In her, malleable to all the influences of the revealing night, fairly disembodied, in her detached and flitting presence, the scene woke dim, coiled memories of an infancy that stirred and pained her even as it left her forever, and frightened longing for the motherhood that life was holding for her. No longer an infant, not yet a woman, this creature that was both felt the helplessness of one, the yearning of the other, and as she pressed the nestling cat tightly to her little breast two great, eager tears slipped down her hot cheeks, and a gulping sob, half loneliness, half pure excitement, broke into the gentle stillness of the lighted room.

"Who's there?"

The man's voice rang like a sudden pistol shot in the night; before Caroline's fascinated gaze the gleaming, softly colored picture faded and vanished into the engulfing darkness, as the lamp went out and a dark, scudding mackerel cloud flew over the moon. Instinctively she fled softly down the knoll, instinctively she dropped behind a bush at the bottom. She heard the rattle of the window pane as the man pushed himself half out of the window; she heard him call back to the waiting room behind him!

"It's a cat, dear—I saw it, plain. It's pretty bright out here. But I thought I saw something white beside it, too. I guess I'll take a look around outside."

There was a sound of movement behind the window, and, caught in an ecstasy of terror, Caroline turned at right angles from the fields and ran to the road that gleamed white, far on the other side of the cottage. Panting, she won it, crossed it, and fairly safe behind the low growth of wayside brushes that fringed its other side, she dashed along, farther and farther from the cottage, more and more frightened with every gasping breath.

On and on she flew, light as a skimming leaf in the wind, the cat bounding in easy, flexible curves beside her. Now a little brown cottage in its plot of land sent them into the road for a moment; now some tiny pond, a mirror for the sprinkled heavens, broke into their course, and they skirted it more slowly, peering continuously into its jeweled depths. With them their hurrying shadows, black on the road, fainter on the grass, fled ceaselessly, hardly more quiet than they. A very intoxication of fear, a panic terror almost delicious, drove Caroline through the night, though after a while she ran more slowly. Utterly ignorant of where she was, reckless of where she might go, she swung along under the streaming moon, no white moth or whispering leaf more wholly a part of the night than she.

Whatever idea of going back she might have had was lost long ago; however little she might have meant to range so far, she was now beyond any turning. No wood creature, no skipping faun or startled dryad dancing under the moon could have belonged more utterly than she to the fragrant, mysterious world around her. The bright, bustling life of every day, its clatter of food and drink, its smarts and fatigues, its settled routine of work and play, all seemed as far behind her as some old tale of another life, half forgotten now.

Just as her pace subsided into a little skipping trot, a thick hedge sprang up across their path, driving them into the road, and continued, stiff and tall, along its edge. The pure pleasure of conquering its prickly stiffness sent Caroline through it, tearing one sleeve from her nightgown and dragging a great rent in one side of it. Emerging into a magnificent sweep of clipped turf, where wide, leafy boughs spread dappled moon shadows, they made for a whispering, clucking fountain that threw a diamond column straight toward the stars, only to break at the top into a beaded mist and clink musically back to its marble basin. Its rhythmic tinkle, the four ball-shaped box trees at either corner, the carved whiteness of the marble basin, and the massive pillar-fronted stone house beyond it, all spread a glamour of fairyland and foreign courts. Caroline bowed gravely to the cat, and, seizing his feathery paws, danced, bowing and posturing, in a bewitched abandon around the tinkling, glistening fountain. The plumy tail of Red Rufus flew behind him as he twirled, his little feet pattered furiously after Caroline's twinkling sandals. Stooping over the fountain, she threw a silvery handful high in the air and ran to catch it on her head.

As she stood at last, panting and dazed with her mad circling, she was aware of the low murmur of a voice, rising and falling in a steady measure, reaching out of the dim bulk of the great house, dark and sunk in sleep before her. For a moment a chill fear struck to the bottom of her little heart: was some weird spell aimed at her, some malignant eye spying on her? She stood frozen to the spot, the tiny drops of sweat cooling on her forehead, while the droning sounded in her ears. Then, out of the very core of her terror, some inexplicable impulse urged her on to face it, and she crept, step by step, the cat tight in her nervous grasp, around the corner of the great house, toward the sound.

This corner was a wing, set at right angles to the main building, and as she rounded it she found herself at the edge of an inner court. In the opposite wing, looking straight across the court, was a lighted room with a long French window opening directly on the shaven turf, and in the center of this window there sat in a high, carved chair a very old woman. She was carefully dressed in deep black, with pure white ruffles at her neck and around her shrunken wrists, and a lace cap on her thin, white hair. Her feet were on a carved foot-stool, and a quaint silver lamp, set on a slender table at her side, threw a stream of light across the court. Her face, lined with countless wrinkles, was bent upon a large book in her lap; from its pages she read in a low, steady voice—the passionless, almost terrifying voice of great and weary age:

"Lord, thou hast been our dwelling place in all generations.

"Before the mountains were brought forth, or ever thou hast formed the earth and the world, even from everlasting to everlasting thou art God."

Caroline stared, fascinated, down the path of lamplight. It marked a bed of yellow tulips with a broad band; they stood motionless, as if carved in ivory.



"For a thousand years in thy sight are but as yesterday when it is past, and as a watch in the night."

The grave, steady voice flowed out and mingled with the silver lamplight; the marble sill of the long window was white like the sill of a tomb.

"We spend our years as a tale that is told.

"The days of our years are threescore years and ten; and if by reason of strength they be fourscore years, yet is their strength labor and sorrow; for it is soon cut off, and we fly away."

The hot excitement of this magic night cooled slowly; over Caroline's bubbling spirit there fell a mild, strange calm. A breath from the very caverns of the infinite stole out along the path of that silver lamp, and in the grave, surrendered voice there sounded for the child upon life's threshold echoes of the final tolling.

Entranced by the measured cadences, Caroline stepped forward unconsciously and stood, white against the gray stone, full in the path of the lamp. The heavy, wrinkled lids raised themselves from the deep-set eyes, and the aged reader gazed calmly at the little figure across the court. The withered old hands clasped each other.

"Jemmy! O Jemmy!"

Caroline never moved.

"It is you, Jemmy!"

The faded eyes devoured the little white figure.

"I thought you'd never come, Jemmy—but I knew they'd send you. I'm all ready. Don't you think I'm afraid, Jemmy: I'm eighty-four years old, and I want to go."

Caroline hardly breathed; a nameless awe held her motionless and silent.

"You see, I don't sleep much any more, Jemmy," the old, toneless voice went on, "and hardly any at night. They're very kind, all of them, but I'm—I'm eighty-four years old, and I want to go."

The ivory tulips gleamed under the stars; the silver lamp, burned lower and lower: its oil was nearly gone.

"And you brought your yellow kitty, too, Jemmy! To think of that! Did they think I wouldn't know my baby? It's only fifty years, ... shall I come now, Jemmy?"

The silver lamp went out. In the starlight Caroline saw the lace cap droop forward, as the the old woman's head settled gently on her breast. Her hands lay clasped on the great volume; her deep-set eyes were closed. She read no more from the book, and the child, awed and sober, stole like a shadow behind the gray wall and left the quiet figure in the carved chair.

Her feet fell into a tiny graveled path, and she drifted aimlessly along it, musing on the meaning of what she had heard. Almost she had persuaded herself that the gray stone building was an enchanted palace, and herself a fairy messenger sent to break the spell, when the delight of pushing through a tiny turnstile and finding a running brook with a waterfall in it close at hand, drove everything else from her mind. The grounds had completely changed their character by now: the turnstile marked the end of cultivation, and the little path, no longer graveled, wound through the wild woodland. Here and there a boulder blocked the way; the undergrowth became dense; great clumps of fern and rhododendron sent out their heavy, rank odors. Now and again the spicy scent of warm pines and cedars prepared the ear for the gentle, ceaseless rustle of their stiff foliage; little scufflings and chitterings at the ground level told of wood-people wakened by the presence of Red Rufus.

A strange whitish bulk that glimmered through the thinning foreground, too big for even a big boulder, too symmetrical and quiet for a waterfall, tempted Caroline on, and she pressed forward hastily, lost in speculation, when a sudden odor foreign to the woods stopped her short at the very edge of a little glade, and she paused, sniffing curiously.

A man, bareheaded, with grizzled curly hair, turned suddenly, not ten feet from her, and stared dumfounded at her, his twisted, brown cigar an inch from his lips.

The torn-out sleeve of her nightgown had bared one side to her waist: the great rent that slit the lower half of the garment left one slender leg uncovered above her white knee. A spray of wild azalea wreathed her dark tumbled hair, and Rufus, his plumy tail curled around her feet in the shadow, and his green eyes flaming, might have been a baby panther. She leaned one hand on the rough bark of a chestnut and gazed with startled eyes at the man; it seemed that the forest must swallow her at a breath from a human throat.

He lifted one hand and pinched the back of the other with it till his face contorted with the pain.

"Then there are such things!" he said softly; "well, why not?"

He moved forward almost imperceptibly.

"If I were younger, I should know you were not possible," he muttered, "but now I know that I have never doubted you—really."

Again he took a small step. Caroline, paralyzed with fear and embarrassment, for she thought he was merely teasing her a little before he punished her—his pleasant, low voice and whimsical manners brought her back suddenly to the ordinary world and the stern facts of her escapade—shivered slightly, but did not attempt flight.

"It was this extraordinary night that brought you out, of course," he went on, again slightly shortening the distance between them, "you and the little cub. It was a moon out of five thousand, I admit. Do you live in that chestnut?"

With a sudden agile bound he covered the space between them and seized her by the shoulder.

"Aha!" he cried, "I have—good heavens, it is a child!"

"Of course I am—I'm Caroline," she murmured writhing under his grasp.

He pulled her out into the little glade.

"Oh! you're Caroline, are you?" he repeated, thoughtfully; "dear me, you gave me quite a turn, Caroline. Where did you come from—the big house?"

"I came from a long way," she said briefly. "I was—I was taking a walk. Where do you live? Don't you ever to go bed?"

The man chuckled.

"I have been feeling adventures in my bones all day," he said, "and here they are; a child and a cat. If you will come with me, Mademoiselle, I will show you where I live."

He led the way gravely to the dim, white object, and Caroline perceived it to be a tent, pitched by the side of a spring that poured through a tiny pipe set into the rock. The tent flap was tied back, and she saw inside it a narrow cot, covered with a coarse blue blanket, a roughly made table, spread with a game of solitaire, and a small leather trunk. On the further side of the tent there smoked, in a rude, improvised oven of stones, a dying fire. Above it, under a shelf nailed to the tree, hung a few simple utensils; two or three large stumps had been hacked into the semblance of seats.

To one of these stumps the man led Caroline, and, seating her, he turned to the shelf above the fire and fumbled among the pots and pans there, producing finally a buttered roll, a piece of maple sugar, and a small fruit tart.

"You must be hungry," he said simply, and Caroline ate greedily. After he had brought her a tin cup of the spring water, he selected a brown pipe from a half dozen on the shelf and began filling it from a leather pouch that hung on the tree.

"Now let's hear all about it," he said easily.

"I am running away," said Caroline abruptly. At that moment it really seemed that she had planned her flight from the hour that left her, tear-stained and disgraced, in her little bed.

"They didn't treat you well?" he suggested, picking out a red ember from the coals on the point of a knife and applying it to the pipe.

"I'm not to wear my knickers any more," Caroline said, with a gulp, "and my bathing suit has to have a skirt. I've got to stop p-playing with the b-boys—so much, that is," she added, honestly.

The man turned his head slightly.

"That seems hard," he said; "what's the reason?"

"I'm 'most twelve," said Caroline; "you have to be a young lady, then."

"I see," the man said. He looked at her thoughtfully. "I suppose you would look larger in more clothes," he added.

"That's it," she assured him, "I do. That's just it."

"And so you expect to avoid all this by running away?" he asked, settling into his own stump seat. "I am afraid you can't do it."

Caroline set her teeth. He regarded her quizzically.

"See here," he went on, "I wish you'd take my advice in this matter."

They confronted each other in the starlight, a strange pair before the dying fire. The moon had gone, and the stars, though bright, seemed less solid and less certainly gold than before. A cool breeze swept through the wood and Caroline shivered in her torn nightdress. The man stepped into the tent and returned with a long army cloak. This he wrapped round her and resumed his seat, with Rufus on his knee.

"My name," he said, "is Peter. Everybody calls me that—just Peter. I don't know exactly why it is, but a lot of people—all over—have got into the way of taking my advice. Perhaps because I've knocked about all over the world more or less, and haven't got any wife or children or brothers and sisters of my own to advise, so I take it out on everybody else. Perhaps because I try to put myself in the other fellow's place before I advise him. Perhaps because I've had a little trouble of my own, here and there, and haven't forgotten it. Anyhow, I get used to talking things over."

A gentle stirring seemed to pass through the woods: the birds spoke softly back and forth, a squirrel chattered. Again that cool wind swept over the trees.

"Now, take it this week," the man went on, puffing steadily; "you wouldn't believe the people just about here who've asked for my advice. I usually camp up here for a week or so in the summer—the people who own the property like to have me here—and the first day I unpacked, up comes a nice girl—I used to make birch whistles for her mother—to tell me all about her young man. She brought me that spray of honeysuckle over the pipes—grows over the front gate. She wants to marry him before her father gets to like him, but she hates to run away. 'Would you advise me to, Peter?' she says. And I advised her to wait.

"Then there's my friend the blacksmith. He lives in a queer little house with dormer windows under a hill, just off the county road. He's got a new baby, and he was afraid it wouldn't pull through. He knew I'd seen a lot of babies—black and red and yellow—and he wanted my advice. 'Peter, what'll I do?' he says, 'what'll I do?'

"'Why, just wait, Harvey. He'll live. Just wait,' I told him."

Caroline listened with interest. He might have been talking to his equal in years, from his tone.

"Then, oddly enough," he continued, "here's my old friend in the big house up yonder—and she is old—and what do you think she's worried about? She's afraid she won't die! 'Oh, Peter,' she says to me—she's fond of me because I'm the same age as a little boy of hers that died—'it seems to me that I can't wait, Peter! What shall I do?' she says. And I tell her to wait. 'Dear old friend,' said I to her last night, 'it will come. It's bound to come. Just be patient.'"

He paused and knocked his pipe empty.

"Now, as to your case," he said, "I know how you feel. I'm sorry for you—by the Lord, I'm sorry for you! But what's the use of running away? You'll keep on growing up, you know. It's one of the things that doesn't stop. You can't beat the game by wearing knickers, you know. And then, there'd come a time when you'd want to quit, anyhow."

She shook her head.

"Really, you would," he assured her, persuasively. "They all do."

"That's what Uncle Joe says," she admitted, "and Aunt Edith. She changed her mind, she says—"

"Are you talking about Joe Holt?" Peter demanded.

"Yes—do you know him? He lives in a big white house with wistaria on the side," Caroline cried joyfully.

"I was a senior when he was a freshman," said Peter. "Then he's taken the Washburn house."

"Do you know Aunt Edith, too?" asked Caroline.

"Yes," said Peter, after a pause, "yes, I know Aunt Edith—or used to. But I didn't know she—they were up in this country. I haven't seen her—them for a good while. Does—does she sing yet?"

"Oh, yes, but not on the stage any more, you know," Caroline explained.

"I see. Does she sing, I wonder, a song about—Oh, something about 'my heart'?"

"'My heart's own heart,' you mean," Caroline said importantly; "yes, indeed. It's her encore song."

"I see," said Peter again.

He looked into the fire, and there was a long silence. After a while he shook his shoulders like a water-dog.

"Now, Caroline," he said briskly, "here's the way of this business. You can't wear knickers until you're one of the boys, and you can't be one of the boys until you wear knickers. Do you see? So you don't get anywhere."

Caroline looked puzzled. She was suddenly overcome with sleep, and the old familiar names and ways tasted of home and comfort to her soul.

"You're too nice to be a boy, Caroline," said Peter, leaning over her and brushing her azalea-crowned hair tenderly with his lips. "If you persist in this plan of running away to be a boy, some boy, growing up anxiously, somewhere, will never forgive you! Take my advice, and wait—will you? Say 'Yes, Peter.'"

"Yes, Peter," Caroline murmured, drowsily.

"Good girl! Then I'll take you home with my little donkey. I don't believe they've missed you yet. You've come four miles, though, you little gypsy!"

He disappeared behind the trees, and Caroline nodded. Later she woke sufficiently to find herself and Rufus on the blue blanket on the bottom of a little donkey cart; Peter stood by the gentle, long-eared head.

"Thank you, Peter," she murmured, half asleep, "and you'll see Aunt Edith, won't you?"

"I don't believe so," he said, very low. "Not yet. Tell her Peter brought you back. Just Peter. But he can't come yet. Get up, Jenny!"

They wound out by an old wood road. A cool spiciness flowed though the green aisles, and as the tiny donkey struck into a dog trot, the man striding easily at her head, a far-away cock crowed shrilly and the dawn gleamed white.



IX

THE ENDS OF THE EARTH

"Caroline!" Henry D. Thoreau cocked one brindled ear cannily and rapped sharply with his tail on the piazza floor, but there was no other answer to the call. "Caroline!" The insistent voice rang louder; it was a very determined voice. A sleepy Angora cat scowled reprovingly at its violence; a gray and pink parrot mimicked its hortatory note, but after that the midsummer silence settled down again. Only the bees droned heavily among the heavy August roses.

"Don't nag her, dear; it doesn't do any good," a sleepy contralto, rich as creamy chocolate, crooned out of a scarlet-fringed hammock.

"That's all very well for you, Edith, you don't have the responsibility of her. Her father wants her to read a little history every day, and this is the best time—it's too hot for anything else."

"Rather hot for history, dear?"

"It's not too hot for the Moonstone, I notice! She's been at that since breakfast, steadily. Not a word for any one."

"'Moonstone' sounds cool, anyhow," drawled the contralto appeasingly.

"Oh, Edith! You're as bad as the child herself!"

"She's fourteen, dear."

"Fourteen! What is that?"

"Anything but a child, when it's you, Sis. You talk to her as if she were ten."

"You'd think she was, if you saw her riding that donkey—a great girl like her!"

"There it is, dear! One moment she's a baby, the next she's a great girl! It's hard on her, Sis."

"But, Edith—that donkey!"

"Poor Rose-Marie! I rode him myself—bareback and standing up!—when I was fifteen—at a circus. Do you remember?"

The voice chuckled unwillingly. "You always were a tomboy, Deedee! Do you remember Joe's bull fight?"



"And the lemonade stand!" Contralto cried, with a rich swoop of laughter. Their voices took up a happy canon of gold memories; there were no more cries for Caroline.

She was not a hundred yards away from the sister aunts, sheltering under a heavy arbor vitae, flat on her stomach, her nose glued to the reprehensible Moonstone: that she had heard the calls and resented them the scowl between her eyebrows exhibited. Behind her, patiently at graze, a small, mouse-colored donkey stood, shifting a pair of quaint panniers from side to side and wagging his scarlet ear tassels thoughtfully.

The chapter ended, Caroline rose, peered across to the piazza, nodded to herself at the flow of voices and shrugged her shoulders.

"Good old Aunt Deedee!" she muttered, "she choked her off! Now, for heaven's sake, don't bray, Rose-Marie, and perhaps we can get away. I wouldn't dare get over to the house for a luncheon; we'll have to get along with sweet-boughs."

She slipped the book into one pannier, a cushion into the other and threw a worn steamer rug over the little beast's back; Caroline was a luxurious lounger and rarely traveled without her sumpter mule and his impedimenta. She led him with practiced quiet away from the house and paused under the gnarled old sweet-bough tree: the greenish-yellow, almost translucent globes dotted the lush, warm grass, their languorous sweet filled the air. Selecting a dozen thoughtfully, she added them to the donkey's load, and they went on at a foot pace, through the slowly reddening Baldwins and seek-no-furthers, the tiny lady-apples and the king-of-Tompkins-counties, through the belt of dead, warped fruit trees, blighted and gray—"like those Dore pictures," she murmured to Rose-Marie—down three, crumbling brick steps, where the little fellow picked his way as daintily as a careful lady, and across the dusty road into a pasture trail that led to a wood stretch, sparse at first, thicker as one plunged in deeper. The sun filtered through in delicious diamonds; here and there a resinous pine, steeped in heat, threw out a cloud of balmy odor; a chipmunk scuttered across their path, clicking nervously, only to squat on his haunches and stare beadily at Rose-Marie, taut with quivering curiosity. Caroline scowled at him.

"Rise of the Dutch Republic!" she muttered angrily. "I think not!"

The chipmunk winked sympathetically.

"Your father says it's as interesting as any novel" (with startling mimicry of the piazza voice). "I notice they don't read it!"

The chipmunk's place was empty; only a slight stir among the leaves marked his path.

Caroline's eyes widened, grew dreamy. She leaned her sharp elbows on Rose-Marie's hairy back and threw her weight on him thoughtfully: he checked and stood like a table.

"Do you suppose there really are regular roads through the trees, like the monkeys took Mowgli on?" she queried.

Rose-Marie waved his long, hairy ears meditatively, but said nothing.

"I don't mean in any fairy way," she explained hastily, "but just scientifically. It might be. Corners and turns and short-cuts—why not? they all know them. He may be running home by a back way, now, to call his children to look at Rose-Marie; it's as good as a whole circus parade to them, I suppose. And they talk to each other...."

Held in a muse, she leaned against the donkey; the moments slipped by. She lost all count of time. Her eyes stared emptily at some sunny flicker, some dappled pattern of leaf work; her ears were filled with the forest drone, the mysterious murmur made up of so many nameless instruments that only the Great Conductor can classify and number them. Time ceased to be.

At length she woke with a start, shook herself coltishly, and they pushed on. The wood grew thicker; now and then Rose-Marie had to force his way along the tiny trail; his red tassels caught on the twigs.

"I'll tell you what," Caroline began, suddenly, "I'm going to try that wood track to-day and see where it goes, to the very end. It must go somewhere. Where do they haul the wood from, if there isn't some place at the end? Come on, Rose-Marie!"

At a point where the trail forked she led the donkey along the wider and less interesting way. It was ridged and rutty, and Rose-Marie sniffed disgustedly as he slipped among the gnarled roots; the apples bumped and slid in the pannier. After a while Caroline stopped under a tree, ate three of the apples, gave the donkey two, and resting in an artfully constructed nest of rug and pillow, dipped refreshingly into the Moonstone.

"That's a kind of luncheon," she remarked philosophically, "and now we'll start again. I'll go to the end of this, if it takes all day!"

They settled down to a dogged pace and after an hour, during which the wood grew thinner by imperceptible degrees, found themselves on a relatively easy track that forked suddenly into a genuine country road, stretching far to left and right of them. It was a new country to Caroline; she found no landmarks whatever. The road glared with heat, the dust was powdery, the shade nowhere, once they had cleared the wood. She sighed with fatigue and emptiness; it seemed a long pull, and the harbor far from worth the voyage, when all was said and done.

"What did we want to get to this nasty hot road for, Rose-Marie?" she cried pettishly, shifting from one long leg to the other, shrugging a nervous, bony shoulder. "Oh, what's the sense of anything, anyway?"

Rose-Marie turned a patient, clear brown eye toward her and shook his head vaguely. Gnats buzzed about his flexible ears, and with a swishing fanning motion he displaced them.

"If my back aches," she warned him callously, "you'll have to take me home, you know! Tired or not. It feels as if it might, any minute. I never used to get tired, this way."

A half mile along the road, set off to the left, among cool trees and behind a great well sweep, she perceived suddenly a white farm house. It stood alone, neighborless and well up on a drained, southerly slope; smoke rose languidly from one of its chimneys.

"Perhaps they'll give us some milk, Rose-Marie," said Caroline, "and farms usually have cookies. If there are any children there, you can give 'em rides to pay for it!"

Rose-Marie nodded and they went on with some spirit. As they turned into the deep front yard Caroline almost wept with comfort and a pathetic sense of the wayworn wanderer on the edge of home and rest, so the place breathed of these. Clear and white with the faded whiteness of old New England white shingles, it drowsed under its elms; a fire of nasturtiums smoldered along the broken, flagged path that led to it; phlox and "Bouncing Bets" crowded up among the once formal bed of larkspur on each side the sagging flagstone steps, beneath the simple entrance porch. Old-fashioned green paper shades hung evenly half way down the clean windows; the door stood hospitably ajar.

"Just wait there, Rose-Marie, till I find out about things," said Caroline, tapping lightly on the door. The house was perfectly silent. She tapped again, and it seemed that something heavy moved across the floor in a farther room, but there was no answer. Pushing the door open gently, she stepped in and stood surprised, for she found herself not in the stiff, unused country "parlor" she had expected, but a neat bedroom. A quaint four-poster with a fluted valance, a polished mahogany chest of drawers, a stand by the bed with a Bible worn to a soft gray and a night lamp on it, some faded photographs tacked to the white walls—this was an odd reception room. She hesitated, and again the faint rumbling sound pointed to some person stirring and she went into the next room.

Here was a clean, kindly kitchen of the best; a swept floor, a freshly blackened cooking stove, a row of bright tins. It was carpeted with faded oilcloth, but rag rugs, washed dim and soft-toned, lay here and there, and the room was so large that the spread table, standing in an ell, made only a pleasant episode in it, a certainty of restoring food at needful times.

It was evidently a sitting room as well, in the primitive, clear fashion that groups all domestic life about the central fire that feeds it; a stand with books, a sewing basket, oil lamps for evening reading, all not too far from brick-shaped pans where unmistakable bread rose under a clean, folded, red cloth. The whole place seemed waiting, quietly, hospitably waiting, for just such an empty, discouraged pilgrim as Caroline.

She sank gratefully into a high-backed arm-chair, stuffed to just the hollow of her tired back, covered with a clean, homely patchwork, and drew out the faithful Moonstone from under her elbow.

"Someone'll come soon," she assured herself, and slipped into the story as a hot swimmer slips off his sunny rock into the waiting blue. Another world, a delicious, smooth element—Romance itself—received her, and of hunger and heat, thirst and the fatigue of the road, she knew no more than the blessed dead themselves....

A sharp tap at the farther door disturbed her, and instinctively she called, "Come in!"

A swift, swishing step brushed across the bedroom and a slender, angry-eyed young woman poised like a gull before her.

"Can I get something to eat here?"

Her voice was at once imperious, irritated, unsure of itself. It could not be that the owner of this voice, dressed with that insolent simplicity that need not consider the costly patience of the work-women, ringed like a dowager with great audacious squares of ruby and white diamond, booted and hatted as one who wears and throws away, with a bag of golden mesh on her wrist to pay the price of any whim—it could not be that she doubted what answer she should receive. And yet she did—did, and had before this: so much was evident at first sight. She was a curious gypsyish type, for all her Rue de la Paix curvings and slim, inevitable folds and pleats; a full, drooping mouth in a slender dark face, great brown eyes and heavy waves of black hair. She looked discontented and ready to make some one suffer for it.

"Well—can I?" she repeated, as Caroline stared. "I'm ready to pay, of course."

"I don't know—I don't live here," said Caroline shortly. She felt untidy and badly dressed beside this graceful thing standing in a faint cloud of subtle perfume of her own; her sleeves were too short and her heavy shoes knobby and worn. She wanted furiously to smell sweet like that; and the golden bag—oh, to feel it, powerful and careless, on her wrist!

"Can you find out?" said the girl, eyeing the room attentively; "my car broke down—the man left it in the road and went to Ogdenville for gasoline. I've got to rest somewhere."

"I don't know anything about it," Caroline said coldly. "I'm waiting for someone to come, myself. There's nobody here. I don't live here at all."

With that, and because she was embarrassed and cross and hungry, she opened her book ostentatiously and affected to read busily. The girl frowned angrily a moment, then gave a foreign little shrug of her shoulder and settled herself in a low rocking chair near the bread, her hands loose in her lap. The old clock ticked reprovingly through the hot and conscious silence of the room, but there was no other sound. Caroline could not have lifted her eyes to save her life, and the older girl's lips curled scornfully: her eyelids were sullen.

After a few moments of this intolerable stillness the same low rumbling sound was heard again, this time moving nearer. Something was advancing to the kitchen from a farther room, and as they looked instinctively at the door it pushed open slowly and a sort of foot rest upon wheels appeared; two large wheels followed, and a woman pushed her chair into the kitchen. She was a large, good-looking woman, middle-aged, and not weak, evidently, for she managed her chair easily with one hand; the other held a slice of pink ham on a white platter in her lap. Her face, under a placid parting of grayish fair hair, was rather high colored than of an invalid pallor, her chest broad and deep, her blue eyes at once kind and keen. She wore a neat dress of dark-blue print with a prim, old-fashioned linen collar and a blue bow, a white apron around her plump waist almost covered the patchwork quilt that wrapped her from the hips down: a shell comb showed slightly above her crisp hair. As she faced her two angry guests a smile of unmistakable sincerity and delight greeted them.

"Well, of all things!" she cried eagerly; "how long, 'you been here?"

Caroline waited sulkily for her social superior; the girl was undoubtedly a "young lady." Her errand was soon explained, her question asked.

"Something to eat?" echoed their delighted hostess. "Well, I should think so! I'm just getting my dinner. Of course I'm all alone, this time o' day, but I always say if I'm good enough to cook it well, I'm good enough to eat it comfortable, and I sit down to table just's if the family was all here. There's some that believe in a bite and a bit, when the men folks are out, but I never did. And then—" she blushed shyly like a girl—"I always want to feel ready in case anyone should come. Just in case. He says it's foolishness, but look at you two, now! How'd I feel if I wasn't prepared! And once—in April, 'twas—a sewing-machine man came. I had ham then, too."

She beamed on them, frankly overjoyed in their company, and in the mellow warmth of that honest pleasure the fog and anger in the room rolled back like mist under a noon sun, and Caroline unbent, named herself, and mentioned her donkey and their woodland journey.

"You don't say!"

Quick as a flash their hostess was across the room and peering through the window.

"Well, of all the funny little fellows! I never saw one before, that I remember. Aren't those red tossels neat, though! I s'pose he's tame?"

Caroline put him through his paces, as he came like a dog at her call, and she of the wheel chair applauded like a child at a Punch and Judy.

"We saw so many of those in Italy," said the older girl. "I rode one in the Alps."

The woman's face flushed a deep, quick red; she gripped the arms of her chair and stared at the nervous little jeweled creature before her as if she were a vision of the night.

"Have you been to Italy?" she cried eagerly, "not really!"

"Me? Oh, yes, I've been all over Europe," said the girl indifferently. "Why? Do you like it?"

Now it was the woman who echoed, "Me?"

She flashed a whimsical look at Caroline; instinct taught her that they were two to one, here.

"Why, dear, I've never been out of Lockwood's Corners in my life!"

Simple, rude incredulity pushed out the girl's lip.

"Nonsense!" she said brusquely, "that's ridiculous!"

"Maybe it is," her hostess answered quietly, "but it's true, all the same. I never have." Gold-bag did not blush for her rudeness, for the simple reason that she did not realize it, and Caroline suddenly felt less embarrassed by her. Girls of that age were too old to talk so pettishly to people not in their own families, and she twiddled her fingers too much, anyway, and stared too much, or else, again, she didn't look at one enough.

"You've been to New York, haven't you?" she asked abruptly.

"Never," said the woman. "I've been this way since I was seventeen. I'm a pretty heavy woman, you know, and they couldn't put me on a train very well. So—"

"There's plenty of room in a drawing-room car."

"I guess we couldn't afford that," said the woman simply.

There was an awkward pause; Caroline blushed furiously. How horrid it all was! But their hostess brushed it away in a moment.

"And here you are hungry!" she cried; "the idea! I'll get this ham right on and fry up some potatoes—I'll do them French! I've got some fresh raised-doughnuts—I got the prize for them at the county fair, years ago, so I know they're all right—and some summer apple sauce; 'tain't much, with summer apples, but I put in lemon peel and a taste o' last year's cider—it makes a relish, anyhow; and I've got some fine sweet-pickled watermelon rind. I could have had sponge cakes, if I'd only known! Would you care to try a cut pie? The sewing-machine man said he hadn't tasted anything like my squash pie in years. It was cut, too."

With incredible swiftness she rolled from table to buttery, from stove to larder. As the pink ham curled and sputtered in its savory juices, she turned an earnest face to the girl who watched her curiously.

"Can't you tell us a little about Italy, while we're waiting?" she begged.

"It's full of fleas," said the traveler carelessly, "and moldy old places—it's awfully cold, too. I wore my furs a lot of the time. It smells bad nearly everywhere. Do you stay here in the winter, too?"

"I've stayed here forty-five winters"—she turned the ham capably—"and I expect to stay as many more as the Lord spares my life! I was born here. So was father. Grandfather was born right in the Corners. In eighty-eight we were snowed up a week here. Mr. Winterpine—that's my husband—had bronchitis, and he couldn't get out to tend to the stock. Edgar—that was the hired man's name—was only twenty, and I had to help with one of the cows; I went out in my chair through a snow tunnel!"

She chuckled reminiscently and her guests listened, fascinated.

"We were caught in a bad storm outside of St. Petersburg, once," Gold-bag volunteered. "If it hadn't been for J. G. we'd have gone out, probably. As it was, the driver lost a finger."

"St. Petersburg, Russia?" the woman inquired respectfully, her skillet full of potatoes colored like autumn beech leaves.

The girl nodded. "J. G. swore at the man, so he didn't dare die," she continued, with a hard little grin; "and we just about pulled through."

"Who is J. G.?" asked Caroline abruptly.

"J. G. Terwilliger," she answered simply. It was as if one had said "Edward Seventh" or "Adelina Patti" or "P. T. Barnum."

"Who's he?"

"He's my father, for one thing. I suppose you know who he is as well as anybody else."

"I never heard of him," Caroline said carelessly, "are you all ready, now, Mrs. Winterpine?"

"He is the greatest mining expert in the world," the girl declared emphatically, "and I don't know where you've lived not to know it. You—" with a look at the woman, "you know him, of course?"

"I don't know anybody of that name, no," the woman admitted; "but then, you know, we don't know much, 'way off here, about city people."

"There hasn't been a daily paper for ten days that hasn't had his name in it," the girl remarked dryly.

Mrs. Winterpine wiped her face, flanked the ham with the potatoes, assembled an incredible array of sweets and relishes in odd, thick little glass dishes, and with a wave of her hand indicated her guests' places.

"We take the Lockwood's Corners Clarion," she explained pacifically.

They addressed themselves to the meal, a strange trio. Caroline, usually a hopeless chatterbox, fell somehow and inevitably into the listener's seat. Their hostess could no longer be denied: her thirst gleamed in her eyes, and flesh and blood could not have withstood her plea for tidings of those distant, rosy lands whose laden wharves she could never see, nor ever glimpse their tiled roofs under foreign sunsets, their white spires beneath mysterious moons. Their clothes: was it true that the French wore wooden shoes? She had read that men in Italy walked in gay capes, colored like birds. Was there water in the streets, and were boats really their carriages? Did soldiers, red-coated, demand passports? Had her guest seen the snow tops of green slopes? Did dogs drag milk carts for white-capped women?

The girl, sulky at first, yielded finally, and in quick, nervous phrases poured out of her full budget. Taken from her convent school in California at fifteen, she had roamed the world with the tireless "J. G." From Panama to Alaska, from Cairo to Christiania, with her uncreased Paris frocks and the discontented line between her dark eyes, she had steamed and sailed and ridden; she had ridden a camel in Algeria, a gelding in Hyde Park, a broncho on the Western plains.

"Why do you call your father 'J. G.'?" Caroline demanded suddenly.

"Do you like 'Klondike Jim' any better? That's his other name," Gold-bag shot at her defiantly.

Then came strange tales of a flaring, glaring mining camp: lights and liquor and bared knives, rough men and rougher words, and in the midst a thin, big-eyed little creature in the hand of a burly, red-shirted miner, with the very gift of gold under his matted hair, the scent for it in his blunt nostrils, the feel for it in his callous finger tips. Klondike Jim! He had made for his Klondike as a bloodhound makes for the quarry; he could not be mistaken. Night and day she had been with him, his first claim named for her—the Madeline—his first earnings a gold belt for her childish waist!

And then, money and money and more money. Rivers of it, ponds of it.

"If J. G. said there was copper under Fifth Avenue, they'd dig it up to-morrow!"

"You must be real proud of him," said Mrs. Winterpine genially.

"I used to be," the girl answered, with her mouth a little awry.

"My dear, my dear!"

"Oh, yes," she cried angrily, pushing back her chair and facing them; "all very well, but who are we? Who was my mother? Who was my grandfather? Where did we come from? Will a sapphire bracelet answer me that, do you think? Who knows us? 'Miss Maddy Money Bags'! How long do you think I'd stay in that convent? Who does J. G. know? Hotelmen and barkeeps and presidents of things! If you could see the counts he wanted me to marry! If you could hear the couriers laugh at him!"

"But think of all the traveling you've done, dear! What things to remember! How happy—"

"Happy! I hate it. As J. G. says, I hate it like—well, I just hate it," she concluded, with propriety, if a little lamely.

Something in the look she cast around the warm, clean kitchen struck the woman suddenly. "You don't mean you'd rather live here—here?" she exclaimed amazedly.

"Don't you like it?" queried Madeline sharply.

Mrs. Winterpine considered a moment. "You see, it's my home," she began. The girl's dry laugh interrupted her.

"That's just it. It's your home," she repeated. "We haven't any. That's the idea. What's the use of traveling if you can't come home? And we can't, ever. Unless we go back to the Klondike," she added satirically.

There was a long pause. It seemed that the girl was slowly undressing herself before them: travel and money and gold bag and scented linings slipped from her like so many petticoats and left her thin and cold between them, warm as they were in their solid homespun of kin and hearth. Lean and empty, a houseless, flitting, little shadow, she had scoured the world and sat now, envious, by a kitchen fire. How strange!

Mrs. Winterpine gathered the dishes with accustomed hands and piled them by a pan of hot, soapy water. Caroline, sobered, rose to help her with the instinctive courtesy of the home-trained child, but drew back at her shaken head and waving finger, and followed her glance toward her other guest, who stared morosely into the dooryard, her chin in her ringed, brown hand. She was evidently not far from tears—in a nervous crisis.

"I wonder if you'd help me with these dishes, Madeline?" said the woman quietly, and with a start the girl rose, stood meekly while a checked apron was tied about her waist and received the moist, shining ware from the plump hands without a word. She appeared to have utterly forgotten Caroline.

After a few moments of rhythmical click and splash, a few journeys from sink to dresser, the tension broke quietly and the air was aware of it, as when a threatened thunderstorm goes by above and dissipates in wind. Feeling this, Mrs. Winterpine began to talk softly, half to herself it seemed, for her voice took on the tone of one who is much alone and thinks aloud.

"All my life I've been crazy for travel. I used to read my geography book till I wore it out nearly; the exports and the imports, you know? And the pictures of those Arabian men with white turbans, and the South Sea Islanders riding on surf boards—I can see 'em now. There was a castle for Germany, with the moon behind it and the Rhine—do you know 'Bingen on the Rhine'? I love the sound of that. And the Black Forest! Think of it!"

She paused with a platter dripping in her hand, her eyes fixed; and so strong was the compulsion of her vision that to Caroline, vibrant as a wind harp to such suggestion, the splash of the water in the tin was the very tinkle of Undine's mystic stream and Kuehleborn, that wicked uncle-brook dashed in cold floods over the belated knight in the dark German wood!

"I dreamed once about an Indian temple," the woman went on, "and you'd really think I'd been there, I saw it so plain. Fat priests and that big idol that sits cross-legged, all made of brass, and smiling; and such funny drums and pipes—creepy music. The heathens brought wreaths and stretched out on their stomachs flat on the ground. I'd read it somewhere, I guess. I could smell the flowers, like pond lilies and honeysuckle."

She poured away the dish water, wiped the pan and began rinsing her towels and cloths in a small wooden tub bound with tin. The girl moved aimlessly about the room, fingering the worn furniture.

"That clock looks awfully old," she said abruptly, pausing before a square high Dutch affair with a ridiculous picture of Mount Vernon, wobbly-columned, let in at the bottom.

"Goodness, yes! That clock—why, that clock was a wedding present to Lorenzo's great aunt Valeria—she was a Swedenborgian, I believe. She used to have trances and she could tell you where things were lost. That chair by the window was her mother's. It's made with wooden nails, dowels, they call 'em."

"Did she live here, too?"

"Yes, indeed. The Winterpines are great hands to stay in one place. And the way they come back to die! I'm half Winterpine myself—he and I were second cousins—and I well remember Uncle Milton Winterpine coming home from Java to die in his bed. He was a sailor, and how I used to hang around and coax him to tell me what he'd seen! I remember how he staggered into the house—Mother Winterpine was living then.

"'Here, Esther, here's a fifty-pound sack of Old Gov'ment Javvy for ye, green, and fit for the president's table as soon's it gits ripe,' he says, 'and you won't have to nurse me long;' and we got his boots off and helped him to bed. He never left it. He brought me a parrot, that trip, sort of indigo color and pink. It used to set me thinking of the hot countries and pineapples and natives, and those tall trees with all the leaves on top—palms, I guess I mean. It seems the stars are lower, there, and look bigger; did you ever see the Southern Cross?"

"Oh, yes. It's like any other stars. The first officer on the P & O line always asks me to come and see it. Then he proposes. J. G. plays poker the whole trip. He can't lose. He says it's tiresome."

The strange dialogue went on for what might have been an hour. Far ports and foreign streets, full sails and thronged inns, the fountains of paved courts, the market squares of dark and vivid nations, blossomed from the tongue of this chair-bound woman in her farmhouse prison; and from the blind, unhappy voyager came halting, telegraphic phrases: climate and train schedules and over-lavish fees, miles and meals and petty miseries. No sunset had stained her hurried way, no handed flowers from shy street children had sweetened it. And ever and again she returned insistently to the barnyard interests of the Winterpines!

"See here!" she burst out suddenly, "I'll tell you what I'll do! I told J. G. that I wouldn't go another step with him—mascot or no mascot. He wants to go over the Himalayas—to start next week—he has an idea. But if you'll go, I'll take you! What do you say? My guest, of course: it don't cost you a penny."

The woman turned utterly white. Where her knuckles gripped the arms of the chair they showed a bluish tinge.

"Me? Me?" she whispered. Her eyes fell to her helpless knees.

"Oh, you needn't think of that at all," said Madeline. "I knew a man who didn't have any legs, even, that went round the world and up the Pyramids. He had money."

The woman looked wildly about. Her eyes fell on Caroline and this seemed to bring her into some sort of focus again; the color came back to her face.

"That was lovely for you to think of, dear," she said, breathlessly yet; "but—but—for a moment I forgot.... I—I didn't think of Lorenzo!"

"Oh, we'll get a housekeeper for Lorenzo," Madeline said lightly; "he'll do very well, won't he? One man can't be much to take care of—you haven't any children?"

The easy, equal tone, the bright, dry impudence of this little air plant, this rootless, aimless bubble skipping over the bottomless deeps of life, brought the dazzled woman quickly to herself. She looked compassionately at the girl.

"No," she said gravely, her hands unconsciously flying to her deep breast; "we haven't any children. And he's not much to take care of—for his wife. But he wouldn't care for a housekeeper."

"Oh!" her eyes fell uneasily. "Then we'll take him along!" She recovered herself.

Mrs. Winterpine sent her chair with a swift push close to the girl and laid one hand on her hot forehead, pushing back the thick hair.

"What a gen'rous little thing you are!" she cried wonderingly. "But where were you brought up, child? Lorenzo can't jump and run off to the Himalaya Mountains like that! It takes him a long time to make up his mind. He—he don't care for travel, besides. He's a regular Winterpine. And there's the stock. No. I guess I'll keep on doing my traveling at home. That book you said you'd send...."

"I'll send a dozen—fifty!" the girl cried impulsively. "I'll bring them up from New York to-morrow! I'll bring some pictures, too. The Alps and Venice and the snapshots I took on the Nile! You seem to know how they look, well enough!"

"Yes, I know, I know...." the woman repeated dreamily.

"Don't you want to go?" Madeline urged curiously.

Again Mrs. Winterpine turned white.

"Then why don't you?"

"Child, child!" cried she of the chair, "didn't I tell you he don't care for travel? We can't do as we like in this world—we don't live alone. We're placed. There's a hundred things.... Where were you brought up?"

Madeline's face flushed a dark, heavy red. Her light confidence drowned in it; she dropped her eyes.

"In the Klondike!" she said sullenly, "I told you."

A loud, whirring horn cut through the country quiet. A great rattle of gear and chain stormed along the road.

"There's the machine!" the girl said sulkily; "I must go. It's fifteen miles to Ogdenville, and a vile road. Good-by—I'll be up with the books in a day or two."

She moved to the door.

"If I can't come—I change my mind awfully—I'll send them just the same, and—and—" a curious sense of struggle, a visible effort at thought for another, an attempt to grasp an alien point of view, dawned in the defiant dark eyes—"I'll write to you from India, if you want. Would you like it? I can take snap shots...."

"You're real gen'rous, dear," said her hostess, and wheeling quickly to her, kissed her warmly.

She was gone in a cloud of dust. Caroline and the woman sat in silence. At last Rose-Marie yawned pitifully and his mistress got up with reluctance.

"Good-by, Mrs. Winterpine," she said soberly; "I have to go home. They'll be anxious about me. But I'll come again."

"Do, my dear," said the other; "this'll be a wonderful summer for me, with so much company. Wonderful. He'll be interested. But you run right on: don't let the folks worry. I never had any children, but I always had my heart set on a daughter. Good-by."

Caroline and the donkey walked slowly off toward the wood, which cast cool shadows. They vanished into its depths, and Mrs. Winterpine sat and watched them kindly from her chair, as one watches off the traveler bound for far and golden countries.

"He'd have liked that young one," she said softly.

* * * * *



The following pages contain advertisements of a few of the Macmillan novels.



NOVELS, ETC., BY "BARBARA"

(MABEL OSGOOD WRIGHT)

Each, in decorated cloth binding, $1.50

The Garden of a Commuter's Wife Illustrated

"Reading it is like having the entry into a home of the class that is the proudest product of our land, a home where love of books and love of nature go hand in hand with hearty, simple love of 'folks.' ... It is a charming book."—The Interior.

People of the Whirlpool Illustrated

"The whole book is delicious, with its wise and kindly humor, its just perspective of the true values of things, its clever pen pictures of people and customs, and its healthy optimism for the great world in general."—Philadelphia Evening Telegraph.

The Woman Errant

"The book is worth reading. It will cause discussion. It is an interesting fictional presentation of an important modern question, treated with fascinating feminine adroitness."—Miss JEANNETTE GILDER in the Chicago Tribune.

At the Sign of the Fox

"Her little pictures of country life are fragrant with a genuine love of nature, and there is fun as genuine in her notes on rural character."—New York Tribune.

The Garden, You and I

"This volume is simply the best she has yet put forth, and quite too deliciously torturing to the reviewer, whose only garden is in Spain.... The delightful humor which pervaded the earlier books, and without which Barbara would not be Barbara, has lost nothing of its poignancy."—Congregationalist.

The Open Window. Tales of the Months.

"A little vacation from the sophistication of the commonplace."—Argonaut.

Poppea of the Post-Office

"A rainbow romance, ... tender yet bracing, cheerily stimulating ... its genial entirety refreshes like a cooling shower."—Chicago Record-Herald.

Princess Flower Hat Just Ready

A Comedy from the Perplexity Book of Barbara the Commuter's Wife.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY Publishers 64-66 Fifth Avenue New York

* * * * *



BY ZONA GALE

Friendship Village

Cloth, 12mo, $1.50

"As charming as an April day, all showers and sunshine, and sometimes both together, so that the delighted reader hardly knows whether laughter or tears are fittest for his emotions.... This book especially makes for higher thinking and better living and emphasizes the existence of these virtues in lowly places as well as high."—New York Times.

"The characters are like an orchestra, each instrument holding a part of its own, all interwoven to a harmonious whole; an orchestra of strings, be it added, for even the Proudfits' motor fails to introduce a note of brass.... With the wholesome pungency of humor that pervades it all, the book cannot fail to find a welcome."—New York Post.

"There is not a trace of sarcasm or even grotesqueness; her villagers are not caricatures; they are efficient, useful men and women whose individualities have been crystallized into distinct outlines by their limited environments and intimate relations. The book is happily optimistic, presenting, indeed, the commonplaces of narrow lives but breathing also the underlying spirit of poetry and romance."—Baltimore Sun.

The Loves of Pelleas and Etarre

Cloth, 12mo, $1.50

"To all who know the hidden sources of human joy and have neither grown old in cynicism nor gray in utilitarianism, Miss Gale's charming love stories, full of fresh feeling and grace of style, will be a draught from the fountain of youth."—Outlook.

"The achievement is unusual for delicacy, subtlety, and the ... felicitous tenderness which brood over the book like a golden autumnal haze which dims the outlines of common things and beautifies them.... The story is indeed unique in this, that it is an idyl for the aged—a romance of seventy."—Chicago Tribune.

"It is an ideal book for husband and wife to read aloud together.... Its picture of steadfast love in old age is the best kind of idealism."—Chicago Record Herald.

PUBLISHED BY THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 64-66 Fifth Avenue, New York

* * * * *



Mr. JAMES LANE ALLEN'S NOVELS

Each, cloth, 12mo, $1.50

The Choir Invisible

This can also be had in a special edition illustrated by Orson Lowell, $2.50

"One reads the story for the story's sake, and then re-reads the book out of pure delight in its beauty. The story is American to the very core.... Mr. Allen stands to-day in the front rank of American novelists. The Choir Invisible will solidify a reputation already established and bring into clear light his rare gifts as an artist. For this latest story is as genuine a work of art as has come from an American hand."—HAMILTON MABIE in The Outlook.

The Reign of Law. A Tale of the Kentucky Hempfields

"Mr. Allen has a style as original and almost as perfectly finished as Hawthorne's, and he has also Hawthorne's fondness for spiritual suggestion that makes all his stories rich in the qualities that are lacking in so many novels of the period.... If read in the right way, it cannot fail to add to one's spiritual possessions."—San Francisco Chronicle.

The Mettle of the Pasture

"It may be that The Mettle of the Pasture will live and become a part of our literature; it certainly will live far beyond the allotted term of present-day fiction. Our principal concern is that it is a notable novel, that it ranks high in the range of American and English fiction, and that it is worth the reading, the re-reading, and the continuous appreciation of those who care for modern literature at its best."—By E. F. E. in the Boston Transcript.

Summer in Arcady. A Tale of Nature Cloth, $1.25

"This story by James Lane Allen is one of the gems of the season. It is artistic in its setting, realistic and true to nature and life in its descriptions, dramatic, pathetic, tragic, in its incidents; indeed, a veritable masterpiece that must become classic. It is difficult to give an outline of the story; it is one of the stories which do not outline; it must be read."—Boston Daily Advertiser.

Shorter Stories

The Blue Grass Region of Kentucky $1.50 Flute and Violin, and Other Kentucky Tales $1.50 The Bride of the Mistletoe $1.25 A Kentucky Cardinal. Illustrated $1.00 Aftermath. A Sequel to "A Kentucky Cardinal" $1.00

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

* * * * *



Mr. ROBERT HERRICK'S NOVELS

Cloth, extra, gilt tops, each, $1.50

The Gospel of Freedom

"A novel that may truly be called the greatest study of social life, in a broad and very much up-to-date sense, that has ever been contributed to American fiction."—Chicago Inter-Ocean.

The Web of Life

"It is strong in that it faithfully depicts many phases of American life, and uses them to strengthen a web of fiction, which is most artistically wrought out."—Buffalo Express.

The Real World

"The title of the book has a subtle intention. It indicates, and is true to the verities in doing so, the strange dreamlike quality of life to the man who has not yet fought his own battles, or come into conscious possession of his will—only such battles bite into the consciousness."—Chicago Tribune.

The Common Lot

"It grips the reader tremendously.... It is the drama of a human soul the reader watches ... the finest study of human motive that has appeared for many a day."—The World To-day.

The Memoirs of an American Citizen. Illustrated with about fifty drawings by F. B. Masters.

"Mr. Herrick's book is a book among many, and he comes nearer to reflecting a certain kind of recognizable, contemporaneous American spirit than anybody has yet done."—New York Times.

"Intensely absorbing as a story, it is also a crisp, vigorous document of startling significance. More than any other writer to-day he is giving us the American novel."—New York Globe.

Together

"Journeys end in lovers meeting," says the old saw; so all novels used to end—in marriage. Yet Mr. Herrick's interesting new novel only begins there; the best brief description of it is, indeed,—a novel about married people for all who are married.

THE MACMILLAN COMPANY PUBLISHERS, 64-66 FIFTH AVENUE, NEW YORK

THE END