the track was pulled up; them spikes wasn't good for tires.

The dry farmers' shacks kept a getting more and more scattered as mile after mile was covered; then came strips of open land which looked like they had been missed entirely by the soil tilling army, but, as the driver told 'em, them strips hadn't been missed, it was just that the shacks had been tore down when the farmer went away, and the fences had went too. Scattering over where oats and rye had once been planted was little bunches of cattle and horses, grazing on what was once again range land.

One more ridge and then Old Dan would be able to see where the old home ranch had been; he pictured the town that would be there instead and he sit tight ready for whatever blow the sight might give. He was afraid to look, and it wasn't till he was sure the car was where he could get a good plain view of the land that he opened his eyes, he wanted to get it all at once.

for very little more than a long lease would cost. He could get all he wanted and deeds for the whole, then he wouldn't have to contend with keeping the sheepman off of it and he wouldn't have to worry about straying herds of cattle or horses that'd take the feed away from his own stock.

All that went through the old man's brain as the car went on and finally came to a stop in front of the old ranch house. Here he got out and somehow he didn't look so much like an old man no more. He stood a minute and sized the old place up, and then stepping on the porch he looked the direction where the town's main street had once been. All there was to show of that now was a couple of houses on either side, but he didn't see them, they'd soon be going down.

"That's what's left of it," says the driver pointing down the creek bottom, "most of the houses have been hauled away to the town we left this morning and for the farmers on the river."

Old Dan's heart went up ten notches at the sight he was seeing and the words he was hearing. His mouth opened to speak but he couldn't say a word,-he just looked and listened.

Outside of the few scattering shacks and run down fences that was left to mar the land the old country still looked near the same. Even the old ranch house which he thought gone to make room for town houses was still there and looking like it was waiting for him. Part of his corrals was still up, and with the short time that old cowboy had to view his old range and home he already pictured how with a little hired help to pull away the fences and burn up the dilapidated shacks he could make it all come back to life as the country he'd once knowed.

Yep! it would be even better than the country he once knowed; it would be his and not free government range for anybody to use. As his old friend at the bank told him the land could be bought

Outside of that mess to clean up the old house wouldn't be needing much work done to it to make it as good as it ever was; it had sagged a little or maybe just settled, and it'd be good for many snows

to come.

The two old timers was near like youngsters again as they took in what could be seen in their ramblings. The old ranch house and the country around brought many memories back to life again, and there was remarks passed such as "Remember Dan, when a few of us stood off a party of Sioux warriors right over there by that cliff" or "Remember one of the hard winters Frank, when we couldn't see the high corrals for snow?" etc., etc. The two kept a talking of the times each spot or other reminded 'em of till away late in the afternoon, and Dan was just in the thick of another of them old time happenings when he stopped short and listened to a sound like he wasn't believing his ears, it was a familiar sound but he hadn't heard it for many years. It was the thump of boot heels on the wide porch and the ringing of spur rowels.

Old Dan jumped up and sticking his head around the corner of the house spotted a rider there; it was only a sec

ond later when the old cowboy and that rider sort of clinched into a handshake and happy cuss words. . . . That rider was none other than his old cow foreman who regardless of Old Dan's advice to hit for the desert when the outfit "broke up" had stuck to the old home range. He'd been just riding by and spotting the car in front of the house had stopped to say "howdy" to whoever might be there. Folks had been kinda scarce the last few years.

Old Dan found afterward that there'd been many other of his old riders what hadn't at all followed his advice in hitting for the dry country.

"It all makes me feel like a quitter," Old Dan remarked that evening to Frank and the cow foreman as the three was

setting on the porch. "Here I pulled up stakes and left just when the country needed help most. . . . It's been under an awful spell, boys, but it came out through, all scarred but sure enough through and still alive,-now it's sleeping; the scars of the plow are healing and the dry weedy scabs are blowing away to the winds, the healthy skin of sod and buffalo grass is creeping up to make it all what it was, what it should of always been, and what it will always be, . . range land."

Away off on the bench land the beller of a cow critter was heard, then a little while afterward that of a little calf answered. The skies turned from a sunset purple to a deep blue, and then darkness, the range land was resting.

I think out there,

In the moonlit air,

You can hear the harps of heaven!

From your teeming brain.

In the scent of the orange blooms.

Whispered and long,

You told of the sunlit day.

To Paradise

Are beauty and the young.

JHE lived in the loveliest possible house, high up on a hill, so high that from her elaborate garden you could see the whole sweep of surrounding country. Even the largest and most expensive cars had to be put into second speed as they climbed the winding road, bordered by flowering hydrangeas, and swept round the gravelled drive to her door, and the smaller ones, though there were never many of those, arrived chugging with steaming radiators. And when you entered her airy hall, with its shining bare floors and its glassed doorways, you felt that she belonged there as no one else could.

Though there was nothing airy about her. She was concentrated and firm, like a piece of sand-colored whip-cord. All the rightness of the place, its smooth austerity, its high-above-the-worldness, was centred in her. She was its emblem, and certainly she made me feel especially hot and dusty as she came slowly down the wide stairs in her cool linen dress to meet

me.

"How do you do, Emily?" she said in her clear, clipped voice, and waited. She had a manner of looking you solemnly in the eyes after she had made a remark that seemed only to mean: "Well, what have you to offer me in the way of response?" "Edith," I exclaimed, "it's so nice to be here!" It was the best I could do. "You must be tired after your journey. I'll show you to your room. Morgan will bring your things."

Morgan appeared carrying my worn brown suitcase, obviously stuffed too full, and with a disgraceful bit of white tape sticking out one side of it. She paused and looked at it a moment, and I felt that it ought not to have been a suitcase at all,

but a pigskin hat-box that kept its secrets; then she turned, and I followed her upstairs.

"Oh, what a lovely room!" Pale-green furniture with impossible little pink flowers painted on it, a rugless floor here, too, and plain white curtains. I went to the window and looked down on miles and miles of hazy green country, cupped in an overlapping rim of pale, cloudlike hills.

"I hope that you will find everything that you need," said Edith at the door.

"This view is all I need after that hot, stuffy train. But I should like to see Franklyn. How old is he, six?"

"Franklyn is seven years old," said Edith, and she smiled faintly for the first time. "He is having a tennis lesson now, but he will be back in an hour."

"And Herbert, how is he?" I added, unnecessarily, for my cousin Herbert had never been known to have anything the matter with him.

"Herbert is very well," she said precisely. "You will find us in the drawingroom when you come down." She looked me full in the eyes again. "He is bringing a Miss Kenworthy in to tea."

A Miss Kenworthy! Why had she said it that way, as if there were dozens of Miss Kenworthys, all exactly alike, or as if to be a Miss Kenworthy was something vaguely not quite nice!

When she had shut the door I struggled with my suitcase until it burst open, disclosing a hard mound of flattened clothes and my sponge-bag, whose string had been cruelly pinched by the cover and exposed to the gaze of a cold and unsympathetic world. I am very fond of that sponge-bag of blue denim lined with rubber. When I had hung it in my whitetiled bathroom, and put my brushes and comb on the dressing-table, and hung my things on hangers in the commodious closet, I felt very much at home. There

were at least five, feet of clothes hanging there, and how I had ever managed to get them into that suitcase seemed a miracle. I thrust the thing, now light with shrunken sides, into a corner of the closet and sat down by the window. It is such fun to be alone in what is, temporarily, one's own room in a strange house; not to know what is going on in the rest of it, not to have an idea of what to expect when one goes down-stairs. To me who have never known poignant joy, such

always thought that the more money he paid for a thing the better it must be. Edith looked expensive, too.

A door slammed. Some one clattered up the uncarpeted stairs. Reluctantly, I got out of my chair and changed my dress. Like all intensely shy women, I dreaded, a little, personal contact with people, and hated to leave my room whose four walls so airily and comfortably boxed all that away from me.

Herbert rushed into the hall to meet

moments are a delight, but I suppose that, just as one's eyes are blinded after coming from a blaze of light into the twilight, to most people whose lives are more eventful, mild pleasures like that don't count. But poignant joy comes but seldom, and isn't it just as well to be able continually to strike these little warm glows in unexpected places as to have it consumed once or twice in a roaring conflagration? Just as well, perhaps

I thought of my cousin. How did he fit into this grand and austere simplicity? Surely Herbert would have been happier among thick velvet carpets, cushioned divans, and silk lamps with dingle-dangles on them. But this was undoubtedly expensive, and I remembered that Herbert, even as a child, whatever his tastes, had VOL. LXXXII.-19B

me as I came down-stairs. "Dear old Emily! Well, well! How are you?" He patted me on the back and led me with his arm around me to the drawing-room. "Let me introduce Miss Kenworthy-my cousin, Miss Fraser. We used to play together, didn't we, Em? Do you remember the old hay-loft? Well! How are you?"

Miss Kenworthy half-rose to greet me, then hesitatingly, as if she were not sure that it was the right thing to do, she changed her mind and offered me her hand from her chair. "I'm awfully glad to meet you," she said.

She was very pretty in a queer sort of way, with dark eyes, very wide apart, and a mid-Victorian mouth. Her upper lip came down over the lower in a little point. Her dress was of black satin, and I

thought that might be why she was to Edith a Miss Kenworthy, for I knew that Edith would not approve of black satin on a summer's day in the country. But I liked her. She seemed so awfully much to want to please, and not to be sure quite how to do it.

"Think of it, we haven't seen each other in-how many years? It must be all of sixteen," Herbert went on. "You're looking fine as silk. How do you like our house?"

"It's a perfectly wonderful house, Herbert."

"Isn't it lovely!" put in Miss Kenworthy enthusiastically. And she glanced at Edith in a timid way as if she meant: "Have I said the right thing? Do you like me to admire your house?"

"Have you noticed the furniture?" Herbert said. "All museum pieces. Some of it is Flemish, Seventeenth Century. Spanish too." He beamed at me. There is something about the wide, straight line of Herbert's lips, the shine of his spectacles, and the way he has of looking quickly from one person to the other that makes him appear to be always radiantly beaming.

"I love Spanish furniture," ventured Miss Kenworthy.

Edith, with a lump of sugar poised in silver tongs over a teacup, said: "Do you? It's very uncomfortable." And seemed subtly to convey that she alone knew wherein the real value of her things lay, and that none of us could possibly understand it. "How many? Two?"

"Yes, please," said Miss Kenworthy, as if she were a little girl playing tea-party. "And a little milk."

"I'm afraid it's only cream," said Edith, filling her cup. "I'm sorry."

That was cruel of Edith if she knew, as I was sure that she did, that Miss Kenworthy had said milk in a pathetic effort to live up to her. She no doubt had heard that the English look with amused scorn on our habit of serving cream with tea, and perhaps she had observed some of those people who are consciously correct at all times, asking for milk even when they know it to be cream. She seemed terribly in awe of Edith for some reason, and eager to impress her. But Edith only accepted as her equals those who had

adopted or been born with-not the customs of the English, but their impregnable and bland conviction that whatever they did was made right because they did it, and asked for sarsaparilla at five o'clock if they chose.

And how, I thought, she must scorn poor Herbert, who obviously clamored to do the right thing. Delicately aloof, far and away from the swash of his bounding vulgarity and his healthy exuberance, she looked down on him, like a tight-lipped Greek statue in a niche. No wonder that Franklyn was the only one, and even his existence made me ponder and doubt somewhat the laws of physiology.

Bravely smiling, Miss Kenworthy took her cup of tea from Herbert. "The cup that cheers but never tightens. Isn't that what the poet said, Em?"

"What poet?" I asked.

"Byron or somebody. Well, Cheerio!" And then while his back was turned to Edith, I saw his fingers touch hers under the cup and run swiftly down her wrist, saw a look pass between them, his almost a wink, like a delighted little boy sharing a secret, hers imploring, terrified. She bit her lip and gave a quick shake of her head. that plainly meant: "Don't-not here."

So that was it! That undoubtedly was it. No wonder she was embarrassed, I thought with righteous indignation. She ought to be. Naturally, since she was more perceptive than Herbert, who simply had no perceptions, she felt something essentially wrong in her being there. It put things out of adjustment, and the situation in that calm room, flooded with late afternoon light, must have put her teeth on edge like some harsh, raucous noise. How utterly brash it was of him to have brought her! Is there such a word? Certainly only brash expressed him to me then as he stood there with his stocky legs in golf stockings, far apart, and his tousled head, so protected in the armor of his complacency that he could crash through those fine barriers, like silk threads drawn tight, that hurt more sensitive people. He had made her come because he had wanted to show off to her his house, Edith, and the "museum pieces."

Edith was frankly bored with Miss Kenworthy, so with the air of one who has done her social duty and can now come