THE SHAPE OF FEAR

AND OTHER GHOSTLY TALES

By Elia Wilkinson Peattie

Original Transcriber's Note:

 I have omitted signature indicators and italicization of the running heads. In addition, I have made the following changes to the text:

 PAGE LINE ORIGINAL CHANGED TO 156 1 where as were as 156 4 mouth mouth. 165 5 Wedgwood Wedgewood 166 9 Wedgwood Wedgewood 167 6 surperfluous superfluous 172 11 every ever 173 17 Bogg Boggs

CONTENTS

 THE SHAPE OF FEAR

 ON THE NORTHERN ICE

 THEIR DEAR LITTLE GHOST

 A SPECTRAL COLLIE

 THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT

 STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE

 A CHILD OF THE RAIN

 THE ROOM OF THE EVIL THOUGHT

 STORY OF THE VANISHING PATIENT

 THE PIANO NEXT DOOR

 AN ASTRAL ONION

 FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD

 A GRAMMATICAL GHOST

THE SHAPE OF FEAR

TIM O'CONNOR--who was descended from the O'Conors with one N---- startedlife as a poet and an enthusiast. His mother had designed him forthe priesthood, and at the age of fifteen, most of his verses had anecclesiastical tinge, but, somehow or other, he got into the newspaperbusiness instead, and became a pessimistic gentleman, with a literarystyle of great beauty and an income of modest proportions. He fell inwith men who talked of art for art's sake, --though what right they hadto speak of art at all nobody knew, --and little by little his view oflife and love became more or less profane. He met a woman who suckedhis heart's blood, and he knew it and made no protest; nay, to the greatamusement of the fellows who talked of art for art's sake, he went thelength of marrying her. He could not in decency explain that he hadthe traditions of fine gentlemen behind him and so had to do as he did, because his friends might not have understood. He laughed at the dayswhen he had thought of the priesthood, blushed when he ran across any ofthose tender and exquisite old verses he had written in his youth, and became addicted to absinthe and other less peculiar drinks, and togaming a little to escape a madness of ennui. 

As the years went by he avoided, with more and more scorn, that part ofthe world which he denominated Philistine, and consorted only with thefellows who flocked about Jim O'Malley's saloon. He was pleased withsolitude, or with these convivial wits, and with not very much elsebeside. Jim O'Malley was a sort of Irish poem, set to inspiring measure. He was, in fact, a Hibernian Mæcenas, who knew better than to putbad whiskey before a man of talent, or tell a trite tale in the presenceof a wit. The recountal of his disquisitions on politics and othercurrent matters had enabled no less than three men to acquire nationalreputations; and a number of wretches, having gone the way of men whotalk of art for art's sake, and dying in foreign lands, or hospitals, or asylums, having no one else to be homesick for, had been homesick forJim O'Malley, and wept for the sound of his voice and the grasp of hishearty hand. 

When Tim O'Connor turned his back upon most of the things he was bornto and took up with the life which he consistently lived till theunspeakable end, he was unable to get rid of certain peculiarities. Forexample, in spite of all his debauchery, he continued to look like theBeloved Apostle. Notwithstanding abject friendships he wrote limpid andnoble English. Purity seemed to dog his heels, no matter how violentlyhe attempted to escape from her. He was never so drunk that he wasnot an exquisite, and even his creditors, who had become inured to hisdeceptions, confessed it was a privilege to meet so perfect a gentleman. The creature who held him in bondage, body and soul, actually came tolove him for his gentleness, and for some quality which baffled her, and made her ache with a strange longing which she could not define. Not that she ever defined anything, poor little beast! She had skin thecolor of pale gold, and yellow eyes with brown lights in them, and greatplaits of straw-colored hair. About her lips was a fatal and sensuoussmile, which, when it got hold of a man's imagination, would not let itgo, but held to it, and mocked it till the day of his death. She wasthe incarnation of the Eternal Feminine, with all the wifeliness and thematernity left out--she was ancient, yet ever young, and familiar as joyor tears or sin. 

She took good care of Tim in some ways: fed him well, nursed him backto reason after a period of hard drinking, saw that he put on overshoeswhen the walks were wet, and looked after his money. She even prized hisbrain, for she discovered that it was a delicate little machine whichproduced gold. By association with him and his friends, she learned thata number of apparently useless things had value in the eyes of certainconvenient fools, and so she treasured the autographs of distinguishedpersons who wrote to him--autographs which he disdainfully tossed in thewaste basket. She was careful with presentation copies from authors, andshe went the length of urging Tim to write a book himself. But at thathe balked. 

"Write a book!" he cried to her, his gentle face suddenly white withpassion. "Who am I to commit such a profanation?"

She didn't know what he meant, but she had a theory that it wasdangerous to excite him, and so she sat up till midnight to cook a chopfor him when he came home that night. 

He preferred to have her sitting up for him, and he wanted everyelectric light in their apartments turned to the full. If, by anychance, they returned together to a dark house, he would not enter tillshe touched the button in the hall, and illuminated the room. Or if itso happened that the lights were turned off in the night time, andhe awoke to find himself in darkness, he shrieked till the woman camerunning to his relief, and, with derisive laughter, turned them onagain. But when she found that after these frights he lay trembling andwhite in his bed, she began to be alarmed for the clever, gold-makinglittle machine, and to renew her assiduities, and to horde moretenaciously than ever, those valuable curios on which she some dayexpected to realize when he was out of the way, and no longer in aposition to object to their barter. 

O'Connor's idiosyncrasy of fear was a source of much amusement among theboys at the office where he worked. They made open sport of it, andyet, recognizing him for a sensitive plant, and granting that genius wasentitled to whimsicalities, it was their custom when they called forhim after work hours, to permit him to reach the lighted corridor beforethey turned out the gas over his desk. This, they reasoned, was but aslight service to perform for the most enchanting beggar in the world. 

"Dear fellow, " said Rick Dodson, who loved him, "is it the Devil youexpect to see? And if so, why are you averse? Surely the Devil is notsuch a bad old chap. "

"You haven't found him so?"

"Tim, by heaven, you know, you ought to explain to me. A citizen of theworld and a student of its purlieus, like myself, ought to know whatthere is to know! Now you're a man of sense, in spite of a fewbad habits--such as myself, for example. Is this fad of yoursmadness?--which would be quite to your credit, --for gadzooks, I like alunatic! Or is it the complaint of a man who has gathered too muchdata on the subject of Old Rye? Or is it, as I suspect, something moreoccult, and therefore more interesting?"

"Rick, boy, " said Tim, "you're too--inquiring!" And he turned to hisdesk with a look of delicate hauteur. 

It was the very next night that these two tippling pessimists spenttogether talking about certain disgruntled but immortal gentlemen, who, having said their say and made the world quite uncomfortable, had nowjourneyed on to inquire into the nothingness which they postulated. Thedawn was breaking in the muggy east; the bottles were empty, thecigars burnt out. Tim turned toward his friend with a sharp breaking ofsociable silence. 

"Rick, " he said, "do you know that Fear has a Shape?"

"And so has my nose!"

"You asked me the other night what I feared. Holy father, I make myconfession to you. What I fear is Fear. "

"That's because you've drunk too much--or not enough. 

 "'Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of Spring Your winter garment of repentance fling--'"

"My costume then would be too nebulous for this weather, dear boy. Butit's true what I was saying. I am afraid of ghosts. "

"For an agnostic that seems a bit--"

"Agnostic! Yes, so completely an agnostic that I do not even know thatI do not know! God, man, do you mean you have no ghosts--no--no thingswhich shape themselves? Why, there are things I have done--"

"Don't think of them, my boy! See, 'night's candles are burnt out, andjocund day stands tiptoe on the misty mountain top. '"

Tim looked about him with a sickly smile. He looked behind him and therewas nothing there; stared at the blank window, where the smoky dawnshowed its offensive face, and there was nothing there. He pushed awaythe moist hair from his haggard face--that face which would look likethe blessed St. John, and leaned heavily back in his chair. 

"'Yon light is not daylight, I know it, I, '" he murmured drowsily, "'itis some meteor which the sun exhales, to be to thee this night--'"

The words floated off in languid nothingness, and he slept. Dodson arosepreparatory to stretching himself on his couch. But first he bent overhis friend with a sense of tragic appreciation. 

"Damned by the skin of his teeth!" he muttered. "A little more, and hewould have gone right, and the Devil would have lost a good fellow. Asit is"--he smiled with his usual conceited delight in his own sayings, even when they were uttered in soliloquy--"he is merely one of thosesplendid gentlemen one will meet with in hell. " Then Dodson had amomentary nostalgia for goodness himself, but he soon overcame it, andstretching himself on his sofa, he, too, slept. 

That night he and O'Connor went together to hear "Faust" sung, andreturning to the office, Dodson prepared to write his criticism. Exceptfor the distant clatter of telegraph instruments, or the peremptorycries of "copy" from an upper room, the office was still. Dodson wroteand smoked his interminable cigarettes; O' Connor rested his head inhis hands on the desk, and sat in perfect silence. He did not know whenDodson finished, or when, arising, and absent-mindedly extinguishing thelights, he moved to the door with his copy in his hands. Dodson gatheredup the hats and coats as he passed them where they lay on a chair, andcalled:

"It is done, Tim. Come, let's get out of this. "

There was no answer, and he thought Tim was following, but after he hadhanded his criticism to the city editor, he saw he was still alone, andreturned to the room for his friend. He advanced no further than thedoorway, for, as he stood in the dusky corridor and looked within thedarkened room, he saw before his friend a Shape, white, of perfectloveliness, divinely delicate and pure and ethereal, which seemed as theembodiment of all goodness. From it came a soft radiance and a perfumesofter than the wind when "it breathes upon a bank of violets stealingand giving odor. " Staring at it, with eyes immovable, sat his friend. 

It was strange that at sight of a thing so unspeakably fair, a coldnesslike that which comes from the jewel-blue lips of a Muir crevasseshould have fallen upon Dodson, or that it was only by summoning all themanhood that was left in him, that he was able to restore light tothe room, and to rush to his friend. When he reached poor Tim he wasstone-still with paralysis. They took him home to the woman, who nursedhim out of that attack--and later on worried him into another. 

When he was able to sit up and jeer at things a little again, and helphimself to the quail the woman broiled for him, Dodson, sitting besidehim, said:

"Did you call that little exhibition of yours legerdemain, Tim, yousweep? Or are you really the Devil's bairn?"

"It was the Shape of Fear, " said Tim, quite seriously. 

"But it seemed mild as mother's milk. "

"It was compounded of the good I might have done. It is that which Ifear. "

He would explain no more. Later--many months later--he died patientlyand sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little beast withthe yellow eyes had high mass celebrated for him, which, all thingsconsidered, was almost as pathetic as it was amusing. 

Dodson was in Vienna when he heard of it. 

"Sa, sa!" cried he. "I wish it wasn't so dark in the tomb! What do yousuppose Tim is looking at?"

As for Jim O'Malley, he was with difficulty kept from illuminating thegrave with electricity. 

ON THE NORTHERN ICE

THE winter nights up at Sault Ste. Marie are as white and luminous asthe Milky Way. The silence which rests upon the solitude appears to bewhite also. Even sound has been included in Nature's arrestment, for, indeed, save the still white frost, all things seem to be obliterated. The stars have a poignant brightness, but they belong to heaven and notto earth, and between their immeasurable height and the still ice rollsthe ebon ether in vast, liquid billows. 

In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is actuallypeopled. It seems as if it might be the dark of the day after Cainkilled Abel, and as if all of humanity's remainder was huddled inaffright away from the awful spaciousness of Creation. 

The night Ralph Hagadorn started out for Echo Bay--bent on a pleasantduty--he laughed to himself, and said that he did not at all objectto being the only man in the world, so long as the world remained asunspeakably beautiful as it was when he buckled on his skates and shotaway into the solitude. He was bent on reaching his best friend in timeto act as groomsman, and business had delayed him till time was at itsbriefest. So he journeyed by night and journeyed alone, and when thetang of the frost got at his blood, he felt as a spirited horse feelswhen it gets free of bit and bridle. The ice was as glass, his skateswere keen, his frame fit, and his venture to his taste! So he laughed, and cut through the air as a sharp stone cleaves the water. He couldhear the whistling of the air as he cleft it. 

As he went on and on in the black stillness, he began to have fancies. He imagined himself enormously tall--a great Viking of the Northland, hastening over icy fiords to his love. And that reminded him that he hada love--though, indeed, that thought was always present with him as abackground for other thoughts. To be sure, he had not told her that shewas his love, for he had seen her only a few times, and the auspiciousoccasion had not yet presented itself. She lived at Echo Bay also, andwas to be the maid of honor to his friend's bride--which was one morereason why he skated almost as swiftly as the wind, and why, now andthen, he let out a shout of exultation. 

The one cloud that crossed Hagadorn's sun of expectancy was theknowledge that Marie Beaujeu's father had money, and that Marie lived ina house with two stories to it, and wore otter skin about her throatand little satin-lined mink boots on her feet when she went sledding. Moreover, in the locket in which she treasured a bit of her deadmother's hair, there was a black pearl as big as a pea. These thingsmade it difficult--perhaps impossible--for Ralph Hagadorn to saymore than, "I love you. " But that much he meant to say though he werescourged with chagrin for his temerity. 

This determination grew upon him as he swept along the ice under thestarlight. Venus made a glowing path toward the west and seemed eager toreassure him. He was sorry he could not skim down that avenue of lightwhich flowed from the love-star, but he was forced to turn his back uponit and face the black northeast. 

It came to him with a shock that he was not alone. His eyelashes werefrosted and his eyeballs blurred with the cold, so at first he thoughtit might be an illusion. But when he had rubbed his eyes hard, hemade sure that not very far in front of him was a long white skater influttering garments who sped over the ice as fast as ever werewolf went. 

He called aloud, but there was no answer. He shaped his hands andtrumpeted through them, but the silence was as before--it was complete. So then he gave chase, setting his teeth hard and putting a tension onhis firm young muscles. But go however he would, the white skater wentfaster. After a time, as he glanced at the cold gleam of the north star, he perceived that he was being led from his direct path. For a momenthe hesitated, wondering if he would not better keep to his road, but hisweird companion seemed to draw him on irresistibly, and finding it sweetto follow, he followed. 

Of course it came to him more than once in that strange pursuit, thatthe white skater was no earthly guide. Up in those latitudes men seecurious things when the hoar frost is on the earth. Hagadorn's ownfather--to hark no further than that for an instance!--who lived upthere with the Lake Superior Indians, and worked in the copper mines, had welcomed a woman at his hut one bitter night, who was gone bymorning, leaving wolf tracks on the snow! Yes, it was so, and JohnFontanelle, the half-breed, could tell you about it any day--if he werealive. (Alack, the snow where the wolf tracks were, is melted now!)

Well, Hagadorn followed the white skater all the night, and when the iceflushed pink at dawn, and arrows of lovely light shot up into the coldheavens, she was gone, and Hagadorn was at his destination. The sunclimbed arrogantly up to his place above all other things, and asHagadorn took off his skates and glanced carelessly lakeward, he behelda great wind-rift in the ice, and the waves showing blue and hungrybetween white fields. Had he rushed along his intended path, watchingthe stars to guide him, his glance turned upward, all his body atmagnificent momentum, he must certainly have gone into that cold grave. 

How wonderful that it had been sweet to follow the white skater, andthat he followed!

His heart beat hard as he hurried to his friend's house. But heencountered no wedding furore. His friend met him as men meet in housesof mourning. 

"Is this your wedding face?" cried Hagadorn. "Why, man, starved as I am, I look more like a bridegroom than you!"

"There's no wedding to-day!"

"No wedding! Why, you're not--"

"Marie Beaujeu died last night--"

"Marie--"

"Died last night. She had been skating in the afternoon, and she camehome chilled and wandering in her mind, as if the frost had got in itsomehow. She grew worse and worse, and all the time she talked of you. "

"Of me?"

"We wondered what it meant. No one knew you were lovers. "

"I didn't know it myself; more's the pity. At least, I didn't know--"

"She said you were on the ice, and that you didn't know about the bigbreaking-up, and she cried to us that the wind was off shore and therift widening. She cried over and over again that you could come in bythe old French creek if you only knew--"

"I came in that way. "

"But how did you come to do that? It's out of the path. We thoughtperhaps--"

But Hagadorn broke in with his story and told him all as it had come topass. 

That day they watched beside the maiden, who lay with tapers at her headand at her feet, and in the little church the bride who might have beenat her wedding said prayers for her friend. They buried Marie Beaujeu inher bridesmaid white, and Hagadorn was before the altar with her, as hehad intended from the first! Then at midnight the lovers who were towed whispered their vows in the gloom of the cold church, and walkedtogether through the snow to lay their bridal wreaths upon a grave. 

Three nights later, Hagadorn skated back again to his home. They wantedhim to go by sunlight, but he had his way, and went when Venus made herbright path on the ice. 

The truth was, he had hoped for the companionship of the white skater. But he did not have it. His only companion was the wind. The only voicehe heard was the baying of a wolf on the north shore. The world was asempty and as white as if God had just created it, and the sun had notyet colored nor man defiled it. 

THEIR DEAR LITTLE GHOST

THE first time one looked at Elsbeth, one was not prepossessed. She wasthin and brown, her nose turned slightly upward, her toes went in justa perceptible degree, and her hair was perfectly straight. But when onelooked longer, one perceived that she was a charming little creature. The straight hair was as fine as silk, and hung in funny little braidsdown her back; there was not a flaw in her soft brown skin, and hermouth was tender and shapely. But her particular charm lay in a lookwhich she habitually had, of seeming to know curious things--such as itis not allotted to ordinary persons to know. One felt tempted to say toher:

"What are these beautiful things which you know, and of which others areignorant? What is it you see with those wise and pellucid eyes? Why isit that everybody loves you?"

Elsbeth was my little godchild, and I knew her better than I knew anyother child in the world. But still I could not truthfully say that Iwas familiar with her, for to me her spirit was like a fair and fragrantroad in the midst of which I might walk in peace and joy, but where Iwas continually to discover something new. The last time I saw her quitewell and strong was over in the woods where she had gone with her twolittle brothers and her nurse to pass the hottest weeks of summer. Ifollowed her, foolish old creature that I was, just to be near her, forI needed to dwell where the sweet aroma of her life could reach me. 

One morning when I came from my room, limping a little, because I amnot so young as I used to be, and the lake wind works havoc with me, mylittle godchild came dancing to me singing:

"Come with me and I'll show you my places, my places, my places!"

Miriam, when she chanted by the Red Sea might have been more exultant, but she could not have been more bewitching. Of course I knew what"places" were, because I had once been a little girl myself, but unlessyou are acquainted with the real meaning of "places, " it would beuseless to try to explain. Either you know "places" or you do not--justas you understand the meaning of poetry or you do not. There are thingsin the world which cannot be taught. 

Elsbeth's two tiny brothers were present, and I took one by each handand followed her. No sooner had we got out of doors in the woods thana sort of mystery fell upon the world and upon us. We were cautioned tomove silently, and we did so, avoiding the crunching of dry twigs. 

"The fairies hate noise, " whispered my little godchild, her eyesnarrowing like a cat's. 

"I must get my wand first thing I do, " she said in an awed undertone. "It is useless to try to do anything without a wand. "

The tiny boys were profoundly impressed, and, indeed, so was I. I feltthat at last, I should, if I behaved properly, see the fairies, whichhad hitherto avoided my materialistic gaze. It was an enchanting moment, for there appeared, just then, to be nothing commonplace about life. 

There was a swale near by, and into this the little girl plunged. Icould see her red straw hat bobbing about among the tall rushes, and Iwondered if there were snakes. 

"Do you think there are snakes?" I asked one of the tiny boys. 

"If there are, " he said with conviction, "they won't dare hurt her. "

He convinced me. I feared no more. Presently Elsbeth came out of theswale. In her hand was a brown "cattail, " perfectly full and round. Shecarried it as queens carry their sceptres--the beautiful queens we dreamof in our youth. 

"Come, " she commanded, and waved the sceptre in a fine manner. So wefollowed, each tiny boy gripping my hand tight. We were all three atrifle awed. Elsbeth led us into a dark underbrush. The branches, asthey flew back in our faces, left them wet with dew. A wee path, made bythe girl's dear feet, guided our footsteps. Perfumes of elderberry andwild cucumber scented the air. A bird, frightened from its nest, madefrantic cries above our heads. The underbrush thickened. Presently thegloom of the hemlocks was over us, and in the midst of the shadowy greena tulip tree flaunted its leaves. Waves boomed and broke upon theshore below. There was a growing dampness as we went on, treading verylightly. A little green snake ran coquettishly from us. A fat and glossysquirrel chattered at us from a safe height, stroking his whiskers witha complaisant air. 

At length we reached the "place. " It was a circle of velvet grass, bright as the first blades of spring, delicate as fine sea-ferns. Thesunlight, falling down the shaft between the hemlocks, flooded it witha softened light and made the forest round about look like deep purplevelvet. My little godchild stood in the midst and raised her wandimpressively. 

"This is my place, " she said, with a sort of wonderful gladness in hertone. "This is where I come to the fairy balls. Do you see them?"

"See what?" whispered one tiny boy. 

"The fairies. "

There was a silence. The older boy pulled at my skirt. 

"Do YOU see them?" he asked, his voice trembling with expectancy. 

"Indeed, " I said, "I fear I am too old and wicked to see fairies, andyet--are their hats red?"

"They are, " laughed my little girl. "Their hats are red, and assmall--as small!" She held up the pearly nail of her wee finger to giveus the correct idea. 

"And their shoes are very pointed at the toes?"

"Oh, very pointed!"

"And their garments are green?"

"As green as grass. "

"And they blow little horns?"

"The sweetest little horns!"

"I think I see them, " I cried. 

"We think we see them too, " said the tiny boys, laughing in perfectglee. 

"And you hear their horns, don't you?" my little godchild asked somewhatanxiously. 

"Don't we hear their horns?" I asked the tiny boys. 

"We think we hear their horns, " they cried. "Don't you think we do?"

"It must be we do, " I said. "Aren't we very, very happy?"

We all laughed softly. Then we kissed each other and Elsbeth led us out, her wand high in the air. 

And so my feet found the lost path to Arcady. 

The next day I was called to the Pacific coast, and duty kept me theretill well into December. A few days before the date set for my return tomy home, a letter came from Elsbeth's mother. 

"Our little girl is gone into the Unknown, " she wrote--"that Unknown inwhich she seemed to be forever trying to pry. We knew she was going, andwe told her. She was quite brave, but she begged us to try some way tokeep her till after Christmas. 'My presents are not finished yet, ' shemade moan. 'And I did so want to see what I was going to have. You can'thave a very happy Christmas without me, I should think. Can you arrangeto keep me somehow till after then?' We could not 'arrange' either withGod in heaven or science upon earth, and she is gone. "

She was only my little godchild, and I am an old maid, with no businessfretting over children, but it seemed as if the medium of light andbeauty had been taken from me. Through this crystal soul I had perceivedwhatever was loveliest. However, what was, was! I returned to my homeand took up a course of Egyptian history, and determined to concernmyself with nothing this side the Ptolemies. 

Her mother has told me how, on Christmas eve, as usual, she andElsbeth's father filled the stockings of the little ones, and hung them, where they had always hung, by the fireplace. They had little heart forthe task, but they had been prodigal that year in their expenditures, and had heaped upon the two tiny boys all the treasures they thoughtwould appeal to them. They asked themselves how they could have beenso insane previously as to exercise economy at Christmas time, and whatthey meant by not getting Elsbeth the autoharp she had asked for theyear before. 

"And now--" began her father, thinking of harps. But he could notcomplete this sentence, of course, and the two went on passionately andalmost angrily with their task. There were two stockings and two pilesof toys. Two stockings only, and only two piles of toys! Two is verylittle!

They went away and left the darkened room, and after a time theyslept--after a long time. Perhaps that was about the time the tiny boysawoke, and, putting on their little dressing gowns and bed slippers, made a dash for the room where the Christmas things were always placed. The older one carried a candle which gave out a feeble light. The otherfollowed behind through the silent house. They were very impatient andeager, but when they reached the door of the sitting-room they stopped, for they saw that another child was before them. 

It was a delicate little creature, sitting in her white night gown, withtwo rumpled funny braids falling down her back, and she seemed to beweeping. As they watched, she arose, and putting out one slenderfinger as a child does when she counts, she made sure over and overagain--three sad times--that there were only two stockings and two pilesof toys! Only those and no more. 

The little figure looked so familiar that the boys started toward it, but just then, putting up her arm and bowing her face in it, as Elsbethhad been used to do when she wept or was offended, the little thingglided away and went out. That's what the boys said. It went out as acandle goes out. 

They ran and woke their parents with the tale, and all the house wassearched in a wonderment, and disbelief, and hope, and tumult! Butnothing was found. For nights they watched. But there was only thesilent house. Only the empty rooms. They told the boys they must havebeen mistaken. But the boys shook their heads. 

"We know our Elsbeth, " said they. "It was our Elsbeth, cryin' 'cause shehadn't no stockin' an' no toys, and we would have given her all ours, only she went out--jus' went out!"

Alack!

The next Christmas I helped with the little festival. It was none ofmy affair, but I asked to help, and they let me, and when we were allthrough there were three stockings and three piles of toys, and in thelargest one was all the things that I could think of that my dear childwould love. I locked the boys' chamber that night, and I slept on thedivan in the parlor off the sitting-room. I slept but little, and thenight was very still--so windless and white and still that I think Imust have heard the slightest noise. Yet I heard none. Had I been in mygrave I think my ears would not have remained more unsaluted. 

Yet when daylight came and I went to unlock the boys' bedchamber door, I saw that the stocking and all the treasures which I had bought for mylittle godchild were gone. There was not a vestige of them remaining!

Of course we told the boys nothing. As for me, after dinner I went homeand buried myself once more in my history, and so interested was I thatmidnight came without my knowing it. I should not have looked up at all, I suppose, to become aware of the time, had it not been for a faint, sweet sound as of a child striking a stringed instrument. It was sodelicate and remote that I hardly heard it, but so joyous and tenderthat I could not but listen, and when I heard it a second time it seemedas if I caught the echo of a child's laugh. At first I was puzzled. ThenI remembered the little autoharp I had placed among the other things inthat pile of vanished toys. I said aloud:

"Farewell, dear little ghost. Go rest. Rest in joy, dear little ghost. Farewell, farewell. "

That was years ago, but there has been silence since. Elsbeth was alwaysan obedient little thing. 

A SPECTRAL COLLIE

WILLIAM PERCY CECIL happened to be a younger son, so he left home--whichwas England--and went to Kansas to ranch it. Thousands of younger sonsdo the same, only their destination is not invariably Kansas. 

An agent at Wichita picked out Cecil's farm for him and sent the deedsover to England before Cecil left. He said there was a house on theplace. So Cecil's mother fitted him out for America just as she hadfitted out another superfluous boy for Africa, and parted from himwith an heroic front and big agonies of mother-ache which she kept toherself. 

The boy bore up the way a man of his blood ought, but when he went outto the kennel to see Nita, his collie, he went to pieces somehow, androlled on the grass with her in his arms and wept like a booby. But theremarkable part of it was that Nita wept too, big, hot dog tears whichher master wiped away. When he went off she howled like a hungry baby, and had to be switched before she would give any one a night's sleep. 

When Cecil got over on his Kansas place he fitted up the shack ascosily as he could, and learned how to fry bacon and make soda biscuits. Incidentally, he did farming, and sunk a heap of money, finding outhow not to do things. Meantime, the Americans laughed at him, and wereinclined to turn the cold shoulder, and his compatriots, of whom therewere a number in the county, did not prove to his liking. They consoledthemselves for their exiled state in fashions not in keeping withCecil's traditions. His homesickness went deeper than theirs, perhaps, and American whiskey could not make up for the loss of his English home, nor flirtations with the gay American village girls quite compensatehim for the loss of his English mother. So he kept to himself and hadnostalgia as some men have consumption. 

At length the loneliness got so bad that he had to see some living thingfrom home, or make a flunk of it and go back like a cry baby. He hada stiff pride still, though he sobbed himself to sleep more than onenight, as many a pioneer has done before him. So he wrote home for Nita, the collie, and got word that she would be sent. Arrangements were madefor her care all along the line, and she was properly boxed and shipped. 

As the time drew near for her arrival, Cecil could hardly eat. Hewas too excited to apply himself to anything. The day of her expectedarrival he actually got up at five o'clock to clean the house and makeit look as fine as possible for her inspection. Then he hitched up anddrove fifteen miles to get her. The train pulled out just before hereached the station, so Nita in her box was waiting for him on theplatform. He could see her in a queer way, as one sees the purple centreof a revolving circle of light; for, to tell the truth, with the longride in the morning sun, and the beating of his heart, Cecil was onlyabout half-conscious of anything. He wanted to yell, but he didn't. He kept himself in hand and lifted up the sliding side of the box andcalled to Nita, and she came out. 

But it wasn't the man who fainted, though he might have done so, beingcrazy homesick as he was, and half-fed and overworked while he was yetsoft from an easy life. No, it was the dog! She looked at her master'sface, gave one cry of inexpressible joy, and fell over in a realfeminine sort of a faint, and had to be brought to like any other lady, with camphor and water and a few drops of spirit down her throat. ThenCecil got up on the wagon seat, and she sat beside him with her head onhis arm, and they rode home in absolute silence, each feeling too muchfor speech. After they reached home, however, Cecil showed her all overthe place, and she barked out her ideas in glad sociability. 

After that Cecil and Nita were inseparable. She walked beside himall day when he was out with the cultivator, or when he was mowing orreaping. She ate beside him at table and slept across his feet at night. Evenings when he looked over the Graphic from home, or read the bookshis mother sent him, that he might keep in touch with the world, Nitawas beside him, patient, but jealous. Then, when he threw his book orpaper down and took her on his knee and looked into her pretty eyes, orfrolicked with her, she fairly laughed with delight. 

In short, she was faithful with that faith of which only a dog iscapable--that unquestioning faith to which even the most loving womennever quite attain. 

However, Fate was annoyed at this perfect friendship. It didn't give herenough to do, and Fate is a restless thing with a horrible appetite forvariety. So poor Nita died one day mysteriously, and gave her lastlook to Cecil as a matter of course; and he held her paws till the lastmoment, as a stanch friend should, and laid her away decently in a pinebox in the cornfield, where he could be shielded from public view if hechose to go there now and then and sit beside her grave. 

He went to bed very lonely, indeed, the first night. The shack seemedto him to be removed endless miles from the other habitations of men. He seemed cut off from the world, and ached to hear the cheerful littlebarks which Nita had been in the habit of giving him by way of goodnight. Her amiable eye with its friendly light was missing, the gay wagof her tail was gone; all her ridiculous ways, at which he was nevertired of laughing, were things of the past. 

He lay down, busy with these thoughts, yet so habituated to Nita'spresence, that when her weight rested upon his feet, as usual, he feltno surprise. But after a moment it came to him that as she was dead theweight he felt upon his feet could not be hers. And yet, there it was, warm and comfortable, cuddling down in the familiar way. He actuallysat up and put his hand down to the foot of the bed to discover whatwas there. But there was nothing there, save the weight. And that stayedwith him that night and many nights after. 

It happened that Cecil was a fool, as men will be when they are young, and he worked too hard, and didn't take proper care of himself; and soit came about that he fell sick with a low fever. He struggled aroundfor a few days, trying to work it off, but one morning he awoke only tothe consciousness of absurd dreams. He seemed to be on the sea, sailingfor home, and the boat was tossing and pitching in a weary circle, andcould make no headway. His heart was burning with impatience, but theboat went round and round in that endless circle till he shrieked outwith agony. 

The next neighbors were the Taylors, who lived two miles and a halfaway. They were awakened that morning by the howling of a dog beforetheir door. It was a hideous sound and would give them no peace. SoCharlie Taylor got up and opened the door, discovering there an excitedlittle collie. 

"Why, Tom, " he called, "I thought Cecil's collie was dead!"

"She is, " called back Tom. 

"No, she ain't neither, for here she is, shakin' like an aspin, and abeggin' me to go with her. Come out, Tom, and see. "

It was Nita, no denying, and the men, perplexed, followed her to Cecil'sshack, where they found him babbling. 

But that was the last of her. Cecil said he never felt her on hisfeet again. She had performed her final service for him, he said. The neighbors tried to laugh at the story at first, but they knew theTaylors wouldn't take the trouble to lie, and as for Cecil, no one wouldhave ventured to chaff him. 

THE HOUSE THAT WAS NOT

BART FLEMING took his bride out to his ranch on the plains when shewas but seventeen years old, and the two set up housekeeping in threehundred and twenty acres of corn and rye. Off toward the west there wasan unbroken sea of tossing corn at that time of the year when the bridecame out, and as her sewing window was on the side of the house whichfaced the sunset, she passed a good part of each day looking into thatgreat rustling mass, breathing in its succulent odors and listeningto its sibilant melody. It was her picture gallery, her opera, herspectacle, and, being sensible, --or perhaps, being merely happy, --shemade the most of it. 

When harvesting time came and the corn was cut, she had muchentertainment in discovering what lay beyond. The town was east, and itchanced that she had never ridden west. So, when the rolling hills ofthis newly beholden land lifted themselves for her contemplation, andthe harvest sun, all in an angry and sanguinary glow sank in the veiledhorizon, and at noon a scarf of golden vapor wavered up and downalong the earth line, it was as if a new world had been made for her. Sometimes, at the coming of a storm, a whip-lash of purple cloud, fullof electric agility, snapped along the western horizon. 

"Oh, you'll see a lot of queer things on these here plains, " her husbandsaid when she spoke to him of these phenomena. "I guess what you see isthe wind. "

"The wind!" cried Flora. "You can't see the wind, Bart. "

"Now look here, Flora, " returned Bart, with benevolent emphasis, "you'rea smart one, but you don't know all I know about this here country. I'velived here three mortal years, waitin' for you to git up out of yourmother's arms and come out to keep me company, and I know what there isto know. Some things out here is queer--so queer folks wouldn't believe'em unless they saw. An' some's so pig-headed they don't believe theirown eyes. As for th' wind, if you lay down flat and squint toward th'west, you can see it blowin' along near th' ground, like a big ribbon;an' sometimes it's th' color of air, an' sometimes it's silver an' gold, an' sometimes, when a storm is comin', it's purple. "

"If you got so tired looking at the wind, why didn't you marry someother girl, Bart, instead of waiting for me?"

Flora was more interested in the first part of Bart's speech than in thelast. 

"Oh, come on!" protested Bart, and he picked her up in his arms andjumped her toward the ceiling of the low shack as if she were a littlegirl--but then, to be sure, she wasn't much more. 

Of all the things Flora saw when the corn was cut down, nothinginterested her so much as a low cottage, something like her own, whichlay away in the distance. She could not guess how far it might be, because distances are deceiving out there, where the altitude is highand the air is as clear as one of those mystic balls of glass in whichthe sallow mystics of India see the moving shadows of the future. 

She had not known there were neighbors so near, and she wondered forseveral days about them before she ventured to say anything to Barton the subject. Indeed, for some reason which she did not attempt toexplain to herself, she felt shy about broaching the matter. PerhapsBart did not want her to know the people. The thought came to her, as naughty thoughts will come, even to the best of persons, that somehandsome young men might be "baching" it out there by themselves, andBart didn't wish her to make their acquaintance. Bart had flattered herso much that she had actually begun to think herself beautiful, thoughas a matter of fact she was only a nice little girl with a lot ofreddish-brown hair, and a bright pair of reddish-brown eyes in a whiteface. 

"Bart, " she ventured one evening, as the sun, at its fiercest, rushedtoward the great black hollow of the west, "who lives over there in thatshack?"

She turned away from the window where she had been looking at theincarnadined disk, and she thought she saw Bart turn pale. But then, her eyes were so blurred with the glory she had been gazing at, that shemight easily have been mistaken. 

"I say, Bart, why don't you speak? If there's any one around toassociate with, I should think you'd let me have the benefit of theircompany. It isn't as funny as you think, staying here alone days anddays. "

"You ain't gettin' homesick, be you, sweetheart?" cried Bart, puttinghis arms around her. "You ain't gettin' tired of my society, be yeh?"

It took some time to answer this question in a satisfactory manner, butat length Flora was able to return to her original topic. 

"But the shack, Bart! Who lives there, anyway?"

"I'm not acquainted with 'em, " said Bart, sharply. "Ain't them biscuitsdone, Flora?"

Then, of course, she grew obstinate. 

"Those biscuits will never be done, Bart, till I know about that house, and why you never spoke of it, and why nobody ever comes down the roadfrom there. Some one lives there I know, for in the mornings and atnight I see the smoke coming out of the chimney. "

"Do you now?" cried Bart, opening his eyes and looking at her withunfeigned interest. "Well, do you know, sometimes I've fancied I seenthat too?"

"Well, why not, " cried Flora, in half anger. "Why shouldn't you?"

"See here, Flora, take them biscuits out an' listen to me. There ain'tno house there. Hello! I didn't know you'd go for to drop the biscuits. Wait, I'll help you pick 'em up. By cracky, they're hot, ain't they?What you puttin' a towel over 'em for? Well, you set down here on myknee, so. Now you look over at that there house. You see it, don't yeh?Well, it ain't there! No! I saw it the first week I was out here. I wasjus' half dyin', thinkin' of you an' wonderin' why you didn'twrite. That was the time you was mad at me. So I rode over there oneday--lookin' up company, so t' speak--and there wa'n't no house there. Ispent all one Sunday lookin' for it. Then I spoke to Jim Geary aboutit. He laughed an' got a little white about th' gills, an' he said heguessed I'd have to look a good while before I found it. He said thatthere shack was an ole joke. "

"Why--what--"

"Well, this here is th' story he tol' me. He said a man an' his wifecome out here t' live an' put up that there little place. An' she wasyoung, you know, an' kind o' skeery, and she got lonesome. It worked onher an' worked on her, an' one day she up an' killed the baby an' herhusband an' herself. Th' folks found 'em and buried 'em right there ontheir own ground. Well, about two weeks after that, th' house was burneddown. Don't know how. Tramps, maybe. Anyhow, it burned. At least, Iguess it burned!"

"You guess it burned!"

"Well, it ain't there, you know. "

"But if it burned the ashes are there. "

"All right, girlie, they're there then. Now let's have tea. "

This they proceeded to do, and were happy and cheerful all evening, but that didn't keep Flora from rising at the first flush of dawn andstealing out of the house. She looked away over west as she went tothe barn and there, dark and firm against the horizon, stood thelittle house against the pellucid sky of morning. She got on Ginger'sback--Ginger being her own yellow broncho--and set off at a hard pacefor the house. It didn't appear to come any nearer, but the objectswhich had seemed to be beside it came closer into view, and Florapressed on, with her mind steeled for anything. But as she approachedthe poplar windbreak which stood to the north of the house, the littleshack waned like a shadow before her. It faded and dimmed before hereyes. 

She slapped Ginger's flanks and kept him going, and she at last got himup to the spot. But there was nothing there. The bunch grass grew talland rank and in the midst of it lay a baby's shoe. Flora thought ofpicking it up, but something cold in her veins withheld her. Then shegrew angry, and set Ginger's head toward the place and tried to drivehim over it. But the yellow broncho gave one snort of fear, gatheredhimself in a bunch, and then, all tense, leaping muscles, made for homeas only a broncho can. 

STORY OF AN OBSTINATE CORPSE

VIRGIL HOYT is a photographer's assistant up at St. Paul, and enjoyshis work without being consumed by it. He has been in search of thepicturesque all over the West and hundreds of miles to the north, inCanada, and can speak three or four Indian dialects and put a canoethrough the rapids. That is to say, he is a man of adventure, and nodreamer. He can fight well and shoot better, and swim so as to put up awinning race with the Indian boys, and he can sit in the saddle all dayand not worry about it to-morrow. 

Wherever he goes, he carries a camera. 

"The world, " Hoyt is in the habit of saying to those who sit with himwhen he smokes his pipe, "was created in six days to be photographed. Man--and particularly woman--was made for the same purpose. Cloudsare not made to give moisture nor trees to cast shade. They have beencreated in order to give the camera obscura something to do. "

In short, Virgil Hoyt's view of the world is whimsical, and he likes tobe bothered neither with the disagreeable nor the mysterious. Thatis the reason he loathes and detests going to a house of mourning tophotograph a corpse. The bad taste of it offends him, but above all, he doesn't like the necessity of shouldering, even for a few moments, apart of the burden of sorrow which belongs to some one else. He dislikessorrow, and would willingly canoe five hundred miles up the coldCanadian rivers to get rid of it. Nevertheless, as assistantphotographer, it is often his duty to do this very kind of thing. 

Not long ago he was sent for by a rich Jewish family to photograph theremains of the mother, who had just died. He was put out, but he wasonly an assistant, and he went. He was taken to the front parlor, wherethe dead woman lay in her coffin. It was evident to him that there wassome excitement in the household, and that a discussion was going on. But Hoyt said to himself that it didn't concern him, and he thereforepaid no attention to it. 

The daughter wanted the coffin turned on end in order that the corpsemight face the camera properly, but Hoyt said he could overcome therecumbent attitude and make it appear that the face was taken in theposition it would naturally hold in life, and so they went out and lefthim alone with the dead. 

The face of the deceased was a strong and positive one, such asmay often be seen among Jewish matrons. Hoyt regarded it with someadmiration, thinking to himself that she was a woman who had knownwhat she wanted, and who, once having made up her mind, would proveimmovable. Such a character appealed to Hoyt. He reflected that hemight have married if only he could have found a woman with strength ofcharacter sufficient to disagree with him. There was a strand of hairout of place on the dead woman's brow, and he gently pushed it back. A bud lifted its head too high from among the roses on her breast andspoiled the contour of the chin, so he broke it off. He remembered thesethings later with keen distinctness, and that his hand touched her chillface two or three times in the making of his arrangements. 

Then he took the impression, and left the house. 

He was busy at the time with some railroad work, and several days passedbefore he found opportunity to develop the plates. He took them fromthe bath in which they had lain with a number of others, and wentenergetically to work upon them, whistling some very saucy songs he hadlearned of the guide in the Red River country, and trying to forget thatthe face which was presently to appear was that of a dead woman. He hadused three plates as a precaution against accident, and they cameup well. But as they developed, he became aware of the existence ofsomething in the photograph which had not been apparent to his eyein the subject. He was irritated, and without attempting to face themystery, he made a few prints and laid them aside, ardently hoping thatby some chance they would never be called for. 

However, as luck would have it, --and Hoyt's luck never had beengood, --his employer asked one day what had become of those photographs. Hoyt tried to evade making an answer, but the effort was futile, and hehad to get out the finished prints and exhibit them. The older man satstaring at them a long time. 

"Hoyt, " he said, "you're a young man, and very likely you have neverseen anything like this before. But I have. Not exactly the same thing, perhaps, but similar phenomena have come my way a number of times sinceI went in the business, and I want to tell you there are things inheaven and earth not dreamt of--"

"Oh, I know all that tommy-rot, " cried Hoyt, angrily, "but when anythinghappens I want to know the reason why and how it is done. "

"All right, " answered his employer, "then you might explain why and howthe sun rises. "

But he humored the young man sufficiently to examine with him the bathsin which the plates were submerged, and the plates themselves. All wasas it should be; but the mystery was there, and could not be done awaywith. 

Hoyt hoped against hope that the friends of the dead woman would somehowforget about the photographs; but the idea was unreasonable, and oneday, as a matter of course, the daughter appeared and asked to see thepictures of her mother. 

"Well, to tell the truth, " stammered Hoyt, "they didn't come outquite--quite as well as we could wish. "

"But let me see them, " persisted the lady. "I'd like to look at themanyhow. "

"Well, now, " said Hoyt, trying to be soothing, as he believed it wasalways best to be with women, --to tell the truth he was an ignoramuswhere women were concerned, --"I think it would be better if you didn'tlook at them. There are reasons why--" he ambled on like this, stupidman that he was, till the lady naturally insisted upon seeing thepictures without a moment's delay. 

So poor Hoyt brought them out and placed them in her hand, and thenran for the water pitcher, and had to be at the bother of bathing herforehead to keep her from fainting. 

For what the lady saw was this: Over face and flowers and the head ofthe coffin fell a thick veil, the edges of which touched the floor insome places. It covered the features so well that not a hint of them wasvisible. 

"There was nothing over mother's face!" cried the lady at length. 

"Not a thing, " acquiesced Hoyt. "I know, because I had occasion to touchher face just before I took the picture. I put some of her hair backfrom her brow. "

"What does it mean, then?" asked the lady. 

"You know better than I. There is no explanation in science. Perhapsthere is some in--in psychology. "

"Well, " said the young woman, stammering a little and coloring, "motherwas a good woman, but she always wanted her own way, and she always hadit, too. "

"Yes. "

"And she never would have her picture taken. She didn't admire her ownappearance. She said no one should ever see a picture of her. "

"So?" said Hoyt, meditatively. "Well, she's kept her word, hasn't she?"

The two stood looking at the photographs for a time. Then Hoyt pointedto the open blaze in the grate. 

"Throw them in, " he commanded. "Don't let your father see them--don'tkeep them yourself. They wouldn't be agreeable things to keep. "

"That's true enough, " admitted the lady. And she threw them in the fire. Then Virgil Hoyt brought out the plates and broke them before her eyes. 

And that was the end of it--except that Hoyt sometimes tells the storyto those who sit beside him when his pipe is lighted. 

A CHILD OF THE RAIN

IT was the night that Mona Meeks, the dressmaker, told him she didn'tlove him. He couldn't believe it at first, because he had so long beenaccustomed to the idea that she did, and no matter how rough the weatheror how irascible the passengers, he felt a song in his heart as hepunched transfers, and rang his bell punch, and signalled the driverwhen to let people off and on. 

Now, suddenly, with no reason except a woman's, she had changed hermind. He dropped in to see her at five o'clock, just before time for thenight shift, and to give her two red apples he had been saving for her. She looked at the apples as if they were invisible and she could not seethem, and standing in her disorderly little dressmaking parlor, with itscuttings and scraps and litter of fabrics, she said:

"It is no use, John. I shall have to work here like this all mylife--work here alone. For I don't love you, John. No, I don't. Ithought I did, but it is a mistake. "

"You mean it?" asked John, bringing up the words in a great gasp. 

"Yes, " she said, white and trembling and putting out her hands as if tobeg for his mercy. And then--big, lumbering fool--he turned aroundand strode down the stairs and stood at the corner in the beating rainwaiting for his car. It came along at length, spluttering on the wetrails and spitting out blue fire, and he took his shift after a gruff"Good night" to Johnson, the man he relieved. 

He was glad the rain was bitter cold and drove in his face fiercely. He rejoiced at the cruelty of the wind, and when it hustled pedestriansbefore it, lashing them, twisting their clothes, and threatening theirequilibrium, he felt amused. He was pleased at the chill in his bonesand at the hunger that tortured him. At least, at first he thought itwas hunger till he remembered that he had just eaten. The hours passedconfusedly. He had no consciousness of time. But it must have beenlate, --near midnight, --judging by the fact that there were few personsvisible anywhere in the black storm, when he noticed a little figuresitting at the far end of the car. He had not seen the child when shegot on, but all was so curious and wild to him that evening--he himselfseemed to himself the most curious and the wildest of all things--thatit was not surprising that he should not have observed the littlecreature. 

She was wrapped in a coat so much too large that it had become frayedat the bottom from dragging on the pavement. Her hair hung in unkemptstringiness about her bent shoulders, and her feet were covered with oldarctics, many sizes too big, from which the soles hung loose. 

Beside the little figure was a chest of dark wood, with curiouslywrought hasps. From this depended a stout strap by which it could becarried over the shoulders. John Billings stared in, fascinated by thepoor little thing with its head sadly drooping upon its breast, its thinblue hands relaxed upon its lap, and its whole attitude so suggestiveof hunger, loneliness, and fatigue, that he made up his mind he wouldcollect no fare from it. 

"It will need its nickel for breakfast, " he said to himself. "Thecompany can stand this for once. Or, come to think of it, I mightcelebrate my hard luck. Here's to the brotherhood of failures!" Andhe took a nickel from one pocket of his great-coat and dropped it inanother, ringing his bell punch to record the transfer. 

The car plunged along in the darkness, and the rain beat more viciouslythan ever in his face. The night was full of the rushing sound of thestorm. Owing to some change of temperature the glass of the car becameobscured so that the young conductor could no longer see the littlefigure distinctly, and he grew anxious about the child. 

"I wonder if it's all right, " he said to himself. "I never saw livingcreature sit so still. "

He opened the car door, intending to speak with the child, but justthen something went wrong with the lights. There was a blue and greenflickering, then darkness, a sudden halting of the car, and a greatsweep of wind and rain in at the door. When, after a moment, light andmotion reasserted themselves, and Billings had got the door together, heturned to look at the little passenger. But the car was empty. 

It was a fact. There was no child there--not even moisture on the seatwhere she had been sitting. 

"Bill, " said he, going to the front door and addressing the driver, "what became of that little kid in the old cloak?"

"I didn't see no kid, " said Bill, crossly. "For Gawd's sake, close thedoor, John, and git that draught off my back. "

"Draught!" said John, indignantly, "where's the draught?"

"You've left the hind door open, " growled Bill, and John saw himshivering as a blast struck him and ruffled the fur on his bear-skincoat. But the door was not open, and yet John had to admit to himselfthat the car seemed filled with wind and a strange coldness. 

However, it didn't matter. Nothing mattered! Still, it was as well nodoubt to look under the seats just to make sure no little crouchingfigure was there, and so he did. But there was nothing. In fact, Johnsaid to himself, he seemed to be getting expert in finding nothing wherethere ought to be something. 

He might have stayed in the car, for there was no likelihood of morepassengers that evening, but somehow he preferred going out where therain could drench him and the wind pommel him. How horribly tired hewas! If there were only some still place away from the blare of the citywhere a man could lie down and listen to the sound of the sea or thestorm--or if one could grow suddenly old and get through with the botherof living--or if--

The car gave a sudden lurch as it rounded a curve, and for a moment itseemed to be a mere chance whether Conductor Billings would stay onhis platform or go off under those fire-spitting wheels. He caughtinstinctively at his brake, saved himself, and stood still for a moment, panting. 

"I must have dozed, " he said to himself. 

Just then, dimly, through the blurred window, he saw again the littlefigure of the child, its head on its breast as before, its blue handslying in its lap and the curious box beside it. John Billings felt acoldness beyond the coldness of the night run through his blood. Then, with a half-stifled cry, he threw back the door, and made a desperatespring at the corner where the eerie thing sat. 

And he touched the green carpeting on the seat, which was quite dryand warm, as if no dripping, miserable little wretch had ever crouchedthere. 

He rushed to the front door. 

"Bill, " he roared, "I want to know about that kid. "

"What kid?"

"The same kid! The wet one with the old coat and the box with ironhasps! The one that's been sitting here in the car!"

Bill turned his surly face to confront the young conductor. 

"You've been drinking, you fool, " said he. "Fust thing you know you'llbe reported. "

The conductor said not a word. He went slowly and weakly back to hispost and stood there the rest of the way leaning against the end of thecar for support. Once or twice he muttered:

"The poor little brat!" And again he said, "So you didn't love me afterall!"

He never knew how he reached home, but he sank to sleep as dying mensink to death. All the same, being a hearty young man, he was on dutyagain next day but one, and again the night was rainy and cold. 

It was the last run, and the car was spinning along at its limit, whenthere came a sudden soft shock. John Billings knew what that meant. Hehad felt something of the kind once before. He turned sick for a moment, and held on to the brake. Then he summoned his courage and went aroundto the side of the car, which had stopped. Bill, the driver, was beforehim, and had a limp little figure in his arms, and was carrying it tothe gaslight. John gave one look and cried:

"It's the same kid, Bill! The one I told you of!"

True as truth were the ragged coat dangling from the pitiful body, thelittle blue hands, the thin shoulders, the stringy hair, the big arcticson the feet. And in the road not far off was the curious chest of darkwood with iron hasps. 

"She ran under the car deliberate!" cried Bill. "I yelled to her, butshe looked at me and ran straight on!"

He was white in spite of his weather-beaten skin. 

"I guess you wasn't drunk last night after all, John, " said he. 

"You--you are sure the kid is--is there?" gasped John. 

"Not so damned sure!" said Bill. 

But a few minutes later it was taken away in a patrol wagon, and with itthe little box with iron hasps. 

THE ROOM OF THE EVIL THOUGHT

THEY called it the room of the Evil Thought. It was really thepleasantest room in the house, and when the place had been used as therectory, was the minister's study. It looked out on a mournful clumpof larches, such as may often be seen in the old-fashioned yards inMichigan, and these threw a tender gloom over the apartment. 

There was a wide fireplace in the room, and it had been the youngminister's habit to sit there hours and hours, staring ahead of him atthe fire, and smoking moodily. The replenishing of the fire and of hispipe, it was said, would afford him occupation all the day long, andthat was how it came about that his parochial duties were neglected sothat, little by little, the people became dissatisfied with him, thoughhe was an eloquent young man, who could send his congregation away drunkon his influence. However, the calmer pulsed among his parish began towhisper that it was indeed the influence of the young minister and notthat of the Holy Ghost which they felt, and it was finally decidedthat neither animal magnetism nor hypnotism were good substitutes forreligion. And so they let him go. 

The new rector moved into a smart brick house on the other side of thechurch, and gave receptions and dinner parties, and was punctiliousabout making his calls. The people therefore liked him very much--somuch that they raised the debt on the church and bought a chime ofbells, in their enthusiasm. Every one was lighter of heart than underthe ministration of the previous rector. A burden appeared to be liftedfrom the community. True, there were a few who confessed the new mandid not give them the food for thought which the old one had done, but, then, the former rector had made them uncomfortable! He had not onlymade them conscious of the sins of which they were already guilty, butalso of those for which they had the latent capacity. A strange andfatal man, whom women loved to their sorrow, and whom simple men couldnot understand! It was generally agreed that the parish was well rid ofhim. 

"He was a genius, " said the people in commiseration. The word was anuncomplimentary epithet with them. 

When the Hanscoms moved in the house which had been the old rectory, they gave Grandma Hanscom the room with the fireplace. Grandma was wellpleased. The roaring fire warmed her heart as well as her chill oldbody, and she wept with weak joy when she looked at the larches, becausethey reminded her of the house she had lived in when she was firstmarried. All the forenoon of the first day she was busy putting thingsaway in bureau drawers and closets, but by afternoon she was ready tosit down in her high-backed rocker and enjoy the comforts of her room. 

She nodded a bit before the fire, as she usually did after luncheon, andthen she awoke with an awful start and sat staring before her with sucha look in her gentle, filmy old eyes as had never been there before. She did not move, except to rock slightly, and the Thought grew and grewtill her face was disguised as by some hideous mask of tragedy. 

By and by the children came pounding at the door. 

"Oh, grandma, let us in, please. We want to see your new room, and mammagave us some ginger cookies on a plate, and we want to give some toyou. "

The door gave way under their assaults, and the three little ones stoodpeeping in, waiting for permission to enter. But it did not seem to betheir grandma--their own dear grandma--who arose and tottered towardthem in fierce haste, crying:

"Away, away! Out of my sight! Out of my sight before I do the thing Iwant to do! Such a terrible thing! Send some one to me quick, children, children! Send some one quick!"

They fled with feet shod with fear, and their mother came, and GrandmaHanscom sank down and clung about her skirts and sobbed:

"Tie me, Miranda. Make me fast to the bed or the wall. Get some one towatch me. For I want to do an awful thing!"

They put the trembling old creature in bed, and she raved there allthe night long and cried out to be held, and to be kept from doing thefearful thing, whatever it was--for she never said what it was. 

The next morning some one suggested taking her in the sitting-roomwhere she would be with the family. So they laid her on the sofa, hemmedaround with cushions, and before long she was her quiet self again, though exhausted, naturally, with the tumult of the previous night. Now and then, as the children played about her, a shadow crept overher face--a shadow as of cold remembrance--and then the perplexed tearsfollowed. 

When she seemed as well as ever they put her back in her room. Butthough the fire glowed and the lamp burned, as soon as ever she wasalone they heard her shrill cries ringing to them that the Evil Thoughthad come again. So Hal, who was home from college, carried her up to hisroom, which she seemed to like very well. Then he went down to have asmoke before grandma's fire. 

The next morning he was absent from breakfast. They thought he mighthave gone for an early walk, and waited for him a few minutes. Thenhis sister went to the room that looked upon the larches, and found himdressed and pacing the floor with a face set and stern. He had not beenin bed at all, as she saw at once. His eyes were bloodshot, his facestricken as if with old age or sin or--but she could not make it out. When he saw her he sank in a chair and covered his face with his hands, and between the trembling fingers she could see drops of perspiration onhis forehead. 

"Hal!" she cried, "Hal, what is it?"

But for answer he threw his arms about the little table and clung toit, and looked at her with tortured eyes, in which she fancied she sawa gleam of hate. She ran, screaming, from the room, and her father cameand went up to him and laid his hands on the boy's shoulders. And thena fearful thing happened. All the family saw it. There could be nomistake. Hal's hands found their way with frantic eagerness toward hisfather's throat as if they would choke him, and the look in his eyes wasso like a madman's that his father raised his fist and felled him as heused to fell men years before in the college fights, and then draggedhim into the sitting-room and wept over him. 

By evening, however, Hal was all right, and the family said it must havebeen a fever, --perhaps from overstudy, --at which Hal covertly smiled. But his father was still too anxious about him to let him out of hissight, so he put him on a cot in his room, and thus it chanced that themother and Grace concluded to sleep together downstairs. 

The two women made a sort of festival of it, and drank little cups ofchocolate before the fire, and undid and brushed their brown braids, and smiled at each other, understandingly, with that sweet intuitivesympathy which women have, and Grace told her mother a number of thingswhich she had been waiting for just such an auspicious occasion toconfide. 

But the larches were noisy and cried out with wild voices, and the flameof the fire grew blue and swirled about in the draught sinuously, sothat a chill crept upon the two. Something cold appeared to envelopthem--such a chill as pleasure voyagers feel when a berg steals beyondNewfoundland and glows blue and threatening upon their ocean path. 

Then came something else which was not cold, but hot as the flames ofhell--and they saw red, and stared at each other with maddened eyes, andthen ran together from the room and clasped in close embrace safe beyondthe fatal place, and thanked God they had not done the thing that theydared not speak of--the thing which suddenly came to them to do. 

So they called it the room of the Evil Thought. They could not accountfor it. They avoided the thought of it, being healthy and happy folk. But none entered it more. The door was locked. 

One day, Hal, reading the paper, came across a paragraph concerning theyoung minister who had once lived there, and who had thought andwritten there and so influenced the lives of those about him that theyremembered him even while they disapproved. 

"He cut a man's throat on board ship for Australia, " said he, "and thenhe cut his own, without fatal effect--and jumped overboard, and so endedit. What a strange thing!"

Then they all looked at one another with subtle looks, and a shadow fellupon them and stayed the blood at their hearts. 

The next week the room of the Evil Thought was pulled down to make wayfor a pansy bed, which is quite gay and innocent, and blooms all thebetter because the larches, with their eternal murmuring, have been laidlow and carted away to the sawmill. 

STORY OF THE VANISHING PATIENT

THERE had always been strange stories about the house, but it was asensible, comfortable sort of a neighborhood, and people took pains tosay to one another that there was nothing in these tales--of coursenot! Absolutely nothing! How could there be? It was a matter of commonremark, however, that considering the amount of money the Nethertons hadspent on the place, it was curious they lived there so little. Theywere nearly always away, --up North in the summer and down South in thewinter, and over to Paris or London now and then, --and when they didcome home it was only to entertain a number of guests from the city. Theplace was either plunged in gloom or gayety. The old gardener who kepthouse by himself in the cottage at the back of the yard had things muchhis own way by far the greater part of the time. 

Dr. Block and his wife lived next door to the Nethertons, and he and hiswife, who were so absurd as to be very happy in each other's company, had the benefit of the beautiful yard. They walked there mornings whenthe leaves were silvered with dew, and evenings they sat beside the lilypond and listened for the whip-poor-will. The doctor's wife moved herroom over to that side of the house which commanded a view of the yard, and thus made the honeysuckles and laurel and clematis and all themasses of tossing greenery her own. Sitting there day after day withher sewing, she speculated about the mystery which hung impalpably yetundeniably over the house. 

It happened one night when she and her husband had gone to their room, and were congratulating themselves on the fact that he had no very sickpatients and was likely to enjoy a good night's rest, that a ring cameat the door. 

"If it's any one wanting you to leave home, " warned his wife, "you musttell them you are all worn out. You've been disturbed every night thisweek, and it's too much!"

The young physician went downstairs. At the door stood a man whom he hadnever seen before. 

"My wife is lying very ill next door, " said the stranger, "so ill thatI fear she will not live till morning. Will you please come to her atonce?"

"Next door?" cried the physician. "I didn't know the Nethertons werehome!"

"Please hasten, " begged the man. "I must go back to her. Follow asquickly as you can. "

The doctor went back upstairs to complete his toilet. 

"How absurd, " protested his wife when she heard the story. "There is noone at the Nethertons'. I sit where I can see the front door, and no onecan enter without my knowing it, and I have been sewing by the windowall day. If there were any one in the house, the gardener would have theporch lantern lighted. It is some plot. Some one has designs on you. Youmust not go. "

But he went. As he left the room his wife placed a revolver in hispocket. 

The great porch of the mansion was dark, but the physician made out thatthe door was open, and he entered. A feeble light came from the bronzelamp at the turn of the stairs, and by it he found his way, his feetsinking noiselessly in the rich carpets. At the head of the stairs theman met him. The doctor thought himself a tall man, but the strangertopped him by half a head. He motioned the physician to follow him, andthe two went down the hall to the front room. The place was flushed witha rose-colored glow from several lamps. On a silken couch, in the midstof pillows, lay a woman dying with consumption. She was like a lily, white, shapely, graceful, with feeble yet charming movements. She lookedat the doctor appealingly, then, seeing in his eyes the involuntaryverdict that her hour was at hand, she turned toward her companion witha glance of anguish. Dr. Block asked a few questions. The man answeredthem, the woman remaining silent. The physician administered somethingstimulating, and then wrote a prescription which he placed on themantel-shelf. 

"The drug store is closed to-night, " he said, "and I fear the druggisthas gone home. You can have the prescription filled the first thing inthe morning, and I will be over before breakfast. "

After that, there was no reason why he should not have gone home. Yet, oddly enough, he preferred to stay. Nor was it professional anxiety thatprompted this delay. He longed to watch those mysterious persons, who, almost oblivious of his presence, were speaking their mortal farewellsin their glances, which were impassioned and of unutterable sadness. 

He sat as if fascinated. He watched the glitter of rings on the woman'slong, white hands, he noted the waving of light hair about her temples, he observed the details of her gown of soft white silk which fell abouther in voluminous folds. Now and then the man gave her of the stimulantwhich the doctor had provided; sometimes he bathed her face with water. Once he paced the floor for a moment till a motion of her hand quietedhim. 

After a time, feeling that it would be more sensible and considerateof him to leave, the doctor made his way home. His wife was awake, impatient to hear of his experiences. She listened to his tale insilence, and when he had finished she turned her face to the wall andmade no comment. 

"You seem to be ill, my dear, " he said. "You have a chill. You areshivering. "

"I have no chill, " she replied sharply. "But I--well, you may leave thelight burning. "

The next morning before breakfast the doctor crossed the dewy sward tothe Netherton house. The front door was locked, and no one answered tohis repeated ringings. The old gardener chanced to be cutting the grassnear at hand, and he came running up. 

"What you ringin' that door-bell for, doctor?" said he. "The folks ain'tcome home yet. There ain't nobody there. "

"Yes, there is, Jim. I was called here last night. A man came for me toattend his wife. They must both have fallen asleep that the bell is notanswered. I wouldn't be surprised to find her dead, as a matter of fact. She was a desperately sick woman. Perhaps she is dead and something hashappened to him. You have the key to the door, Jim. Let me in. "

But the old man was shaking in every limb, and refused to do as he wasbid. 

"Don't you never go in there, doctor, " whispered he, with chatteringteeth. "Don't you go for to 'tend no one. You jus' come tell me when yousent for that way. No, I ain't goin' in, doctor, nohow. It ain't partof my duties to go in. That's been stipulated by Mr. Netherton. It's mybusiness to look after the garden. "

Argument was useless. Dr. Block took the bunch of keys from the oldman's pocket and himself unlocked the front door and entered. He mountedthe steps and made his way to the upper room. There was no evidence ofoccupancy. The place was silent, and, so far as living creature went, vacant. The dust lay over everything. It covered the delicate damask ofthe sofa where he had seen the dying woman. It rested on the pillows. The place smelled musty and evil, as if it had not been used for a longtime. The lamps of the room held not a drop of oil. 

But on the mantel-shelf was the prescription which the doctor hadwritten the night before. He read it, folded it, and put it in hispocket. 

As he locked the outside door the old gardener came running to him. 

"Don't you never go up there again, will you?" he pleaded, "not unlessyou see all the Nethertons home and I come for you myself. You won't, doctor?"

"No, " said the doctor. 

When he told his wife she kissed him, and said:

"Next time when I tell you to stay at home, you must stay!"

THE PIANO NEXT DOOR

BABETTE had gone away for the summer; the furniture was in its summerlinens; the curtains were down, and Babette's husband, John Boyce, wasalone in the house. It was the first year of his marriage, and he missedBabette. But then, as he often said to himself, he ought never tohave married her. He did it from pure selfishness, and because he wasdetermined to possess the most illusive, tantalizing, elegant, andutterly unmoral little creature that the sun shone upon. He wanted herbecause she reminded him of birds, and flowers, and summer winds, and other exquisite things created for the delectation of mankind. Heneither expected nor desired her to think. He had half-frightened herinto marrying him, had taken her to a poor man's home, provided her withno society such as she had been accustomed to, and he had no reasonablecause of complaint when she answered the call of summer and flittedaway, like a butterfly in the morning sunshine, to the place where theflowers grew. 

He wrote to her every evening, sitting in the stifling, ugly house, andpoured out his soul as if it were a libation to a goddess. She sometimesanswered by telegraph, sometimes by a perfumed note. He schooled himselfnot to feel hurt. Why should Babette write? Does a goldfinch indictepistles; or a humming-bird study composition; or a glancing, red-scaledfish in summer shallows consider the meaning of words?

He knew at the beginning what Babette was--guessed herlimitations--trembled when he buttoned her tiny glove--kissed her daintyslipper when he found it in the closet after she was gone--thrilled atthe sound of her laugh, or the memory of it! That was all. A mere caseof love. He was in bonds. Babette was not. Therefore he was in thecity, working overhours to pay for Babette's pretty follies down at theseaside. It was quite right and proper. He was a grub in the furrow;she a lark in the blue. Those had always been and always must be theirrelative positions. 

Having attained a mood of philosophic calm, in which he was prepared tospend his evenings alone--as became a grub--and to await withdignified patience the return of his wife, it was in the nature of aninconsistency that he should have walked the floor of the dull littledrawing-room like a lion in cage. It did not seem in keeping withthe position of superior serenity which he had assumed, that, readingBabette's notes, he should have raged with jealousy, or that, in theloneliness of his unkempt chamber, he should have stretched out arms oflonging. Even if Babette had been present, she would only have smiledher gay little smile and coquetted with him. She could not understand. He had known, of course, from the first moment, that she could notunderstand! And so, why the ache, ache, ache of the heart! Or WAS it theheart, or the brain, or the soul?

Sometimes, when the evenings were so hot that he could not endure theclose air of the house, he sat on the narrow, dusty front porch andlooked about him at his neighbors. The street had once been smart andaspiring, but it had fallen into decay and dejection. Pale young men, with flurried-looking wives, seemed to Boyce to occupy most of thehouses. Sometimes three or four couples would live in one house. Most ofthese appeared to be childless. The women made a pretence at fashionabledressing, and wore their hair elaborately in fashions which somehowsuggested boarding-houses to Boyce, though he could not have told why. Every house in the block needed fresh paint. Lacking this renovation, the householders tried to make up for it by a display of lace curtainswhich, at every window, swayed in the smoke-weighted breeze. Stripsof carpeting were laid down the front steps of the houses where thecommunities of young couples lived, and here, evenings, the inmates ofthe houses gathered, committing mild extravagances such as the treatingof each other to ginger ale, or beer, or ice-cream. 

Boyce watched these tawdry makeshifts at sociability with bitterness andloathing. He wondered how he could have been such a fool as to bringhis exquisite Babette to this neighborhood. How could he expect that shewould return to him? It was not reasonable. He ought to go down on hisknees with gratitude that she even condescended to write him. 

Sitting one night till late, --so late that the fashionable young wiveswith their husbands had retired from the strips of stair carpeting, --andraging at the loneliness which ate at his heart like a cancer, he heard, softly creeping through the windows of the house adjoining his own, thesound of comfortable melody. 

It breathed upon his ear like a spirit of consolation, speakingof peace, of love which needs no reward save its own sweetness, ofaspiration which looks forever beyond the thing of the hour to findattainment in that which is eternal. So insidiously did it whisper thesethings, so delicately did the simple and perfect melodies creep upon thespirit--that Boyce felt no resentment, but from the first listenedas one who listens to learn, or as one who, fainting on the hot road, hears, far in the ferny deeps below, the gurgle of a spring. 

Then came harmonies more intricate: fair fabrics of woven sound, inthe midst of which gleamed golden threads of joy; a tapestry of sound, multi-tinted, gallant with story and achievement, and beautiful things. Boyce, sitting on his absurd piazza, with his knees jambed againstthe balustrade, and his chair back against the dun-colored wall of hishouse, seemed to be walking in the cathedral of the redwood forest, with blue above him, a vast hymn in his ears, pungent perfume in hisnostrils, and mighty shafts of trees lifting themselves to heaven, proudand erect as pure men before their Judge. He stood on a mountain atsunrise, and saw the marvels of the amethystine clouds below his feet, heard an eternal and white silence, such as broods among the everlastingsnows, and saw an eagle winging for the sun. He was in a city, and awayfrom him, diverging like the spokes of a wheel, ran thronging streets, and to his sense came the beat, beat, beat of the city's heart. He sawthe golden alchemy of a chosen race; saw greed transmitted to progress;saw that which had enslaved men, work at last to their liberation; heardthe roar of mighty mills, and on the streets all the peoples of earthwalking with common purpose, in fealty and understanding. And then, fromthe swelling of this concourse of great sounds, came a diminuendo, calmas philosophy, and from that, nothingness. 

Boyce sat still for a long time, listening to the echoes which thismusic had awakened in his soul. He retired, at length, content, but determined that upon the morrow he would watch--the day beingSunday--for the musician who had so moved and taught him. 

He arose early, therefore, and having prepared his own simple breakfastof fruit and coffee, took his station by the window to watch for theman. For he felt convinced that the exposition he had heard was that ofa masculine mind. The long, hot hours of the morning went by, but thefront door of the house next to his did not open. 

"These artists sleep late, " he complained. Still he watched. He wastoo much afraid of losing him to go out for dinner. By three in theafternoon he had grown impatient. He went to the house next door andrang the bell. There was no response. He thundered another appeal. Anold woman with a cloth about her head answered the door. She was verydeaf, and Boyce had difficulty in making himself understood. 

"The family is in the country, " was all she would say. "The family willnot be home till September. "

"But there is some one living here?" shouted Boyce. 

"_I_ live here, " she said with dignity, putting back a wisp of dirtygray hair behind her ear. "It is my house. I sublet to the family. "

"What family?"

But the old creature was not communicative. 

"The family that lives here, " she said. 

"Then who plays the piano in this house?" roared Boyce. "Do you?"

He thought a shade of pallor showed itself on her ash-colored cheeks. Yet she smiled a little at the idea of her playing. 

"There is no piano, " she said, and she put an enigmatical emphasis tothe words. 

"Nonsense, " cried Boyce, indignantly. "I heard a piano being played inthis very house for hours last night!"

"You may enter, " said the old woman, with an accent more vicious thanhospitable. 

Boyce almost burst into the drawing-room. It was a dusty and forbiddingplace, with ugly furniture and gaudy walls. No piano nor any othermusical instrument stood in it. The intruder turned an angry and baffledface to the old woman, who was smiling with ill-concealed exultation. 

"I shall see the other rooms, " he announced. The old woman did notappear to be surprised at his impertinence. 

"As you please, " she said. 

So, with the hobbling creature, with her bandaged head, for a guide, heexplored every room of the house, which being identical with his own, hecould do without fear of leaving any apartment unentered. But no pianodid he find!

"Explain, " roared Boyce at length, turning upon the leering old hagbeside him. "Explain! For surely I heard music more beautiful than I cantell. "

"I know nothing, " she said. "But it is true I once had a lodger whorented the front room, and that he played upon the piano. I am poor athearing, but he must have played well, for all the neighbors used tocome in front of the house to listen, and sometimes they applauded him, and sometimes they were still. I could tell by watching their hands. Sometimes little children came and danced. Other times young men andwomen came and listened. But the young man died. The neighbors wereangry. They came to look at him and said he had starved to death. It wasno fault of mine. I sold his piano to pay his funeral expenses--and ittook every cent to pay for them too, I'd have you know. But since then, sometimes--still, it must be nonsense, for I never heard it--folks saythat he plays the piano in my room. It has kept me out of the letting ofit more than once. But the family doesn't seem to mind--the family thatlives here, you know. They will be back in September. Yes. "

Boyce left her nodding her thanks at what he had placed in her hand, andwent home to write it all to Babette--Babette who would laugh so merrilywhen she read it!

AN ASTRAL ONION

WHEN Tig Braddock came to Nora Finnegan he was red-headed and freckled, and, truth to tell, he remained with these features to the end of hislife--a life prolonged by a lucky, if somewhat improbable, incident, asyou shall hear. 

Tig had shuffled off his parents as saurians, of some sorts, do theirskins. During the temporary absence from home of his mother, who was atthe bridewell, and the more extended vacation of his father, who, likeVillon, loved the open road and the life of it, Tig, who was not awell-domesticated animal, wandered away. The humane society never heardof him, the neighbors did not miss him, and the law took no cognizanceof this detached citizen--this lost pleiad. Tig would have sunk intothat melancholy which is attendant upon hunger, --the only form ofdespair which babyhood knows, --if he had not wandered across the path ofNora Finnegan. Now Nora shone with steady brightness in her orbit, and no sooner had Tig entered her atmosphere, than he was warmed andcomforted. Hunger could not live where Nora was. The basement room whereshe kept house was redolent with savory smells; and in the stove in herfront room--which was also her bedroom--there was a bright fire glowingwhen fire was needed. 

Nora went out washing for a living. But she was not a poor washerwoman. Not at all. She was a washerwoman triumphant. She had perfect health, anenormous frame, an abounding enthusiasm for life, and a rich abundanceof professional pride. She believed herself to be the best washer ofwhite clothes she had ever had the pleasure of knowing, and the valueplaced upon her services, and her long connection with certain familieswith large weekly washings, bore out this estimate of herself--anestimate which she never endeavored to conceal. 

Nora had buried two husbands without being unduly depressed by thefact. The first husband had been a disappointment, and Nora winked atProvidence when an accident in a tunnel carried him off--that is tosay, carried the husband off. The second husband was not so much of adisappointment as a surprise. He developed ability of a literary order, and wrote songs which sold and made him a small fortune. Then he ranaway with another woman. The woman spent his fortune, drove him todissipation, and when he was dying he came back to Nora, who receivedhim cordially, attended him to the end, and cheered his last hours bysinging his own songs to him. Then she raised a headstone recounting hisvirtues, which were quite numerous, and refraining from any reference tothose peculiarities which had caused him to be such a surprise. 

Only one actual chagrin had ever nibbled at the sound heart of NoraFinnegan--a cruel chagrin, with long, white teeth, such as rodents have!She had never held a child to her breast, nor laughed in its eyes; neverbathed the pink form of a little son or daughter; never felt a tuggingof tiny hands at her voluminous calico skirts! Nora had burnt manycandles before the statue of the blessed Virgin without remedying thisdeplorable condition. She had sent up unavailing prayers--she had, attimes, wept hot tears of longing and loneliness. Sometimes in her sleepshe dreamed that a wee form, warm and exquisitely soft, was pressedagainst her firm body, and that a hand with tiniest pink nails creptwithin her bosom. But as she reached out to snatch this delicious littlecreature closer, she woke to realize a barren woman's grief, and turnedherself in anguish on her lonely pillow. 

So when Tig came along, accompanied by two curs, who had faithfullyfollowed him from his home, and when she learned the details of hisstory, she took him in, curs and all, and, having bathed the three ofthem, made them part and parcel of her home. This was after the demiseof the second husband, and at a time when Nora felt that she had doneall a woman could be expected to do for Hymen. 

Tig was a preposterous baby. The curs were preposterous curs. Nora hadalways been afflicted with a surplus amount of laughter--laughter whichhad difficulty in attaching itself to anything, owing to the lack of thereally comic in the surroundings of the poor. But with a red-headed andfreckled baby boy and two trick dogs in the house, she found a good andsufficient excuse for her hilarity, and would have torn the cave whereecho lies with her mirth, had that cave not been at such an immeasurabledistance from the crowded neighborhood where she lived. 

At the age of four Tig went to free kindergarten; at the age of six hewas in school, and made three grades the first year and two the next. Atfifteen he was graduated from the high school and went to work aserrand boy in a newspaper office, with the fixed determination to make ajournalist of himself. 

Nora was a trifle worried about his morals when she discovered hisintellect, but as time went on, and Tig showed no devotion for any womansave herself, and no consciousness that there were such things as badboys or saloons in the world, she began to have confidence. All of hisearnings were brought to her. Every holiday was spent with her. He toldher his secrets and his aspirations. He admitted that he expected tobecome a great man, and, though he had not quite decided upon the natureof his career, --saving, of course, the makeshift of journalism, --it wasnot unlikely that he would elect to be a novelist like--well, probablylike Thackeray. 

Hope, always a charming creature, put on her most alluring smiles forTig, and he made her his mistress, and feasted on the light of her eyes. Moreover, he was chaperoned, so to speak, by Nora Finnegan, who listenedto every line Tig wrote, and made a mighty applause, and filled him upwith good Irish stew, many colored as the coat of Joseph, and pungentwith the inimitable perfume of "the rose of the cellar. " Nora Finneganunderstood the onion, and used it lovingly. She perceived the differencebetween the use and abuse of this pleasant and obvious friend of hungryman, and employed it with enthusiasm, but discretion. Thus it cameabout that whoever ate of her dinners, found the meals of other cooksstrangely lacking in savor, and remembered with regret the soupsand stews, the broiled steaks, and stuffed chickens of the woman whoappreciated the onion. 

When Nora Finnegan came home with a cold one day, she took it in such ajocular fashion that Tig felt not the least concern about her, and when, two days later, she died of pneumonia, he almost thought, at first, thatit must be one of her jokes. She had departed with decision, such as hadcharacterized every act of her life, and had made as little trouble forothers as possible. When she was dead the community had the opportunityof discovering the number of her friends. Miserable children with faceswhich revealed two generations of hunger, homeless boys with viciouscountenances, miserable wrecks of humanity, women with bloated faces, came to weep over Nora's bier, and to lay a flower there, and to scuttleaway, more abjectly lonely than even sin could make them. If the catsand the dogs, the sparrows and horses to which she had shown kindness, could also have attended her funeral, the procession would have been, from a point of numbers, one of the most imposing the city had everknown. Tig used up all their savings to bury her, and the next week, bysome peculiar fatality, he had a falling out with the night editor ofhis paper, and was discharged. This sank deep into his sensitivesoul, and he swore he would be an underling no longer--which foolishresolution was directly traceable to his hair, the color of which, itwill be recollected, was red. 

Not being an underling, he was obliged to make himself into somethingelse, and he recurred passionately to his old idea of becoming anovelist. He settled down in Nora's basement rooms, went to work ona battered type-writer, did his own cooking, and occasionally pawnedsomething to keep him in food. The environment was calculated to furtherimpress him with the idea of his genius. 

A certain magazine offered an alluring prize for a short story, and Tigwrote one, and rewrote it, making alterations, revisions, annotations, and interlineations which would have reflected credit upon Honoré;Balzac himself. Then he wrought all together, with splendid brevity anddramatic force, --Tig's own words, --and mailed the same. He was convincedhe would get the prize. He was just as much convinced of it as NoraFinnegan would have been if she had been with him. 

So he went about doing more fiction, taking no especial care of himself, and wrapt in rosy dreams, which, not being warm enough for the weather, permitted him to come down with rheumatic fever. 

He lay alone in his room and suffered such torments as the condemnedand rheumatic know, depending on one of Nora's former friends to come intwice a day and keep up the fire for him. This friend was aged ten, andlooked like a sparrow who had been in a cyclone, but somewhere insidehis bones was a wit which had spelled out devotion. He found fuel forthe cracked stove, somehow or other. He brought it in a dirty sack whichhe carried on his back, and he kept warmth in Tig's miserable body. Moreover, he found food of a sort--cold, horrible bits often, and Tigwept when he saw them, remembering the meals Nora had served him. 

Tig was getting better, though he was conscious of a weak heart and alamenting stomach, when, to his amazement, the Sparrow ceased to visithim. Not for a moment did Tig suspect desertion. He knew that onlysomething in the nature of an act of Providence, as the insurancecompanies would designate it, could keep the little bundle of bones awayfrom him. As the days went by, he became convinced of it, for no Sparrowcame, and no coal lay upon the hearth. The basement window fortunatelylooked toward the south, and the pale April sunshine was beginningto make itself felt, so that the temperature of the room was notunbearable. But Tig languished; sank, sank, day by day, and was keptalive only by the conviction that the letter announcing the award of thethousand-dollar prize would presently come to him. One night he reached aplace, where, for hunger and dejection, his mind wandered, and he seemedto be complaining all night to Nora of his woes. When the chill dawncame, with chittering of little birds on the dirty pavement, and anagitation of the scrawny willow "pussies, " he was not able to lift hishand to his head. The window before his sight was but "a glimmeringsquare. " He said to himself that the end must be at hand. Yet it wascruel, cruel, with fame and fortune so near! If only he had some food, he might summon strength to rally--just for a little while! Impossiblethat he should die! And yet without food there was no choice. 

Dreaming so of Nora's dinners, thinking how one spoonful of a stew suchas she often compounded would now be his salvation, he became consciousof the presence of a strong perfume in the room. It was so familiarthat it seemed like a sub-consciousness, yet he found no name for thisfriendly odor for a bewildered minute or two. Little by little, however, it grew upon him, that it was the onion--that fragrant and kindly bulbwhich had attained its apotheosis in the cuisine of Nora Finnegan ofsacred memory. He opened his languid eyes, to see if, mayhap, the planthad not attained some more palpable materialization. 

Behold, it was so! Before him, in a brown earthen dish, --a most familiardish, --was an onion, pearly white, in placid seas of gravy, smoking anddelectable. With unexpected strength he raised himself, and reached forthe dish, which floated before him in a halo made by its own steam. Itmoved toward him, offered a spoon to his hand, and as he ate he heardabout the room the rustle of Nora Finnegan's starched skirts, and nowand then a faint, faint echo of her old-time laugh--such an echo as onemay find of the sea in the heart of a shell. 

The noble bulb disappeared little by little before his voracity, and incontentment greater than virtue can give, he sank back upon his pillowand slept. 

Two hours later the postman knocked at the door, and receiving noanswer, forced his way in. Tig, half awake, saw him enter with nosurprise. He felt no surprise when he put a letter in his hand bearingthe name of the magazine to which he had sent his short story. He wasnot even surprised, when, tearing it open with suddenly alert hands, hefound within the check for the first prize--the check he had expected. 

All that day, as the April sunlight spread itself upon his floor, hefelt his strength grow. Late in the afternoon the Sparrow came back, paler, and more bony than ever, and sank, breathing hard, upon thefloor, with his sack of coal. 

"I've been sick, " he said, trying to smile. "Terrible sick, but I comeas soon as I could. "

"Build up the fire, " cried Tig, in a voice so strong it made the Sparrowstart as if a stone had struck him. "Build up the fire, and forget youare sick. For, by the shade of Nora Finnegan, you shall be hungry nomore!"

FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD

WHEN Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all the men stop their talking tolisten, for they know her to be wise with the wisdom of the old people, and that she has more learning than can be got even from the greatschools at Reykjavik. She is especially prized by them here in thisnew country where the Icelandmen are settled--this America, so new inletters, where the people speak foolishly and write unthinking books. So the men who know that it is given to the mothers of earth to bevery wise, stop their six part singing, or their jangles about thefree-thinkers, and give attentive ear when Urda Bjarnason lights herpipe and begins her tale. 

She is very old. Her daughters and sons are all dead, but hergranddaughter, who is most respectable, and the cousin of a physician, says that Urda is twenty-four and a hundred, and there are others whosay that she is older still. She watches all that the Iceland people doin the new land; she knows about the building of the five villages onthe North Dakota plain, and of the founding of the churches and theschools, and the tilling of the wheat farms. She notes with suspicionthe actions of the women who bring home webs of cloth from the store, instead of spinning them as their mothers did before them; and sheshakes her head at the wives who run to the village grocery store everyfortnight, imitating the wasteful American women, who throw butter inthe fire faster than it can be turned from the churn. 

She watches yet other things. All winter long the white snows reachacross the gently rolling plains as far as the eye can behold. In themorning she sees them tinted pink at the east; at noon she notesgolden lights flashing across them; when the sky is gray--which is notoften--she notes that they grow as ashen as a face with the death shadowon it. Sometimes they glitter with silver-like tips of ocean waves. Butat these things she looks only casually. It is when the blue shadowsdance on the snow that she leaves her corner behind the iron stove, andstands before the window, resting her two hands on the stout bar of hercane, and gazing out across the waste with eyes which age has restoredafter four decades of decrepitude. 

The young Icelandmen say:

"Mother, it is the clouds hurrying across the sky that make the dance ofthe shadows. "

"There are no clouds, " she replies, and points to the jewel-like blue ofthe arching sky. 

"It is the drifting air, " explains Fridrik Halldersson, he who hasbeen in the Northern seas. "As the wind buffets the air, it looks blueagainst the white of the snow. 'Tis the air that makes the dancingshadows. "

But Urda shakes her head, and points with her dried finger, andthose who stand beside her see figures moving, and airy shapes, andcontortions of strange things, such as are seen in a beryl stone. 

"But Urda Bjarnason, " says Ingeborg Christianson, the pert young wifewith the blue-eyed twins, "why is it we see these things only when westand beside you and you help us to the sight?"

"Because, " says the mother, with a steel-blue flash of her old eyes, "having eyes ye will not see!" Then the men laugh. They like to hearIngeborg worsted. For did she not jilt two men from Gardar, and one fromMountain, and another from Winnipeg?

Not even Ingeborg can deny that Mother Urda tells true things. 

"To-day, " says Urda, standing by the little window and watching thedance of the shadows, "a child breathed thrice on a farm at the West, and then it died. "

The next week at the church gathering, when all the sledges stoppedat the house of Urda's granddaughter, they said it was so--that JohnChristianson's wife Margaret never heard the voice of her son, but thathe breathed thrice in his nurse's arms and died. 

"Three sledges run over the snow toward Milton, " says Urda; "all areladen with wheat, and in one is a stranger. He has with him a strangeengine, but its purpose I do not know. "

Six hours later the drivers of three empty sledges stop at the house. 

"We have been to Milton with wheat, " they say, "and Christian Johnsonhere, carried a photographer from St. Paul. "

Now it stands to reason that the farmers like to amuse themselvesthrough the silent and white winters. And they prefer above all thingsto talk or to listen, as has been the fashion of their race for athousand years. Among all the story-tellers there is none like Urda, forshe is the daughter and the granddaughter and the great-granddaughterof storytellers. It is given to her to talk, as it is given to JohnThorlaksson to sing--he who sings so as his sledge flies over the snowat night, that the people come out in the bitter air from their doors tolisten, and the dogs put up their noses and howl, not liking music. 

In the little cabin of Peter Christianson, the husband of Urda'sgranddaughter, it sometimes happens that twenty men will gather aboutthe stove. They hang their bear-skin coats on the wall, put their furgauntlets underneath the stove, where they will keep warm, and thenstretch their stout, felt-covered legs to the wood fire. The room isfetid; the coffee steams eternally on the stove; and from her chair inthe warmest corner Urda speaks out to the listening men, who shake theirheads with joy as they hear the pure old Icelandic flow in sweet rhythmfrom between her lips. Among the many, many tales she tells is that ofthe dead weaver, and she tells it in the simplest language in allthe world--language so simple that even great scholars could find nosimpler, and the children crawling on the floor can understand. 

"Jon and Loa lived with their father and mother far to the north of theIsland of Fire, and when the children looked from their windows they sawonly wild scaurs and jagged lava rocks, and a distant, deep gleam of thesea. They caught the shine of the sea through an eye-shaped opening inthe rocks, and all the long night of winter it gleamed up at them, likethe eye of a dead witch. But when it sparkled and began to laugh, thechildren danced about the hut and sang, for they knew the bright summertime was at hand. Then their father fished, and their mother was gay. But it is true that even in the winter and the darkness they were happy, for they made fishing nets and baskets and cloth together, --Jon and Loaand their father and mother, --and the children were taught to read inthe books, and were told the sagas, and given instruction in the partsinging. 

"They did not know there was such a thing as sorrow in the world, for noone had ever mentioned it to them. But one day their mother died. Thenthey had to learn how to keep the fire on the hearth, and to smoke thefish, and make the black coffee. And also they had to learn how to livewhen there is sorrow at the heart. 

"They wept together at night for lack of their mother's kisses, and inthe morning they were loath to rise because they could not see her face. The dead cold eye of the sea watching them from among the lava rocksmade them afraid, so they hung a shawl over the window to keep it out. And the house, try as they would, did not look clean and cheerful as ithad used to do when their mother sang and worked about it. 

"One day, when a mist rested over the eye of the sea, like that whichone beholds on the eyes of the blind, a greater sorrow came to them, fora stepmother crossed the threshold. She looked at Jon and Loa, and madecomplaint to their father that they were still very small and not likelyto be of much use. After that they had to rise earlier than ever, and towork as only those who have their growth should work, till their heartscracked for weariness and shame. They had not much to eat, for theirstepmother said she would trust to the gratitude of no other woman'schild, and that she believed in laying up against old age. So she putthe few coins that came to the house in a strong box, and bought littlefood. Neither did she buy the children clothes, though those which theirdear mother had made for them were so worn that the warp stood apartfrom the woof, and there were holes at the elbows and little warmth tobe found in them anywhere. 

"Moreover, the quilts on their beds were too short for their growinglength, so that at night either their purple feet or their thinshoulders were uncovered, and they wept for the cold, and in themorning, when they crept into the larger room to build the fire, theywere so stiff they could not stand straight, and there was pain at theirjoints. 

"The wife scolded all the time, and her brow was like a storm sweepingdown from the Northwest. There was no peace to be had in the house. The children might not repeat to each other the sagas their mother hadtaught them, nor try their part singing, nor make little doll cradles ofrushes. Always they had to work, always they were scolded, always theirclothes grew thinner. 

"'Stepmother, ' cried Loa one day, --she whom her mother had called thelittle bird, --'we are a-cold because of our rags. Our mother would havewoven blue cloth for us and made it into garments. '

"'Your mother is where she will weave no cloth!' said the stepmother, and she laughed many times. 

"All in the cold and still of that night, the stepmother wakened, andshe knew not why. She sat up in her bed, and knew not why. She knew notwhy, and she looked into the room, and there, by the light of a burningfish's tail--'twas such a light the folk used in those days--was awoman, weaving. She had no loom, and shuttle she had none. All withher hands she wove a wondrous cloth. Stooping and bending, rising andswaying with motions beautiful as those the Northern Lights make in amidwinter sky, she wove a cloth. The warp was blue and mystical to see, the woof was white, and shone with its whiteness, so that of all thewebs the stepmother had ever seen, she had seen none like to this. 

"Yet the sight delighted her not, for beyond the drifting web, andbeyond the weaver she saw the room and furniture--aye, saw them throughthe body of the weaver and the drifting of the cloth. Then she knew--asthe haunted are made to know--that 'twas the mother of the children cometo show her she could still weave cloth. The heart of the stepmother wascold as ice, yet she could not move to waken her husband at her side, for her hands were as fixed as if they were crossed on her dead breast. The voice in her was silent, and her tongue stood to the roof of hermouth. 

"After a time the wraith of the dead mother moved toward her--the wraithof the weaver moved her way--and round and about her body was wound theshining cloth. Wherever it touched the body of the stepmother, it was ashateful to her as the touch of a monster out of sea-slime, so that herflesh crept away from it, and her senses swooned. 

"In the early morning she awoke to the voices of the children, whispering in the inner room as they dressed with half-frozen fingers. Still about her was the hateful, beautiful web, filling her soul withloathing and with fear. She thought she saw the task set for her, andwhen the children crept in to light the fire--very purple and thin weretheir little bodies, and the rags hung from them--she arose and held outthe shining cloth, and cried:

"'Here is the web your mother wove for you. I will make it intogarments!' But even as she spoke the cloth faded and fell intonothingness, and the children cried:

"'Stepmother, you have the fever!'

"And then:

"'Stepmother, what makes the strange light in the room?'

"That day the stepmother was too weak to rise from her bed, and thechildren thought she must be going to die, for she did not scold as theycleared the house and braided their baskets, and she did not frown atthem, but looked at them with wistful eyes. 

"By fall of night she was as weary as if she had wept all the day, andso she slept. But again she was awakened and knew not why. And againshe sat up in her bed and knew not why. And again, not knowing why, shelooked and saw a woman weaving cloth. All that had happened the nightbefore happened this night. Then, when the morning came, and thechildren crept in shivering from their beds, she arose and dressedherself, and from her strong box she took coins, and bade her husband gowith her to the town. 

"So that night a web of cloth, woven by one of the best weavers in allIceland, was in the house; and on the beds of the children were blanketsof lamb's wool, soft to the touch and fair to the eye. After that thechildren slept warm and were at peace; for now, when they told the sagastheir mother had taught them, or tried their part songs as they sattogether on their bench, the stepmother was silent. For she fearedto chide, lest she should wake at night, not knowing why, and see themother's wraith. "

A GRAMMATICAL GHOST

THERE was only one possible objection to the drawing-room, and that wasthe occasional presence of Miss Carew; and only one possible objectionto Miss Carew. And that was, that she was dead. 

She had been dead twenty years, as a matter of fact and record, and tothe last of her life sacredly preserved the treasures and traditions ofher family, a family bound up--as it is quite unnecessary to explain toany one in good society--with all that is most venerable and heroic inthe history of the Republic. Miss Carew never relaxed theproverbial hospitality of her house, even when she remained its solerepresentative. She continued to preside at her table with dignity andstate, and to set an example of excessive modesty and gentle decorum toa generation of restless young women. 

It is not likely that having lived a life of such irreproachablegentility as this, Miss Carew would have the bad taste to die in any waynot pleasant to mention in fastidious society. She could be trusted tothe last, not to outrage those friends who quoted her as an exemplar ofpropriety. She died very unobtrusively of an affection of the heart, oneJune morning, while trimming her rose trellis, and her lavender-coloredprint was not even rumpled when she fell, nor were more than the tips ofher little bronze slippers visible. 

"Isn't it dreadful, " said the Philadelphians, "that the property shouldgo to a very, very distant cousin in Iowa or somewhere else on thefrontier, about whom nobody knows anything at all?"

The Carew treasures were packed in boxes and sent away into the Iowawilderness; the Carew traditions were preserved by the HistoricalSociety; the Carew property, standing in one of the most umbrageousand aristocratic suburbs of Philadelphia, was rented to all mannerof folk--anybody who had money enough to pay the rental--and societyentered its doors no more. 

But at last, after twenty years, and when all save the oldestPhiladelphians had forgotten Miss Lydia Carew, the very, very distantcousin appeared. He was quite in the prime of life, and so agreeable andunassuming that nothing could be urged against him save his patronymic, which, being Boggs, did not commend itself to the euphemists. With himwere two maiden sisters, ladies of excellent taste and manners, whorestored the Carew china to its ancient cabinets, and replaced the Carewpictures upon the walls, with additions not out of keeping withthe elegance of these heirlooms. Society, with a magnanimity almostdramatic, overlooked the name of Boggs--and called. 

All was well. At least, to an outsider all seemed to be well. But, in truth, there was a certain distress in the old mansion, and inthe hearts of the well-behaved Misses Boggs. It came about mostunexpectedly. The sisters had been sitting upstairs, looking out at thebeautiful grounds of the old place, and marvelling at the violets, which lifted their heads from every possible cranny about the house, andtalking over the cordiality which they had been receiving by those uponwhom they had no claim, and they were filled with amiable satisfaction. Life looked attractive. They had often been grateful to Miss Lydia Carewfor leaving their brother her fortune. Now they felt even more gratefulto her. She had left them a Social Position--one, which even aftertwenty years of desuetude, was fit for use. 

They descended the stairs together, with arms clasped about each other'swaists, and as they did so presented a placid and pleasing sight. Theyentered their drawing-room with the intention of brewing a cup of tea, and drinking it in calm sociability in the twilight. But as they enteredthe room they became aware of the presence of a lady, who was alreadyseated at their tea-table, regarding their old Wedgewood with the air ofa connoisseur. 

There were a number of peculiarities about this intruder. To begin with, she was hatless, quite as if she were a habitué; of the house, andwas costumed in a prim lilac-colored lawn of the style of two decadespast. But a greater peculiarity was the resemblance this lady bore to afaded daguerrotype. If looked at one way, she was perfectly discernible;if looked at another, she went out in a sort of blur. Notwithstandingthis comparative invisibility, she exhaled a delicate perfume of sweetlavender, very pleasing to the nostrils of the Misses Boggs, who stoodlooking at her in gentle and unprotesting surprise. 

"I beg your pardon, " began Miss Prudence, the younger of the MissesBoggs, "but--"

But at this moment the Daguerrotype became a blur, and Miss Prudencefound herself addressing space. The Misses Boggs were irritated. Theyhad never encountered any mysteries in Iowa. They began an impatientsearch behind doors and portières, and even under sofas, thoughit was quite absurd to suppose that a lady recognizing the merits of theCarew Wedgewood would so far forget herself as to crawl under a sofa. 

When they had given up all hope of discovering the intruder, they sawher standing at the far end of the drawing-room critically examining awater-color marine. The elder Miss Boggs started toward her with sterndecision, but the little Daguerrotype turned with a shadowy smile, became a blur and an imperceptibility. 

Miss Boggs looked at Miss Prudence Boggs. 

"If there were ghosts, " she said, "this would be one. "

"If there were ghosts, " said Miss Prudence Boggs, "this would be theghost of Lydia Carew. "

The twilight was settling into blackness, and Miss Boggs nervously litthe gas while Miss Prudence ran for other tea-cups, preferring, forreasons superfluous to mention, not to drink out of the Carew china thatevening. 

The next day, on taking up her embroidery frame, Miss Boggs found anumber of oldfashioned cross-stitches added to her Kensington. Prudence, she knew, would never have degraded herself by taking a cross-stitch, and the parlor-maid was above taking such a liberty. Miss Boggsmentioned the incident that night at a dinner given by an ancient friendof the Carews. 

"Oh, that's the work of Lydia Carew, without a doubt!" cried thehostess. "She visits every new family that moves to the house, but shenever remains more than a week or two with any one. "

"It must be that she disapproves of them, " suggested Miss Boggs. 

"I think that's it, " said the hostess. "She doesn't like their china, ortheir fiction. "

"I hope she'll disapprove of us, " added Miss Prudence. 

The hostess belonged to a very old Philadelphian family, and she shookher head. 

"I should say it was a compliment for even the ghost of Miss Lydia Carewto approve of one, " she said severely. 

The next morning, when the sisters entered their drawing-room there werenumerous evidences of an occupant during their absence. The sofa pillowshad been rearranged so that the effect of their grouping was lessbizarre than that favored by the Western women; a horrid little Buddhistidol with its eyes fixed on its abdomen, had been chastely hidden behinda Dresden shepherdess, as unfit for the scrutiny of polite eyes; andon the table where Miss Prudence did work in water colors, after thefashion of the impressionists, lay a prim and impossible compositionrepresenting a moss-rose and a number of heartsease, colored with thatcaution which modest spinster artists instinctively exercise. 

"Oh, there's no doubt it's the work of Miss Lydia Carew, " said MissPrudence, contemptuously. "There's no mistaking the drawing of thatrigid little rose. Don't you remember those wreaths and bouquets framed, among the pictures we got when the Carew pictures were sent to us? Igave some of them to an orphan asylum and burned up the rest. "

"Hush!" cried Miss Boggs, involuntarily. "If she heard you, it wouldhurt her feelings terribly. Of course, I mean--" and she blushed. "Itmight hurt her feelings--but how perfectly ridiculous! It's impossible!"

Miss Prudence held up the sketch of the moss-rose. 

"THAT may be impossible in an artistic sense, but it is a palpablething. "

"Bosh!" cried Miss Boggs. 

"But, " protested Miss Prudence, "how do you explain it?"

"I don't, " said Miss Boggs, and left the room. 

That evening the sisters made a point of being in the drawing-roombefore the dusk came on, and of lighting the gas at the first hint oftwilight. They didn't believe in Miss Lydia Carew--but still they meantto be beforehand with her. They talked with unwonted vivacity and ina louder tone than was their custom. But as they drank their tea eventheir utmost verbosity could not make them oblivious to the fact thatthe perfume of sweet lavender was stealing insidiously through the room. They tacitly refused to recognize this odor and all that it indicated, when suddenly, with a sharp crash, one of the old Carew tea-cupsfell from the tea-table to the floor and was broken. The disaster wasfollowed by what sounded like a sigh of pain and dismay. 

"I didn't suppose Miss Lydia Carew would ever be as awkward as that, "cried the younger Miss Boggs, petulantly. 

"Prudence, " said her sister with a stern accent, "please try not to be afool. You brushed the cup off with the sleeve of your dress. "

"Your theory wouldn't be so bad, " said Miss Prudence, half laughing andhalf crying, "if there were any sleeves to my dress, but, as you see, there aren't, " and then Miss Prudence had something as near hysterics asa healthy young woman from the West can have. 

"I wouldn't think such a perfect lady as Lydia Carew, " she ejaculatedbetween her sobs, "would make herself so disagreeable! You maytalk about good-breeding all you please, but I call such intrusionexceedingly bad taste. I have a horrible idea that she likes us andmeans to stay with us. She left those other people because she did notapprove of their habits or their grammar. It would be just our luck toplease her. "

"Well, I like your egotism, " said Miss Boggs. 

However, the view Miss Prudence took of the case appeared to be theright one. Time went by and Miss Lydia Carew still remained. When theladies entered their drawing-room they would see the little lady-likeDaguerrotype revolving itself into a blur before one of the familyportraits. Or they noticed that the yellow sofa cushion, toward whichshe appeared to feel a peculiar antipathy, had been dropped behind thesofa upon the floor, or that one of Jane Austen's novels, which none ofthe family ever read, had been removed from the book shelves and leftopen upon the table. 

"I cannot become reconciled to it, " complained Miss Boggs to MissPrudence. "I wish we had remained in Iowa where we belong. Of course Idon't believe in the thing! No sensible person would. But still I cannotbecome reconciled. "

But their liberation was to come, and in a most unexpected manner. 

A relative by marriage visited them from the West. He was a friendlyman and had much to say, so he talked all through dinner, and afterwardfollowed the ladies to the drawing-room to finish his gossip. The gas inthe room was turned very low, and as they entered Miss Prudence caughtsight of Miss Carew, in company attire, sitting in upright propriety ina stiff-backed chair at the extremity of the apartment. 

Miss Prudence had a sudden idea. 

"We will not turn up the gas, " she said, with an emphasis intended toconvey private information to her sister. "It will be more agreeable tosit here and talk in this soft light. "

Neither her brother nor the man from the West made any objection. MissBoggs and Miss Prudence, clasping each other's hands, divided theirattention between their corporeal and their incorporeal guests. MissBoggs was confident that her sister had an idea, and was willing toawait its development. As the guest from Iowa spoke, Miss Carew bent apolitely attentive ear to what he said. 

"Ever since Richards took sick that time, " he said briskly, "it seemedlike he shed all responsibility. " (The Misses Boggs saw the Daguerrotypeput up her shadowy head with a movement of doubt and apprehension. ) "Thefact of the matter was, Richards didn't seem to scarcely get on the wayhe might have been expected to. " (At this conscienceless split to theinfinitive and misplacing of the preposition, Miss Carew arose tremblingperceptibly. ) "I saw it wasn't no use for him to count on a quickrecovery--"

The Misses Boggs lost the rest of the sentence, for at the utterance ofthe double negative Miss Lydia Carew had flashed out, not in a blur, butwith mortal haste, as when life goes out at a pistol shot!

The man from the West wondered why Miss Prudence should have cried at sopathetic a part of his story:

"Thank Goodness!"

And their brother was amazed to see Miss Boggs kiss Miss Prudence withpassion and energy. 

It was the end. Miss Carew returned no more.