pointed her unswerved finger at his latest canvas as at the earlier ones and had judged him to the quick: you will never be a great painter. If you cannot be content to remain less, quit, stop!

Thus youth's choice and a man's half a lifetime of effort and ambition ended in abandonment not because he was a failure, but because the choice had been a blunder. A multitude of men topple into this chasm, and crawl out nobody. Few of them at middle age in the darkness of that pit can grope within themselves for some second candle, and by it once more become illumined through and through. He found his second candle,-it should have been his first, and he lighted it, and it became the light of his life; but it did not illumine him completely, it never dispelled the shadows of the one that had burned out.

What he did with it was this: having reached the end of his own career, he turned and made his way back to the fields of youth, and taking his stand by that ever fresh path, always, as students would rashly pass him, he halted them like a wise monitor, describing the best way to travel, warning of the difficulties of the country ahead, but insisting that the goal was worth the toil and the trouble; searching secretly among his pupils year after year for signs of what he was not, a great painter, and pouring out his sympathies on all those who, like himself, would never be one.

Now he sat looking across at his class with mastery of them. They sat looking eagerly at him. Then he struck his theme: "Your work on this portrait is your best, because the model, as I stated to you at the outset would be the case, has called forth your finer selves; she has caused you to feel. And she has been able to do this because her countenance, her whole being, radiates one of the great passions and faiths of our common humanity-the look of reverent motherhood. You recognize that look, that mood; you believe in it; you honor it; you have worked at the outpost of its living eloquence. Observe, then, the result. Turn again to your canvases and see how, though proceeding differently, you have all dipped your brushes as in a common light; how you have all drawn an identical line around that old-time tenderness. You have in

truth copied from her one of the great beacon-lights of human expression that has been burning and signaling through ages upon ages of human history-the look of the devoted mother, the angel of selfsacrifice.

"While we wait, we might go a little way into this general matter, since you, in the study of portraiture, will always have to deal with it. This look of hers, which you have caught on your canvases, with all the other great beacon-lights of human expression, stands, of course, for the inner energies of our lives, the leading forces of our characters. But, as ages pass, human life changes; its chief elements shift their places, some forcing their way to the front, others being pushed to the rear; and the great beacon-lights change correspondingly. Ancient ones go out, new ones appear; and your art of portraiture, which is the undying historian of the human countenance, is subject to this law of the birth and death of its material.

"Perhaps more ancient lights have died out of human faces than modern lights have been kindled to replace them. Do you understand why? The reason is this: throughout an immeasurable time the aim of nature was to make the human countenance as complete an instrument of expression as it could possibly be. Man, except for his gestures and wordless sounds, had nothing else with which to speak; he must speak with his face. And thus the primitive face became the chronicle of what was going on within him as well as of what had taken place without. It was his earliest bulletin-board of intelligence. It was the first parchment to bear tidings, it was the original newspaper; it was the rude, but vivid, book of the woods. The human face was all that. Ages more had to pass before spoken language began, and still more ages before written language began. Thus for an immeasurable time nature developed the face and multiplied its expressions to enable man to make himself understood. At last this development was checked; what we may call the natural occupation of the face culminated. Civilization began, and as soon as civilization began, the decline in natural expressiveness began with it. Gradually civilization supplanted primeval needs; it contrived other means for doing what the face alone had done

frankly, marvelously. When you can print news on paper, you may cease to print news on the living skin. Moreover, the aim of civilization is to develop in us the consciousness not to express, but to suppress. Its aim is not to reveal, but to conceal, thought and emotion; not to make the countenance a beacon-light, but a muffler of the inner candle, whatever that candle for the time may be. All our ruling passions, good or bad, noble or ignoble, we now try publicly to hide. This is civilization. And thus the face, having started out expressionless in nature, tends through civilization to become expressionless again.

"How few faces does any one of us know that frankly radiate the great passions and moods of human nature except what little is left of this ancient tremendous drama in the poor pantomime of the stage? Search crowds, search the streets. See everywhere masked faces, telling as little as possible to those around them of what they glory in or what they suffer. Search modern portrait galleries. Do you find portraits of either men or women who radiate the overwhelming passions, the vital moods, of our galled and soaring nature? It is not a long time since the Middle Ages. In the stretch of history centuries shrink to nothing, and the Middle Ages are as the earlier hours of our own day. But has there not been a change even within that short time? Did not the medieval portrait-painters portray in their sitters great moods as no painter portrays them now? How many painters of to-day can find them in the faces of his sitters?

"And so I come again to your model. What makes her so remarkable, so significant, so touching, so exquisite, so human, is the fact that her face seems almost a survival of a great tender past in which the beacon-lights of humanity did more. openly appear upon the features. In her case one beacon-light most of all,the greatest that has ever shone on the faces of women, -the one which seems to be slowly vanishing from the faces of modern women, the look of the mother, that transfiguration of the face of the mother who believed that the nativity was the divine event in her earthly existence, and the emotions and energies of whose life centered about her offspring. How often does any living painter have his chance

"It does not seem worth while to wait longer. Evidently your model has been kept away to-day. Let us hope that no ill has befallen her and that she will be here to-morrow. If she is here, we shall go on with her portrait. If she should not be here, I will have another model ready, and we shall take up another study until she returns. Bring fresh canvases."

He left the room. They lingered, looking again at their canvases, understanding their own work as they had not, and more strongly drawn than ever toward the woman whom that day they missed. Slowly, and with disappointment and with many conjectures as to why she had not come, they separated.

V

IT was the Sunday after. All round St. Luke's Hospital quiet reigned. The day was very still on the heights up there under the blue curtain of the sky.

In

When he had been left stretched against the curb on the dark roadway, rolled over and tossed there with no outcry, no movement, as limp and senseless as a mangled weed, the careless crowd which somewhere in the city every day gathers about such scenes quickly gathered about him. this throng was the physician whose car stood near by; and he, used to sights of suffering, but touched by that street tragedy of unconscious child and half-crazed mother, hurried them both to St. Luke's -to St. Luke's, which is always open, always ready, and always free to those who lack means.

Just before they stopped at the entrance she had pleaded in the doctor's ear.

"To the private ward," he said to those who lifted the lad to the stretcher, speaking as though he added his authority to her entreaty.

"One of the best rooms," he said before the operation, speaking again as though he shouldered the responsibility of the ex

thing! Everything!"

Every

So there he was now, the lad, or what there was left of him, this quiet Sunday, in a pleasant room opposite the cathedral. The air was like early summer. The windows were open. He lay on his back, not seeing anything. The skin of his forehead had been torn entirely off; there was a bandage over his eyes. And there were bruises on his body and on his face, which was horribly disfigured. The lips were swollen two or three thicknesses; it was agony to speak. When he realized what had happened, after the operation, his first mumbled words to her were:

"They will never have me now." About the middle of the forenoon of this still Sunday morning, when the doctor left, she followed him into the hall as usual, and questioned him once more with her eyes. He encouraged her, and encouraged himself:

"I believe he is going to get well. He has the will to get well, he has the bravery to get well. He is brave about it; he is as brave as he can be."

"Of course he is brave," she said stolidly. "Of course he is brave."

"The love of such a mother would call him back to life," the doctor added, and he laid one of his hands on her head for a moment.

She shrank back, and walked to the end of the transverse hall. Across the road was the cathedral. The morning service was just over. People were pouring out through the temporary side doors and the temporary front doors so placidly, so contentedly! Some were evidently strangers; as they reached the outside they turned and studied the cathedral curiously as those who had never before seen it. Others turned and looked at it familiarly, with pride in its progress. Some stopped and looked down at the young grass, stroking it with their toes; they were saying how fresh and green it was. Some looked up at the sky; they were saying how blue it was. Some looked at one another keenly; they were discussing some agreeable matNot one looked across at the hospital. Not a soul of them seemed to be even aware of its existence. Not a soul of them.

ter.

Particularly her eyes became riveted upon two middle-aged ladies in black who came out through a side door of the cathedral-slow-paced women, bereft, full of

squirrel came jumping along in front of them on its way to the park. One stooped and coaxed it and tried to pet it: it became a vital matter with both of them to pour out upon the little creature which had no need of them their pent-up, ungratified affection. With not a glance across to the window where she stood, with her mortal need of them, her need of all mothers, of everybody-her mortal need of everybody! Why were they not there at his bedside? Why had they not heard? Why had not all of them heard? Why had anything else been talked of that day? Why were they not all massed around the hospital doors, clamoring their sympathies? How could they hold services in the cathedral-ordinary services? Why was it not crowded to the doors with the clergy of all faiths and the lay

against such destruction? Why did they not stop building temples to God, to the God of life, to the God who gave little children, until they had stopped the murder of children, His children!

Everybody had been kind. Even his little rivals who had fought with him over the sale of papers had given some of their pennies and had bought flowers for him, and one of them had brought their gift to the great hospital entrance. Every day a shy group of them had gathered on the street while one came to inquire how he was. Kindness had rained on her; it could not keep from raining, for there was that in the sight of her that unsealed kindness in every heart that was not stone. She had been too nearly crazed to know all this. Her bitterness and anguish broke through the near cordon of sympathy, and went out against the whole brutal and careless world that did not care-to legislatures that did not care, to magistrates that did not care, to juries that did not care, to officials that did not care, to drivers that did not care, to the whole world that did not care save only those who mourned for the maimed and the dead.

Through the doors of the cathedral the people streamed out unconcerned. Beneath her, along the street, young couples passed, flushed with their climb of the park hillside, and flushed with young love, young health. Sometimes they held each other's hands; they mocked her agony in their careless joy.

One last figure issued from the side door of the cathedral hurriedly, and looked eagerly across at the hospital-looked straight at her, and came straight toward her, the choir-master. She had not sent word to him or to any one; but he, when his new pupil had failed to report as promised, had come down to find out why. And he, like all the others, had been kind; and he was coming now to inquire.

THE bright, serene hours of the day passed one by one in nature's carelessness. It was afternoon and near the hour for the choral even-song across the way at the cathedral, the temporary windows of which were open.

She had relieved the nurse, and was alone with him. Often during these days he had put out one of his hands and groped about with it to touch her, turn

ing his head a little toward her under his bandaged eyes, and feeling much mystified about her, but saying nothing. She kept out of his reach, but leaned over in response, and talked ever to him, barely stroking him with the tips of her stiffened fingers.

The afternoon was so still that by and by through the opened windows a deep note sent a thrill into the room-the awakened soul of the organ. And as the two heard it in silence, soon there floated over to them the voices of the choir as the line moved slowly down the aisle, the blended voices of the chosen band, his school-fellows of the altar. By the bedside she suddenly rocked to and fro, and then she bent over and said with a smile in her tone:

"Do you hear? Do you hear them?" He made a motion with his lips, but they hurt him. So he nodded: he heard them.

A moment later he tugged at the bandage over his eyes.

She saw it, and sprang toward him. "O my precious one, you must not tear the bandage off your eyes!"

"I want to see you!" he said. "It has been so long since I saw you!"

VI

THE class had been engaged with another. model. Their work was forced and listless. As days passed without her return, their thought and their talk dwelt more and more upon her disappearance. Why had she not come back? What had befallen her? What did it all mean? Would they never know?

One day after their luncheon-hour, as they were about to resume work, the teacher of the class entered. There was a shock in his eyes; his look shocked them; an instant sympathy ran through them. He spoke quietly, with some effort:

"She has come back. She is downstairs. Something has befallen her indeed. She told me as briefly as possible, and I tell you all I know. Her son, a little fellow who had just been chosen for the cathedral choir school was run over. A mention of it-the usual story-was in the papers, but who of us reads such things in the papers? They bore us; they are not even news. He was taken to St.

Luke's, and she has been at St. Luke's, and the end came at St. Luke's, and all the time we have been here a few yards distant and have known nothing of it. Such is New York! It was for his musical education that she first came to us, she said. And it was the news that he had been chosen for the choir school that accounts for the new happiness which we saw brighten her day by day. Now she comes again for the same small wage, with other need, no doubt; the expenses of it all, a rose-bush for his breast. She told me this as calmly as though it caused her no grief. It was not my privilege, not our privilege, to share her tragedy; she does not impose it upon us.

"She has asked to go on with the sittings. I have told her to come to-morrow. But she does not realize all that this involves. You will have to bring new canvases, it will have to be a new portrait. She is in mourning. Her hands will have to be left out, for she has hurt them; they are bandaged. The new portrait will be of the head and face only. But the chief reason is the change of expression. The light that was in her face, which you have partly caught upon your canvases, has died out; it was brutally put out. The look is gone. It is gone, and will never come back-the tender, brooding, reverent happiness and peace of motherhood with the child at her knee-that great earthly beacon-light of humanity in women of ages past. It was brutally put out, but it did not leave darkness behind it. As it died, there came in its place another light, another ancient beacon-light on the faces of women of old-the look of faith in immortal things. Now she is not the mother with the tenderness of this earth, but the mother with the expectation of eternity. Her eyes have followed some one who has left her arms and gone into a distance. Ever she follows him into that distance."

WHEN she entered the room next morning, at the sight of her in mourning, so changed, with one impulse of respect they all rose to her. She took no notice,-perhaps it would have been unendurable to notice, but she advanced, and climbed to the platform without faltering, and he posed her for the head and shoulders. Then, to study the effect from different

angles, he went behind the easels, passing from one to another. As he returned, with the thought of giving her pleasure, he brought along with him one of the students' sketches of herself, and held it out before her.

"Do you recognize it?" he asked.

At first she refused to look. Then with indifference she glanced at it, arousing herself. But when she beheld there what she had never seen, how great had been her love of him; when she beheld the light now gone out and the end of happy days, quickly she shut her eyes, and jerked her head to one side with a motion for him to take the picture away. But brought too close to her bereavement and to the fount of self-pity, suddenly over her hands she bent like a broken reed, and the storm of her anguish came upon her.

They started up. They fought one another to get to her. They crowded around the platform, and tried to hide her from one another's eyes, and knelt down, and wound their arms about her, and sobbed beside her; and then they lifted her and guided her behind the screens.

"Now, if you will allow them," he said, when she came out with them, " some of these young friends will go home with you. And whenever you wish, whenever you feel like it, come back to us. shall be ready. We shall be waiting. We shall all be glad."

We

ON the heights the cathedral risesslowly, as the great houses of its faith have always risen.

Years have drifted by as silently as the winds since the first rock was riven where its foundations were to be laid, and still all day on the clean air sounds the lonely clink of drill and chisel as the blasting and the shaping of the stone goes on. The snows of winters have sifted deep above its rough beginnings; the suns of many a spring have melted them. Well nigh a generation of human lives has already crumbled about its corner-stones. Farbrought, many-tongued toilers, toiling on the rising walls, have dropped their work and stretched themselves for their sleep; others have climbed to their places; the

work goes on. Upon the shoulders of the images of the Apostles, which stand about the chancel, generations of pigeons, the doves of the temple whose nests are in the