week, going to rent their house to city folks in the summer, the way all the rest here in the street do. They didn't want to go a bit. Eliza felt dreadful about it, but what can they do? Ezra hasn't had enough carpentering to do in the last six months to pay their grocery bill, and down in Johnsonville they can't get carpenters enough. Besides, all the children's friends are there, and they got so lonesome here winters."

Miss Abigail quailed a little, but rallying, she brought out, "What's the matter with the Bennetts? The whole kit and b'iling of them came in here the other day to pester me asking about how I grew my lilies."

"Why, Miss Abigail! You don't pay any more attention to village news! They've been working in the mills for two years now, and only come home for two weeks in the summer like everybody else."

The old woman stirred her weighty person wrathfully. "Like everybody else! Molly, you talk like a fool! As if there was nobody lived here all the year around!"

"But it's so! I don't know what's coming to Greenford!"

An imperative gesture from the older woman cut her short. "Don't chatter so, Molly! If it's true, that about the library, we've got to do something!"

The interview had ended in an agreement from her, after a struggle with the two passions of her life, to give up the tulip bulbs for which she had been saving so long, and spend the money for repairing the roof. Miss Molly, having no money to give, since she was already much poorer than she could possibly be and live, agreed, according to Miss Abigail's peremptory suggestion, to give her time, and keep the library open at least during the afternoons.

"You can do it, Molly, as well as not, for you don't seem to have half the sewing you used to."

"There's nobody here any more to sew for—" began the seamstress despairingly, but Miss Abigail would not listen, bundling her out of the garden gate and sending her trotting home, cheered unreasonably by the old woman's jovial blustering, "No such kind of talk allowed in my garden!"

But now, after the second warning, Miss Abigail felt the need of some cheer for herself as she toiled among the hollyhocks and larkspurs. She would not let herself think of the significance of the visit of the agent for the chairs, and she could not force herself to think of anything else. For several wretched weeks she hung in this limbo. Then, one morning as she stood gazing at her Speciosums Rubrums without seeing them, she received her summons to the front. She had a call from her neighbor, Mr. Edward Horton, whom the rest of the world knows as a sculptor, but whom Miss Abigail esteemed only because of his orthodox ideas on rose culture. He came in to ask some information about a blight on his Red Ramblers, although after Miss Abigail had finished her strong recommendation to use whale oil soap sprayed, and not hellebore, he still lingered, crushing a leaf of lemon verbena between his fingers and sniffing the resultant perfume with thoughtful appreciation. He was almost as enthusiastic a horticulturist as Miss Abigail, and stood high in her good graces as one of the few individuals of sense among the summer colony. She faced him therefore in a peaceable, friendly mood, glad of the diversion from her thoughts, and quite unprepared for the shock he was about to give her.

"I'm on my way to interview the trustees of the church," he remarked. "It is curious that all but one of them now really live in Johnsonville, although they still keep their nominal residence here."

"What do you want to see them for?" asked Miss Abigail, with a bluntness caused in part by her wincing at his casual statement of an unwelcome fact.

"Why, I've had what I flatter myself is an inspiration for everyone concerned. I've got a big commission for part of the decorations of the new State House in Montana, and I need a very large studio. It occurred to me the other day that instead of building I'd save time by buying the old church here and using that."

Miss Abigail leaned against the palings. "Buy our church!" she said, and every letter was a capital.

"I didn't know you were a member," said the sculptor, a little surprised. "You don't often go."

Miss Abigail shouted out, "Why, my grandfather was minister in that church!" Mr. Horton received this as a statement of fact. "Indeed? I didn't realize the building was so old. I wonder if the foundations are still in good shape." He went on, explanatorily, "I really don't know why I hadn't thought of the plan before. The number who attend church in that great barn of a place could easily be put into someone's parlor, and save the trustees the expense of heating. One of them whom I saw the other day seemed quite pleased with the notion—said they'd been at a loss to know what to do about conditions here." He glanced at his watch. "Well, I must be going or I shall miss the train to Johnsonville. Thank you very much for the hint about the blight."

He went down the street, humming a cheerful little tune.

To Miss Abigail it was the bugle call of "Forward, charge!" She had been, for the last few weeks, a little paler than usual. Now her powerful old face flushed to an angry red. She dashed her trowel to the garden path and clenched her fists. "What's coming to Greenford!" she shouted. It was no longer a wail of despair. It was a battle-cry of defiance.



II

She had no time to organize a campaign, forced as she was to begin fighting at once. Reaching wildly for any weapon at hand, she rushed to the front, as grim-visaged a warrior as ever frightened a peaceable, shiftless non-combatant "Joel Barney!" she cried, storming up his front steps. "You're a trustee of the church, aren't you? Well, if you don't vote against selling the church, I'll foreclose the mortgage on your house so quick you can't wink. And you tell 'Lias Bennett that if he doesn't do the same, I'll pile manure all over that field of mine near his place, and stink out his summer renters so they'll never set foot here again."

She shifted tactics as she encountered different adversaries and tried no blackmail on stubborn Miles Benton, whom she took pains to see the next time he came back to Greenford for a visit. Him she hailed as the Native-Born. "How would you like to have brazen models and nasty statues made in the building where your own folks have always gone to church?"

But when the skirmish was over, she realized ruefully that the argument which had brought her her hard-won victory had been the one which, for a person of such very moderate means as hers, reflected the least hope for future battles. At the last, in desperation, she had guaranteed in the name of the Ladies' Aid Society that the church, except for the minister's salary, should thereafter be no expense to the trustees. She had invented that source of authority, remembering that Molly Leonard had said she belonged to the Ladies' Aid Society, "and I can make Molly do anything," she thought, trusting Providence for the management of the others.

As a matter of fact, when she came to investigate the matter, she found that Molly was now the sole remaining member. Her dismay was acute, Molly's finances being only too well known to her, but she rallied bravely. "They don't do much to a church that costs money," she thought, and, when Molly went away, she made out her budget unflinchingly. Wood for the furnace, kerosene for the lamps, wages to the janitor, repairs when needed—"Well, Abigail Warner," she told herself, "it means nothing new bought for the garden, and no new microscope—the roof to the library costing more than they said 'twould and all."

But the joy of triumphant battle was still swelling her doughty old heart, so that even these considerations did not damp her exultation over her artist neighbor the next time he came to see her. He listened to her boasting with his pleasant, philosophic smile, and, when she finished, delivered himself of a quiet little disquisition or the nature of things which was like ice-water in the face of the hot-blooded old fighter.

"My dear Miss Abigail, your zeal does your heart credit, and your management of the trustees proves you an unsuspected diplomat; but as a friend, and, believe me, a disinterested friend, let me warn you that you are contending against irresistible forces. You can no more resuscitate your old Greenford than you can any other dead body. You have kept the church from my clutches, it is true, though for that matter I wouldn't have offered to buy it if I hadn't thought no one cared about it—but what do you mean to do with it now you have it? You cannot bring back the old Greenford families from their well-paid work in Johnsonville to sit in those rescued pews, or read in your deserted library, or send their children to your empty schoolhouse. You tell me they are loyal to their old home, and love to come back here for visits. Is that strange? Greenford is a charming village set in the midst of beautiful mountains, and Johnsonville is a raw factory town in a plain. But they cannot live on picturesque scenery or old associations. The laws of economics are like all other laws of nature, inevitable in their action and irresistible in—"

Miss Abigail gave the grampus snort which had been her great-grandfather's war-cry. "Hoo! You're like all other book folks! You give things such long names you scare yourselves! I haven't got anything to do with economics, nor it with me. It's a plain question as to whether the church my ancestors built and worshipped in is to be sold. There's nothing so inevitable in that, let me tell you. Laws of nature—fiddlesticks! How about the law of gravity? Don't I break that every time I get up gumption enough to raise my hand to my head!"

Mr. Horton looked at the belligerent old woman with the kindest smile of comprehension. "Ah, I know how hard it is for you. In another way I have been through the same bitter experience. My home, my real home, where my own people are, is out in a wind-swept little town on the Nebraska prairies. But I cannot live there because it is too far from my world of artists and art patrons. I tried it once, but the laws of supply and demand work for all alike. I gave it up. Here I am, you see. You can't help such things. You'd better follow on to Johnsonville now and not embitter the last of your life with a hopeless struggle."

Miss Abigail fairly shouted at him her repudiation of his ideas. "Not while there is a breath in me! My folks were all soldiers."

"But even soldiers surrender to overpowering forces."

"Hoo! Hoo! How do they know they're overpowering till they're overpowered! How do they dare surrender till they're dead! How do they know that if they hold out just a little longer they won't get reenforcements!"

Mr. Horton was a little impatient of his old friend's unreason. "My dear Miss Abigail, you have brains. Use them! What possible reinforcements can you expect?"

The old woman opposed to his arguments nothing but a passionately bare denial. "No! No! No! We're different! It's in your blood to give up because you can reason it all out that you're beaten," She stood up, shaking with her vehemence. "It's in my blood to fight and fight and fight—"

"And then what?" asked the sculptor, as she hesitated.

"Go on fighting!" she cried.



III

She was seventy-one years old when she first flew this flag, and for the next four years she battled unceasingly under its bold motto against odds that rapidly grew more overwhelming as the process that had been imperceptibly draining Greenford of its population gained impetus with it own action. In the beginning people moved to Johnsonville because they could get work in the print mill, but after a time they went because the others had gone. Before long there was no cobbler in Greenford because there was so little cobbling to do. After that the butcher went away, then the carpenter, and finally the grocery-store was shut up and deserted by the man whose father and grandfather had kept store in the same building for sixty years. It was the old story. He had a large family of children who needed education and "a chance."

The well-kept old village still preserved its outer shell of quaintness and had a constantly increasing charm for summering strangers who rejoiced with a shameless egoism in the death-like quiet of the moribund place, and pointed out to visiting friends from the city the tufts of grass beginning to grow in the main street as delightful proofs of the tranquillity of their summer retreat.

Miss Abigail overheard a conversation to this effect one day between some self-invited visitors to her wonderful garden. Her heart burned and her face blackened. "You might as well," she told them, "laugh at the funny faces of a person who's choking to death!"

The urbane city people turned amused and inquiring faces upon her. "How so?"

"Roads aren't for grass to grow in!" she fulminated. "They're for folks to use, for men and women and little children to go over to and from their homes."

"Ah, economic conditions," they began to murmur. "The inevitable laws of supply and—"

"Get out of my garden!" Miss Abigail raged at them. "Get out!"

They had scuttled before her, laughing at her quaint verocity, and she had sworn wrath fully never to let another city dweller inside her gate—a resolution which she was forced to forego as time passed on and she became more and more hard pressed for ammunition.

Up to this time she had lived in perfect satisfaction on seven hundred dollars a year, but now she began to feel straitened. She no longer dared afford even the tiniest expenditure for her garden. She spaded the beds herself, drew leaf mold from the woods in repeated trips with a child's express wagon, and cut the poles for her sweet-peas with her own hands. When Miss Molly Leonard declared herself on the verge of starvation from lack of sewing to do, and threatened to move to Johnsonville to be near her sister Annie, Miss Abigail gave up her "help" and paid Miss Molly for the time spent in the empty reading-room of the library. But the campaign soon called for more than economy, even the most rigid. When the minister had a call elsewhere, and the trustees of the church seized the opportunity to declare it impossible to appoint his successor, Miss Abigail sold her woodlot and arranged through the Home Missionary Board for someone to hold services at least once a fortnight. Later the "big meadow" so long coveted by a New York family as a building site was sacrificed to fill the empty war chest, and, temporarily in funds, she hired a boy to drive her about the country drumming up a congregation.

Christmas time was the hardest for her. The traditions of old Greenford were for much decorating of the church with ropes of hemlock, and a huge Christmas tree in the Town Hall with presents for the best of the Sunday-school scholars. Winding the ropes had been, of old, work for the young unmarried people, laughing and flirting cheerfully. By the promise of a hot supper, which she furnished herself, Miss Abigail succeeded in getting a few stragglers from the back hills, but the number grew steadily smaller year by year. She and Miss Molly always trimmed the Christmas tree themselves. Indeed, it soon became a struggle to pick out any child a regular enough attendant at Sunday-school to be eligible for a present. The time came when Miss Abigail found it difficult to secure any children at all for the annual Christmas party.

The school authorities began to murmur at keeping up the large old schoolhouse for a handful of pupils. Miss Abigail, at her wit's end, guaranteed the fuel for warming the house, and half the pay of a teacher. Examining, after this, her shrunk and meager resources, she discovered she had promised far beyond her means. She was then seventy-three years old, but an ageless valor sprang up in her to meet the new emergency. She focused her acumen to the burning point and saw that the only way out of her situation was to earn some money—an impossible thing at her age. Without an instant's pause, "How shall I do it?" she asked herself, and sat frowning into space for a long time.

When she rose up, the next development in her campaign was planned. Not in vain had she listened scornfully to the silly talk of city folks about the picturesqueness of her old house and garden. It was all grist to her mill, she perceived, and during the next summer it was a grimly amused old miller who watched the antics of Abigail Warner, arrayed in a pseudo-oldfashioned gown of green-flowered muslin, with a quaintly ruffled cap confining her rebellious white hair, talking the most correct book-brand of down-east jargon, and selling flowers at twenty times their value to automobile and carriage folk. She did not mind sacrificing her personal dignity, but she did blush for her garden, reduced to the most obvious commonplaces of flowers that any child could grow. But by September she had saved the school-teacher's pay, and the Martins and the Allens, who had been wavering on account of their children, decided to stay another winter at least.

That was something, Miss Abigail thought, that Christmas, as she and Miss Molly tortured their rheumatic limbs to play games with the six children around the tree. She had held rigorously to the old tradition of having the Christmas tree party in the Town Hall, and she had heartened Miss Molly through the long lonely hours they had spent in trimming it; but as the tiny handful of forlorn celebrants gathered about the tall tree, glittering in all the tinsel finery which was left over from the days when the big hall had rung to the laughter of a hundred children and as many more young people, even Miss Abigail felt a catch in her throat as she quavered through "King Willyum was King James's son!"

When the games were over and the children sat about soberly, eating their ice-cream and cake, she looked over her shoulder into the big empty room and shivered. The children went away and she and Miss Molly put out the lights in silence. When they came out into the moonlight and looked up and down the deserted street, lined with darkened houses, the face of the younger woman was frankly tear-stained. "Oh, Miss Abigail," she said; "let's give it up!"

Miss Abigail waited an instant, perceptible instant before answering, but, when she did, her voice was full and harsh with its usual vigor. "Fiddlesticks! You must ha' been losing your sleep. Go tuck yourself up and get a good night's rest and you won't talk such kind of talk!"

But she herself sat up late into the night with a pencil and paper, figuring out sums that had impossible answers.

That March she had a slight stroke of paralysis, and was in an agony of apprehension lest she should not recover enough to plant the flowers for the summer's market. By May, flatly against the doctor's orders, she was dragging herself around the garden on crutches, and she stuck to her post, smiling and making prearranged rustic speeches all the summer. She earned enough to pay the school-teacher another winter and to buy the fuel for the schoolhouse, and again the Martins and the Allens stayed over; though they announced with a callous indifference to Miss Abigail's ideas that they were going down to Johnsonville at Christmas to visit their relatives there, and have the children go to the tree the ex-Greenfordites always trimmed.

When she heard this Miss Abigail set off to the Allen farm on the lower slope of Hemlock Mountain. "Wa'n't our tree good enough?" she demanded hotly.

"The tree was all right," they answered, "but the children were so mortal lonesome. Little Katie Ann came home crying."

Miss Abigail turned away without answering and hobbled off up the road toward the mountain. Things were black before her eyes and in her heart as she went blindly forward where the road led her. She still fought off any acknowledgment of the bitterness that filled her, but when the road, after dwindling to a wood trail and then to a path, finally stopped, she sat down with a great swelling breath. "Well, I guess this is the end," she said aloud, instantly thereafter making a pretense to herself that she meant the road. She looked about her with a brave show of interest in the bare November woods, unroofed and open to the sunlight, and was rewarded by a throb of real interest to observe that she was where she had not been for forty years, when she used to clamber over the spur of Hemlock Mountain to hunt for lady's-slippers in the marshy ground at the head of the gorge. A few steps more and she would be on her own property, a steep, rocky tract of brushland left her by her great-uncle. She had a throb as she realized that, besides her house and garden, this unsalable bit of the mountainside was her only remaining possession. She had indeed come to the end.

With the thought came her old dogged defiance to despair. She shut her hands on her crutches, pulled herself heavily up to her feet, and toiled forward through some brush. She would not allow herself to think if thoughts were like that. Soon she came out into a little clearing beside the Winthrop Branch, swirling and fumbling in its headlong descent. The remains of a stone wall and a blackened beam or two showed her that she had hit upon the ruins of the old sawmill her great-grandfather had owned. This forgotten and abandoned decay, a symbol of the future of the whole region, struck a last blow at the remnants of her courage. She sank down on the wall and set herself to a losing struggle with the blackness that was closing in about her. All her effort had been in vain. The fight was over. She had not a weapon left.

A last spark of valor flickered into flame within her. She stood up, lifting her head high, and summoning with a loudly beating heart every scattered energy. She was alive; her fight could not be over while she still breathed.

For an instant she stood, self-hypnotized by the intensity of her resolution. Then there burst upon her ear, as though she had not heard it before, the roar of the water rushing past her. It sounded like a loud voice calling to her. She shivered and turned a little giddy as though passing into a trance, and then, with one bound, the gigantic forces of subconscious self, wrought by her long struggle to a white heat of concentration on one aim, arose and mastered her. For a time—hours perhaps—she never knew how long, old Miss Abigail was a genius, with the brain of an engineer and the prophetic vision of a seer.



IV

The next months were the hardest of her life. The long dreary battle against insurmountable obstacles she had been able to bear with a stoical front, but the sickening alternations of emotions which now filled her days wore upon her until she was fairly suffocated. About mail time each day she became of an unendurable irritability, so that poor Miss Molly was quite afraid to go near her. For the first time in her life there was no living thing growing in her house.