FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE
LOVE STORIES

BY

ZONA GALE

AUTHOR OF "FRIENDSHIP VILLAGE," "THE LOVES
OF PELLEAS AND ETARRE," ETC.

NEW YORK
GROSSET & DUNLAP
PUBLISHERS

Copyright, 1909,
By THE MACMILLAN COMPANY.
——
Set up and electrotyped. Published November, 1909. Reprinted
November, 1909; April, 1912.

Norwood Press
J. S. Cushing Co.—Berwick & Smith Co.
Norwood, Mass., U.S.A.

To
MY FRIENDS IN PORTAGE
WISCONSIN

Certain of the following chapters have appeared in Everybody's, The American Magazine, The Outlook, The Woman's Home Companion, and The Delineator. Thanks are due to the editors for their courteous permission to reprint these chapters, and to Messrs. Harper Brothers for permission to reprint the sonnet in Chapter XI.

CONTENTS

Friendship Village Love Stories

I OPEN ARMS

Although it is June, the Little Child about whom I shall sometimes write in these pages this morning brought me a few violets. June violets. They sound unconvincing and even sentimental. However, here they are in their vase; and they are all white but one.

"Only one blue one," said Little Child, regretfully; "May must be 'most dead by mistake."

"Don't the months die as soon as they go away?" I asked her, and a little shocked line troubled her forehead.

"Oh, no," she said; "they never die at all. They wait and show the next months how."

So this year's May is showing June how. As if one should have a kind of pre-self, who kept on, after one's birth, and told one what to live and what not to live. I wish that I had had a pre-self and that it had kept on with me to show me how. It is what one's mother is, only one is so occupied in being one's born self that one thinks of her worshipfully as one's mother instead. But this young June seems to be chiefly May, and I am glad: for of all the months, May is to me most nearly the essence of time to be. In May I have always an impulse to date my letters "To-morrow," for all the enchantment of the usual future seems come upon me. The other months are richly themselves, but May is all the great premonitory zest come true; it is expectation come alive; it is the Then made Now. Conservatively, however, I date my May letters merely "To-morrow," and it is pleasant to find a conservative estimate which no one is likely to exceed. For I own that though there is a conservatism which is now wholly forbidden to me, yet I continue to take in it a sensuous, stolen pleasure, such as I take in certain ceremonies; and I know that if I were wholly pagan, extreme conservatism would be my chief indulgence.

This yet-May morning, then, I have been down in the village, gardening about the streets. My sort of gardening. As in spring another looks along the wall for her risen phlox and valley-lilies, or for the upthrust of the annuals, so after my year's absence I peered round this wall and that for faces and things in the renascence of recognition, or in the pleasant importance of having just been born. Many a gate and façade and well-house, of which in my absence I have not thought even once, has not changed a whit in consequence. And when changes have come, they have done so with the prettiest preening air of accomplishment: "We too," they say, "have not been idle."

Thus the streets came unrolling to meet me and to show me their treasures: my neighbour's new screened-in porch "with a round extension so to see folks pass on the cross street"; in the house in which I am to live a former blank parlour wall gravely regarding me with a magnificent new plate glass eye; Daphne Street, hitherto a way of sand, now become a thing of proud macadam; the corner catalpas old enough to bloom; a white frame cottage rising like a domestic Venus from a once vacant lot of foam-green "Timothy"; a veranda window-box acquired, like a bright bow-knot at its house's throat; and, farther on, the Herons' freshly laid cement sidewalk, a flying heron stamped on every block. I fancy they will have done that with the wooden heron knocker which in the kitchen their grandfather Heron himself carved on sleepless nights. ("Six hundred and twenty hours of Grandpa Heron's life hanging on our front door," his son's wife said; "I declare I feel like that bird could just about lay.") To see all these venturesome innovations, these obscure and pleasant substitutions, is to be greeted by the very annuals of this little garden as a real gardener in green lore might be signalled, here by a trembling of new purple and there by a yellow marching line of little volunteers.

I do not miss from their places many friends. In this house and that I find a new family domiciled and to be divined by the subtle changes which no old tenant would ever have made: the woodpile in an unaccustomed place, the side shed door disused and strung for vines, a wagon now kept by a north and south space once sacred to the sweet-pea trench. Here a building partly ruined by fire shows grim, returned to the inarticulate, not evidently to be rebuilt, but to be accepted, like any death. But these variations are the exception, and only one variation is the rule, and against that one I have in me some special heritage of burning. I mean the felling of the village trees. We have been used wantonly to sacrifice to the base and the trivial, trees already stored with years of symmetry when we of these Midlands were the intruders and not they—and I own that for me the time has never wholly passed. They disturb the bricks in our walks, they dishevel our lawns with twigs, they rot the shingles on our barns. It has seemed to occur to almost nobody to pull down his barn instead. But of late we, too, are beginning to discern, so that when in the laying of a sidewalk we meet a tree who was there before we were anywhere at all, though we may not yet recognize the hamadryad, we do sacrifice to her our love of a straight line, and our votive offering is to give the tree the walk—such a slight swerving is all the deference she asks!—and in return she blesses us with balms and odours.... For me these signs of our mellowing are more delightful to experience than might be the already-made quietudes of a nation of effected and distinguished standards. I have even been pleased when we permit ourselves an elemental gesture, though I personally would prefer not to be the one to have made the gesture. And this is my solace when with some inquisitioner I unsuccessfully intercede for a friend of mine—an isolated silver cottonwood, or a royally skirted hemlock: verily, I say, it was so that we did here in the old days when there were forests to conquer, and this good inquisitioner has tree-taking in his blood as he has his genius for toil. And I try not to remember that if in America we had had plane trees, we should almost certainly have cut them into cabins.... But this morning even the trees that I missed could not make me sad. No, nor even the white crape and the bunch of garden flowers hanging on a street door which I passed. All these were as if something elementary had happened, needless wounds, it might be, on the plan of things, contortions which science has not yet bred away, but, as truly as the natural death from age, eloquent of the cosmic persuading to shape in which the nations of quietude and we of strivings are all in fellowship.

In fellowship! I think that in this simple basic emotion lies my joy in living in this, my village. Here, this year long, folk have been adventuring together, knowing the details of one another's lives, striving a little but companioning far more than striving, kindling to one another's interests instead of practising the faint morality of mere civility; and I love them all—unless it be only that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, newly come to Friendship; and perhaps my faint liking for her arises from the fact that she has not yet lived here long enough to be understood, as Friendship Village understands. The ways of these primal tribal bonds are in my blood, for from my heart I felt what my neighbour felt when she told me of the donation party which the whole village has just given to Lyddy Ember:—

"I declare," she said, "it wasn't so much the stuff they brought in, though that was all elegant, but it was the Togetherness of it. I couldn't get to sleep that night for thinkin' about God not havin' anybody to neighbour with."

It was no wonder, therefore, that when in the middle of Daphne Street my neighbour met me this morning, for the first time since my return, and held out her arms, I walked straight into them. Here is the secret, as more of us know than have the wisdom to acknowledge: fellowship, comradeship, kinship—call it what you will. My neighbour and I will understand.

"I heard you was here," my neighbour said—bless her, her voice trembled. I suppose there never was such a compliment as that tremor of her voice.

I am afraid that I am not going to tell what else she said. But it was all about our coming to Friendship Village to live; and that is a thing which, as I feel about it, should be set to music and sung in the wind—where Thoreau said that some apples are to be eaten. As for me, I nodded at my neighbour, and could do no more than that—as is the custom of mortals when they are face to face with these sorceries of Return and Meeting and Being Together.

I am not yet wonted to the sweetness of our coming to Friendship Village to live, the Stranger and I. Here they still call him the Stranger; and this summer, because of the busts and tablets which he must fashion in many far places, so do I. Have I said that that Stranger of mine is a sculptor? He is. But if anyone expects me to write about him, I tell you that it is impossible. Save this: That since he came out of the mist one morning on the Plank Road here in Friendship Village, we two have kept house in the world, shared in the common welfare, toiled as we might for the common good, observed the stars, and thanked God. And this: that since that morning, it is as if Someone had picked us up and set us to music and sung us to the universal piping. And we remember that once we were only words, and that sometime we shall be whatever music is when it is free of its body of sound, and for that time we strive. But I repeat that these vagrant notes are not about this great Stranger, absent on his quests of holy soul prisoned in this stone and that marble, nor yet about our life together. Rather, I write about our Family, which is this loved town of ours. For we have bought Oldmoxon House, and here, save for what flights may be about and over-seas, we hope that we may tell our days to their end.

My neighbour had both my hands, there in the middle of Daphne Street, and the white horse of the post-office store delivery wagon turned out for us as if he knew.

"If I'd thought of seeing you out so early I'd have put on my other hat," my neighbour said, "but I'm doing up berries, an' I just run down for some rubbers for my cans. Land, fruit-jar rubbers ain't what they used to be, are they? One season an' they lay down life. I could jounce up an' down I'm so glad to see you. I heard you'd been disappointed gettin' somebody to help you with your writin'. I heard the girl that was comin' to help you ain't comin' near."

My secretary, it is true, has disappointed me, and she has done the disappointing by telegraph. I had almost said, publicly by telegraph. But I protest that I would rather an entire village should read my telegrams and rush to the rescue, than that a whole city should care almost nothing for me or my telegrams either. And if you please, I would rather not have that telegram-reading criticised.

"Well," said my neighbour, with simplicity, "I've got you one. She'll be up to talk to you in a day or two—I saw to that. It's Miggy. She can spell like the minister."

I had never heard of Miggy, but I repeated her name with something of that sense of the inescapable to which the finality of my neighbour impressed me. As if I were to have said, "So, then, it is to be Miggy!" Or was it something more than that? Perhaps it was that Miggy's hour and mine had struck. At all events, I distinctly felt what I have come to call the emotion of finality. I suppose that other people have it: that occasional prophetic sense which, when a thing is to happen, expresses this futurity not by words, but by a consciousness of—shall I say?—brightness; a mental area of clearness; a quite definite physical emotion of yes-ness. But if the thing will not happen this says itself by a complementary apprehension of dim, down-sloping, vacant negation. I have seldom known this divination to fail me—though I am chary of using it lest I use it up! And then I do not always wish to know. But this morning my emotion of finality prevailed upon me unaware: I knew that it would be Miggy.

"What a curious name," I said, in a manner of feebly fending off the imminent; "why Miggy?" For it seemed to me one of those names instead of which any other name would have done as well and perhaps better.

"Her name is Margaret," my neighbour explained, "and her mother was a real lady that come here from Off and that hard work killed her because she was a lady. The father was bound there shouldn't be any lady about Miggy, but he couldn't seem to help himself. Margaret was her mother's name and so he shaved it and shrunk it and strained it down to Miggy. 'No frills for nobody,' was his motto, up to his death. Miggy and her little sister lives with her old Aunt Effie that dress-makes real French but not enough to keep 'em alive on. Miggy does odd jobs around. So when I heard about your needin' somebody, I says to myself, 'Miggy!'—just like I've said it to you."

It was not the name, as a name, which I would have said could be uppermost in my mind as I walked on that street of June—that May was helping to make fair. And I was annoyed to have the peace of my return so soon invaded. I fell wondering if I could not get on, as I usually do, with no one to bother. I have never wanted a helper at all if I could avoid it, and I have never, never wanted a helper with a personality. A personality among my strewn papers puts me in a fever of embarrassment and misery. Once such an one said to me in the midst of a chapter: "Madame, I'd like to ask you a question. What do you think of your hero?" In an utter rout of confusion I owned that I thought very badly of him, indeed; but I did not add the truth, that she had effectually drugged him and disabled me for at least that day. My taste in helpers is for one colourless, noiseless, above all intonationless, usually speechless, and always without curiosity—some one, save for the tips of her trained fingers, negligible. As all this does sad violence to my democratic passions, I usually prefer my negligible self. So the idea of a Miggy terrified me, and I said to myself that I would not have one about. As I knew the village, she was not of it. She was not a part of my gardening. She was no proper annual. She was no doubt merely a showy little seedling, chance sown in the village.... But all the time, moving within me, was that serene area of brightness, that clear certainty that, do what I could, it would still be Miggy.

... It is through this faint soothsaying, this conception which is partly of sight and partly of feeling, that some understanding may be won of the orchestration of the senses. I am always telling myself that if I could touch at that fluent line where the senses merge, I should occasionally find there that silent Custodian who is myself. I think, because emotion is so noble, that the Custodian must sometimes visit this line where the barrier between her and me is so frail. Her presence seems possible to me only for a moment, only, it may be, for the fraction of a second in which I catch the romance, the idea of something old and long familiar. And when this happens, I say: She has just been there, between the seeing and the feeling, or between the seeing and the knowing. Often I am sure that I have barely missed her. But I am never quick enough to let her know....

When I finished my walk and stepped under the poplars before my gate, I caught a faint exclamation. It was that Little Child, who had been waiting for me on my doorstep and came running to meet me and bring me the violets. When she saw me, she said, "Oh!" quickly and sweetly in her throat, and, as I stood still to taste the delight of having her run toward me, I felt very sorry for every one who has not heard that involuntary "Oh!" of a child at one's coming. Little Child and I have met only once before, and that early this morning, at large, on the village street, as spirits met in air, with no background of names nor auxiliary of exchange of names; but we had some talk which for me touched on eternal truth and for her savoured of story-telling; and we are friends. So now when she gave me the violets and explained to me Who was showing June how, I accepted this fair perception of the motherhood of May, this childish discernment of the familyhood of things, and,

"Will you come some day soon to have another story?" I asked her.

"Prob'ly I can," said Little Child. "I'll ask Miggy."

"Miggy! But is it your Miggy, too?" I demanded.

"It's my sister," said Little Child, nodding.

I thought that the concreteness of her reply to my ill-defined query was almost as if she remembered how to understand without words. You would think that children would need to have things said out, but they are evidently closer to a more excellent way.

So when I entered the house just now, I brought in with me a kind of premonitory Miggy, one of those ghostly, anticipatory births which we are constantly giving to those whom we have not met. As if every one had for us a way of life without the formality of being seen. As if we are a big, near family whether we want to be so or not. Verily, it is not only May and June, or Little Child and Miggy, who are found unexpectedly to be related; it is the whole world, it seems, and he is wise who quickens to many kinships. I like to think of the comrade company that already I have found here: June and Little Child and Miggy-to-be and my neighbour and Daphne Street and the remembered faces of the village and the hamadryads. I think that I include the very herons in the cement sidewalk. Like a kind of perpetual gift it is, this which my neighbour called Togetherness.

II INSIDE JUNE

The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough to it. This month comes within few houses, and if you want it you must go out to it. When you are within doors, knowing that out-of-doors it is June, the urge to be out there with it is resistless. But though you wade in green, steep in sun, breast wind, and glory in them all, still the day itself eludes you. It would seem, in June, that there should be a specific for the malady of being oneself, so that one might get to be a June day outright. However, if one were oneself more and more, might not one finally become a June day?...

Or something of this sort. I am quoting, as nearly as may be, from the Book of Our Youth, your youth and mine. Always the Book of Youth will open at a page like this. And occasionally it is as if we turned back and read there and made a path right away through the page.

This morning a rose-breasted grosbeak wakened me, singing on a bough of box-elder so close to my window that the splash of rose on his throat almost startled me. It was as if I ought not to have been looking. And to turn away from out-of-doors was like leaving some one who was saying something. But as soon as I stepped into the day I perceived my old problem: The difficulty with a June day is that you can never get near enough.

I stood for a little at the front gate trying soberly to solve the matter—or I stood where the front gate should have been; for in our midland American villages we have few fences or hedges, and, alas, no stone walls. Though undoubtedly this lack comes from an insufficient regard for privacy, yet this negative factor I am inclined to condone for the sake of the positive motive. And this I conceive to be that we are wistful of more ample occupation than is commonly contrived by our fifty-feet village lots, and so we royally add to our "yards" the sidewalk and the planting space and the road and as much of our neighbour's lawn as our imagination can annex. There seems to me to be in this a certain charming pathos; as it were, a survival in us of the time when we had only to name broad lands our own and to stay upon them in order to make them ours in very fact. And now it is as if this serene pushing back of imaginary borders were in reality an appending, a kind of spiritual taking up of a claim.

How to get nearer to June? I admit that it is a question of the veriest idler. But what a delightful company of these questions one can assemble. As, How to find one's way to a place that is the way it seems Away Across a Meadow. How to meet enough people who hear what one says in just the way that one means it. How to get back at will those fugitive moments when one almost knows ... what it is all about. And with this question the field of the idler becomes the field of the wise man; and, indeed, if one idles properly—or rather, if the proper person idles—the two fields are not always on opposite sides of the road. To idle is by no means merely to do nothing. It is an avocation, a calling away, nay, one should say, a piping away. To idle is to inhibit the body and to let the spirit keep on. Not every one can idle. I know estimable people who frequently relax, like chickens in the sun; but I know only a few who use relaxation as a threshold and not as a goal, and who idle until the hour yields its full blessing.

I wondered if to idle at adventure might not be the way to June, so I went out on the six o'clock street in somewhat the spirit in which another might ride the greenwood. Almost immediately I had an encounter, for I came on my neighbour in her garden. Not my neighbour who lives on the other side of me, and who is a big and obvious deacon, with a family of a great many Light Gowns; but My Neighbour. She was watering her garden. These water rules and regulations of the village are among its spells. To look at the members of the water commission one would never suspect them of romance. But if they have it not, why have they named from five until nine o'clock the only morning hours when one may use the city water for one's lawn and garden? I insist that it cannot be a mere regard for the municipal resources, and that the commissioners must see something of the romance of getting up before five o'clock to drench one's garden, and are providing for the special educational value of such a custom. Or, if I do not believe this, I wish very much that I did, with the proper grounds.

To tell the truth, however, I do not credit even my neighbour with feeling the romance of the hour and of her occupation. She is a still woman of more than forty, who does not feel a difference between her flower and her vegetable gardens, but regards them both as a part of her life in the kind of car-window indifference and complacency of certain travellers. She raises foxgloves and parsley, and the sun shines over all. I must note a strange impression which my neighbour gives me: she has always for me an air of personal impermanence. I have the fancy, amounting to a sensation, that she is where she is for just a moment, and that she must rush back and be at it again. I do not know at what. But whether I see her in church or at a festival, I have always all I can do to resist saying to her, "How did you get away?" It was so that she was watering her flowers; as if she were intending at any moment to hurry off to get breakfast or put up the hammock or mend. And yet before she did so she told me, who was a willing listener, a motion or two of the spirit of the village.

There is, I observe, a nicety of etiquette here, about the Not-quite-news, Not-quite-gossip shared with strangers and semi-strangers. The rules seem to be:—

Strangers shall be told only the pleasant occurrences and conditions.

Half strangers may discuss the unpleasant matters which they themselves have somehow heard, but only pleasant matters may be added by accretion.

The rest of society may say whatever it "has a mind." But this mind, as I believe, is not harsh, since nobody ever gossips except to people who gossip back.

"Mis' Toplady told me last night that Calliope Marsh is coming home for the Java entertainment, next week," my neighbour imparted first. And this was the best news that she could have given me.

It has been a great regret to me that this summer Calliope is not in the village. She has gone to the city to nurse some distant kinswoman more lonely than she, and until ill-health came, long forgetful of Calliope. But she is to come back now and again, to this and to that, for the village interests are all her own. I have never known any one in whom the tribal sense is so persistently alive as in Calliope.

I asked my neighbour what this Java entertainment would be, which was to give back Calliope, and she looked her amazement that I did not know. It would be, it appeared, one of those great fairs which the missionary society is always projecting and carrying magnificently forward.

"It's awful feet-aching work," said my neighbour, reflectively; "but honestly, Calliope seems to like it. I donno but I do, too. The Sodality meant to have one when they set out to pave Daphne Street, but it turned out it wasn't needed. Well, big affairs like that makes it seem as if we'd been born into the whole world and not just into Friendship Village."

My neighbour told me that a new public library had been opened in a corner of the post-office store, and that "a great crowd" was drawing books, though for this she herself cannot vouch, since the library is only open Saturday evenings, and "Saturday," she says with decision, "is a bad night." It is, in fact, I note, very difficult to find a free night in the village, save only Tuesday. Monday, because of its obvious duties and incident fatigue, is as impossible as Sunday; Wednesday is club day; Thursday "is prayer-meeting"; Friday is sacred to church suppers and entertainments and the Ladies' Aid Society; and Saturday is invariably denominated a bad night and omitted without question. We are remote from society, but Tuesday is literally our only free evening.

"Of course it won't be the same with you about books," my neighbour admits. "You can send your girl down to get a book for you. But I have to be home to get out the clean clothes. How's your girl going to like the country?" she asked.

I am to have here in the village, I find, many a rebuke for habits of mine which lag behind my theories. For though I try to solve my share of a tragic question by giving to my Swedish maid, Elfa, the self-respect and the privilege suited to a human being dependent on me, together with ways of comfort and some leisure, yet I find the homely customs of the place to have accomplished more than my careful system. And though, when I took her from town I scrupulously added to the earnings of my little maid, I confess that it had not occurred to me to wonder whether or not she would like Friendship Village. We seem so weary-far from the conditions which we so facilely conceive. Especially, I seem far. I am afraid that I engaged Elfa in the first place with less attention to her economic fitness than that she is so trim and still and wistful, with such a peculiarly winning upward look; and that her name is Elfa. I told my neighbour that I did not know yet, whether Elfa would like it here or not; and for refuge I found fault with the worms on the rose bushes. Also I made a note in my head to ask Elfa how she likes the country. But the spirit of a thing is flown when you make a note of it in your head. How does Elfa like the town, for that matter? I never have asked her this, either.

"She'll be getting married on your hands, anyway," my neighbour observed; "the ladies here say that's one trouble with trying to keep a hired girl. They will get married. But I say, let 'em."

At least here is a matter in which my theory, like that of my neighbour's, outruns those of certain folk of both town and village. For I myself have heard women complain of their servants marrying and establishing families, and deplore this shortsightedness in not staying where there is "a good home, a nice room, plenty to eat, and all the flat pieces sent to the laundry."

"Speaking of books," said my neighbour, "have you seen Nicholas Moor?"

"I see almost no new books," I told her guiltily.

"Me either," she said; "I don't mean he's a book. He's a boy. Nicholas Moor—that does a little writin' himself? I guess you will see him. He'll be bringin' some of his writing up to show you. He took some to the new school principal, I heard, and to the invalid that was here from the city. He seems to be sort of lonesome, though he has got a good position. He's interested in celluloid and he rings the Catholic bell. Nicholas must be near thirty, but he hasn't even showed any signs."

"Signs?" I hazarded.

"Of being in love," she says simply. And I have pondered pleasantly on this significant ellipsis of hers which takes serenely for granted the basic business of the world. Her elision reminds me of the delicate animism of the Japanese which says, "When the rice pot speaks with a human voice, then the demon's name is Kanjo." One can appraise a race or an individual by the class of things which speech takes for granted, love or a demon or whatever it be.

And apropos of "showing signs," do I remember Liva Vesey and Timothy Toplady, Jr.? I am forced to confess that I remember neither. I recall, to be sure, that the Topladys had a son, but I had thought of him as a kind of qualifying clause and it is difficult to conceive of him as the subject of a new sentence. When I hear of Liva Vesey I get her confused with a pink gingham apron and a pail of buttermilk which used sometimes to pass my house with Liva combined. Fancy that pink gingham and that pail becoming a person! And my neighbour tells me that the Qualifying Clause and the Pink Gingham are "keeping company," and perhaps are to determine the cut of indeterminate clauses and aprons, world without end.

"The young folks will couple off," says my neighbour; "and," she adds, in a manner of spontaneous impression, "I think it's nice. And it's nice for the whole family, too. I've seen families that wouldn't ever have looked at each other come to be real friends and able to see the angels in each other just by the young folks pairing off. This whole town's married crisscross and kittering, family into family. I like it. It kind o' binds the soil."

My neighbour told me of other matters current in the village, pleasant commonplaces having for her the living spirit which the commonplace holds in hostage. ("I'm breathing," Little Child soberly announced to me that first day of our acquaintance. And I wonder why I smiled?) My neighbour slowly crossed her garden and I followed on the walk—these informal colloquies of no mean length are perfectly usual in the village and they do not carry the necessity for an invitation within the house or the implication of a call. The relations of hostess and guest seem simply to be suspended, and we talk with the freedom of spirits met in air. Is this not in its way prophetic of the time when we shall meet, burdened of no conventions or upholstery or perhaps even words, and there talk with the very freedom of villagers? Meanwhile I am content with conventions, and passive amid upholstery. But I do catch myself looking forward.

Suddenly my neighbour turned to me with such a startled, inquiring manner that I sent my attention out as at an alarm to see what she meant. And then I heard what I had not before noted: a thin, wavering line of singing, that had begun in the street beyond our houses, and now floated inconsequently to us, lifting, dipping, wandering. I could even hear the absurd words.

"My Mary Anna Mary, what you mean I never know.

You don't make me merry, very, but you make me sorry, oh—"

the "oh" prolonged, undulatory, exploring the air.

To say something was like interrupting my neighbour's expression; so I waited, and,

"It's old Cary," she explained briefly. "When he does that it's like something hurts you, ain't it?"

I thought that this would be no one of my acquaintance, and I said so, but tentatively, lest I should be forgetting some inherent figure of the village.

"He's come here in the year," she explained—and, save about the obvious import of old Cary's maudlin song, she maintained that fine, tribal reticence of hers. "Except for the drinking," she even said, "he seems to be a quiet, nice man. But it's a shame—for Peter's sake. Peter Cary," she added, like a challenge, "is the brainiest young man in this town, say what you want."

On which she told me something of this young superintendent of the canning factory who has "tried it in Nebraska," and could not bear to leave his father here, "this way," and has just returned. "He works hard, and plays the violin, and is making a man of himself generally," she told me; "Don't miss him." And I have promised that I will try not to miss Peter Cary.

"They live out towards the cemetery way," she added, "him and his father, all alone. Peter'll be along by here in a minute on his way to work—it's most quarter to. I set my husband down to his breakfast and got up his lunch before I come out—I don't have my breakfast till the men folks get out of the way."

I never cease to marvel at these splendid capabilities which prepare breakfasts, put up lunches, turn the attention to the garden, and all, so to speak, with the left hand; ready at any moment to enter upon the real business of life—to minister to the sick or bury the dead, or conduct a town meeting or a church supper or a birth. They have a kind of goddess-like competence, these women. At any of these offices they arrive, lacking the cloud, it is true, but magnificently equipped to settle the occasion. In crises of, say, deafness, they will clap a hot pancake on a friend's ear with an Æsculapian savoir faire, for their efficiencies combine those of lost generations with all that they hear of in this, in an open-minded eclecticism. With Puritans and foresters and courtiers in our blood, who knows but that we have, too, the lingering ichor of gods and goddesses? Oh—"don't you wish you had?" What a charming peculiarity it would be to be descended from a state of immortality as well as to be preparing for it, nay, even now to be entered upon it!

In a few moments after that piteous, fuddled song had died away on the other street, Peter Cary came by my neighbour's house. He was a splendid, muscular figure in a neutral, belted shirt and a hat battered quite to college exactions, though I am sure that Peter did not know that. I could well believe that he was making a man of himself. I have temerity to say that this boy superintendent of a canning factory looked as, in another milieu, Shelley might have looked, but so it was. It was not the first time that I have seen in such an one the look, the eyes with the vision and the shadow. I have seen it in the face of a man who stood on a step-ladder, papering a wall; I have seen it in a mason who looked up from the foundation that he mortared; I have seen it often and often in the faces of men who till the soil. I was not surprised to know that Peter Cary "took" on the violin. The violin is a way out (for that look in one's eyes), as, for Nicholas Moor, I have no doubt, is the ringing of the Catholic bell. And I am not prepared to say that celluloid, and wall-paper, and mortar, and meadows, and canneries,—run under good conditions,—may not be a way out as well. At all events, the look was still in Peter's face.

Peter glanced briefly at my neighbour, running the risk of finding us both looking at him, realized the worst, blushed a man's brown blush, and nodded and smiled after he had looked away from us.

"You see this grass?" said my neighbour. "Peter keeps it cut, my husband don't get home till so late. We're awful fond of Peter."

There is no more tender eulogy. And I would rather have that said of me in the village than in any place I know. No grace of manner or dress or mind can deceive anybody. They are fond of you or they are not, and I would trust their reasons for either.

My neighbour's husband came out the front door at that moment, and he and Peter, without greeting, went on together. Her husband did not look toward us, because, in the village, it seems not to be a husband and wife ceremonial to say good-by in the morning. I often fall wondering how it is in other places. Is it possible that men in general go away to work without the consciousness of family, of themselves as going forth on the common quest? Is it possible that women see them go and are so unaware of the wonder of material life that they do not instance it in, at least, good-by? One would think that even the female bear in the back of the cave must growl out something simple when her lord leaves her in the hope of a good kill.

And when the two men had turned down the brick walk, the maple leaves making a come-and-go of shadows and sun-patterns on their backs, my neighbour looked at me with a smile—or, say, with two-thirds of a smile—as if her vote to smile were unanimous, but she were unwilling by it to impart too much.

"It's all Miggy with Peter," she said, as if she were mentioning a symptom.

"Miggy?" I said with interest—and found myself nodding to this new relationship as to a new acquaintance. And I was once more struck with the precision with which certain simple people and nearly all great people discard the particularities and lay bare their truths. Could any amount of elegant phrasing so reach the heart of the thing and show it beating as did, "It's all Miggy with Peter"?

"Yes," my neighbour told me, "it's been her with him ever since he come here."

Assuredly I thought the better of Miggy for this; and,

"Is it all Peter with Miggy?" I inquired, with some eagerness.

Land knows, my neighbour thought, and handed me the hose to hold while she turned off the water at the hydrant. I remember that a young robin tried to alight on the curving spray just as the water failed and drooped.

"I like to get a joke on a robin that way," said my neighbour, and laughed out, in a kind of pleasant fellowship with jokes in general and especially with robins. "It made Miggy's little sister laugh so the other day when that happened," she added. Then she glanced over at me with a look in her face that I have not seen there before.

"Land," she said, "this is the time of day, after my husband goes off in the morning, when I wish I had a little young thing, runnin' round. Now almost more than at night. Well—I don't know; both times."

I nodded, without saying anything, my eyes on a golden robin prospecting vainly among the green mulberries. I wish that I were of those who know what to say when a door is opened like this to some shut place.

"Well," said my neighbour, "now I'll bake up the rest of the batter. Want a pink?"

Thus tacitly excused—how true her instinct was, courteously to put the three fringed pinks in my hand to palliate her leaving!—I have come back to my house and my own breakfast.

"Elfa," said I, first thing, "do you think you are going to like the country?"

My little maid turned to me with her winning upward look.

"No'm," she shocked me by saying. And there was another door, opened into another shut place; and I did not know what to say to that either.

But I am near to my neighbour; and, in a manner to which Elfa's trimness and wistfulness never have impressed me, near to Elfa herself, and I am near, near to the village. As I left the outdoors just now, all the street was alive: with men and girls going to work, women opening windows, a wagon or two in from a Caledonia farm, a general, universal, not to say cosmic air of activity and coffee. All the little houses, set close together up and down the street, were like a friendly porch party, on a long, narrow veranda, where folk sit knee to knee with an avenue between for the ice-cream to be handed. All the little lawns and gardens were disposed like soft green skirts, delicately embroidered, fragrant, flowing.... As I looked, it seemed to me that I could hear the faint hum of the village talk—in every house the intimate, revealing confidences of the Family, quick with hope or anxiety or humour or passion, animated by its common need to live. And along the street flooded the sun, akin to the morning quickening in many a heart.

The day has become charged for me with something besides daylight, something which no less than daylight pervades, illumines, comes to meet me at a thousand points. I wonder if it can be that, unaware, I did get near to June?

III MIGGY

I have never heard the chimes of Westminster cathedral, but when some time they do sound for me I shall find in them something all my own. For the old rosewood clock which has told time for me these many years is possessed of a kind of intelligence because its maker gave to it the Westminster chimes. Thus, though the clock must by patient ticking teach the rhythm of duration until the secret monotony of rhythm is confessed, it has also its high tides of life, rhythmic, too, and at every quarter hour fills a kind of general creative office: four notes for the quarter, eight for the half, twelve for the three-quarters, sixteen for the hour, and then the deep Amen of the strokes. At twelve o'clock it swells richly to its zenith of expression and almost says something else. Through even the organ fulness of the cathedral bells I shall hear the tingling melody of the rosewood clock chimes, for their sweet incidence has been to me both matins and lullaby and often trembles within my sleep. I have the clock always with me. It is a little voice-friend, it is one of those half folk, like flowers and the wind and an open fireplace and a piano, which are a frail, semi-born race, wistful of complete life, but as yet only partly overlapping our own sphere. These fascinate me almost as much as the articulate. That was why, when my little maid Elfa had brought me the summons to-day, I stood on the threshold and in some satisfaction watched Miggy, rapt before my clock in its musical maximum of noon.

Miggy is as thin as a bough, and her rather large head is swept by an ungovernable lot of fine brown hair. Her face was turned from me, and she was wearing a high-necked gingham apron faded to varying values of brown and faint purple and violet of a quite surprising beauty. When the last stroke ceased, she turned to me as if I had been there all the time.

"I wish I could hear it do that again," she said, standing where she had stood, arms folded.

"You will, perhaps, to-morrow," I answered.

Truly, if it was to be Miggy, then she would hear the chimes to-morrow and to-morrow; and as she turned, my emotion of finality increased. I have never loved the tribe of the Headlongs, though I am very sorry for any one who has not had with them an occasional innocent tribal junket; but I hold that through our intuitions, we may become a kind of apotheosis of the Headlongs. Who of us has not chosen a vase, a chair, a rug, by some motive transcending taste, by the bidding of a friendly-faithful monitor who, somewhere inside one, nodded a choice which we obeyed? And yet a vase is a dead thing with no little seeking tentacles that catch and cling, while in choosing the living it is that one's friendly-faithful monitor is simply recognizing the monitor of the other person. I, for one, am more and more willing to trust these two to avow their own. For I think that this monitor is, perhaps, that silent Custodian whom, if ever I can win through her elusiveness, I shall know to be myself. As the years pass I trust her more and more. I find that we like the same people, she and I! And instantly we both liked Miggy.

Miggy stood regarding me intently.

"I saw you go past the Brevy's yesterday, where the crape is on the door," she observed; "I thought it was you."

I wonder at the precision with which very little people and very big people brush aside the minor conventions and do it in such ways that one nature is never mistaken for the other.

"The girl who died there was your friend, then?" I asked.

"No," Miggy said; "I just knew her to speak to. And she didn't always bother her head to speak to me. I just went in there yesterday morning to get the feeling."

"I beg your pardon. To get—what?" I asked.

"Well," said Miggy, "you know when you look at a corpse you can always sense your own breath better—like it was something alive inside you. That's why I never miss seeing one if I can help. It's the only time I'm real glad I'm living."

As I motioned her to the chair and took my own, I felt a kind of weariness. The neurotics, I do believe, are of us all the nearest to the truth about things, but as I grow older I find myself getting to take a surpassing comfort in the normal. Or rather, I am always willing to have the normal thrust upon me, but my neurotics I wish to select for myself.

"My neighbour tells me," I said merely, "that she thinks you should be my secretary." (It is a big word for the office, but a little hill is still a hill.)

"I think so, too," said Miggy, simply, "I was afraid you wouldn't."

"Have you ever been anybody's secretary?" I continued.

"Never," said Miggy. "I never saw anybody before that had a secretary."

"But something must have made her think you would do," I suggested. "And what made you think so?"

"Well," Miggy said, "she thinks so because she wants me to get ahead. And I think so because I generally think I can do anything—except mathematics. Has Secretary got any mathematics about it?"

"Not my secretary work," I told her, reviewing these extraordinary qualifications for duty; "except counting the words on a page. You could do that?"

"Oh, that!" said Miggy. "But if you told me to multiply two fractions you'd never see me again, no matter how much I wanted to come back. Calliope Marsh says she's always expecting to find some folks' heads caved in on one side—same as red and blue balloons. If mine caved, it'd be on the mathematics corner."

I assured her that I never have a fraction in my house.

"Then I'll come," said Miggy, simply.

But immediately she leaned forward with a look of anxiety, and her face was pointed and big-eyed, so that distress became a part of it.

"Oh," she said, "I forgot. I meant to tell you first."

"What is it? Can you not come, after all?" I inquired gravely.

"I've got a drawback," said Miggy, soberly. "A man's in love with me."

She linked her arms before her, a hand on either shoulder—arms whose slenderness amazes me, though at the wrist they taper and in their extreme littleness are yet round. Because of this frailty she has a kind of little girl look which at that moment curiously moved me.

"Who told you that?" I asked abruptly.

"About it being a drawback? Everybody 'most," said Miggy. "They all laugh about us and act like it was a pity."

For a moment I felt a kind of anger as I felt it once when a woman said to me of a wife of many years whose first little child was coming, that she was "in trouble." I own that,—save with my neighbour, and Calliope, and a few more whom I love—here in the village I miss the simple good breeding of the perception that nothing is nobler than the emotions, and the simple good taste of taking seriously love among its young. Taking it seriously, I say. Not, heaven forbid, taking it for granted, as do the cities.

"Other things being equal, I prefer folk who are in love," I told Miggy. Though I observe that I instance a commercialization which I deplore by not insisting on this secretarial qualification to anything like the extent with which I insist on, say, spelling.

Miggy nodded—three little nods which seemed to settle everything.

"Then I'll come," she repeated. "Anyhow, it isn't me that's in love at all. It's Peter. But of course I have to have some of the blame."

So! It was, then, not "all Peter with Miggy." Poor Peter. It must be a terrific problem to be a Peter to such a Miggy. I must have looked "Poor Peter," because the girl's face took on its first smile. Such a smile as it was, brilliant, sparkling, occupying her features instead of informing them.

"He won't interfere much," she observed. "He's in the cannery all day and then he practises violin and tinkers. I only see him one or two evenings a week; and I never think of him at all."

"As my secretary," said I, "you may make a mental note for me: remind me that I wish sometime to meet Peter."

"He'll be real pleased," said Miggy, "and real scared. Now about my being your secretary: do I have to take down everything you do?"

"My dear child!" I exclaimed.

"Don't I?" said Miggy. "Why, the Ladies' Aid has a secretary and she takes down every single thing the society does. I thought that was being one."

I told her, as well as might be, what I should require of her—not by now, I own, with any particularity of idea that I had a secretary, but rather that I had surprisingly acquired a Miggy, who might be of use in many a little mechanical task. She listened, and, when I had made an end, gave her three little nods; but her face fell.

"It's just doing as you're told," she summed it up with a sigh. "Everything is, ain't it? I thought maybe Secretary was doing your best."

"But it is," I told her.

"No," she said positively, "you can't do your best when you have to do just exactly what you're told. Your best tells you how to do itself."

At this naïve putting of the personal equation which should play so powerful a part in the economics of toil I was minded to apologize for intending to interfere with set tasks in Miggy's possible duties with me. She had the truth, though: that the strong creative instinct is the chief endowment, primal as breath; for on it depend both life and the expression of life, the life of the race and the ultimate racial utterance.

We talked on for a little, Miggy, I observed, having that royal indifference to time which, when it does not involve indifference to the time of other people, I delightedly commend. For myself, I can never understand why I should eat at one or sleep at eleven, if it is, as it often is, my one and my eleven and nobody else's. For, as between the clock and me alone, one and eleven and all other o'clocks are mine and I am not theirs. But I have known men and women living in hotels who would interrupt a sunset to go to dine, or wave away the stars in their courses to go to sleep, merely because the hour had struck. It must be in their blood, poor things, as descendants from the cell, to which time and space were the only considerations.

When Miggy was leaving, she paused on the threshold with her first hint of shyness, a hint which I welcomed. I think that every one to whom I am permanently drawn must have in his nature a phase of shyness, even of unconquerable timidity.

"If I shouldn't do things," Miggy said, "like you're used to having them done—would you tell me? I know a few nice things to do and I do 'em. But I'm always waking up in the night and thinking what a lot there must be that I do wrong. So if I do 'em wrong would you mind not just squirming and keeping still about 'em—but tell me?"

"I'll tell you, child, if there is need," I promised her. And I caught her smile—that faint, swift, solemn minute which sometimes reveals on a face the childlike wistfulness of every one of us, under the mask, to come as near as may be to the others.

I own that when, just now, I turned from her leave-taking, I had that infrequent sense of emptiness-in-the-room which I have had usually only with those I love or with some rare being, all fire and spirit and idea, who has flamed in my presence and died into departure. I cannot see why we do not feel this sense of emptiness whenever we leave one another. Would you not think that it would be so with us who live above the abyss and below the uttermost spaces? It is not so, and there are those from whose presence I long to be gone in a discomfort which is a kind of orison of my soul to my body to hurry away. It is so that I long to be gone from that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson, and of this I am sorely ashamed. But I think that all such dissonance is merely a failure in method, and that the spirit of this business of being is that we long for one another to be near.

Yes, in "this world of visible images" and patterns and schedules and o'clocks, it is like stumbling on the true game to come on some one who is not on any dial. And I fancy that Miggy is no o'clock. She is not Dawn o'clock, because already she has lived so much; nor Noon o'clock, because she is far from her high moment; nor is she Dusk o'clock, because she is so poignantly alive. Rather, she is like the chimes of a clock—which do not tell the time, but which almost say something else.

IV SPLENDOUR TOWN

Last night I went for a walk across the river, and Little Child went with me to the other end of the bridge.

I would have expected it to be impossible to come to the fourth chapter and to have said nothing of the river. But the reason is quite clear: for the setting of the stories of the village as I know them is preëminently rambling streets and trim dooryards, and neat interiors with tidy centre-tables. Nature is merely the necessary opera-house, not the intimate setting. Nature's speech through the trees is most curiously taken for granted as being trees alone, and she is, as I have shown, sometimes cut off quite rudely in the midst of an elm or linden sentence and curtly interrupted by a sidewalk. If a grove of trees is allowed to remain in a north dooryard it is almost certainly because the trees break the wind. Likewise, Nature's unfoldings in our turf and clover we incline to regard as merely lawns, the results of seeds and autumn fertilizing. Our vines are for purposes of shade, cheaper and prettier than awnings or porch rollers. With our gardens, where our "table vegetables" are grown, Nature is, I think, considered to have little or nothing to do; and we openly pride ourselves on our early this and our prodigious that, quite as when we cut a dress or build a lean-to. We admit the rain or the sunny slope into partnership, but what we recognize is weather rather than the mighty spirit of motherhood in Nature. Indeed, our flower gardens, where are wrought such miracles of poppies and pinks, are perhaps the only threshold on which we stand abashed, as at the sound of a singing voice, a voice that sings believing itself to be alone.

These things being so, it is no wonder that the river has been for so long no integral part of village life. The river is accounted a place to fish, a place to bathe, a thing to cross to get to the other side, an objective point—including the new iron bridge—to which to take guests. But of the everyday life it is no proper part. On the contrary, the other little river, which strikes out silverly for itself to eastward, is quite a personality in the village, for on it is a fine fleet of little launches with which folk take delight. But this river of mine to the west is a thing of whims and eddies and shifting sand bars, and here not many boats adventure. So the river is accepted as a kind of pleasant hermit living on the edge of the village. It draws few of us as Nature can draw to herself. We know the water as a taste only and not yet as an emotion. We say that we should enjoy going there if we had the time. I know, I know. You see that we do not yet live the river, as an ancient people would live their moor. But in our launches, our camping parties, our flights to a little near lake for dinner, in a tent here and a swing there, set to face riverward, there lies the thrill of process, and by these things Nature is wooing us surely to her heart. Already the Pump pasture has for us the quality of individuality, and we have picnics there and speak of the pasture almost as of a host. Presently we shall be companioned by all our calm stretches of meadow, our brown sand bars, our Caledonia hills, our quiet lakes, our unnavigable river, as the Northmen were fellowed of the sea.

Little Child has at once a wilder and a tamer instinct. She has this fellowship and the fellowship of more.

"Where shall we go to-day?" I ask her, and she always says, "Far away for a party"—in a combination, it would seem, of the blood of shepherd kings with certain corpuscles of modernity. And when we are in the woods she instances the same dual quality by, "Now let's sit down in a roll and wait for a fairy, and be a society."

We always go along the levee, Little Child and I, and I watch the hour have its way with her, and I do not deny that occasionally I try to improve on the hour by a tale of magic or by the pastime of teaching her a lyric. I love to hear her pretty treble in "Who is Sylvia? What is she?" and "She dwelt among th' untrodden ways," and "April, April, laugh thy girlish laughter," and in Pippa's song. Last night, to be sure, the lyrics rather gave way to some talk about the circus to be to-day, an unwonted benison on the village. But even the reality of the circus could not long keep Little Child from certain sweet vagaries, and I love best to hear her in these fancyings.

"Here," she said to me last night, "is her sponge."

I had no need to ask whose sponge. We are always finding the fairy's cast-off ornaments and articles of toilet. On occasion we have found her crown, her comb, her scarf, her powder-puff, her cup, her plumed fan, her parasol—a skirtful of fancies which next day Little Child has brought to me in a shoe box for safe keeping so that "They" would not throw the things away: that threatening "They" which overhangs childhood, casting away its treasures, despoiling its fastnesses, laying a ladder straight through a distinct and recognizable fairy ring in the back yard. I can visualize that "They" as I believe it seems to some children, something dark and beetling and menacing and imminent, less like the Family than like Fate. Is it not sad that this precious idea of the Family, to conserve which is one of our chief hopes, should so often be made to appear to its youngest member in the general semblance of a phalanx?

We sat down for a little at the south terminal of the bridge, where a steep bank and a few desperately clinging trees have arranged a little shrine to the sunset. It was sunset then. All the way across the bridge I had been watching against the gold the majestic or apathetic or sodden profiles of the farmers jogging homeward on empty carts, not one face, it had chanced, turned to the west even to utilize it to forecast the weather. Such a procession I want to see painted upon a sovereign sky and called "The Sunset." I want to have painted a giant carpenter of the village as I once saw him, his great bare arms upholding a huge white pillar, while blue figures hung above and set the acanthus capital. And there is a picture, too, in the dull red of the butcher's cart halted in snow while a tawny-jerseyed boy lifts high his yellow light to find a parcel. Some day we shall see these things in their own surprising values and fresco our village libraries with them—yes, and our drug stores, too.

The story that I told Little Child while we rested had the symbolism which I often choose for her: that of a girl keeping a garden for the coming of a child. All her life she has been making ready and nothing has been badly done. In one green room of the garden she has put fair thoughts, in another fair words, and in the innermost fastnesses of the garden fair deeds. Here she has laid colour, there sweet sound, there something magic which is a special kind of seeing. When the child comes, these things will be first toys, then tools, then weapons. Sometimes the old witch of the wood tries to blow into the garden a thistle of discord or bubbles of delight to be followed, and these must be warded away. All day the spirit of the child to come wanders through the garden, telling the girl what to do here or here, keeping her from guile or from idleness-without-dreams. She knows its presence and I think that she has even named it. If it shall be a little girl, then it is to be Dagmar, Mother of Day, or Dawn; but if a little boy, then it shall be called for one whom she has not yet seen. Meanwhile, outside the door of the garden many would speak with the girl. On these she looks, sometimes she even leans from her casement, and once, it may be, she reaches out her hand, ever so swiftly, and some one without there touches it. But at that she snatches back her hand and bars the garden, and for a time the spirit of the little child does not come very near. So she goes serenely on toward the day when a far horn sounds and somebody comes down the air from heaven, as it has occurred to nobody else to do. And they hear the voice of the little child, singing in the garden.

"The girl is me," says little Little Child, as she always says when I have finished this story.

"Yes," I tell her.

"I'd like to see that garden," she says thoughtfully.

Then I show her the village in the trees of the other shore, roof upon roof pricked by a slim steeple; for that is the garden.

"I don't care about just bein' good," she says, "but I'd like to housekeep that garden."

"For a sometime-little-child of your own," I tell her.

"Yes," she assents, "an' make dresses for."

I cannot understand how mothers let them grow up not knowing, these little mothers-to-be who so often never guess their vocation. It is a reason for everything commonly urged on the ground of conduct, a ground so lifeless to youth. But quicken every desert space with "It must be done so for the sake of the little child you will have some day," and there rises a living spirit. Morals, civics, town and home economics, learning—there is the concrete reason for them all; and the abstract understanding of these things for their own sakes will follow, flower-wise, fruit-wise, for the healing of the times.

I had told to that old Aunt Effie who keeps house for Miggy and Little Child something of what I thought to do—breaking in upon the old woman's talk of linoleum and beans and other things having, so to say, one foot in the universe.

"Goodness," that old woman had answered, with her worried turn of head, "I'm real glad you're going to be here. I dread saying anything."

Here too we must look to the larger day when the state shall train for parenthood and for citizenship, when the schools and the universities shall speak for the state the cosmic truths, and when by comparison botany and differential calculus shall be regarded as somewhat less vital in ushering in the kingdom of God.

The water reservoir rose slim against the woods to the north; to the south was a crouching hop house covered with old vines. I said to Little Child:—

"Look everywhere and tell me where you think a princess would live if she lived here."

She looked everywhere and answered:—

"In the water tower in those woods."

"And where would the old witch live?" I asked her.

"In the Barden's hop house," she answered.

"And where would the spirit of the little child be?" I tested her.

She looked long out across the water.

"I think in the sunset," she said at last. And then of her own will she said over the Sunset Spell I have taught her:—

"I love to stand in this great air

And see the sun go down.

It shows me a bright veil to wear

And such a pretty gown.

Oh, I can see a playmate there

Far up in Splendour Town."

I could hardly bear to let her go home, but eight o'clock is very properly Little Child's bedtime, and so I sent her across the bridge waving her hand every little way in that fashion of children who, I think, are hoping thus to save the moment that has just died. I have known times when I, too, have wanted to wave my hand at a moment and keep it looking at me as long as possible. But presently the moment almost always turned away.

Last night I half thought that the sunset itself would like to have stayed. It went so delicately about its departure, taking to itself first a shawl of soft dyes, then a painted scarf, then frail iris wings. It mounted far up the heavens, testing its strength for flight and shaking brightness from its garments. And it slipped lingeringly away as if the riot of colour were after all the casual part, and the real business of the moment were to stay on with everybody. In the tenuity of the old anthropomorphisms I marvel that they did not find the sunset a living thing, tender of mortals, forever loth to step from out one moment into the cherishing arms of the next. Think! The sunset that the Greeks knew has been flaming round the world, dying from moment to moment and from mile to mile, with no more of pause than the human heart, since sunset flamed for Hero and Helen and Ariadne.

If the sunset was made for lovers, and in our midland summers lingers on their account, then last night it was lingering partly for Miggy and Peter. At the end of the bridge I came on them together.

Miggy did not flush when she saw me, and though I would not have expected that she would flush I was yet disappointed. I take an old-fashioned delight in women whose high spirit is compatible with a sensibility which causes them the little agonizings proper to this moment, and to that.

But Miggy introduced Peter with all composure.

"This," she said, "is Peter. His last name is Cary."

"How do you do, Peter?" I said very heartily.

I thought that Peter did something the rationale of which might have been envied of courts. He turned to Miggy and said "Thank you." Secretly I congratulated him on his embarrassment. In a certain milieu social shyness is as authentic a patent of perception as in another milieu is taste.

"Come home with me," I besought them. "We can find cake. We can make lemonade. We can do some reading aloud." For I will not ask the mere cake and lemonade folk to my house. They must be, in addition, good or wise or not averse to becoming either.

I conceived Peter's evident agony to rise from his need to reply. Instead, it rose from his need to refuse.

"I take my violin lesson," he explained miserably.

"He takes his violin lesson," Miggy added, with a pretty, somewhat maternal manner of translating. I took note of this faint manner of proprietorship, for it is my belief that when a woman assumes it she means more than she knows that she means.

"I'm awful sorry," said Peter, from his heart; "I was just having to go back this minute."

"To-morrow's his regular lesson day," Miggy explained, "but to-morrow he's going to take me to the circus, so he has his lesson to-night. Go on," she added, "you'll be late and you'll have to pay just the same anyway." I took note of this frank fashion of protection of interests, for it is my belief that matters are advancing when the lady practises economics in courtship. But I saw that Miggy was manifesting no symptoms of accompanying Peter, and I begged them not to let me spoil their walk.

"It's all right," Miggy said; "he'll have to hurry and I don't want to go in yet anyway. I'll walk back with you." And of this I took note with less satisfaction. It was as if Miggy had not come alive.

Peter smiled at us, caught off his hat, and went away with it in his hand, and the moment that he left my presence he became another being. I could see by his back that he was himself, free again, under no bondage of manner. It is a terrific problem, this enslavement of speech and trivial conduct which to some of us provides a pleasant medium and for some of us furnishes fetters. When will they manage a wireless society? I am tired waiting. For be it a pleasant medium or be it fetters, the present communication keeps us all apart. "I hope," I said once at dinner, "that I shall be living when they think they get the first sign from Mars." "I hope," said my companion, "that I shall be living when I think I get the first sign from you—and you—and you, about this table." If this young Shelley could really have made some sign, what might it not have been?

"Everybody's out walking to-night," Miggy observed. "There's Liva Vesey and Timothy Toplady ahead of us."

"They are going to be married, are they not?" I asked.

Miggy looked as if I had said something indelicate.

"Well," she answered, "not out loud yet."

Then, fearing that she had rebuked me, "He's going to take her to the circus to-morrow in their new buckboard," she volunteered. And I find in Friendship that the circus is accounted a kind of official trysting-place for all sweethearts.

We kept a little way back of the lovers, the sun making Liva Vesey's pink frock like a vase-shaped lamp of rose. Timothy was looking down at her and straightway looking away again when Liva had summoned her courage to look up. They were extremely pleasant to watch, but this Miggy did not know and she was intent upon me. She had met Little Child running home.

"She's nice to take a walk with," Miggy said; "but I like to walk around by myself too. Only to-night Peter came."

"Miggy," said I, "I want to congratulate you that Peter is in love with you."

She looked up with puzzled eyes.

"Why, that was nothing," she said; "he seemed to do it real easy."

"But it is not easy," I assured her, "to find many such fine young fellows as Peter seems to be. I hope you will be very happy together."

"I'm not engaged," said Miggy, earnestly; "I'm only invited."

"Ah, well," I said, "if I may be allowed—I hope you are not sending regrets."

Miggy laughed out suddenly.

"Married isn't like a party," she said; "I know that much about society. Party you either accept or regret. Married you do both."

I could have been no more amazed if the rosewood clock had said it.

"Who has been talking to you, child?" I asked in distress.

"I got it out of living," said Miggy, solemnly. "You live along and you live along and you find out 'most everything."

I looked away across the Pump pasture where the railway tracks cut the Plank Road, that comes on and on until it is modified into Daphne Street. I remembered a morning of mist and dogwood when I had walked that road through the gateway into an earthly paradise. Have I not said that since that time we two have been, as it were, set to music and sung; so that the silences of separation are difficult to beguile save by the companionship of the village—the village that has somehow taught Miggy its bourgeoise lesson of doubt?

My silence laid on her some vague burden of proof.

"Besides," she said, "I'm not like the women who marry people. Most of 'em that's married ain't all married, anyway."

"What do you mean, child?" I demanded.

"They're not," protested Miggy. "They marry like they pick out a way to have a dress made when they don't admire any of the styles very much, and they've wore out everything else. Women like some things about somebody, and that much they marry. Then the rest of him never is married at all, and by and by that rest starts to get lonesome."

"But Miggy," I said to all this, "I should think you might like Peter entirely."

She surprised me by her seriousness.

"Anyhow, I've got my little sister to bring up," she said; "Aunt Effie hasn't anything. And I couldn't put two on him to support."

I wondered why not, but I said nothing.

"And besides," Miggy said after a pause, "there's Peter's father. You know about him?"

I did know—who in the village did not know? Since my neighbour had told me of him I had myself seen him singing through the village streets, shouting out and disturbing the serene evenings, drunken, piteous....

"Peter has him all the time," I suggested.

She must have found a hint of resistance in my voice, for her look questioned me.

"I never could stand it to have anybody like that in the house," she said defensively. "I've told Peter. I've told him both reasons...." Miggy threw out her arms and stood still, facing the sunset. "Anyway, I want to keep on feeling all free and liberty-like!" she said.

This intense individualism of youth, passioning only for far spaces, taking no account of the common lot nor as yet urgent to share it is, like the panther grace in the tread of the cat, a survival of the ancient immunity from accountabilities. To note it is to range down the evolution of ages. To tame it—there is a task for all the servants of the new order.

Miggy was like some little bright creature caught unaware in the net of living and still remembering the colonnades of otherwhere, renowned for their shining. She was looking within the sunset, where it was a thing of wings and doors ajar and fair corridors. I saw the great freedoms of sunset in her face—the sunset where Little Child and I had agreed that a certain spirit lived.... Perhaps it was that that little vagrant spirit signalled to me—and the Custodian understood it. Perhaps it was that I saw, beneath the freedoms, the woman-tenderness in the girl's face. In any case I spoke abruptly and half without intention.

"But you don't want to be free from Little Child. It is almost as if she were your little girl, is it not?" I said.

Miggy's eyes did not leave the sunset. It was rather as if she saw some answer there.

"Well, I like to pretend she is," she said simply.

"That," I said quietly, "is pleasant to pretend."

And now her mood had changed as if some one had come to take her place.

"But if she was—that," she said, "her name, then, would most likely be Margaret, like mine, wouldn't it?"

"It would be very well to have it Margaret," I agreed.

Her step was quickened as by sudden shyness.

"It's funny to think about," she said. "Sometimes I most think of—her, till she seems in the room. Not quite my sister. I mean Margaret."

It made my heart beat somewhat. I wondered if anything of my story to Little Child was left in my mind, and if subconsciously Miggy was reading it. This has sometimes happened to me with a definiteness which would be surprising if the supernatural were to me less natural. But I think that it was merely because Miggy had no idea of the sanctity of what she felt that she was speaking of it.

"How does she look?" I asked.

"Like me," said Miggy, readily; "I don't want her to either. I want her to be pretty and I'm not. But when I think of her running 'round in the house or on the street, I always make her look like me. Only little."

"Running 'round in the house." That was the way my neighbour had put it. Perhaps it is the way that every woman puts it.

"Does she seem like you, too?" I tempted her on.

"Oh, better," Miggy said confidently; "learning to play on the piano and not much afraid of folks and real happy."

"Don't you ever pretend about a boy?" I asked.

She shook her head.

"No," she said; "if I do—I never can think him out real plain. Margaret I can most see."

And this, too, was like the girl in the garden and the spirit of that one to be called by a name of one whom she had not seen.

I think that I have never hoped so much that I might know the right thing to say. And when most I wish this I do as I did then: I keep my impulse silent and I see if that vague Custodian within, somewhere between the seeing and the knowing, will not speak for me. I wonder if she did? At all events, what either she or I said was:—

"Miggy! Look everywhere and tell me the most beautiful thing you can see."

She was not an instant in deciding.

"Why, sunset," she said.

"Promise me," said I—said we!—"that you will remember Now. And that after to-night, when you see a sunset—always, always, till she comes—you will think about her. About Margaret."

Because this caught her fancy she promised readily enough. And then we lingered a little, while the moment gave up its full argosy. I have a fancy for these times when I say "I will remember," and I am always selecting them and knowing, as if I had tied a knot in them, that I will remember. These times become the moments at which I keep waving my hand in the hope that they will never turn away. And it was this significance which I wished the hour to have for Miggy, so that for her the sunset should forever hold, as Little Child had said that it holds, that tiny, wandering spirit....

Liva Vesey and Timothy had lingered, too, and we passed them on the bridge, he still trying to win her eyes, and his own eyes fleeing precipitantly whenever she looked up. The two seemed leaning upon the winged light, the calm stretches of the Pump pasture, the brown sand bar, the Caledonia hills. And the lovers and the quiet river and the village, roof upon roof, in the trees of the other shore, and most of all Miggy and her shadowy Margaret seemed to me like the words of some mighty cosmic utterance, with the country evening for its tranquil voice.

V DIFFERENT

Those who had expected the circus procession to arrive from across the canal to-day were amazed to observe it filing silently across the tracks from the Plank Road. The Eight Big Shows Combined had arrived in the gray dawn; and word had not yet gone the rounds that, the Fair Ground being too wet, the performance would "show" in the Pump pasture, beyond the mill. There was to be no evening amusement. It was a wait between trains that conferred the circus on Friendship at all.

Half the country-side, having brought its lunch into town to make a day of it, trailed as a matter of course after the clown's cart at the end of the parade, and about noon arrived in the pasture with the pleasurable sense of entering familiar territory to find it transformed into unknown ground. Who in the vicinity of the village had not known the Pump pasture of old? Haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles, it had lain expressionless as the hills, for as long as memory. When in spring, "Where you goin'? Don't you go far in the hot sun!" from Friendship mothers was answered by, "We're just goin' up to the Pump pasture for vi'lets" from Friendship young, no more was to be said. The pasture was as dependable as a nurse, as a great, faithful Newfoundland dog; and about it was something of the safety of silence and warmth and night-in-a-trundle-bed.

And lo, now it was suddenly as if the pasture were articulate. The great elliptical tent, the strange gold chariots casually disposed, the air of the hurrying men, so amazingly used to what they were doing—these gave to the place the aspect of having from the first been secretly familiar with more than one had suspected.

"Ain't it the divil?" demanded Timothy Toplady, Jr., ecstatically, as the glory of the scene burst upon him.

Liva Vesey, in rose-pink cambric, beside him in the buckboard, looked up at his brown Adam's apple—she hardly ever lifted her shy eyes as far as her sweetheart's face—and rejoined:—

"Oh, Timmie! ain't it just what you might say great?"

"You'd better believe," said Timothy, solemnly, "that it is that."

He looked down in her face with a lifting of eyebrows and an honest fatuity of mouth. Liva Vesey knew the look—without ever having met it squarely, she could tell when it was there, and she promptly turned her head, displaying to Timothy's ardent eyes tight coils of beautiful blond crinkly hair, a little ear, and a line of white throat with a silver locket chain. At which Timothy now collapsed with the mien of a man who is unwillingly having second thoughts.

"My!" he said.

They drove into the meadow, and when the horse had been loosed and cared for, they found a great cottonwood tree, its leaves shimmering and moving like little banners, and there they spread their lunch. The sunny slope was dotted with other lunchers. The look of it all was very gay, partly because the trees were in June green, and among them windmills were whirling like gaunt and acrobatic witches, and partly because it was the season when the women were brave in new hats, very pink and very perishable.

The others observed the two good-humouredly from afar, and once or twice a tittering group of girls, unescorted, passed the cottonwood tree, making elaborate detours to avoid it. At which Liva flushed, pretending not to notice; and Timothy looked wistfully in her face to see if she wished that she had not come with him. However, Timothy never dared look at her long enough to find out anything at all; for the moment that she seemed about to meet his look he always dropped his eyes precipitantly to her little round chin and so to the silver chain and locket. And then he was miserable.

It was strange that a plain heart-shaped locket, having no initials, could make a man so utterly, extravagantly unhappy. Three months earlier, Liva, back from a visit in the city, had appeared with her locket. Up to that time the only personality in which Timothy had ever indulged was to mention to her that her eyes were the colour of his sister's eyes, whose eyes were the colour of their mother's eyes and their father's eyes, and of Timothy's own, and "Our eyes match, mine and yours," he had blurted out, crimson. And yet, even on these terms, he had taken the liberty of being wretched because of her. How much more now when he was infinitely nearer to her? For with the long spring evenings upon them, when he had sat late at the Vesey farm, matters had so far advanced with Timothy that, with his own hand, he had picked a green measuring-worm from Liva's throat. Every time he looked at her throat he thought of that worm with rapture. But also every time he looked at her throat he saw the silver chain and locket. And on circus day, if the oracles seemed auspicious, he meant to find out whose picture was worn in that locket, even though the knowledge made him a banished man.

If only she would ever mention the locket! he thought disconsolately over lunch. If only she would "bring up the subject," then he could find courage. But she never did mention it. And the talk ran now:—

"Would you ever, ever think this was the Pump pasture?" from Liva.

"No, you wouldn't, would you? It don't look the same, does it? You'd think you was in a city or somewheres, wouldn't you now? Ain't it differ'nt?"

"Did you count the elephants?"

"I bet I did. Didn't you? Ten, wa'n't it? Did you count the cages? Neither did I. And they was too many of 'em shut up. I don't know whether it's much of a circus or not—" with gloomy superiority—"they not bein' any calliope, so."

"A good many cute fellows in the band," observed Liva. For Liva would have teased a bit if Timothy would have teased too. But Timothy replied in mere misery:—

"You can't tell much about these circus men, Liva. They're apt to be the kind that carouse around. I guess they ain't much to 'em but their swell way."

"Oh, I don't know," said Liva.

Then a silence fell, resembling nothing so much as the breath of hesitation following a faux pas, save that this silence was longer, and was terminated by Liva humming a little snatch of song to symbolize how wholly delightful everything was.

"My!" said Timothy, finally. "You wouldn't think this was the Pump pasture at all, it looks so differ'nt."

"That's so," Liva said. "You wouldn't."

It was almost as if the two were inarticulate, as the pasture had been until the strange influences of the day had come to quicken it.

While Liva, with housewifely hands, put away the lunch things in their basket, Timothy nibbled along lengths of grass and hugged his knees and gloomed at the locket. It was then that Miggy and Peter passed them and the four greeted one another with the delicate, sheepish enjoyment of lovers who look on and understand other lovers. Then Timothy's look went back to Liva. Liva's rose-pink dress was cut distractingly without a collar, and the chain seemed to caress her little throat. Moreover, the locket had a way of hiding beneath a fold of ruffle, as if it were her locket and as if Timothy had no share in it.

"Oh," cried Liva, "Timmie! That was the lion roared. Did you hear?"

Timothy nodded darkly, as if there were worse than lions.

"Wasn't it the lion?" she insisted.

Timothy nodded again; he thought it might have been the lion.

"What you so glum about, Timmie?" his sweetheart asked, glancing at him fleetingly.

Timothy flushed to the line of his hair.

"Gosh," he said, "this here pasture looks so differ'nt I can't get over it."

"Yes," said Liva, "it does look differ'nt, don't it?"

Before one o'clock they drifted with the rest toward the animal tent. They went incuriously past the snake show, the Eats-'em-alive show, and the Eastern vaudeville. But hard by the red wagon where tickets were sold Timothy halted spellbound. What he had heard was:—

"Types. Types. Right this way AND in this direction for Types. No, Ladies, and no, Gents: Not Tin-types. But Photo-types. Photographs put up in Tintype style AT Tintype price. Three for a quarter. The fourth of a dozen for the fourth of a dollar. Elegant pictures, elegant finish, refined, up-to-date. Of yourself, Gents, of yourself. Or of any one you see around you. And WHILE you wait."

Timothy said it before he had any idea that he meant to say it:—

"Liva," he begged, "come on. You."

When she understood and when Timothy saw the momentary abashment in her eyes, it is certain that he had never loved her more. But the very next moment she was far more adorable.

"Not unless you will, Timmie," she said, "and trade."

He followed her into the hot little tent as if the waiting chair were a throne of empire. And perhaps it was. For presently Timothy had in his pocket a tiny blurry bit of paper at which he had hardly dared so much as glance, and he had given another blurry bit into her keeping. But that was not all. When she thanked him she had met his eyes. And he thought—oh, no matter what he thought. But it was as if there were established a throne of empire with Timothy lord of his world.

Then they stepped along the green way of the Pump pasture and they entered the animal tent, and Strange Things closed about them. There underfoot lay the green of the meadow, verdant grass and not infrequent moss, plantain and sorrel and clover, all as yet hardly trampled and still sweet with the breath of kine and sheep. And three feet above, foregathered from the Antipodes, crouched and snarled the striped and spotted things of the wild, with teeth and claws quick to kill, and with generations of the jungle in their shifting eyes. The bright wings of unknown birds, the scream of some harsh throat of an alien wood, the monkeys chattering, the soft stamp and padding of the elephants chained in a stately central line along the clover—it was certain, one would have said, that these must change the humour of the pasture as the companionship of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind. That the pasture, indeed, would never be the same, and that its influence would be breathed on all who entered there. Already Liva and Timothy, each with the other's picture in a pocket, moved down that tent of the field in another world. Or had that world begun at the door of the stuffy little phototype tent?

It was the cage of bright-winged birds that held the two. Timothy stood grasping his elbows and looking at that flitting flame and orange. Dare he ask her if she would wear his phototype in her locket—dare he—dare he——

He turned to look at her. Oh, and the rose-pink cambric was so near his elbow! Her face, upturned to the birds, was flushed, her lips were parted, her eyes that matched Timothy's were alight; but there was always in Timothy's eyes a look, a softness, a kind of speech that Liva's could not match. He longed inexpressibly to say to her what was in his heart concerning the locket—the phototype—themselves. And Liva herself was longing to say something about the sheer glory of the hour. So she looked up at his brown Adam's apple, and,

"Think, Timmie," she said, "they're all in the Pump pasture where nothin' but cows an' robins an' orioles ever was before!"

"I know it—I know it!" breathed Timothy fervently. "Don't seem like it could be the same place, does it?"

Liva barely lifted her eyes.

"It makes us seem differ'nt, too," she said, and flushed a little, and turned to hurry on.

"I was thinkin' that too!" he cried ecstatically, overtaking her. But all that Timothy could see was tight coils of blond, crinkled hair, and a little ear and a curve of white throat, with a silver locket chain.

Down the majestic line of the elephants, towering in the apotheosis of mere bulk to preach ineffectually that spirit is apocryphal and mass alone is potent; past the panthers that sniffed as if they guessed the nearness of the grazing herd in the next pasture; past the cage in which the lioness lay snarling and baring her teeth above her cubs, so pathetically akin to the meadow in her motherhood; past unknown creatures with surprising horns and shaggy necks and lolling tongues—it was a wonderful progress. But it was as if Liva had found something more wonderful than these when, before the tigers' cage, she stepped forward, stooped a little beneath the rope, and stood erect with shining eyes.

"Look!" she said. "Look, Timmie."

She was holding a blue violet.

"In front of the tigers; it was growing!"

"Why don't you give it to me?" was Timothy's only answer.

She laid it in his hand, laughing a little at her daring.

"It won't ever be the same," she said. "Tigers have walked over it. My, ain't everything in the pasture differ'nt?"

"Just as differ'nt as differ'nt can be," Timothy admitted.

"Here we are back to the birds again," Liva said, sighing.

Timothy had put the violet in his coat pocket and he stood staring at the orange and flame in the cage: Her phototype and a violet—her phototype and a violet.

But all he said, not daring to look at her at all, was:—

"I can't make it seem like the Pump pasture to save me."

There is something, as they have said of a bugle, "winged and warlike" about a circus—the confusions, the tramplings, the shapes, the keen flavour of the Impending, and above all the sense of the Untoward, which is eternal and which survives glamour as his grave survives a man. Liva and Timothy sat on the top row of seats and felt it all, and believed it to be merely honest mirth. Occasionally Liva turned and peered out through the crack in the canvas where the side met the roof, for the pure joy of feeling herself alien to the long green fields with their grazing herds and their orioles, and at one with the colour and music and life within. And she was glad of it all, glad to be there with Timothy. But all she said was:—

"Oh, Timmie, I hope it ain't half over yet. Do you s'pose it is? When I look outside it makes me feel as if it was over."

And Timothy, his heart beating, a great hope living in his breast, answered only:—

"No, I guess it'll be quite some time yet. It's a nice show. Nice performance for the money, right through. Ain't it?"

When at length it really was over and they left the tent, the wagons from town and country-side and the "depot busses" had made such a place of dust and confusion that he took her back to the cottonwood on the slope to wait until he brought the buckboard round. He left her leaning against the tree, the sun burnishing her hair and shining dazzlingly on the smooth silver locket. And when he drove back, and reached down a hand to draw her up to the seat beside him, and saw her for a moment, as she mounted, with all the panorama of the field behind her, he perceived instantly that the locket was gone. Oh, and at that his heart leaped up! What more natural than to dream that she had taken it off to slip his phototype inside and that he had come back too soon? What more natural than to divine the reality of dreams?

His trembling hope held him silent until they reached the highway. Then he looked at the field, elliptical tent, fluttering pennons, streaming crowds, and he observed as well as he could for the thumping of his heart:—

"I kind o' hate to go off an' leave it. To-morrow when I go to town with the pie-plant, it'll look just like nothin' but a pasture again."

Liva glanced up at him and dropped her eyes.

"I ain't sure," she said.

"What do you mean?" he asked her, wondering.

But Liva shook her head.

"I ain't sure," she said evasively, "but I don't think somehow the Pump pasture'll ever be the same again."

Timothy mulled that for a moment. Oh, could she possibly mean because....

Yet what he said was, "Well, the old pasture looks differ'nt enough now, all right."

"Yes," assented Liva, "don't it?"

Timothy had supper at the Vesey farm. It was eight o'clock and the elder Veseys had been gone to prayer-meeting for an hour when Liva discovered that she had lost her locket.

"Lost your locket!" Timothy repeated. It was the first time, for all his striving, that he had been able to mention the locket in her presence. He had tried, all the way home that afternoon, to call her attention innocently to its absence, but the thing that he hoped held fast his intention. "Why," he cried now, in the crash of that hope, "you had it on when I left you under the cottonwood."

"You sure?" Liva demanded.

"Sure," Timothy said earnestly; "didn't—didn't you have it off while I was gone?" he asked wistfully.

"No," Liva replied blankly; she had not taken it off.

When they had looked in the buckboard and had found nothing, Timothy spoke tentatively.

"Tell you what," he said. "We'll light a lantern and hitch up and drive back to the Pump pasture and look."

"Could we?" Liva hesitated.

It was gloriously starlight when the buckboard rattled out on the Plank Road. Timothy, wretched as he was at her concern over the locket, was yet recklessly, magnificently happy in being alone by her side in the warm dusk, and on her ministry. She was silent, and, for almost the first time since he had known her, Timothy was silent too—as if he were giving his inarticulateness honest expression instead of forcing it continually to antics of speech.

From the top of the hill they looked down on the Pump pasture. It lay there, silent and dark, but no longer expressionless; for instantly their imagination quickened it with all the music and colour and life of the afternoon. Just as Timothy's silence was now of the pattern of dreams.

He tied the horse, and together they entered the field by the great open place where the fence had not yet been replaced. The turf was still soft and yielding, in spite of all the treading feet. The pasture was girdled by trees—locusts and box-alders outlined dimly upon the sky, nest-places for orioles; and here and there a great oak or a cottonwood made a mysterious figure on the stars. One would have said that underfoot would certainly be violets. A far light pricked out an answer to their lantern, and a nearer firefly joined the signalling.

"I keep thinkin' the way it looked here this afternoon," said Liva once.

"That's funny, so do I," he cried.

Under the cottonwood on the slope, its leaves stirring like little banners, Timothy flashed his light, first on tufted grass, then on red-tasselled sorrel, then—lying there as simply as if it belonged there—on Liva's silver locket. She caught it from him with a little cry.

"Oh," she said, "I'm so glad. Oh, thank you ever so much, Timmie."

He faced her for a moment.

"Why are you so almighty glad?" he burst out.

"Why, it's the first locket I ever had!" she said in surprise. "So of course I'm glad. Oh, Timmie—thank you!"

"You're welcome, I'm sure," he returned stiffly.

She gave a little skipping step beside him.

"Timmie," she said, "let's circle round a little ways and come by where the big tent was. I want to see how it'll seem."

His ill-humour was gone in a moment.

"That's what we will do!" he cried joyously.

He walked beside her, his lantern swinging a little rug of brightness about their feet. So they passed the site of the big red ticket wagon, of the Eastern vaudeville, of the phototype tent; so they traversed the length where had stretched the great elliptical tent that had prisoned for them colour and music and life, as in a cup. And so at last they stepped along that green way of the pasture where underfoot lay the grass and the not infrequent moss and clover, not yet wholly trampled to dust; and this was where there had been assembled bright-winged birds of orange and flame and creatures of the wild from the Antipodes, and where Strange Things had closed them round.

The influence of what the pasture had seen must have been breathed on all who entered there that night: something of the immemorial freedom of bright birds in alien woods, of the ancestral kinship of the wild. For that tranquil meadow, long haunted of Jerseys and Guernseys and orioles, expressionless as the hills, dependable as a nurse, had that day known strange breath, strange tramplings, cries and trumpetings, music and colour and life and the beating of wild hearts—and was it not certain that these must change the humour of the place as the coming of the grotesque and the vast alters the humour of the mind? The field bore the semblance of a place exquisitely of the country and, here in the dark, it was inarticulate once more. But something was stirring there, something that swept away what had always been as a wind sweeps, something that caught up the heart of the boy as ancient voices stir in the blood.

Timothy cast down his lantern and gathered Liva Vesey in his arms. Her cheek lay against his shoulder and he lifted her face and kissed her, three times or four, with all the love that he bore her.

"Liva," he said, "all the time—every day—I've meant this. Did you mean it, too?"

She struggled a little from him, but when he would have let her go she stood still in his arms. And then he would have her words and "Did you?" he begged again. He could not hear what she said without bending close, close, and it was the sweeter for that.

"Oh, Timmie," she answered, "I don't know. I don't know if I did. But I do—now."

Timothy's courage came upon him like a mantle.

"An' be my wife?" he asked.

"An' be ..." Liva assented, and the words faltered away. But they were not greatly missed.

Timothy looked over the pasture, and over the world. And lo, it was suddenly as if, with these, he were become articulate, and they were all three saying something together.

When they turned, there was the lantern glimmering alight on the trodden turf. And in its little circle of brightness they saw something coloured and soft. It was a gay feather, and Timothy took it curiously in his hand.

"See, it's from one of the circus birds," he said.

"No!" Liva cried. "It's an oriole feather. One of the pasture orioles, Timmie!"

"So it is," he assented, and without knowing why, he was glad that it was so. He folded it away with the violet Liva had gathered that afternoon. After all the strangeness, what he treasured most had belonged to the pasture all the time.

"Liva!" he begged. "Will you wear the picture—my picture—in that locket?"

"Oh," she said, "Timmie, I'm so sorry. The locket's one I bought cheap in the city, and it don't open."

She wondered why that seemed to make him love her more. She wondered a little, too, when on the edge of the pasture Timothy stood still, looking back.

"Liva!" he said, "don't the Pump pasture seem differ'nt? Don't it seem like another place?"

"Yes," Liva said, "it don't seem the same."

"Liva!" Timothy said again, "it ain't the pasture that's so differ'nt. It's us."

She laughed a little—softly, and very near his coat sleeve.

"I 'most knew that this afternoon," she answered.

VI THE FOND FORENOON

This morning Miggy came by appointment to do a little work for me, and she appeared in some "best" frock to honour the occasion. It was a blue silk muslin, cut in an antiquated style and trimmed with tarnished silver passementerie. In it the child was hardly less distinguished than she had been in her faded violet apron. It was impossible for her to seem to be unconscious of her dress, and she spoke of it at once with her fine directness.

"I didn't have anything good enough to wear," she said. "I haven't got any good dress this summer till I get it made myself. I got this out of the trunk. It was my mother's."

"It suits you very well, Miggy," I told her.

"I thought maybe she'd like my wearing it—here," said Miggy, shyly. "You've got things the way she always wanted 'em."

We went in my workroom and sat among my books and strewn papers. A lighted theatre with raised curtain and breathless audience, a room which one wakens to find flooded by a gibbous moon, these have for me no greater sorcery than morning in a little book-filled room, with the day before me. Perhaps it is that I ought to be doing so many things that I take an idler's delight in merely attending to my own occupation.

While I wondered at what I should set Miggy, I looked for the spirit of the minute and tried not to see its skeleton. The skeleton was that I had here an inexperienced little girl who was of almost no use to me. The spirit was that whatever I chose to do, my work was delightful to me, and that to bring Miggy in contact with these things was a kind of adventure. It is, I find, seldom sufficient to think even of the body of one's work, which to-day proved to be in my case a search in certain old books and manuscripts for fond allusions. If one can, so to say, think in and out till one comes to the spirit of a task, then there will be evident an indeterminate sense of wings. Without these wings there can be no expression and no creation. And in the true democracy no work will be wingless. It will still be, please God, laborious, arduous, even heart-breaking, but never body-fettered, never with its birdlike spirit quenched. And in myself I would bring to pass, even now, this fair order of sweet and willing toil by taking to my hand no task without looking deep within for its essential life.

So it was with a sense not only of pleasure but of leisure that I established Miggy by the window with a manuscript of ancient romances and told her what to do: to look through them for a certain story, barely more than a reference, to the love of an Indian woman of this Middle West for her Indian husband, sold into slavery by the French Canadians. It is a simple story—you will find small mention made of it—but having once heard it the romance had haunted me, and I was fain to come on it again: the story of the wife of Kiala, fit to stand niched with the great loves of the world.

The morning sun—it was hardly more than eight o'clock—slanted across the carpet; some roses that Little Child had brought me before her breakfast were fresh on my table; and the whole time was like a quiet cup. In that still hour experience seemed drained of all but fellowship, the fellowship of Miggy and my books and the darling insistence of the near outdoors. Do you not think how much of life is so made up, free of rapture or anxiety, dedicated, in task or in pastime, to serene companionship?

I have said that for me there are few greater sorceries than morning, with the day before me, in a small book-filled room. I wonder if this is not partly because of my anticipations of the parentheses I shall take? Not recesses, but parentheses, which can flavour a whole day. I remember a beloved house in which breakfast and luncheon were daily observations looked forward to not so much for themselves, as that they were occasions for the most delightful interruptions. Dinner was a ceremony which was allowed to proceed; but a breakfast or a luncheon was seldom got through without one or two of us leaving the table to look up a stanza, or to settle if two words had the same derivation, or to find if some obsolete fashion in meanings could not yet be worn with impunity. It grieved the dear housewife, I remember, and we tried to tell her how much more important these things were than that our new potatoes should be buttered while they were hot. But she never could see it, and potatoes made us think of Ireland, and in no time we were deep in the Celtic revival and racing off to find "The Love Talker." I remember but one dinner interruption, and that was when we all left in the midst of the fish to go in the study and determine if moonlight shining through stained glass does cast a coloured shadow, as it did on St. Agnes' eve.... I suppose, in those days, we must have eaten something, though, save a certain deep-dish cherry pie I cannot remember what we ate; but those interruptions are with me like so many gifts, and I maintain that these were the realities. Those days—and especially the morning when we read through the "Ancient Mariner" between pasting in two book plates!—taught me the precious lesson that the interruption and not the task may hold the angel. It was so that I felt that morning with Miggy; and I know that what we did with that forenoon will persist somewhere when all my envelopes of clippings are gone to dust.

After a time I became conscious that the faint rustling of the papers through which I was looking was absorbed by another sound, rhythmic, stedfast. I looked out on my neighbour's lawn, and at that moment, crossing my line of vision through the window before which Miggy was seated, I saw Peter, cutting my neighbour's grass. I understood at once that he had chosen this morning for his service in order to be near Miggy. It all made a charming sight,—Peter, bareheaded, in an open-throated, neutral shirt, cutting the grass there beyond Miggy in her quaint dress, reading a romance. I forgot my work for a little, and watched for those moments of his passing. Miggy read on, absorbed. Then, for a little, I watched her, pleased at her absorption.

Sometimes, from my window, I have looked down on the river and the long yellow sand bar and the mystery of the opposite shore where I have never been, and I have felt a great pity that these things cannot know that they are these things. Sometimes, in the middle of a summer night, when the moon is so bright that one can see well within one's own soul, I have fancied that I have detected an aroma of consciousness, of definite self-wonder, in the Out-of-doors. Fleetingly I have divined it in the surprise of Dawn, the laughter of a blue Forenoon, the girlish shyness of Twilight. And this morning I wanted self-wonder for Miggy and Peter. What a pity that they could not see it all as I saw it: the Shelley-like boy cutting the grass and loving this girl, in her mother's gown. But you must not suppose, either, that I do not know how that vast unconsciousness of Nature and Love flows with a sovereign essence almost more precious than awareness.

"Miggy," I said presently, "Peter is not at work to-day. That is he cutting grass."

She looked out briefly.

"He's got two days off coming to him," she answered. "It's for overtime. This must be one of 'em. Have you read these stories?"

"Yes," I said, "I have. Miggy, don't you want to go and ask Peter to have lunch with us at twelve?"

"Oh, no, thank you," she dismissed this. "This isn't the day I see him."

"But wouldn't you like it?" I pressed the matter curiously. "Just we three at luncheon alone?"

She was turning the leaves of the manuscript and she looked up to set me right.

"Oh, you know," she said, "I don't know Peter that way at all. I just know him to have him walk home with me, or call, or go walking. Peter never eats with me."

Poor Peter, indeed, to be denied the simple intimacy of sometimes breaking bread with Miggy. I understood that to invite a man to "noon lunch" in the village was almost unheard of, but,

"I think he would eat this noon if he never ate before," said I. To which Miggy made answer:—

"If you have read all these stories will you—wouldn't you—tell me some, please? I can't bear to think of having to wait to read 'em before I know 'em!"

She shut the book and leaned her chin in her hand and looked at me. And the idea of having Peter with us for lunch drifted out of the room, unattended.

I maintain that one who loves the craft of letters for its own sake, one who loves both those who have followed it and the records that they have left, and one who is striving to make letters his way of service, must all have acted in the same way; and that was the way that I took. In these days when Helen and Juliet are read aloud to children while they work buttonholes in domestic science class, think of the pure self-indulgence of coming on a living spirit—I say a living spirit—who had never heard of the beloved women of the world. I wonder if we could not find such spirits oftener if we looked with care? When I see certain women shopping, marketing, jolting about in busses, I am sometimes moved to wonder if they know anything about Nicolete and, if they were to be told, whether it would not rest them.

I love it, I love this going back into old time and bringing out its sweet elements. I have said that there is a certain conservatism in which, if I let my taste have its way with me, I would luxuriate, as I might then indulge my love of the semi-precious stones, or of old tiling, or of lilies-of-the-valley, all day long. And it is so that my self-indulgence would lead me to spend my days idling over these shadowy figures in the old romances and the old biographies. The joy of it never leaves me. Always from these books drifts out to me the smoke of some hidden incense that makes the world other. Not that I want the world to be that way, but I like to pretend. I know now that in a world where one must give of one's utmost, spend and be spent if one is even to pay for one's keep, these incense hours must be occasional, not to say stolen. So that to find a Miggy to whom to play preceptor of romance was like digging a moonstone out of the river bank.

What did I tell her? Not of Helen or Cleopatra or Isolde or Heloise or Guinevere, because—why, I think that you would not have told her of these, either. Of Beatrice and Brunhilde and Elaine and Enid I told her, for, though these are so sad, there beat the mighty motives, seeds of the living heart. Last I told her, of Nicolete and of Griselda and of Psyche and of the great sun of these loves that broke from cloud. She listened, wrapt as I was wrapt in the telling. Was it strange that the room, which had been like a quiet cup for serene companionship, should abruptly be throbbing with the potent principles of the human heart? I think that it was not strange, for assuredly these are nearer to us than breathing, instant to leap from us, the lightning of the soul, electric with life or with death. We are never very far from strong emotion. Even while I recounted these things to Miggy, there, without my window, was Peter, cutting the grass.

When I had done, "Is there more like that in books?" asked Miggy.

Oh, yes; thank heaven and the people who wrote them down, there are in books many more like these.

"I s'pose lots didn't get into the books at all," said Miggy, thoughtfully.

It is seldom that one finds and mourns a bird that is dead. But think of the choir of little bright breasts whose raptures nobody hears, nobody misses, nobody remembers. How like them we are, we of the loving hearts.

"I wouldn't wonder if there's lots of folks being that way right, right now," concluded Miggy.

Who am I that I should doubt this?

"A tournament," said Miggy, dreamily; "I s'pose that was something like the Java entertainment is going to be."

She slipped to one side of the big chair and laid both hands on its arm.

"Listen," she said. "Would this be one? You know Delly Watson that's crazy? She was in love with Jem Pitlaw, a school teacher that used to be here, an' that died, an' that wasn't in love with her even if he had stayed living, and it did that to her. You know ... she talks about things that nobody ever heard of, and listens, and laughs at what she thinks she hears. Ain't that like Elaine?"

Yes, if poor Delly Watson of the village had had a barge and a dwarf and a river winding from towered city to towered city, she would not have been unlike Elaine.

"And Jerry, that sets up folks's stoves and is so in love with the music teacher that he joined the chorus and paid his dues and set in the bass corner all winter to watch her and he can't sing a note. And she don't even see him when she passes him. Ain't that like Beatrice and the Pale Man?"

Jerry is so true and patient, and our young music teacher is so fair, that no one could find it sacrilege to note this sad likeness.

"And Mis' Uppers that her husband went out West and she didn't get any word, and he don't come, and he don't come, and she's selling tickets on the parlour clock, and she cries when anybody even whistles his tunes—isn't that some like Brunhilde, that you said about, waiting all alone on top of the mountain? I guess Brunhilde had money, but I don't think Mis' Uppers' principal trouble is that she ain't. With both of 'em the worst of it must 'a' been the waiting."

And I am in no wise sure that that slow-walking woman in the pointed gray shawl may not have a heart which aches and burns and passions like a valkyr's.

"And Mame Wallace, that her beau died and all she's got is to keep house for the family, and keep house, and keep house. It seems as if she's sort of like Psyche, that had such an awful lot of things to do—and her life all mussed up."

Perhaps it is so that in that gaunt Mame Wallace, whose homing passion has turned into the colourless, tidy keeping of her house, there is something shining, like the spirit of Psyche, that would win back her own by the tasks of her hand.

"And then there's Threat Hubbelthwait," said Miggy, "that gets drunk and sets in his hotel bar fiddling, and Mis' Hubbelthwait shoves him his meals in on to the cigar show-case and runs before he throws his bow at her—she's just exactly like those two——"

"Enid or Griselda?" I recognized them, and Miggy nodded. Poor Mis' Hubbelthwait! Was she not indeed an Enid, lacking her beauty, and a Griselda, with no hope of a sweet surprise of a love that but tested her? Truly, it was as Miggy said: in some form they were all there in the village, minus the bower and the silken kirtle, but with the same living hearts.

And these were not all.

"Miggy," I said, "what about Liva Vesey and Timothy? Did you count them?" For Aucassin and Nicolete were happy and so are Liva and Timothy, and I think that they have all understood meadows.

Miggy looked startled. One's own generation never seems so typical of anything as did a generation or two past.

"Could they be?" she asked. "They got engaged the night of the circus Liva told me—everybody knows. Could they be counted in?"

Oh, yes, I assured her. They might be counted. So, I fancy, might all love-in-the-village, if we knew its authentic essence.

"Goodness," said Miggy, meditatively, "then there's Christopha and Allen last winter, that I was their bridesmaid, and that rode off in the hills that way on their wedding night. I s'pose that was like something, if we only knew?"

I could well believe that that first adventure of the young husband and wife, of whom I shall tell you, was like something sweet and bright and long ago.

"And what," I said to Miggy abruptly, "about Peter?"

"Peter?" repeated Miggy.

Why not Peter?

She looked out the window at him.

"Why," she said, "but he's now. Peter's now. And he wears black clothes. And he's cutting grass...."

True for Peter, to all these impeachments. I told her that, in his day, Aucassin was now, too; and that he wore the clothes of his times, and that if he did not do the tasks nearest his hand, then Nicolete should not have loved him.

"And," said I, "unless I'm very much mistaken, in the same way that all the ancient lovers loved their ladies, Peter loves you."

"That way?" said Miggy, laying her hand on the manuscript.

"That way," said I. And a very good way it was, too.

Miggy put up both hands with a manner of pointing at herself.

"Oh, no," she said, "not me." Then her little shoulders went up and she caught her breath like a child. "Honest?" she said.

I said no more, but sat silent for a little, watching her across the fallen manuscript of ancient romances. Presently I picked up the sheets, and by chance my look fell on the very thing for which we had been searching: the story of the wife of Kiala, a Wisconsin Indian chief who was sold into slavery and carried to Martinique. And alone, across those hundreds of miles of pathless snow and sea, the wife of Kiala somehow followed him to the door of his West Indian owner. And to him she gave herself into slavery so that she might be with her husband.

I read the story to Miggy. And because the story is true, and because it happened so near and because of this universe in general, I was not able to read it quite so tranquilly as I should have wished.

"Oh," Miggy said, "is it like that?"

Yes, please God; if the heart is big enough to hold it, it is like that.

Miggy put her hand down quickly on the blue muslin dress she wore.

"My mother knew!" she said.

And that is the most wonderful thing of all: one's mother knew.

Miggy turned once more and looked out the window at Peter. Bless Peter! I think that he must have been over that grass with the mower quite twice—perhaps twice and a half. Almost immediately Miggy looked away from Peter, and I thought—though perhaps after all it was merely the faint colour that often hovers in her cheek. I felt, however, that if I had again suggested to Miggy that we ask Peter to lunch, Peter might possibly have lunched with us. But now I did not suggest it. No, if ever it gets to be "all Peter with Miggy," it must be so by divine non-interference.

My little voice-friend up there on the shelf, the Westminster chimes, struck twelve, in its manner of sweet apology for being to blame for things ending. In the village we lunch at twelve, and so my forenoon was done and even the simple tasks I had set were not all finished. I wonder, though, if deep within this fond forenoon we have not found something—wings, or a light, or a singing—that was of the spirit of the tasks? I wish that I thought so with reasons which I could give to a scientist.

At all events I am richly content. And over our luncheon Miggy has just flattered me unconscionably.

"My!" she said, "I should think everybody would want to be Secretary."

VII AFRAID

I must turn aside to tell of Allen and Christopha, that young husband and wife whose first adventure, Miggy thought, was like something sweet and bright and long ago. It happened this last winter, but I cannot perceive any grave difference between that winter night and this June. Believe me, the seasons and the silences and we ourselves are not so different as we are alike.

On the night of her wedding, Christopha threw her bouquet from the dining-room doorway, because there were no front stairs from which to throw it, but instead only a stairway between walls and to be reached from the dining room: a mere clerk of a stair instead of a proprietor-like hall staircase. In the confusion which followed—the carnations had narrowly missed the blazing white gas burner high in the room—the bride ran away above stairs, her two bridesmaids following. Her mother was already there, vaguely busy with vague fabrics. As Miggy had told me, she herself was one of Christopha's bridesmaids, and it is from Miggy that I have heard something of the outcome of the story.

Almost as soon as the door was closed there was a rap at it, a rap peremptory, confident.

"Let me in," said Allen; "I'm the groom!" Chris herself opened the door. Her muslin-wedding gown and the little bells of lilies unfaded in her blond hair became her wholly, and all her simple prettiness still wore the mystery and authority of the hour.

"Allen," she said, "you oughtn't to of."

"Yes, sir, I ought!" he protested gayly, his voice pleasant with mirth and with its new, deep note. "I'll never see you a bride again—a real, weddin'-dress bride. I had to come."

Christopha's mother looked up from her vague, bright fabrics.

"I thought you started to take the minister the kodak album," she said to Allen plaintively. "Has he got anybody to show him any attention? I should think you might—"

But the two bridesmaids edged their way into the next room, and on some pretext of fabrics, took Christopha's mother with them,—as if there were abroad some secret Word of which they knew the meaning. For Miggy is sufficiently dramatic to know the Word for another, though she is not sufficiently simple to know it for herself.

Allen sat beside his bride on the cretonne-covered skirt box. And after all, he did not look at her, but only at her warm left hand in his.

"It is the funniest thing," he said, "when I see you comin' in the parlour lookin' so differ'nt, I'm blessed if I wasn't afraid of you. What do you think of that?"

"You's afraid of my dress," Chris told him, laughing, "not me. You use' to be afraid of me when we's first engaged, but you ain't now. It's me. I feel afraid of you—Allen. You're—differ'nt."

He laughed tenderly, confidently.

"Boo!" he said. "Now are you?"

"Yes," she answered seriously; "now."

"Chris!" he cried boyishly, "we're married! We're goin' to keep house."

"Oh," she said, "Allen! Think of the fun of puttin' the presents in the house—the dishes, and the glass, and the ornaments. There won't be another dinin' room in town like ours. Sideboard an' plate rail, an' the rug not tacked down."

Their thoughts flew to the little house, furnished and waiting, down the snowy street by the Triangle park: their house.

"Dinners, and suppers, and breakfas's—just us two by ourselves," Allen said. "And the presents. My!"

"Well, and company," she reminded him, "that's what I want. The girls in to tea in our own house."

"Yes," he assented. "Right away?" he wanted to know.

"No," she said, "not right away, Silly! We've got to buy curtains and things. I never thought I'd have so many presents," she went on happily. "They's two water pitchers alike. Bess says I can change hers. We'll take it to the City"—she gave a little bounce on the skirt box—"and see a show, a really, truly show."

"Sure we will," said he, magnificently. "And I'll take you to the place I told you about—where I got picked up."

The little bride nodded, her eyes softening almost maternally. It was as if that story were her own, the story of Allen, the little stray child picked up on the streets of the City by that good woman whom Chris had never seen. But the name of Sarah Ernestine was like a charm to Chris, for the woman had been to Allen father and mother both.

Chris bent down swiftly to his hands, closed over her own, and kissed them.

"Oh, Allen," she said, with a curious wistfulness, "will you always, always be just like you are now?"

"Well, I should say I would," he answered gently. "They's nobody like you anywheres, Chris. Mis' Chris, Mis' Allen Martin."

"Don't it scare you to say it?" she demanded.

"Yes, sir, it does," he confessed. "It's like sayin' your own name over the telephone. What about you? Will you always, too?"

"Yes," she said, "always. Only—"

"Only what?" he repeated anxiously.

"Oh," she said, "don't let's let any outside things come between us, Allen—like they do, like with Bess and Opie,—business and sewin',—that's what I'm afraid of," she ended vaguely.

"Well," he said, "I guess we ain't much afraid of each other, honey. I guess we're just afraid of what could come between us."

A voice, unconvincing, unimportant, a part of the inessential aspect of alien things, detached itself from the accompaniment in the next room, saying something responsible and plaintive about only an hour till train time.

"An hour," Allen said over, and put his arms about her, with boyish awkwardness for the sake of the crisp muslin gown that had so terrified him. She rose and stood beside him, and he waited for a moment looking up in her face. "Chris," he said, "I'm scared of this one hour even. Till train time."

"I'll hurry up and get the hour done as quick as I can," she promised him gayly.

"Honestly, now—" said Chris's mother from the vague and indeterminate region where she moved.

"Right off, Mis' Mother!" Allen said, and knew that she was in the doorway, with the bridesmaids laughing beside her. And then he went down the stairway, his first radiant moment gone by.

In the dining room the messenger was waiting. The messenger had arrived, in the clear cold of the night, from a drive across the Caledonia hills, and some one had sent him to that deserted room to warm himself. But Allen found him breathing on his fingers and staring out the frosty window into the dark. It was Jacob Ernestine, brother to the woman who had brought up Allen and had been kind to him when nobody else in the world was kind. For years Sarah Ernestine had been "West"—and with that awful inarticulacy of her class, mere distance had become an impassable gulf and the Silence had taken her. Allen had not even known that she meant to return. And now, Jacob told him, she was here, at his own home back in the hills—Sarah and a child, a little stray boy, whom she had found and befriended as she had once befriended Allen. And she was dying.

"She didn't get your letter, I guess," the old man said, "'bout gettin' married. She come to-day, so sick she couldn't hold her head up. I see she didn't know nothin' 'bout your doin's. I didn't let her know. I jus' drove in, like split, to tell you, when the doctor went. He says she can't—she won't ... till mornin'. I thought," he apologized wistfully, "ye'd want to know, anyways, so I jus' drove in."

"That was all right," Allen said. "You done right, Jacob."

Then he stood still for a moment, looking down at the bright figures of the carpet. Jacob lived twelve miles back in the hills.

"How'd you come?" Allen asked him briefly.

"I've got the new cutter," the old man answered, with a touch of eager pride. "I'll drive ye."

Then some one in the parlour caught sight of the bridegroom, and they all called to him and came where he was, besieging him with good-natured, trivial talk. The old man waited, looking out the window into the dark. He had known them all since they were children, and their merrymaking did not impress him as wholly real. Neither, for that matter, did Allen's wedding. Besides, his own sister was dying—somehow putting an end to the time when he and she had been at home together. That was all he had thought of during his drive to town, and hardly at all of Allen and his wedding. He waited patiently now while Allen got the wedding guests back to the parlour, and then slipped away from them, and came through the dining room to the stair door.

"Stay there a minute," Allen bade him shortly, and went back to the upper floor and to Chris's door again.

It was her mother who answered his summons this time, and Allen's manner and face checked her words. Before he had done telling her what had happened, Chris herself was on the threshold, already in sober brown, as one who has put aside rainbows and entered on life. She had a little brown hat in one hand, and for the other hand he groped out and held it while he told her, as well as he could.

"I guess I've got to go, Chrissie," he ended miserably.

She met his eyes, her own soft with sympathy for the plight of the other woman.

"Well, yes," she said quietly, "of course we've got to go."

He looked at her breathlessly. That possibility had not crossed his mind.

"You!" he cried. "You couldn't go, dear. Twelve miles out in Caledonia, cold as it is to-night. You—"

In spite of her sympathy, she laughed at him then.

"Did you honestly think I wouldn't?" she asked, in a kind of wonder.

"Well, I'm sure—" began her mother. But the two bridesmaids manifestly heard the Word again, for they talked with her both at once.

"Not with Jacob, though," Chris was saying decisively. "You help father and the boys get out our cutter, Allen."

Allen strode past the mother and lifted his wife's face in his hands.

"Do you mean it?" he demanded. "Will you go—in the cold—all that long way—"

"You Silly!" she answered, and drew away from him and set the little brown hat on her head.

The road lay white before them, twelve miles of snow and stars to Jacob's cottage among the Caledonia hills. Jacob had gone on—from the crest of the rise by the Corner church they saw him and heard the faint signalling of his bells. It was a place, that rise by the Corner church on the edge of the village, where two others in such case might have drawn rein to look at Everything, stretching before, rhythmic crest and shallow, and all silent and waiting. But not these two, incurious as the gods, naïve as the first lovers. Only, though of this they were unconscious, they saw things a little differently that night.

"Look!" said the girl, with a sign to the lowlands, expressive with lights. "So many folks's houses—homes, all started. I s'pose it was just as big a thing for them. But theirs don't seem like anything, side of ours!"

"That's so, too," assented Allen. "And theirs ain't anything side of ours!" he maintained stoutly.

"No, sir," she agreed, laughing.

Then she grew suddenly grave, and fell silent for a little, her eyes here and there on the valley lights, while Allen calculated aloud the time of the arrival at Jacob's house.

"Allen!" she said at last.

"Here!" he answered. "I'm here, you bet."

"Just look at the lights," she said seriously, "and then think. There's Bess and Opie—not speakin' to each other. Over there's the Hubbelthwait farm that they've left for the hotel—an' Threat Hubbelthwait drunk all the time. An' Howells's, poor and can't pay, and don't care if they can't, and quarrels so folks can hear 'em from the road. And the Moneys', that's so ugly to the children, and her findin' fault, and him can't speak without an oath. That only leaves the Topladys' over there that's real, regular people. And she kind o' bosses him."

"Well, now, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, looking at the lights with a difference.

Chris's right hand was warm in his great-coat pocket, and she suddenly snuggled close to him, her chin on his shoulder.

"Oh, Allen," she said, "I'm afraid!"

"What? On the Plank Road?" he wanted to know, missing her meaning.

"All them folks started out with presents, and a house, like us," she said, "and with their minds all made up to bein' happy. But just look at 'em."

"Well," said Allen, reasonably, "we ain't them."

"We might get like 'em," she insisted. "How can you tell? Folks just do get that way or they just don't. How can you tell?"

"I s'pose that's so, ain't it?" said Allen, thoughtfully.

"Mother's got a picture of the Hubbelthwaits when they was married," Chris pursued. "Her in white an' slippers and bracelets, and him slick as a kitten's foot. Think of her now, Allen, with bracelets. And him drunk all the time, 'most. How can you tell how things'll turn out? Oh, Allen, I am! I'm afraid."

He bent to her face and laid his own against hers, glowing and cold and with fresh, warm lips.

"Let's just try to be happy and keep ourselves happy," he said.

The troubled woman was still in her face, but at his touch the fears went a little away, and the valley lights being already left behind among the echoes of the bells, they forgot both the lights and their shadows and drifted back to talk about the new house and the presents, and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together. For these were the stuff of which the time was made. As it was made, too, of that shadowy, hovering fear for the future, and the tragic pity of their errand, and of sad conjecture about the little stray child whom Sarah Ernestine had brought.

"That ain't it a'ready, is it?" Christopha exclaimed when they saw Jacob's cottage.

"It just is—it's 'leven o'clock now," Allen answered, and gave the horse to the old man; and they two went within.

The light in the room, like the lights back in the valley, was as if some great outside influence here and there should part the darkness to win a little stage for a scene of the tragedy: in the valley, for the drunkenness at the Hubbelthwaits', the poverty at the Howells', the ill nature at the Moneys'; and here, in Jacob's cottage, for death. There was no doubt of the quality of the hour in the cottage. The room was instinct with the outside touch. Already it was laid upon the woman in the bed, and with a mystery and authority not unlike that which had come upon Christopha in her marriage hour and was upon her still.

The woman knew Allen, smiled at him, made him understand her thankfulness that he had come. At Christopha she looked kindly and quite without curiosity. Some way, that absence of curiosity at what was so vital to him gripped Allen's heart, and without his knowing the process, showed him the nature of death. The neighbour who had been with the sick woman slipped outside, and as she went she patted Chris's shoulder; and Allen felt that she understood, and he was dumbly grateful to her.

Allen sat by the bed and held the hand of his foster-mother; and Chris moved about the room, heating water for a little pot of tea. And so it was Chris who first saw the child. He was sitting at the end of the wood box, on the floor before the oven—that little stray boy whom Sarah Ernestine had picked up as she had once picked up Allen. He looked up at Christopha with big, soft eyes, naïve as the first bird. Almost before she knew that she meant to do so, Chris stooped, with a wondering word, and took him in her arms. He clung to her and she sat in the rocking chair near the window where stood Jacob's carnation plant. And she tried both to look at the child and to love him, at the same time.

"See, Allen," she said, "this little boy!"

The child looked over his shoulder at Allen, his little arms leaning on Christopha's breast. And very likely because he had felt strange and lonely and now was taken some account of, he suddenly and beautifully smiled, and you would have loved him the more for the way he did that.

The woman, lying with closed eyes, understood and remembered.

"Allen," she said, "that's little John. You find him—a home somewheres. If you can...."

"Why, yes, mother, we'll do that. We can do that, I guess. Don't you worry any about him," said Allen.

"He's all alone. I donno his name, even.... But you be good to him, Allen, will you?" she said restlessly. "I found him somewheres."

"Like me," Allen said.

She shook her head feebly.

"Worse," she said, "worse. I knew I couldn't—do much. I just—thought I could keep him from bein' wicked—mebbe."

"Like you did me, mother, I guess," the boy said.

Then she opened her eyes.

"Allen!" she said clearly. "Oh, if I did! When I think how mebbe I done that—I ain't afraid to die."

Jacob Ernestine came in the room and stood rubbing one hand on the back of the other. He saw the kettle's high column of steam and looked inquiringly at Chris. But she sat mothering the little silent boy, who looked at her gravely, or smiled, or pulled at her collar, responsive to her touch as she was thrillingly responsive to his nearness. So Jacob lifted the kettle to the back of the stove, moved his carnation plant a little away from the frost of the pane, and settled himself at the bed's foot to watch. And when, after a long time, the child fell asleep, Chris would not lay him down. Allen would have taken him, and Jacob came and tried to do so, but she shook her head and they let her be. She sat so still, hour after hour, that at last she herself dozed; and it seemed to her, in a manner of dreaming, that the carnation plant on the window-sill had lifted and multiplied until something white and like fragrance filled the room; and this, then, she dreamed, was what death is, death in the room for the woman. Or might it not be the perfume of her own bridal bouquet, the carnations which she had carried that night? But then the child stirred, and Christopha roused a little, and after all, the sense of flowers in the room was the sense of the little one in her arms. As if many things mean one thing.

It was toward dawn that the end came, quite simply and with no manner of finality, as if one were to pass into another chamber. And after that, as quickly as might be, Christopha and Allen made ready to drive back to the village for the last bitter business of all.

Allen, in the barn with Jacob, wondered what he must do. Allen was sore-hearted at his loss, grateful for the charge that he had been given; but what was he to do? The child ought not to stay in Jacob's cottage. If Chris's mother would take him for a little,—but Allen knew, without at all being able to define it, her plaintive, burdened manner, the burdened manner of the irresponsible. Still puzzling over this, he brought the cutter to the side door; and the side door opened, and Chris came out in the pale light, leading the little boy—awake, warmly wrapped, ready for the ride.

"Where you goin' to take him to, Chrissie?" Allen asked breathlessly.

"Some of the neighbours, I guess, ain't we?" she answered. "I donno. I thought we could see. He mustn't be left here—now."

"No, that's so, ain't it?" said Allen only. "He mustn't."

The three drove out together into the land lying about the gate of dawn. A fragment of moon was in the east. There was about the hour something primitive, as if, in this loneliest of all the hours, the world reverted to type, remembered ancient savage differences, and fell in the primal lines.

"Allen," Chris said, "you'll miss her. I mean miss knowin' she's alive."

"Yes," the boy said, "I'll miss knowin' she's alive."

"Well, we must try to settle what to do with the little boy," she suggested hastily.

"Yes," he assented, "that's right. We've got to settle that," and at this they fell silent.

"There's Hopkins's," Chris said presently, nodding toward the home of the neighbour who had waited their coming to Jacob's cottage. "But she'll hev to be over there lots to-day and to-morrow. And she was kep' up so late it don't hardly seem as if we'd ought to stop and ask her."

"No," Allen said, "I donno as it does, really."

"There's Cripps's," she suggested a little farther on, "but they ain't up yet. I donno's 'twould do to roust 'em up."

"No," Allen agreed, "best not do that, I guess." Christopha looked over the great fields.

"My!" she said, "you'll miss her—miss thinkin' of her bein' somewheres. Allen! Where do you s'pose she is?"

"I thought o' that," said Allen, soberly.

"Goodness!" said Christopha, and shivered, and suddenly drew the child close to her. He was sleeping again. And it was so, with his little body between them, that she could no longer keep her hand warm in Allen's greatcoat pocket. But above the child's head her eyes and Allen's would meet, and in that hour the two had never been so near. Nearer they were than in the talk about the new house, and the presents, and the dinners and suppers and breakfasts together.

They passed the farmhouses that looked asleep, and the farmhouses that looked watchfully awake while their owners slept. It would not be well to knock at these, still and sombre-windowed. And though there were lights at the Moneys' and at the Howells' and at the Hubbelthwait farm, and even at Bess and Opie's, their gates, by common consent, were also passed. Nor did they stop at the Topladys'.

"They're real, regular people with a grown son," Chris said of them vaguely, "and it don't seem hardly fair to give 'em little John, too!"

"Little John," Allen said over wonderingly. When they called him that the child seemed suddenly a person, like themselves. Their eyes met above his head.

"Allen!" Chris said.

"What? What is it?" he asked eagerly.

"Could—do you think—could we?" she demanded.

"My!" he answered, "I been a-wishin'—"

Involuntarily he drew rein. They were on the rise by the Corner church at the edge of the village. The village, rhythmic crest of wall and shallow of lawn, lay below them, and near the little Triangle park would be their waiting house.

"Did you mean have him live with us?" Allen made sure.

"Yes, I did," Chris said, "if we had the money."

"Well!" said the boy, "well, I guess that'll be all right!"

"How much she'd of liked it," said Chris.

"Wouldn't she, though," Allen assented; "wouldn't she? And you heard what she said—that about keepin' him from bein'—wicked? Chrissie—could we, you and me? This little fellow?"

Chris lifted her face and nodded.

"I ain't afraid," she said simply.

"I ain't either," her husband said.

As if, in this new future, there were less need of fear than in the future which had sought to "try to be happy and keep ourselves happy."

They looked down where their house would be, near the gate of the coming dawn. And—as two others in such case might have seen—it was as if they were the genii of their own mysterious future, a future whose solution trembled very near. For with the charge of the child had come a courage, even as the dead woman had known, when she thought of her charge of Allen, that she was not afraid to die.

"Allen," said Chris, stumblingly, "it don't seem as if we could get like the Howells' an' the Hubbelthwaits and them. Somehow it don't seem as if we could!"

"No," said Allen, "we couldn't. That's so, ain't it?"

Above little John's head their eyes met in a kind of new betrothal, new marriage, new birth. But when he would have driven on, Allen pulled at the reins again, and,

"Chrissie," he said suddenly, "if afterwards—there should be anybody—else. I mean for us. Would—would you keep on lovin' this little kiddie, too?"

She met his eyes bravely, sweetly.

"Well, you Silly," she said, "of course I would!"

At which Allen laughed joyously, confidently.

"Why, Chris," he cried, "we're married! For always an' always. An' here's this little old man to see to. Who's afraid?"

Then they kissed each other above the head of the sleeping child, and drove on toward the village, and toward their waiting house.

VIII THE JAVA ENTERTAINMENT

When I opened my door this morning, the Outdoors was like a thing coming to meet me. I mean that it was like a person coming to meet me—no, it was like many persons, hand in hand and, so to speak, mind in mind; a great company of whom straightway I became one. I felt that swift, good gladness that now was now,—that delicate, fleeting Now, that very coquette of time, given and withdrawn. I remember that I could not soon go to sleep on the night of the day on which I learned that the Hebrew tongue has no present tense. They could not catch at that needle-point of experience, and we can do so. I like to glory in it by myself when no one else is thinking of it; to think aside, as if to Something, that now is being now.... And I long for the time when we shall all know it together, all the time, and understand its potentialities and let it be breath and pulse to keep the Spirit Future alive and pure.

It would have been no great wonder if I had been rejoicing past all reason in the moment. For at that very instant came Calliope Marsh, home for the Java entertainment which was set for to-night, and driving to my gate the Sykes's white horse in the post-office store delivery wagon. And as I saw her, so precisely did she look like herself, that I could have believed that Now was not Now, but Then, when first I knew her.

Calliope brought the buckled lines informally over the horse's head and let them fall about the tie post, and ran to me. I am afraid that I am not going to tell what we said. But it was full of being once more in the presence of those whom you love. Do you not think that such being together is a means of actual life transcending both breath and perception?

When our greeting was done, Calliope sat down on the stair in my hall, and,

"Hev you got any spare candle-shades an' sherbet glasses, an' pretty doilies an' lunch cloths an' rugs an' willow chairs an' a statue of almost anybody an' a meat-chopper with a peanut-butter attachment an' a cap an' gown like colleges?" she demanded.

And when I told her that I thought I might have some of these things,

"Well," Calliope said, "she wants 'em all. Who do I mean by She? Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson, the personal queen of things."

She leaned forward, hugging her thin little arms, and she looked up at me from under the brim of her round straw hat.

"I'm in need of grace," she said shortly. "I never felt like this toward any human being. But I tell you, when that little Mis' Johnson comes dilly-nippin' around where I am, noddin' her blue ostrich tip, seems my spine just stiffens out in me like it was going to strike at her, same as a stick. Do you know the feelin'?"

I answered reluctantly, and not as I should wish to answer; for it is certain that I, too, have seldom seen Mrs. Johnson without an urgency to be gone from her little fluttering presence. But Calliope! I could not imagine Calliope shrinking from any one, or knowing herself alien to another.

"For sixty years," she answered my thought of her, "I've never known what it was to couldn't bear anybody, not without I had a reason. They ain't much of anybody I what you might say don't like, without they're malicious or ugly a-purpose. Ugly by nature, ugly an' can't help it, ugly an' don't know it—I can forgive all them. An' Mis' Johnson ain't ugly at all—she's just a real sweet little slip of a thing, doin' her hard-workin' best. But when I first see her in church that day, I says to myself: 'I'll give that little piece two months to carry the sail she's carryin' here to-day; four months to hev folks tired of her, an' six months to get herself the cold shoulder all 'round.' An' I hold to what I said. An' when her baby-blue nineteen-inch feather swings in an' 'round, an' when she tells how things ought to be, I kind o' bristle all over me. I'm ashamed of it—an' yet, do you know, I like to give in to it?" Calliope said solemnly. "I donno what's come over me. Hev you heard where the Java entertainment's put to be?"

I had not heard, nor was I sure just why it was of Java, save that Friendship is continually giving entertainments with foreign names and practising a wild imperialism to carry out an effect of foreign parts. And since, at the missionary meeting which had projected the affair, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had told about their Java entertainment in their church at home, that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was president of the society, had appointed her chairman of the Java entertainment committee.

"And," Calliope informed me, "she's picked out the engine-house for it. Yes, sir,—the fire-engine house. No other place was quaint enough. No other place lent itself to decoration probabilities—or somethin' like that. She turned her back flat on the church an' went round to empty stores, lookin' for quaint-ity. One while I thought she'd hev us in the Chinese laundry, she seemed that took with the tomato-coloured signs on the walls. But, finally, she lit on the engine-house; an' when she see the big, bare engine-room, with the big, shinin' engine in it, an' harnesses hangin' from them rough board beams in a kind of avenoo, an' the board walls all streaked down, she spatted her hands an' 'lowed we'd hev our Java there. 'What a dear, quaint place,' s's she,—'so flexible!' She held out about the harnesses bein' so quaintly picturesque an' the fire-engine a piece o' resistance—or somethin' like that. An' she rents the room, without ay, yes, no, nor boo. My way of thinkin', a chairman ought to hev boo for a background, even if she is chairman. That's where she wants the statue an' the nut butter an' the cap an' gown. Can we borrow 'em of you?"

"The engine-house!" I repeated incredulously. "You cannot mean the fire-engine house, Calliope?"

"I do," Calliope said firmly, "the quaint, flexible fire-engine house. They ain't been a fire in Friendship in over two years, so Mis' Johnson says we ain't got that to think of—an' I donno as we hev. An' they never use the engine any more, now they've got city water, excep' for fires in the country, and then nobody ever gets in to give the alarm till the house is burned down an' no need to bother goin'. Even if they do get in in some sort of season, the department has to go to the mayor to get a permit to go outside the city limits. It was so when the Topladys' barn burned. Timothy told 'em, when they come gallopin' up after it was most done smokin', that if they had held off a little longer they could have been a sight of help to him in shinglin' the new one. Oh, no, they ain't much of any danger of our being disturbed by a fire in them two hours to-night. Anyhow, they can't be a fire. Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson said so."

We laughed like children as we loaded my "Java" stuffs on the wagon. Calliope was a valiant helper to Mrs. Johnson, and so I told her. She was standing in the wagon box, one arm about my palm, the other free for driving.

"I'm the chairman o' the refreshments, too," she confessed. "Oh, well. Yourself you can boss round, you know," she threw back, smiling; "anybody can do that. But your feelin's you're some cramped about runnin'."

It is certain that Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was signally unfitted for a future in Friendship Village. She was a woman of some little world in which she had moved before she came to us, and in the two worlds she perceived no difference. Or, where she saw a difference, she sought to modify it by a touch when a breath would have been too much, and the only factor of potency would have been a kind of potency of spirit, which she did not possess.

The Oliver Wheeler Johnsons had moved to Friendship only three months before, and nobody had looked for them at church on their first Sunday. "Movin' so, you want your Sabbath to take some rest in, an' you ain't expected to dress yourself up an' get out to Sunday service an' face strangers," the village said—and when the two walked into church while the responses were being made nearly everybody lost the place.

They were very young, and they were extremely well dressed.

"He's got on one o' the long coats," comment ran after church, "an' he's got a real soft-speakin' voice. But he seems to know how to act."

And, "I declare, nice white gloves an' a nineteen-inch baby-blue ostrich feather durin' movin' seems some like puttin' on."

And, "The back of her dress fits her just like the front, an' I must say she knows it. No pullin' down the jacket or hitchin' the strings forward for her, when she stands up!"

As Miggy, who first told me about that day, had said, "That Sunday morning, Mis' Oliver Wheeler Johnson was the belle of the congregation."

After service that day, instead of going directly home or waiting to be addressed, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had spoken to the woman with whom she had been seated. It was Mis' Postmaster Sykes.

"Thank you so much," Mrs. Johnson said, "for letting us share your pew. May I present my husband? We have come to Friendship to live, and we shall be coming here to church. And I shall want to join your Ladies' Aid Society and your Missionary Circle and, perhaps, be in the Sunday-school right away. I—I think I'll be less homesick—"

"Actually," Mis' Sykes said afterward, "she took my breath clear away from me. I never heard of such a thing. Of course, we're real glad to hev our newcomers Christian people, but we want quiet Christians. An' did you notice how she was when I give her an introduction around? Why, she up an' out with somethin' to say to everybody. Just a neat little 'How d' do' wouldn't do for her to remark. I always suspicion them talkative-at-first kind. It's like they'd been on the stage or brought up in a hotel."

When she first came to the Ladies' Aid and the missionary meetings, Mrs. Johnson "said something." She was "up to her feet" three or four times at each session with suggestion, information, or description of how they did in her home church. And some way I think that what chiefly separated her from the village was the way that inevitable nineteen-inch blue ostrich plume on the little woman's hat bobbed and won attention and was everywhere at once. Or, perhaps—such creatures of wax we are to our impressions—it may have been little Mrs. Johnson's mere way of lifting her small, pointed chin when she talked, and of frowning and over-emphasizing. Or it may have been that she stood with her hands clasped behind her in what seemed to Friendship exaggerated ease, or that she smiled arbitrarily and ingratiatingly as she talked when there was absolutely nothing at which to smile. I think that these made her seem as alien to us as, in varied measure, certain moral defects might have done.

Moreover, she mentioned with familiarity objects and usages of which Friendship Village knew nothing: Carriage shoes, a new cake of soap for each guest, some kind of ice served, it was incredulously repeated, "in the middle o' the meal!" She innocently let fall that she sent to the city for her letter-paper. She had travelled in a state-room on a train, and she said so. She knew a noted woman. She used, we saw from the street, shaded candles on the table when she and her husband were at supper alone. She thought nothing of ordering Jimmy Sturgis and the bus to take her down town to her marketing on a rainy day. She had inclined to blame the village that Daphne Street was not paved, instead of joining with the village to blame somebody else. Above all, she tried to buy our old furniture. I do not know that another might not have done all these quite without giving offence, and, indeed, rather have left us impressed with her superior familiarity with an envied world. But by the time of the Java entertainment Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson had innocently alienated half Friendship Village. And this morning Calliope merely voiced what I knew to be the sentiment of most of Mrs. Johnson's neighbours and acquaintances. For these people are the kindly of earth; but they are of earth, where reign both the centrifugal and centripetal forces,—and the control is not always so swift as science and the human heart could wish.

At five o'clock to-day—the day set for the Java evening entertainment—I made my way to the engine-house. This was partly because I wished to be as much as possible with Calliope during her few days in the village, and partly it was because the affair would belong to the class of festivity which I am loath to miss, and I think that, for Friendship's sake, I will never willingly pass by a "hall" in which is to be found a like diversion. Already on the great room, receiving its final preparation, had descended something of the excited spirit of the evening: the heat, the insufficient light, the committee members' shrill, rollicking children sliding on the floor, the booths which in all bazaars contain with a precision fairly bewildering the same class of objects; and the inevitable sense of hurry and silk waists and aching feet and mustn't-take-your-change-back. But to all these things the Java engine-house affair would add an element of novelty, almost a flavour of romance. Certainly the room lent itself to "decoration probabilities," as Calliope had vaguely quoted; it had been a roller-skating rink, utilized by the fire-department on the decline of the pastime, and there was, as Mrs. Johnson's pièce de résistance, the fire-engine.

I had never before been in the engine-house—you know how there will be commonplace enough spots in your own town to which you never go: the engine-house, the church belfry, the wood yard, upstairs over this store and that, and grocery cellars whose sloping trap-doors, open now and then to the walk, are as alien as the inside of the trunks of your trees. When I stepped in the engine-house, it seemed insistently a place in which I had never been before. And this may have been partly because the whole idea of a village fire-department is to me singular: the waiting horses and ladders and hose, whose sole reason for being is merely ameliorative, and never human and preventive; that pealing of the sharp, peculiar, terrifying alarm and summons first imprinting something on the very air, stabbing us with Halt while we count the bell strokes for the ward, and then clanging the wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help.

To-day the great glittering fire-engine, flanked by hose-cart and hook-and-ladder wagon, occupied almost wonderingly the head of the room which had been invaded, and an inspired committee had garlanded the engine with paper roses and American flags. The flag of the Netherlands, copied from a dictionary and wrought in red-white-and-blue cambric with a silver crown, drooped meditatively from the smoke-stack; a scarlet fez and a peacock-feather fan hung on the supply hose; and on the tongue-bracer was fixed a pink sofa cushion from Mis' Amanda Toplady's parlour, with an olive Indian gentleman in a tinsel zouave jacket stamped on the cover. On the two big sliding doors, back of which stood the fire company's horses, were tacked innumerable Javanese trifles more picturesque than authentic; and on outlying booths and tables there were others. Directly before the engine was to be the tea-table, where Mis' Postmaster Sykes was to serve Java tea from a Java canister, loaned by the Post-office store.

As soon as I entered I sought out Calliope's booth, a huge affair constructed of rugs whose red-tongued, couchant dogs and bounding fawns somewhat marred the Eastern effect. And within, I found myself in a circle of the Friendship women whom I know best—all of them tired with that deadly tiredness born of a day's work at a church fair of any nation. But at once I saw that it was not merely fatigue which was disquieting them.

Calliope was leaning against a bit of Bagelen blue, loaned by the new minister's wife. And she said to me as if, I thought, in explanation of what I was to hear,—"I guess we're all pretty tired. Most of us look like we wanted to pant. I'm all of a shake, myself."

When Mis' Postmaster Sykes spoke unsmilingly, I understood:—

"It ain't the bein' tired," she disclaimed; "tired I can stand an' hev stood since my own birth. But it's the bein' commanded 'round—me, commanded—by that little I'm-the-one-an'-you-do-as-I-say out there!"

"Land-a-livin' an' a-dyin'!" said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "I declare if I know whether I'm on foot or on horseback. It's bad enough to hev to run a fair, without you've got to be run yourself, too. Ain't it enough for Mis' Johnson to be made chairman without her wantin' to boss besides? She might as well say to me, 'Mis' Holcomb, you do everything the opposite way from the way you've just done it,' an' hev it over with."

Mis' Amanda Toplady—even that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda—shook her head.

"Mis' Johnson surely acts used to bein' bowed down to," she admitted; "she seems fair bent on lordin' it. My land, if she wasn't bound to borrow my Tea rose plant that's just nearin' ready to bud."

Calliope laughed, a little ruefully, and wholly in sympathy.

"Honest," she said, "I guess what's the matter with all of us ain't so much what she does as the particular way she does it. It's so with some folks. They just seem to sort of set you all over, when you come near 'em—same as the cold does to gravy. We'd all ought to wrostle with the feelin', I expect."

"I expect we had," said Mis' Holcomb, "but you could wrostle all your days with vinegar an' it'd pucker your mouth same way."

"Funny part," Calliope observed, "everybody feels just alike about her. When she skips around so sort o' momentous, we all want to dodge. I felt sorry for her, first, because I thought she was in for nervous prostration. But after a while I see it wasn't disease—it was just her feelin' so up an' down significant, you might say."

"I donno," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, "but it's part the way she says her a's. That real a-soundin' a kind," she explained vaguely.

"She's so right an' left cuffy—I guess that's the whole thing," Calliope put it in her rich idiom.

"Well," said Mis' Amanda, sadly, "there must be somethin' we could like her for, even if it was only her husband."

"He ain't what I'd call much, either," Calliope dismissed Mr. Oliver Wheeler Johnson positively; "he's got too soft-speakin' a voice. I like a man's voice to rumble up soft from his chest an' not slip down thin from his brain."

I remember that I listened in a great wonder to these women whom I had seen at many an office of friendliness to strangers and aliens. Yet as I looked across the floor at that little Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson—who, in the hat with the blue plume, was everywhere, directing, altering, objecting, arranging, commanding and, especially, doing over—I most unwillingly felt much as they felt. If only Mrs. Johnson had not continually lifted her little pointed chin. If only she had not perpetually and ingratiatingly smiled when there was nothing at which to smile at all.

Then Abigail Arnold hurried up to us with a tray of cups for the Java tea.

"Calliope," she said to the chairman of the refreshments, "Mis' Johnson jus' put up her little chin an' says, 'What! ain't we no lemons for the tea?'"

Calliope compressed her lips and lifted their thin line tight and high.

"Lemins," she replied, "ain't necessarily found in Java. I've a good big mind to go home to bed."

Then we saw little Mrs. Johnson's blue linen dress hurrying toward us with the waving line of the blue feather above her, like a last little daring flourish by the artist of her. She was really very pretty and childish, with a manner of moving in wreaths and lines and never in solids. Her little feet twinkled along like the signature to the pretty picture of her. But yet she was not appealing. She was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet. Yes, I understand that I sound like a barbarian in these days of splendid corrective treatment of children who are studied and not stormed at. And in this treatment I believe to the uttermost. And yet, overconfidence in a child is of all things the most—I will amend what I said: Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson was like an overconfident child whom you long to shut in a closet because of your ignorance of what else on earth to do. No doubt there is a better way, but none of us knew it. And she came toward us intent, every one felt, on some radical change in arrangements, though the big room was now in the pink of appointment and ready to be left while the committee went home to sup on "just sauce and bread-and-butter," and to don silk waists.

We saw little Mrs. Johnson hurrying toward us, upon a background of the great, patient room, all-tolerant of its petty bedizening. And then Mrs. Johnson, we in Calliope's booth, the sliding, rollicking children, and all the others about stood still, at the sharp, peculiar terrifying alarm and summons which seemed to imprint something on the very air, stabbing us with Halt that we might count the bell strokes for the ward, and clanging a wild fury of the quick-stroke command to help. For the first time in two years the Friendship fire alarm was sounding from the tower above our heads.

There was a panting sweep and scurry for the edges of the room, as instantly a gong on the wall sounded with the alarm, and the two big sliding doors went back, scattering like feathers the innumerable Javanese trifles that had been tacked there. Forward, down the rug-hung vista, plunged the two big horses of the department. We saw the Java tea-table borne to earth, the Javanese exhibits adorning outlying counters swept away, and all the "decoration probabilities" vanish in savage wreck. Then the quaintly picturesque harnesses fell to the horses' necks, their hoofs trampled terrifyingly on the loose boards of the floor, and forth from the yawning doors the horses pounded, dragging the pièce de résistance, with garlands on its sides, the pink zouave cushion crushed beneath it, and the flag of the Netherlands streaming from the stack. Horses rushed thither in competition, came thundering at the doors, and galloped to place before the two carts. I think not a full minute can have been consumed. But the ruin of the Java entertainment committee's work was unbelievably complete. Though there had been not a fire in Friendship Village in two years, that night, of all nights, Jimmy Sturgis's "hay-barn," for the omnibus horses, "took it on itself," it was said, "to go to work an' burn up." And Jimmy's barn is outside the city limits, so that the pièce de résistance had to be used. And Jimmy is in the fire-department, so that the company galloped informally to the rescue without the benefit of the mayor's authority.

As the last of the department disappeared, and the women of the committee stood looking at one another—tired with the deadly tiredness of a day such as theirs—a little blue linen figure sprang upon a chair and clasped her hands behind her, and a blue ostrich feather lifted and dipped as she spoke.

"Quickly!" Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson cried. "All hands at work now! Mrs. Sykes, will you set up the tea-table? You can get more dishes from my house. Mrs. Toplady, this booth, please. You can make it right in no time. Mrs. Holcomb, you will have to do your booth entirely over—you can get some things from my house. Miss Marsh—ah, Calliope Marsh, you must go to my house for my lace curtains—"

She smiled ingratiatingly and surely arbitrarily, for we all knew full well that there was absolutely nothing to smile at. And with that Calliope's indignation, as she afterward said, "kind of crystallized and boiled over." I remember how she stood, hugging her thin little arms and speaking her defiance.

"I donno how you feel, Mis' Johnson," she said dryly, "but, my idea, Bedlam let loose ain't near quaint enough for a Java entertainment. Nor I don't think it's what you might say real Java, either. Things here looks to me too flexible. I'm goin' home an' go to bed."

There was no doubt what the rest meant to do. With one impulse they turned toward the door as Calliope turned, and silently they took the way that the pièce de résistance had taken before them. Little Mrs. Johnson stood on her chair making many gestures; but no one went back.

Calliope looked straight before her.

"My feet ache like I done my thinkin' with 'em," she said, "an' my head feels like I'd stood on it. An' what's it all for?"

"Regular clock performance," Mis' Postmaster Sykes assented. "We've ticked hard all day long an' ain't got a thing out of it. I often think it's that way with my housework, but I did think the Ladies' Missionary could tick, when it did tick, for eternity. I'm tuckered to the bone."

"Nobody knows," said Mis' Holcomb-that-was Mame-Bliss, "how my poor neck aches. It's there I suffer first an' most."

Mis' Amanda Toplady, who was walking behind the rest, took three great steps and caught us up and spoke, a little breathlessly:—

"Land, land," she said, "I guess I'll go home an' pop some corn. Seems to me it'd smell sort of cosy an' homelike an' soothin' down. It's a grand thing to smell when you're feelin' far off from yourself."

Calliope laughed a little then.

"Well," she said, "anyhow I ain't got my silk waist to get into—and I didn't hev a nice one to put on anyway. I was wishin' I had, and now my wish has come true by bein' took away from me, bodily—like they will. But just the same—"

She turned on the walk and faced us, and hugged her thin little arms.

"A while ago," she said, "I give that little woman there six months to get herself the cold shoulder all around. Well, the time ain't up yet—but both my shoulders feels stone cold!"

IX THE COLD SHOULDER

There is something more about Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.

Did you ever look through an old school-book of your own and, say, on the history picture of Vesuvius in eruption impose your own memory of Pompeii, visited in these twenty years since you studied about it; and have you not stared hard at the time between and felt yourself some one other than that one who once dreamed over the Vesuvius picture? Or, years after you read the Letters, you have made a little mark below Cicero's cry from exile, "Oh, that I had been less eager for life!" and you look at the cry and at the mark, and you and one of these become an anachronism—but you are not sure which it is that so becomes. So now, in reading over these notes some while after I have set them down, I am minded here to give you my look ahead to the end of the summer and to slip in some account of what happened as a closing of the tale. And I confess that something about me—perhaps it is the Custodian herself—likes this way of pretending a freedom from time and of looking upon its fruit to say which seeds have grown and which have not.

Friendship Village is not superstitious, but when curious coincidences occur we do, as we say, "take down note." And it did seem like a judgment upon us that, a little time after the Java fiasco, and while indignation was yet at high noon, Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson fell ill.

At first I think we affected not to know it. When she did not appear at church, none of us mentioned it for a Sunday or two. Then when some one casually noted her absence we said, "Oh, wasn't she? Got little cold, likely." That we saw her no more down town or "brushing up" about her door we facilely laid to chance. When the village heard that her maid—who always offended by talking almost in a whisper—had once or twice excused her mistress to callers, every one shut lips and hardened hearts and said some folk acted very funny about their calling duties. But when, at the twelve o'clock breakfast of the new minister's wife—("Like enough breakfast at noon was a real Bible custom," the puzzled devotees solved that amazing hour), Mrs. Johnson did not appear, the village was forced to admit that something must be wrong.

Moreover, against its will the behaviour of young Mr. Johnson was gravely alarming Friendship. Mr. Johnson was in real estate and insurance in the city, and this did not impress the village as a serious business. "Because, what does he sell!" as Abigail Arnold said. "We know he don't own property. He rents the very house they live in. A doctor's a doctor an' he gives pills, an' a store's a store with the kind o' thing you need. But it don't seem like that man could make a real good livin' for her, dealin' vague in nothin' that way." His income, it was felt, was problematical, and the village had settled it that what the Oliver Wheeler Johnsons' had was chiefly wedding presents "an' high-falutin' tastes." But, in the face of the evidence, every afternoon at three o'clock the young husband ordered a phaëton from Jimmy Sturgis and came home from the city to take his wife to drive. Between shutters the village saw that little Mrs. Johnson's face did look betrayingly pale, and the blue ostrich plume lay motionless on her bright hair.

"I guess Mis' Johnson's real run down," her acquaintances said to one another uneasily. Still we did not go to see her. The weeks went by until, one morning, Calliope met the little new Friendship doctor on the street and asked him about his patient.

"I up an' ask' him flat out," Calliope confessed afterward; "not that I really cared to be told, but I hated to know I was heathenish. You don't like the feelin'. To know they ain't heathens is all that keeps some folks from bein' 'em. Well, so I ask' him. 'Doctor Heron,' s'I, 'is that Mis' Johnson real sick, or is she just sickish?' He looks at me an'—'Looks pretty sick, don't she?' s'e. 'Well,' s'I, 'I've seen folks look real rich that wa'n't it by right-down pocketbook evidence.' 'Been to see her?' s'e. 'No,' s'I, short. 'Might drop in,' s'e, an' walks off, lookin' cordial. That little Doctor Heron is that close-mouthed I declare if I don't respect him same as the minister an' the pipe-organ an' the skippin' hills."

So, as midsummer passed and found the little woman still ailing, I obeyed an idle impulse and went one evening to see her. I recall that as soon as I had crossed her threshold the old influence came upon me, and I was minded to run from the place in sheer distaste of the overemphasis and the lifted, pointed chin and the fluttering importances of her presence. I was ashamed enough that this should be so, but so it was; and I held my ground to await her coming to the room only by a measure of will.

I sat with Mrs. Johnson for an hour that evening. And it would seem that, as is the habit of many, having taken my own way I was straightway possessed to draw others after me. There are those who behave similarly and who set cunningly to work to gain their own ends, as, for example, I did. For one night soon I devised a little feast, which I have always held to be a good doorway to any enterprise, and, at the Friendship-appointed supper hour of six, I made my table as fair as possible, as has been done in like case ever since butter was first served "in a lordly dish." And my guests were Calliope, without whom no festival is wholly in keeping, and Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, and Mis' Postmaster Sykes, and that great, tolerant Mis' Amanda Toplady.

Because they had arrived so unsuspectingly I own myself to have felt guilty enough when, in that comfortable half-hour after a new and delectable dessert had been pronounced upon, I suggested with what casualness I might summon that we five pay a visit that night to Mrs. Oliver Wheeler Johnson.

"Land!" said Mis' Holcomb, "I've thought I would an' then I've thought I wouldn't till I feel all two-faced about myself. I donno. Sometimes I think one way an' sometimes I think the other. Are you ever like that?"

"I s'pose," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, majestically, "that them in our position ought to overlook. I donno's 'twould hurt us any to go," she added graciously.

Calliope's eyes twinkled.

"That's it," she said; "let them that's got the social position to overlook things be Christian an' overlook 'em."

That great Mis' Amanda Toplady folded her hands, dimpled like a baby giant's.

"I'd be glad to go," she said simply; "I've got some grape jell that looks to me like it wasn't goin' to keep long, an' I'd be thankful to be on terms with her so's I could carry it in to her. They ain't a single other invalid in Friendship."

Calliope sprang to her feet and crossed her little arms, a hand hugging either shoulder.

"Well said!" she cried; "do let's go! I'm sick to death of slidin' off the subject whenever it comes up in my mind."

So, in the fair October dusk, we five went down the Plank Road—where Summer lingers late. The air was gentle with the soft, impending dark. I wonder why the colonnade of sweet influences, down which we stepped, did not win us to themselves. But I remember how, instead, our imminent visit drew us back to the days of Mrs. Johnson's coming, so that presently we were going over the incident of the Java entertainment, and, as Calliope would have put it, "crystallizing and boiling over" again in the old distaste.

But when we reached the little cottage of the Johnsons, our varied motives for the visit were abruptly merged in a common anxiety. For Doctor Heron's buggy stood at the gate and the little one-story cottage was dark save for a light in what we knew to be a corner bedroom. The hallway was open to the night, but though we could distinctly hear the bell jingle in the kitchen no one answered the summons. Then, there being somewhere about a murmur of voices, Calliope stepped within and called softly:—

"Doctor, Doctor Heron—you there? Is they anything we can do?"

The doctor came momentarily to the lighted doorway down the hall.

"That you, Calliope?" he said. "You might come here, will you? Tell the rest to sit down somewheres. And you tell Mr. Johnson he can come."

On which, from out the dark living room, some one emerged very swiftly and without a word pushed by us all where we were crowded in the passage and strode down to the little lighted chamber. Calliope hurried after him, and we four shrank back in sudden dread and slipped silently into the room which the young husband had left, and stood together in the dimness. Was she so sick? In that room he must have heard the door-bell as we had heard it, and yet he had not answered. Was it possible that we had come too late?

While we waited we said nothing at all, save that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, who said three times or four, "Oh, dear, oh, dear, I'm always waitin' till somethin's too late—either me or the other thing." It seemed very long before we heard some stir, but it can have been only a few minutes until the doctor came down the little hall and groped into the room. In answer to all that we asked he merely occupied himself in lighting a match and setting it deliberately to the candles on the table and adjusting their shades. They were, we noted afterward, the same candles whose presence we had detected and derided at those long ago tête-à-tête suppers in that house. The light glowed on the young doctor's pale face as he looked at us, each in turn, before he spoke. And when he had done with his slow scrutiny—I think that we cannot wholly have fancied its accusation—he said only:—

"Yes, she's pretty sick. I can't tell yet."

Then he turned and closed the outer door and stood leaning against it, looking up the hall.

"Miss Marsh!" he called.

But why did the man not tell us something, we wondered; and there flashed in my mind Calliope's reference to the pipe-organ and the skipping hills. At all events, Calliope would tell us.

And so she did. We heard her step in the hall, coming quickly and yet with a manner of exceeding care. I think that with the swift sense which wings before intelligence, the others understood before they saw her, even as I understood. Calliope stopped in the doorway as if she could trust herself to go no farther. And she was holding something in her arms.

"Calliope," we said; "Calliope...."

She looked down at that which she held, and then she looked at us. And the tears were in her eyes, but her face was brighter than I have ever known it.

"It's a baby," she said, "a little bit of a baby. Her baby. An' it makes me feel—it makes me feel—oh," she broke off, "don't it make you feel that way, too?"

We looked at one another, and avoided one another's look, and then looked long at the baby. I do not remember that we said anything at all, or if we did so, that it bore a meaning. But an instant after Calliope gave the baby to the nurse who appeared in the doorway, we all tiptoed down to the kitchen by common consent. And it was plain that Mrs. Johnson's baby made us feel that way, too.

In our desire to be of tardy service we did the most absurd things. We took possession of the kitchen, rejoicing that we found the supper dishes uncared for, and we heated a great kettle of water, and washed and wiped and put away, as softly as we could; and then we "brushed up around." I think that only the need of silence kept us from cleaning windows. When the nurse appeared—who had arrived that day unknown of Friendship—we sprang as one to do her bidding. We sent the little maid to bed, we tidied the living room, walking tiptoe, and then we went back through the kitchen and sat down on the little side "stoop." And all this time we had addressed one another only about the tasks which we had in hand.

After a little silence,

"The milkman was quite late this morning," observed Mis' Holcomb.

"Well, he's begun to deliver in cans instead o' bottles," Mis' Sykes explained; "it takes him some longer to get around. He says bottles makes his wife just that much more to do."

Then we fell silent again.

It was Calliope, sitting on the porch step outside, where it was dark, who at last had the courage to be articulate.

"I hope—I hope," she said, "she's goin' to be all right."

Mis' Sykes shaded her eyes from the bracket lamp within.

"I'll go bail," she said, "that little you-do-as-I-say chin'll carry her through. I'm glad she's got it."

Just then we heard the thin crying of the child and we could divine Calliope, that on the step where she sat she was hugging her arms and rocking somewhat, to and fro.

"Like enough," she said, "oh, like enough—folks ain't so cramped about runnin' their own feelin's as they think they are!"

To this we murmured something indefinite in sound but positive enough in sense. And we all knew what we all knew.

"Let's go out around the house to the front gate," said that great Mis' Amanda Toplady, abruptly. "Have any of you ladies got two handkerchiefs?"

"I've got two," said Mis' Postmaster Sykes, "an' I ain't used either one. Do you want the one with essence or the one without?"

"I ain't partial," said Mis' Amanda.

We rose and stumbled along the grassy path that led round the house. At the gate we met Doctor Heron.

"Well," he said slowly, "well." And after a moment, "Will—will any of you be here in the morning?" he asked.

"Yes," we all said simply.

"That's good," he commented shortly, "I didn't know."

We five had to separate at the first corner to go our home ways, and we stood for a moment under the gas-light. I remember how, just then, Peter's father came singing past us, like one of the Friendship family who did not understand his kinship. Even as we five had not understood ours.

"You haven't got a shawl, hev you?" Mis' Sykes said to me solicitously.

"The nights have been some chilly on a person's shoulders for a day or two now," said Mis' Holcomb.

Calliope put her hand up quickly to her throat.

"Quit," she said. "All of you. Thank God. An' shake hands. I tell you, after this I bet I'll run my own feelin's about folks or I'll bring down the sky an' make new feelin's! Oh," said Calliope, "don't her—an' now—an' the baby—an'—oh, an' that bright star winkin' over that hitchin' post, make things seem—easy? Good night. I can't stand out here any longer."

But when we had gone away a few steps, Calliope called us back. And as we turned again,

"To bring down the sky," she repeated, "I bet that's the way God meant us to do. They ain't any of us got enough to us to piece out without it!"

X EVENING DRESS

I have said that Daphne Street has been paved within the past year, but I had not heard of the manner in which the miracle had been wrought until the day when Calliope's brief stay in the village ended and she came to tell me good-by—and, more than incidentally, to show me some samples of a dress which she might have, and a dress which she wouldn't have, and a dress which she had made up her mind to have.

"We don't dress much here in Friendship Village," she observed. "Not but what we'd like to, but we ain't the time nor the means nor the places to wear to. But they was one night—"

She looked at me, as always when she means to tell a story, somewhat with the manner of asking a permission.

"None of the low-neck' fashion-plates used to seem real to us," she said. "We used to look at 'em pinned up in Lyddy Ember's dressmakin' windows, ah-ahing in their low pink an' long blue, an' we'd look 'em over an' think tolerant enough, like about sea-serpents. But neither the one nor the other bit hold rill vital, because the plates was so young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we was old an' busy, like you get, an' considered past the dressin' age. Still, it made kind of a nice thing to do on the way home from the grocery hot forenoons—draw up there on the shady side, where the street kitters some into a curve, an' look at Lyddy's plates, an' choose, like you was goin' to get one.

"Land knows we needed some oasises on that street from the grocery up home. Daphne Street, our main street, didn't always use' to be what it is now—neat little wooden blocks an' a stone curb. You know how it use' to be—no curb an' the road a sight, over your shoe-tops with mud in the wet, an' over your shoe-tops with sand when it come dry. We ladies used to talk a good deal about it, but the men knew it meant money to hev it fixed, an' so they told us hevin' it fixed meant cuttin' the trees down, an' that kept us quiet—all but the Friendship Married Ladies Cemetery Improvement Sodality.

"Mis' Postmaster Sykes was president o' the Sodality last year, you know,—she's most always president of everything,—an' we'd been workin' quite hard all that winter, an' had got things in the cemetery rill ship-shape—at least I mean things on the cemetery was. An' at one o' the July meetin's last summer Mis' Sykes up an' proposed that we give over workin' for the dead an' turn to the livin', an' pave the main street of Friendship Village.

"'True,' she says, 'our constitution states that the purpose of our Sodality shall be to keep up the graves of our townspeople an' make 'em attractive to others. But,' says she, 'when they ain't enough of us dead to occupy all the time, the only Christian way to remedy that is to work for folks before they die, while we're waitin' for their graves.'

"This seemed reasonable, an' we voted unanimous to pave Daphne Street. An' on the way home Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Timothy Toplady an' I see Timothy Toplady settin' in the post-office store, an' we went in to tell him an' Silas Sykes about it. But before we could start in, Silas says, eyebrows all eager, 'Ain't you heard?'

"'Heard what?' says his wife, kind o' cross, bein' he was her wedded husband an' she hadn't heard.

"''Bout Threat Hubbelthwait,' says Silas, lookin' at Mis' Toplady an' me, bein's Mis' Sykes was his wife. 'Drunk again,' says Silas, 'an' fiddlin' for dear life, an' won't let anybody into the hotel. Mis' Hubbelthwait has gone over to her mother's, an' the hired girl with her; an' Threat's settin' in the bar an' playin' all the hymn tunes he knows.'

"It wasn't the first time it had happened, you know. Threat an' his wife an' the hired girl keep the only hotel in Friendship Village—when Threat is sober. When he isn't, he sometimes closes up the house an' turns out whoever happens to be there, an' won't let a soul in—though, of course, not much of anybody ever comes to Friendship anyway, excep' now an' then an automobile on its way somewheres. An' there Threat will set in the bar, sometimes most of one week, sometimes most of two, an' scrape away on the only tunes he knows—all hymns, 'Just As I Am,' an' 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' Threat don't mean to be sacrilegious; he shows that by never singin' them two hymns in church, when they're give out.

"'Land!' says Mis' Sykes, when Silas got through, 'what men are!'

"'We ain't so much as woman, lemme tell you,' says Silas, right crisp. Which wasn't what he meant, an' we all laughed at him, so he was a little mad to start with.

"'The Sodality's decided to pave Daphne Street,' Mis' Sykes mentions then, simple.

"'Pave what?' shouts Silas—Silas always seems to think the more you do in sound the more you'll do in sense.

"'Do what to Daphne Street?' says Timothy, whirlin' from the peanut roaster.

"'Pave Daphne Street,' says Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' me, wonderin'.

"Silas wrapped his arms around his own shoulders.

"'When,' says he, lettin' his head lurch with his own emphasizin', 'did the Common Council hear about this?'

"'They ain't heard, about it,' says Mis' Sykes, 'no more'n we ever hear anything about them.'

"Silas an' Timothy is both aldermen, an' rill sensitive over it. I guess the Common Council always is a delicate subject, ain't it?

"Mebbe it wasn't a rill diplomatic way to begin, but it hadn't entered the Sodality's head that the town wouldn't be glad to hev the pavin' done if the Sodality was willin' to do it. Ain't it a hard thing to learn that it ain't all willingness, nor yet all bein' capable, that gets things done in the world? It's part just edgin' round an' edgin' round.

"What did the Common Council do that night but call a special meetin' an' vote not to order any city pavin' done that present year. Every member was there but Threat Hubbelthwait, who was fiddlin', an' every vote was switched by Silas an' Timothy to be unanimous, excep' Eppleby Holcomb's vote. Eppleby, we heard afterwards, said that when a pack o' women made up their minds to pave, they'd pave if it was to pave—some place that Eppleby hadn't ought to 'a' mentioned; an' he was goin' to be on the pavin' side. But then, Eppleby is the gentlest husband in Friendship Village, an' known to be.

"Sodality met special next day, not so much to do anything as to let it be known that we'd took action. This we done by votin' to lay low till such time as we could order the wooden blocks. We preferred to pave peaceable, it bein' hot weather.

"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss an' Mis' Mayor Uppers an' I walked home together from that meetin'. It was a blisterin' July afternoon—one of them afternoons that melts itself out flat, same as a dropped pepp'mint on a brick walk, an' you're left stickin' in it helpless as a fly, an' generally buzzin'. I rec'lect we was buzzin'—comin' down Daphne Street in that chokin' dust an' no pavement.

"'It's a dog's life, livin' in a little town—in some respects,' I remember Mis' Sykes says.

"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, tolerant, 'I know. I know it is. But I'd rather live in a little town an' dog it out than go up to the city an' turn wolf, same as some.'

"An' yet we all felt the same, every one of us. They ain't a woman livin' in a little place that don't feel the same, now and again. It's quiet an' it's easy housework, an' you get to know folks well. But oh, none of it what you might say glitters. An' they ain't no woman whatever—no matter how good a wife an' mother an' Christian an' even housekeeper she is—that don't, 'way down deep in her heart, feel that hankerin' after some sort o' glitter.

"So it was natural enough that we should draw up at Lyddy's dressmakin' window an' rest ourself. An' that afternoon we'd have done so, anyway, for she hed been pinnin' up her new summer plates—Lyddy don't believe in rushin' the season. An' no sooner had we got a good look at 'em—big coloured sheets they was, with full-length pictures—than Mis' Toplady leaned 'way forward, her hands on her knees, an' stood lookin' at 'em the way you look at the parade.

"'Well, look-a-there,' she says. 'Look at that one.'

"The one she meant was a woman with her hair all plaited an' fringed an' cut bias, an' with a little white hat o' lilacs 'bout as big as a cork; an' her dress—my land! Her dress was long an' rill light blue, an' seemed like it must have been paper, it was so fancy. It didn't seem like cloth goods at all, same as we hed on. It was more like we was wearin' meat an' vegetable dresses, an' this dress was dessert—all whipped cream an' pink sugar an' a flower on the plate.

"'Dear land!' says Mis' Toplady, lookin' 'round at us strange, 'do they do it when they get gray hair? I didn't know they done it when their hair was gray.'

"We all looked, an' sure enough, the woman's hair was white. 'Afternoon Toilette for Elderly Woman,' it said underneath, plain as plain. Always before the plates hed all been young an' smilin' an' party-seemin', an' we'd thought of all that as past an' done for, with us, along with all the other things that didn't come true. But here was a woman grayer than any of us, an' yet lookin' as live as if she'd been wearin' a housework dress.

"'Why,' says Mis' Sykes, starin', 'that must be a new thing this season. I never heard of a woman well along in years wearin' anything but brown or navy blue or gray,—besides black.' Mis' Sykes is terribly dressy, but even she never yet got anywheres inside the rainbow, except in a bow at the chin.

"'My,' says Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, wistful, 'wouldn't it seem like heaven to be able to wear colours without bein' talked about?'

"An' Mis' Mayor Uppers—her that her husband grew well off bein' mayor, an' never'd been back to Friendship Village since he was put out of office, she says low:—

"'You ladies that has husbands to keep thinkin' well of you, I should think you'd think about this thing. Men,' she says, 'loves the light shades.'

"At that Mis' Toplady turned around on us, an' we see her eyes expressin' i-dees.

"'Ladies,' says she, impressive, 'Mis' Uppers is right. We hadn't ought to talk back or show mad. We ladies of the Sodality had ought to be able to get our own way peaceable, just by takin' it, the way the Lord give women the weapons to do.'

"We see that somethin' was seethin' in her mind, but we couldn't work our way to what it was.

"'Ladies,' says she, an' stepped up on the wooden step to Lyddy's dressmakin' shop, 'has the husbands of any one of us seen us, for twenty years, dressed in the light shades?'

"I didn't hev any husband to answer for, but I could truthfully say of the rest that you'd think black an' brown an' gray an' navy had exhausted the Lord's ingenuity, for all the attention they'd paid to any other colour He'd wove with.

"'Let's the Sodality get up an evenin' party, an' hev it in post-office hall, an' invite our husbands an' buy new dresses—light shades an' some lace,' says Mis' Toplady, lettin' the i-dee drag her along, main strength.

"Mis' Sykes was studyin' the fashion-plate hungry, but she stopped an' stepped up side o' Mis' Toplady.

"'Well, sir,' she said, 'I donno but 'twould help us to work the pavin' of Daphne Street. Why, Silas Sykes, for one, is right down soft-hearted about clothes. He always notices which one of their waists the choir's got on. I heard him say once he wasn't goin' to church again till they bought somethin' new.'

"Mis' Holcomb nodded. 'Five years ago,' she said, 'I went up to the city with Eppleby. An' I saw him turn around to look after a woman. I'll never forget the sensation it give me—like I was married to a man that wasn't my husband. The woman had on a light pink dress. I know I come home an' bought a pink collar; I didn't think I could go any farther, because she was quite young. Do you s'pose....'

"Mis' Toplady pointed at Lyddy's fashion-plate. 'I should go,' she says, 'just as far as my money would let me go.'

"Mis' Uppers stood lookin' down to the walk. 'The mayor,' she says—she calls him 'the mayor' yet—'was terrible fond o' coloured neckties. He was rill partial to green ones. Mebbe I didn't think enough about what that meant....'

"Mis' Toplady came down off the step. 'Every man is alike,' says she, decided. 'Most of us Friendship ladies thinks if we give 'em a clean roller towel we've done enough towards makin' things pretty; an' I think it's time, as wives, we took advantage of the styles.'

"'An',' says Mis' Sykes, the president, rill dreamy for her, but firm, 'I think so, too.'

"I tell you, we all walked home feelin' like we'd hed a present—me too, though I knew very well I couldn't hev a light dress, an' I didn't hev any husband. You start out thinkin' them are the two principal things, but you get a-hold o' some others, if you pay attention. Still, I judged the ladies was on the right track, for men is men, say what who will. All but Threat Hubbelthwait. We passed the hotel an' heard him settin' in there by the bar scrapin' away on 'Can A Little Child Like Me?' We took shame to him, an' yet I know we all looked at each other sort of motherly, like he was some little shaver, same as he sung, an' performin' most fool.

"It don't take us ladies long to do things, when our minds is made. Especially it don't when Mis' Timothy Toplady is chairman of the Entertainment Committee, or the Doin' Committee of whatever happens, like she was that time. First, we found out they was plenty enough nun's veilin' in the post-office store, cheap an' wide an' in stock an' all the light shades; an' I bought all the dresses, noons, of the clerk, so Silas wouldn't suspect—me not hevin' any husband to inquire around, like they do. Then we hired the post-office hall, vague, without sayin' for what—an' that pleased Silas that gets the rent. An' then we give the invitations, spectacular, through the Friendship Daily to the Sodality's husbands, for the next Tuesday night. We could do it that quick, not bein' dependent on dressmakers same as some. The ladies was all goin' to make their dresses themselves, an' the dresses wa'n't much to do to make. Nobody bothered a very great deal about how we should make 'em, the principal thing bein' the colour; Mis' Toplady's was blue, like the fashion-plate; Mis' Holcomb's pink, like the woman in the city; Mis' Uppers' green, like the mayor's necktie, an' so on. I made me up a dress out o' the spare-room curtains—white, with a little blue flower in it, an' a new blue ribbon belt. But Mis' Sykes, she went to work an' rented a dress from the city, for that one night. That much she give out about it, an' would give out no more. That woman loves a surprise. She's got a rill pleasant mind, Mis' Sykes has, but one that does enjoy jerkin' other people's minds up, an most anything'll do for the string.

"For all we thought we hed so much time, an' it was so easy to do, the afternoon o' the party we went 'most crazy. We'd got up quite a nice little cold supper—Mis' Hubbelthwait had helped us, she bein' still at large, an' Threat fiddlin'. We planned meat loaf an' salad an' pickles an' jelly, an' scalloped potatoes for the hot dish, an' ice cream an' cake, enough in all for thirty folks: fifteen husbands an' fifteen Sodality, or approximatish. An' we planned to go to the hall in the afternoon an' take our dresses there, an' sly em' up and leave 'em, an' put 'em on after we'd got there that night, so's nobody's husbands should suspect. But when we all came in the afternoon, an' the decoratin' with greens an' festoons of cut paper an' all was to do, there Mis' Toplady, that was to make scalloped potatoes, hadn't got her sleeves in yet, an' she was down to the hall tryin' to do both; an' Mis' Holcomb, that was to make the salad dressing, had got so nervous over her collar that she couldn't tell which edge she'd cut for the top. But the rest of us was ready, an' Mis' Sykes's dress had come from the city, an' we all, Mis' Toplady an' Mame too, hed our dresses in boxes in the post-office hall kitchen cupboards. An' we done the decoratin', an' it looked rill lovely, with the long tables laid ready at each side, an' room for bein' a party left in between 'em.

"Mis' Toplady an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb left the hall about five o'clock to go home an' lay out Silas's an' Timothy's an' Eppleby's best clothes for 'em—the rest hed done it at noon. Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' over to the hotel to get some dishes out, an' I went with her to help. The bar was to the back, where Threat set an' slep' an' fiddled, an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was goin' to slip in still an' sly the dishes out to me. A good many of the hotel dishes was her individual weddin' presents, so she didn't think wrong of her conscience.

"We was all five hurryin' along together, rehearsin' all we'd got to do before six-thirty, when we heard a funny sound. We listened, an' we thought they must be testin' the hose. But when we got to Lyddy's shop, where the street kitters off some in a curve, we looked ahead an' we see it wasn't that.

"It's an automobile," says Mis' Toplady. 'My land,' she says, 'it ain't only one. It's two.'

"An' we see it was. There come the two of 'em, ploughin' along through the awful sand of Daphne Street, that was fit for no human locomotive, unless ostriches. When the Proudfits are here, that's the only one in the village with an automobile, they understand the sand, and they'd put on the whole steam and tear right along through it. But strangers would go careful, for fear they'd get stuck, an' so they got it, like you do. An' them two big red cars was comin' slow, the dust like cloaks an' curtains billowin' up behind. They looked quite wild, includin' the seven folks in each one that was laughin' an' callin' out. An' by the time they'd come up to us, us four ladies of the Sodality an' Mis' Hubbelthwait was lined up on the walk watchin' 'em. They stopped an' one of 'em hailed us, leanin' past his driver.

"'I beg your pardon,' he says, 'is this the street to the best hotel?'

"It was Mis' Toplady that answered him, rill collected. 'They's only one street in town,' says she, 'an' they's only one hotel, an' that they ain't now.'

"'Can you tell me how soon there will be one?' says the man. 'By dinner-time, I hope.'

"We all felt kind of delicate about answerin' this, an' so Mis' Hubbelthwait herself spoke up. 'Threat's drunk an' fiddlin', she says. 'They's no tellin' when Friendship Village will ever hev a hotel again.'

"Both automobiles was listenin' by then, an' though some of 'em laughed out sort o' rueful, not many of 'em see the funny.

"'Gad,' one of the men says, 'how about the bird an' the bottle we were to send back to Bonner, sittin' by his tire in the desert, a ways back? Don't tell us there's no place,' he says, 'where we can find dinner, twenty-one of us and the three chauf—' that word.

"Mis' Toplady shook her head. 'They ain't a place big enough to seat twenty-one, even if they was the food to feed 'em—' she begun, an' then she stopped an' looked 'round at us, as though she was thinkin' somethin'.

"'Oh, come now,' says the man,—he was good-lookin' an' young, an' merry-seemin',—'Oh, come now,' he said, 'I am sure that the ladies of Friendship could cook things such as never man yet ate. We are sta-arving,' he says, humorous. 'Can't you do something for us? We'll give you,' he winds up, genial, 'two dollars a plate for a good, home-cooking dinner for the twenty-four of us. What do you say?'

"Mis' Toplady whirled toward us sort o' wild. 'Is two dollars times twenty-four, forty-eight dollars?' says she, low.

"An' we see it was, though Mis' Holcomb was still figurin' it out in the palm of her other hand, while we stood gettin' glances out of each other's eyes, an' sendin' 'em, give for take. We see, quick as a flash, what Mis' Toplady was thinkin' about. An' it was about that hall, all festooned with greens an' cut paper, an' the two long tables laid ready, an' the veal loaf an' scalloped potatoes an' ice-cream for thirty. An' when Mis' Sykes, that usually speaks, stood still, an' didn't say one word, but just nodded a little bit, sort o' sad, Mis' Toplady, that was chairman o' the Entertainment Committee, done like she does sometimes—she took the whole thing into her own hands an' just settled it.

"'Why, yes,' she says to 'em, rill pleasant, 'if you want to come up to post-office hall at half-past six,' she says, 'the Friendship Married Ladies' Cemetery Improvement Sodality will serve you your supper, nice as the nicest, for two dollars a head.'

"'Good!' the men all sings out, an' the women spats their hands soft, an' one of 'em says somethin' to the merry-seemin' man.

"'Oh, yes,' he says then, 'couldn't we all break into this hotel an' floss up a bit before dinner?'

"Mis' Hubbelthwait stepped out towards 'em.

"'I was thinkin' of that,' says she. 'My husband,' she says, dignified, 'is settin' in the bar—practisin' his violin. He—he does that sometimes, an' we—don't bother him. But the bar is at the back. I can let you in, still, the front way to the rooms, if you want. An' I'll be there myself to wait on you.'

"An' that was what they done, somebody takin' one o' the cars back for the other car, an' the rest of us fair breakin' into a run toward post-office hall.

"'My land,' says Mis' Toplady, almost like a groan, 'what hev we done?'

"It was a funny thing to do, we see it afterward. But I tell you, you can't appreciate the influence o' that forty-eight dollars unless you've tried to earn money in a town the size o' Friendship Village. Sodality hardly ever made more than five dollars to its ten-cent entertainments—an' that for a big turn-out on a dry night. An' here was the price of about nine such entertainments give us outright, an' no extra work, an' rill feet-achin' weather. I say it was more than flesh an' blood or wives could stand. We done it automatic, like you contradict when it's necessary.

"But there was the men to reckon with.

"'What'll Timothy—an' Silas—an' Eppleby....' Mis' Toplady says, an' stops, some bothered an' some rill pained.

"I judged, not havin' any husband to be doin' the inquirin', it wasn't polite for me to laugh. But I couldn't hardly help it, thinkin' o' them fifteen hungry men an' the supper et away from 'em, just William Nilly.

"Mis' Sykes, we remembered afterwards, never said a word, but only kep' up with us back to the hall.

"Back to the hall, where the rest o' the Sodality was, we told 'em what we'd done—beginnin' with the forty-eight dollars, like some kind o' weapon. But I tell you, we hadn't reckoned without knowin' our hostesses, head an' heart. An' they went in pell mell, pleased an' glad as we was, an' plannin' like mad.

"The first need was more food to make up that supper to somewheres near two dollars' worth—feedin' your husband is one thing an' gettin' up a two-dollar meal is another. But we collected that all in pretty sudden: leg o' lamb, left from the Holcombs' dinner an' only cut off of one side; the Sykes's roast o' veal, the same; three chickens for soup the Libertys hed just dressed for next day company dinner; big platter of devilled eggs chipped in from Mis' Toplady; a jar o' doughnuts, a steamer o' cookies, a fruit-cake a year old—we just made out our list an' scattered to empty out all our pantries.

"By six o'clock we was back in the hall, an' all the food with us. But nobody hed met nobody's husband yet, an' nobody wanted to. We didn't quite know how we was goin' to do, I guess—but done is done, an' to do takes care of itself.

"'Hadn't we ought to 'a' sent word to the men?' says Mis' Holcomb, for the third or fourth time. 'I sneaked around so's not to pass Eppleby's office, but I declare I feel mean. He'll hev to eat sauce an' plain bread-an'-butter for his supper. An' most o' the men-folks the same. 'Seems though somebody'd ought to send 'em word an' not let 'em come up here, all washed an' dressed.'

"'Well,' says Mis' Toplady, cuttin' cake with her lips shut tight an' talkin' anyway, 'I kind o' thought—leave 'em come up. I bet they'd rather be in it than out of it, every one of 'em, an' who knows they might be some supper left? An' we can all—'

"An' at that Mis' Toplady faces round from cuttin' the cake: 'My land, my land,' she says, sort o' hushed, 'why, doin' this, we can't none of us wear our new dresses!'

"An' at that we looked at each other, each one sort of accusin', an' I guess all our hearts givin' one o' them sickish thumps. An' Mis' Sykes, her that hed been so still, snaps back:—

"'I wondered what you thought I'd rented my dress from the city for at Three Dollars a night.'

"I tell you, that made a hush in the middle of the plannin'. We'd forgot all about our own dresses, an' that was bad enough, with the hall all hired an' everything all ready, an' every chance in the world of everybody's husband's findin' out about the dresses before we could get up another Sodality party, same way. But here was Mis' Sykes, three dollars out, an mebbe wouldn't be able to rent her dress again at all.

"'I did want Silas,' Mis' Sykes says then, wistful, 'to see me in that dress. Silas an' I have been married so long,' she says, 'that I often wonder if I seem like a person to him at all. But in that dress from the city, I think I would.'

"We was each an' all ready to cry, an' I dunno but we would hev done it—though we was all ready to serve, too: coffee made, potatoes pipin' hot, veal an' lamb het up an' smellin' rich, chicken soup steamin', an' all. But just that very minute we heard some of 'em comin' in the hall—an' the one 'ready' conquered the other 'ready,' like it will, an' we all made a rush, part curious an' part nerves, to peek through the little servin' window from the kitchen.

"What do you think we saw? It was the automobile folks, hungry an' got there first. In they'd come, women laughin', men jokin', all makin' a lark out o' the whole thing. An' if the women wasn't, every last one of 'em, wearin'—not the clothes they hed come in, but light pink an' light blue an' white an' flowered things, an' all like that.

"Mis' Hubbelthwait burst in on us while we was lookin'. 'They hed things in their trunk at the back o' the automobile,' says she. 'They says they wanted to floss up for dinner, an' floss up they hev. They look like Lyddy's fashion sheets, one an' all.'

"At that Mis' Sykes, a-ceasin' to peek, she drops her tray on the bare floor an' begun untyin' her apron. 'Quick!' she raps out, 'Mis' Hubbelthwait, you go an' set 'em down. An' every one o' you—into them togs of ours! Here's the chance to wear 'em—here an' now,' she says, 'an' leave them folks see we know how to do things here in Friendship Village as good as the best.'

"Well, bein' as she had rented the dress, an' three dollars hed to be paid out anyhow, an' bein' as she was president, an' bein' as we was all hankerin' in our hearts, we didn't need much urgin'. We slammed the servin' window shut an' set chairs against both doors, an' we whisked out of our regular dresses like wild.

"'Oh, land—my land, the sleeves—the sleeves ain't in mine!' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' glazed, an' speakin' in a wail. But we encouraged her up to pin 'em in, which she done, an' it couldn't be told from stitches. Poor Mame Holcomb's collar that wasn't on yet we turned in for her V-shape, so's her dress was low, like the best. An' Mis' Uppers, that was seasonin' the chicken soup like none of us could, her we took turns in dressin' in her green. An' I'd got into my spare-room curtains, somehow, just as Mis' Hubbelthwait come shoving at that door.

"'The men—the men!' says she, painful. 'They're all out here—Silas an' Timothy an' Eppleby an' all. They've all heard about it—the automobiles went to the post-office for their mail, an' Silas told 'em enjoyable about Threat, an' the automobiles told him where they was goin' to eat. An' they've come, thinkin' they's enough for all, an' they're out here now.'

"Mis' Toplady groaned a little, agonized an' stifled, but rill firm. 'Tell 'em, then,' says she, 'to come back up here, like men, an' help.'

"Then we heard a little rustle, soft an' silky an' kind o' pink-soundin', an' we looked around, an' there, from where she had been dressin' herself over behind the kitchen boiler all alone, Mis' Postmaster Sykes stepped out. My land, if she wasn't in a white dress, a little low in the neck, an' elbow sleeves, an' all covered solid as crust with glitterin' silver spangles.

"'Let's tell 'em ourselves,' she says, 'come on—all of you. Let's take out the first course, an' tell the men what we want 'em to do.'

"We made Mis' Sykes go first, carryin' high the tureen of chicken soup. An' on one side of her walked Mis' Timothy Toplady, in blue, with the wafers, an' on the other Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss, in pink, with the radishes. An' neither one of 'em could hardly help lookin' at Mis' Sykes's dress all the way out. An' back of 'em went the rest o' the ladies, all in pink an' blue an' white an' pale green nun's veilin' that they'd made, an' carryin' the water-pitchers an' ice an' celery an' like that. An' me, I hung back in the kitchen watchin' an' lovin' 'em every one—an' almost lovin' Timothy Toplady an' Silas Sykes an' Eppleby when they looked on an' saw.

"Mis' Sykes set the soup down in front o' the merry-seemin' man for him to serve it. An' then she crossed over an' spoke to Silas, an' swep' up ahead of him in that spangly dress, the other ladies followin' an' noddin' bright when they passed the men, an' motionin' 'em toward the back o' the hall. An' back the men all come into the kitchen, followin' as they was asked to do, an' orderly through bein' dazed. Silas an' Timothy an' Eppleby was first, an' Mis' Sykes an' Mis' Toplady an' Mame went up to 'em together.

"I'll never forget that minute. I thought the men was goin' to burst out characteristic an' the whole time be tart, an' I shut both doors an' the servin' window careful. An' instead o' that, them three men stood there just smilin' a little an lookin' surprised an' agreeable; an' the other husbands, either takin' the cue or feelin' the same, done likewise, too. An' when Mame Bliss says, sort o' tremblin'—Eppleby bein' the gentlest husband in Friendship Village, an' known to be: 'How do you like us, Eppleby?' Eppleby just nods an' wrinkles up his eyes an' smiles at her, like he meant lots more. An' he says, 'Why didn't you never wear that dress before, Mame?'

"An' 'Well, Timothy?' says Mis' Toplady, sort o' masterful, an' fully expectin' to hev to master. But Timothy Toplady, he just rubs his hands an' looks at her sort o' wonderin', an' he says, 'Blisterin' Benson, you look as good as the city folks, Amandy—all light, an' loose made, an' stylish—'

"But Silas Sykes, he just stood lookin' at his wife an' lookin'. Of course she did hev the advantage, bein' her spangles shone so. An' Silas looked at her an' looked, just as if her bein' his wife didn't make him admire her any the less. An' Mis' Sykes, she was rill pink an' pleased an' breathless, an' I guess she could see she seemed like a person to Silas, the way she'd wanted to.

"It all went off splendid. The men stayed an' dished in the kitchen an' helped carry away from the tables—the forty-eight dollars completin' their respect—an' we ladies done the servin'. An' I tell you, we served 'em with an air, 'count o' bein' well dressed, like they was, an' knowin' it. An' we knew the automobile folks appreciated it—we could tell by the way they kep' lookin' at us. But of course we all understood Mis' Sykes looked the best, an' we let her do all the most prominent things—bringin' in the first dish of everything an' like that, so's they could hev a good look.

"When it was over, the merry-seemin' man stood up an' made a little speech o' thanks, rill courteous an' sweet, an' like he knew how to act. An' when he was through we, one an' all, nudged Mis' Sykes to reply, an' she done so, the two tables listenin', an' the Sodality standin' in between, an' the Sodality's husbands crowdin' in both kitchen doors to listen.

"Mis' Sykes says, rill dignified, an' the light catchin' in her spangles: 'We're all very much obliged, I'm sure, for our forty-eight dollars clear. An' we think perhaps you'd like to know what the money is goin' toward. It's goin',' she says, 'towards the pavin' of the main street of our little city.'

"Silas Sykes was lookin' out the servin' window like it was a box. 'What's that?' says he, more of him comin' out of the window, 'what's that you say?'

"An' they was a little wave o' moves an' murmurs all around him like when somethin' is goin' to happen an' nobody knows what; an' I know the Sodality caught its breath, for, as Mis' Toplady always says, the dear land knows what men will do.

"With that up springs the merry-seemin' man, his face all beamin', an' he says loud an' clear an' drowndin' out everything else: 'Hear, hear! Likewise, here an' now. I move that we as one man, an' that man's automobile having lately come up the main street of Friendship Village—do ourself contribute to this most worthy end. Get to work,' says he. 'Think civic thoughts!'

"He slid the last roll off its plate, an' he laid somethin' in paper money on it, an' he started it down the table. An' every man of 'em done as he done. An' I tell you, when we see Mis' Hubbelthwait's bread plate pilin' with bills, an' knew what it was for, we couldn't help—the whole Sodality couldn't help—steppin' forwards, close to the table, an' standin' there an' holdin' our breaths. An' the men, back there in the kitchen, they hushed up when they see the money, an' they kep' hushed. Land, land, it was a great minute! I like to think about it.

"An' when the plate come back to the merry-seemin' man, he took it an' he come over towards us with it in his hand, an' we nudged Mis' Sykes to take the money. An' she just lifted up the glitter part of her skirt an' spread it out an' he dropped the whole rustlin' heap on to the spangles. An' the rest of us all clapped our hands, hard as we could, an' right while we was doin' it we heard somethin' else—deeper an' more manly than us. An' there was the men streamin' out o' the kitchen doors, an' Silas Sykes high in the servin' window—an' every one of 'em was clappin', too.

"I tell you, we was glad an' grateful. An' we was grateful, too, when afterwards they was plenty enough supper left for the men-folks. An' when we all set down together around that table, Mis' Sykes at the head an' the plate o' bills for a centrepiece, Mis' Toplady leaned back, hot an' tired, an' seein' if both her sleeves was still pinned in place, an' she says what we was all thinkin':—

"'Oh, ladies,' she says, 'we can pave streets an' dress in the light shades even if we ain't young, like the run o' the fashion-plates. Ain't it like comin' to life again?' she says."

XI UNDERN

I have a guest who is the best of the three kinds of welcome guests. Of these some are like a new rug which, however fine and unobtrusive it be, at first changes the character of your room so that when you enter you are less conscious of the room than of the rug. Some guests are like flowers on the table, leaving the room as it was save for their sweet, novel presence. And some guests are like a prized new book, unread, from which you simply cannot keep away. Of these last is my guest whom my neighbour calls the New Lady.

My neighbour and Elfa and Miggy and Little Child and I have all been busy preparing for her. Elfa has an almost pathetic fondness for "company,"—I think it is that she leads such a lonely life in the little kitchen-prison that she welcomes even the companionship of more-voices-in-the-next-room. I have tried to do what I can for Elfa, but you never help people very much when you only try to do what you can. It must lie nearer the heart than that. And I perfectly understand that the magazines and trifles of finery which I give to her, and the flowers I set on the kitchen clock shelf, and the talks which, since my neighbour's unconscious rebuke, I have contrived with her, are about as effectual as any merely ameliorative means of dealing with a social malady. For Elfa is suffering from a distinct form of the social malady, and not being able to fathom it, she knows merely that she is lonely. So she has borrowed fellowship from her anticipation of my guest and of those who next week will come down from the town; and I know, though she does not know, that her jars of fresh-fried cakes and cookies, her fine brown bread and her bowl of salad-dressing, are her utmost expression of longing to adjust the social balance and give to herself companionship, even a kind of household.

Little Child to-day came, bringing me a few first sweet peas and Bless-your-Heart, Bless-your-Heart being her kitten, and as nearly pink as a cat can be and be still a cat.

"To lay in the New Lady's room," she remarked, bestowing these things impartially upon me.

Later, my neighbour came across the lawns with a plate of currant tarts and a quarter of a jelly cake.

"Here," she said, "I don't know whether you like tarts or not. They're more for children, I always think. I always bake 'em, and the little round child fried cakes, too, and I put frosting faces on the cookies, and such things. It makes my husband and I seem more like a family," she explained, "and that's why I always set the dining-room table. As long as we ain't any little folks running around, I always tell him that him and I would be eating meat and potatoes on the kitchen drop-leaf like savages if I didn't pretend there was more of us, and bake up for 'em."

Miggy alone does not take wholly kindly to the New Lady idea, though I assure her that our mornings are to remain undisturbed.

"Of course," she observed, while in the New Lady's honour she gathered up strewn papers, "I know I'll like her because she's your friend. But I don't know what folks want to visit for. Don't you s'pose that's why the angels don't come back—because they know everything, and they know what a lot of extra work they'd make us?"

In Miggy the tribal sense seems to have run itself out. Of the sanctity of the individual she discerns much; but of the wider sanctities she has no clear knowledge. Most relationships she seems to regard, like the love of Peter, as "drawbacks," save only her indefinite consciousness of that one who is "not quite her sister"—the little vague Margaret. And this, I think, will be the leaven. Perhaps it is the universal leaven, this consciousness.

I was glad that the New Lady was to arrive in the afternoon. Sometimes I think that the village afternoon is the best time of all. It is no wonder that they used to call that time "undern." If they had not done so, the word must have grown of its own will—perhaps it did come to life with no past, an immaculate thing, so like its meaning that it could not help being here among us. I know very well that Sir John Mandeville and others used "undern" to mean the third hour, or about nine in the morning, but that may have been because at first not every one recognized the word. Many a fairy thing wanders for a long time on earth, patiently putting up with other connotations than its own. Opportunism, the subconscious mind, personality, evolution itself,—all these are still seeking their full incarnations in idea. No wonder "undern" was forced for a long while to mean morning. But nine o'clock in the morning! How, after all, was that possible? You have only to say it over—undern, undern, undern,—to be heavenly drowsy with summer afternoon. The north of England recognized this at last and put the word where it belongs; and I have, too, the authority of the lady of Golden Wing:—

"Undern cometh after noon,

Golden Wings will be here soon...."

One can hardly stop saying that, once one is started. I should like to go on with it all down the page.

I was thinking of these things as I drove to the station alone to meet the New Lady. The time had taken on for me that pleasant, unlike-itself aspect which time bears in any mild excitement, so that if in the moment of reading a particularly charming letter one can remember to glance up and look the room in the face, one may catch its other expression, the expression which it has when one is not looking. So now I caught this look in the village and an air of Something-different-is-going-to-happen, such as we experience on holidays. Next week, when the New Lady's friends come down to us for two days, I dare say, if I can remember to look for it, that the village will have another expression still. Yet there will be the same quiet undern—though for me it is never a commonplace time. Indeed, usually I am in the most delighted embarrassment how to spend it. In the mornings now—Miggy being willing—I work, morning in the true democracy being the work time; afternoon the time for recreation and the more specialized forms of service and a little rest; the evening for delight, including the delight of others. Not every one in the village accepts my afternoon and evening classifications. I am constantly coming on people making preserves after mid-day, and if I see a light in a kitchen window after nine at night I know that somebody is ironing in the cool of the day. But usually my division of time is the general division, save that—as in the true democracy—service is not always recognized as service. Our afternoons may be spent in cutting carpet rags, or in hemming linen, or sewing articles for an imminent bazaar, and this is likely to be denominated "gettin' through little odd jobs," and accounted in a measure a self-indulgence. And if evening delight takes the form of gardening and later a flame of nasturtiums or dahlias is carried to a friend, nobody dreams that this is not a pleasant self-indulgence too, and it is so regarded. With these things true is it not as if a certain hope abroad in the world gave news of itself?

Near the Pump pasture I came on Nicholas Moor—who rings the Catholic bell and is interested in celluloid—and who my neighbour had told me would doubtless come to me, bringing his little sheaf of "writin's." I had not yet met him, though I had seen in the daily paper a vagrant poem or two over his name—I remember a helpless lyric which made me think of a gorgeous green and gold beetle lying on its back, unable to recover its legs, but for all that flashing certain isolated iridescent colours. My heart ached for Nicholas, and when I saw him now going across the pasture his loneliness was like a gap in things, one of the places where two world-edges do not quite meet. There are so many pleasant ways to do and the boy seemed to know how to do none of them. How can he be lonely in the village? For myself, if I decide of an afternoon to take my work and pay a visit, I am in a pleasant quandary as to which way to turn. If I go to the west end of Daphne Street, there are at least five families among whom to choose, the other four of whom will wonder why I did not come to them. Think of knowing five families in two blocks who would welcome one's coming and even feel a little flattering bitterness if one chose the other four! If I take a cross street, I am in the same difficulty. And if I wish to go to the house of one of my neighbours, my motives clash so seriously that I often sit on my porch and call to whoever chances to be in sight to come to me. Do you wonder that, in town, the moment I open my address book I feel smothered? I recover and enjoy town as much as anybody, but sometimes in a stuffy coupé, hurrying to get a half-dozen of the pleasantest calls "done," I surprise a companion by saying: would now that it were undern on Daphne Street!

I told this to the New Lady as we drove from the station. The New Lady is an exquisite little Someone, so little that it is as if she had been drawn quickly, in a single delicate curving line, and then left, lest another stroke should change her. She understands the things that I say in the way that I mean them; she is the way that you always think the people whom you meet are going to be, though they so seldom are; like May, she is expectation come alive. What she says fits in all the crannies of what you did not say and have always known, or else have never thought of before and now never can forget. She laughs when she should laugh, and never, never when somebody else should laugh alone. When you tell her that you have walked eight miles and back, she says "And back!" with just the proper intonation of homage. She never tells a story upon the heels of your own little jest so swiftly that it cannot triumphantly escape. When you try to tell her something that you have not quite worked out, she nods a little and you see that she meant it before you did. She enters every moment by its gate and not over its wall, though she frequently wings her way in instead of walking. Also, she is good to look at and her gowns are as meet as the clouds to the sky—and no less distracting than the clouds are at their very best. There is no possible excuse for my saying so much about her, but I like to talk of her. And I like to talk to her as I did when we left the station and I was rambling on about undern.

The New Lady looked about with a breath of content.

"No wonder," she said, "you like to pretend Birthday, in New York."

It is true that when I am there where, next to the village, I like best to live, I am fond of this pretence. It is like the children's game of "Choosing" before shop windows, only it is extensive and not, as cream puffs and dolls and crumpets in the windows dictate to the children, purely intensive. Seeing this man and that woman in the subway or the tea-room or the café or the car, I find myself wondering if it is by any chance their birthdays; and if it is, I am always wishing to deal out poor little gifts at which I fancy they would hardly look. To the lithe idle blond woman, elbows on table; to the heavy-lidded, engagement-burdened gentlewoman; to the busy, high-eyebrowed man in a cab; to the tired, slow-winking gentleman in his motor; to the thick-handed labourer hanging to his strap, I find myself longing to distribute these gifts: a breakfast on our screened-in porch in the village, with morning-glories on the table; a full-throated call of my oriole—a June call, not the isolated reminiscent call of August; an hour of watering the lawn while robins try to bathe in the spray; a morning of pouring melted paraffin on the crimson tops of moulds of currant jelly; a yellow afternoon of going with me to "take my work and stay for supper." I dare say that none of my chosen beneficiaries would accept; but if I could pop from a magic purse a crop of caps and fit folk, willy nilly, I wonder if afterward, even if they remembered nothing of what had occurred, they might not find life a little different.

"If it was my birthday," said the New Lady, "I would choose to be driven straight away through that meadow, as if I had on wings."

That is the way she is, the New Lady. Lacking wings of her own she gives them to many a situation. Straightway I drove down into the Pump pasture and across it, springy soil and circus-trodden turf and mullein stalks and ten-inch high oak trees.

"Let's let down the bars," said the New Lady, "and drive into that next meadow. If it is a sea, as it looks, it will be glad of your company."

It was not a sea, for as we drove through the lush grass the yellow and purple people of the meadow came marching to meet us, as dignified as garden flowers, save that you knew, all the time, that wild hearts were beating beneath the rainbow tassels. It was a meadow with things to say, but with finger on lip—as a meadow should be and as a spirit must be. The meadow seemed to wish to say: "It is all very pleasant for you there in the village to admire one another's wings, but the real romance is in the flight." I wondered if it were not so that it had happened—that one day a part of the village had got tired waiting, and had broken off and become something free, of which the meadow was the body and its secret was the spirit. But then the presence of the New Lady always sets me wondering things like this.

"Why," I said to her suddenly, "spring has gone! I wonder how that happened. I have been waiting really to get hold of spring, and here it is June."

"June-and-a-half," assented the New Lady, and touched the lines so that we came to a standstill in the shade of a cottonwood.

"This way," she said—and added softly, as one who would not revive a sadness, her own idea of the matter.

"Where did Spring die? I did not hear her go

Down the soft lane she painted. All flower still

She moved among her emblems on the hill

Touching away their burden of old snow.

Was it on some great down where long winds flow

That the wild spirit of Spring went out to fill

The eyes of Summer? Did a daffodil

Lift the pale urn remote where she lies low?

"Oh, not as other moments did she die,

That woman-season, outlined like a rose.

Before the banner of Autumn's scarlet bough

The Summer fell; and Winter, with a cry,

Wed with March wind. Spring did not die like those;

But vaguely, as if Love had prompted, 'Now.'"

The New Lady's theory does not agree with that of Little Child. I am in doubt which to accept. But I like to think about both.

And when the New Lady had said the faint requiem, we drove on again and the next moment had almost run down Nicholas Moor, lying face downward in the lush grass.

I recognized him at once, but of course the New Lady did not do so, and she leaned from the cart, thoroughly alarmed at the boy's posture and, as he looked up, at his pallor.

"Oh, what is the matter?" she cried, and her voice was so heavenly pitying that one would have been willing to have most things the matter only to hear her.

Nicholas Moor scrambled awkwardly to his feet, and stood abashed, looking as strangely detached from the moment as if he had fallen from a frame and left the rest of the picture behind.

"Nothing. I just like to be here," he was surprised into saying.

The New Lady sat down and smiled. And her smile was even more captivating than had been her late alarm.

"So do I," she told him heartily. "So do I. What do you like about it, best?"

I do not think that any one had ever before spoken to Nicholas so simply, and he answered, chord for chord.

"I guess—I guess I like it just on account of its being the way it is," he said.

"That is a very, very nice reason," the New Lady commented. "Again, so do I."

We left him, I remember, looking about as if he were seeing it all for the first time.

As we drove away I told my New Lady about Nicholas, and she looked along her own thought and shook her head.

"There must be hundreds of them," she said, "and some are poets. But most of them are only lonesome. I wonder which Nicholas is?"

We lingered out-of-doors as long as we might, because the touch of the outdoors was so companioning that to go indoors was a distinct good-by. Is it so with you that some Days, be they never so sunny, yet walk with you in a definite reserve and seem to be looking somewhere else; while other Days come to you like another way of being yourself and will not let you go? I know that some will put it down to mood and not to the Day at all; but, do what I will, I cannot credit this.

It was after five o'clock when we drove into the village, and all Daphne Street was watering its lawns. Of those who were watering some pretended not to see us, but I understood that this they accounted the etiquette due to a new arrival. Some bowed with an excess of cordiality, and this I understood to be the pleasant thought that they would show my guest how friendly we all are. And some laid down the hose and came to the sidewalk's edge to meet the New Lady then and there.

Of these were Mis' Postmaster Sykes an' Mis' Holcomb-that-was-Mame-Bliss and my neighbour.

"Pleased to meet you, I'm sure," Mis' Postmaster Sykes said graciously to the New Lady. "I must say it seems good to see a strange face now an' then. I s'pose you feel all travel dust an' mussed up?"

And at Mis' Holcomb's hitching post:—

"Pleased to meet you," said Mis' Holcomb. "I was saying to Eppleby that I wondered if you'd come. Eppleby says, 'I donno, but like enough they've went for a ride somewheres.' Lovely day, ain't it? Been to the cemetery?"

I said that we had not been there yet, and,

"Since it's kept up it makes a real nice thing to show folks," Mis' Holcomb said. "I s'pose you wouldn't come inside for a bite of supper, would you?"

My neighbour—bless her!—had on a black wool dress to do honour to my guest.

"It's nice for the neighbours to see company comin' and goin'," she said cordially, "though of course we don't have any of the extra work. But I guess everybody likes extra work of this kind."

And as we drove away:—

"Good-by," she cried, "I hope you'll have a good night's rest and a good breakfast."

When I looked at the New Lady I saw her eyes ever so slightly misted.

"Spring didn't die," she said—as Little Child had said. "Spring knew how to keep alive. It got down in these people's hearts."