"Two gallant ships from old England

came

Blow high, blow low, and so sailed we; The one was Prince of Luther, and the other Prince of Wales,

Cruising down on the coast of
Bar-ba-rie."

He stopped, and the child stirred uneasily.

"Sing!" he said sleepily.

The captain laughed.

"Well, I guess I'll have to overhaul that song a bit if I 'm goin' to sail straight through it," he declared. "It 's be'n stowed away in my old head long enough to git pretty rusty. Le''s see how it goes." He thought a moment, and then, clearing his throat diffidently, sang it through to the end.

"Sing it again!" insisted the child, without looking up.

"Like it, do ye?" said the captain. "Well, I guess the boys used to, too. Guess boys are boys the world overnever git enough of what they like." Then he sang it again, and, ending it, in an odd, singsong voice droned out the old ballad of "Lord Bateman."

Songs that he had not thought of for years came trooping back to his memory -old ballads and sentimental ditties, and stirring chanties droned about capstans and on halyards and braces under every star of the belted seas; and he sang them all.

As he sang, he looked about the bare room in which they sat. Unmistakably it was the abode of poverty. It hurt him for the child's sake, and Thomas's reply to his question hurt him more. So gradually there awoke in his mind a desire that had long lain dormant. Into his lonely, self-centered life the coming of a son would be a perfect happiness. Alone in the world, he saw his future enriched by the prattle of a child. His dormant instinct of paternity stirred anew, and he began to live life over again in his plans for the boy.

In his arms the little figure lay limp at last. Awkwardly the captain shifted the little head to his other shoulder, for his arm had become numb from its constrained position. The boy stirred uneasily.

"Sing!" he murmured.

"All right, buddy," the captain replied gently. "How 'd ye like to have me sing ev'ry night, heh?"

The child smiled.

"Would ye like it?" persisted the cap

tain.

"Yes," said the child, and closed his

eyes.

"You could come to live with me, an' have a boat, an' a dog, an' a sled with your name painted on it-an' ev'rything. How 'd ye like that, son?"

"I'd like that,' answered the child. He looked up into the captain's face. "Goats are nice," he said eagerly.

"Yes; a goat, too, an' bimeby a pony." The captain's brows wrinkled in uncertainty. "Would ye have the pony black or white?" he asked. "Blame if I can decide."

"Black," replied the child, promptly. "Good enough!" exclaimed the captain, and then began to sing again.

The night dragged on, but they were not disturbed. Not daring to stir, for fear of waking the child, the captain sat stiffly while the clock ticked off the slow hours. It grew chilly toward morning, and slipping off his coat with great difficulty, he wrapped it about the little form.

Accustomed to uncertain hours, as he was, he was not disturbed by his prolonged vigil. His thoughts were busy.

"They'll give him up!" once he muttered. "Have to, when they see what I'll do for him." He looked down at the little face against his shoulder, slightly flushed. The lips were parted; his little hand grasped tightly the captain's stubby forefinger. "Little tad!" the captain exclaimed, grinning. "He's got a grip, though! Could pull on the halyards now. But he won't," he went on. "I'll make a man of him—a man. He won't grow up to be no waddlin' old duck like me, that don't know nothin' but wind an' tide an' weather. No, sir! He 'll hold up his head with the best on 'em. I'll educate him, an' start him square, an' he ain't the boy I take him for if he don't take to it like a duck to water."

Once his face fell: he was thinking of his own age. But he put the thought aside with a characteristic refusal to contemplate old age or death.

"I'm good fer twenty year' yit," he told himself, "or more. I ain't got an

ache or a pain, an' we 're long-lived, we Cosgroves." He chuckled. "That makes me think I don't even know his name. But he 'll be Cosgrove. I'll keep his first name if I like it; but not if it's some common name. No, sir!"

He heard the cocks crowing outside at last, and, turning to the window, saw that the day was coming. It manifested itself in a wan suggestion of light rather than in any tangible reappearance of physical aspects; for the fog still wrapped the world.

"I guess they'll be gittin' here pretty soon, if they 're ever goin' to," he told himself as he watched the light slowly increase. He had no concern for them, only a restless desire to have the matter settled. Rather grimly he told himself that if anything had happened, it would be easier for him and the boy. Then he heard the barn door shut and Thomas's voice calling to the cows. A moment later the front door opened, and a quick, uncertain step sounded in the hall.

The captain looked up as the door opened and mentally braced himself for the meeting. He saw a wan-faced woman of thirty slip in. She paused an instant as her eyes caught sight of him, and then her glance fell to the huddled figure in his arms; the next moment she was on her knees at his feet. There was no surprise at sight of him there, no questioning look or word; but the captain knew that his dream was over: he had seen the mother eyes.

He gave up the child and awkwardly got to his feet, stumbling a little. All at once he knew that he was very tired. He hardly noticed the man who later hurried

in, and he roused himself only when he heard them thanking him for his care of their boy.

"Thomas told me," exclaimed the father. "Ye see, we broke down; an' then it come on thick, an' we lost our way. Never saw such a night. Lizzie here was well-nigh crazy. Well, sir, I guess ye know how much obliged we are to you, sir."

"Oh, it wa' n't nothin'," said the captain. He looked at them, smiling vaguely, then turned to the window. The faint outlines of apple-trees showed through the fog, which was lifting at last. "Guess 't was 'bout as broad 's 't was long," he went on. "Ye see, I kind o' got off my course, myself, an' if I kept him comp'ny, why, I got my lodgin'. So I guess nobody 's out."

He would not stay to breakfast, but set out at once, not even glancing toward the child.

The sun was breaking red through the drifting veil of fog as he went stumbling down the road, where his footsteps stirred the dark covering of dampened earth, showing the powdery white beneath. Two crows rose cawing from behind a hedge and flapped leisurely away; somewhere in the distance a kingfisher screamed and scolded with spiteful ribaldry at some invisible annoyance; a cow gazed placidly at the captain as he passed, her jaws moving steadily in their sidelong rhythm. The captain stopped short.

"Blame if I did n't forgit my pail even!" he exclaimed. "Guess I'm gittin' old-too old to bring up-" He broke off, and went resolutely down the road, with his head lowered on his breast.

THE Mazers came to Pelham Heights

HE Mazers came to Pelham Heights

were persuaded to build in "the Heights" only when it was made plain to them that on Fifth Avenue their three millions would be little better than an exasperation. But having once been diverted northward, they took the big "round corner" opposite Talbot Smith's, built a classical colonial mansion twice the size of anything existing in 1776, and gathered to themselves six servants, two carriages, and an automobile. Then, since Pelham Heights was altogether too new a suburban colony to possess anything corresponding to a society, the Mazers proceeded to organize that society themselves.

I say "the Mazers"; but these things were really done by that masterful woman, Mrs. Mazer, assisted by her thin and much too educated eldest daughter, Edytha, and in a lesser degree by the two younger girls, Maida and Verdie. "Charley G.," the husband and father, who had earned the three millions, came to New York perhaps once a month to see the architect and contractor, and he came again to buy the horses and carriages and the automobile; but it was not by any desire of his that he was selling out at fiftyfive, and selling out to move "East." He himself would come on for good only when he had exhausted his last weak, undeceiving pretext for remaining in Wasti

gon.

And Mrs. Mazer, though in her own way a worthy woman, had early confessed to Edytha that in the first part of their "getting on" Mr. Mazer would only be in their way. To tell the truth, she would have been almost ready to admit the same concerning herself. What she did do was in all things to defer to Edytha, "who had spent her winters in the highest New York art circles" for the last three years. A month after they moved in, under Edytha's invaluable teaching, Mrs. Mazer began her campaign upon the yet unorganized

society of Pelham Heights by bringing Pelham, into being the Poetical Culture Club.

The Poetical Culture Club consisted essentially of Mrs. Smythe-Clythering, the eminent Browning reader and interpreter, and Velvyn d'Auvergnay, the poet. By the potency of the Mazer purse they were induced to adventure themselves north of the Harlem for the purpose of assisting in "Friday evenings." And lured by their names, the Heights came in at once. At least the ladies of the Heights came in at once; they said it would be a privilege to give their drawing-rooms. The gentlemen came more reservedly. Some of them came with forebodings, having had poetical culture before. And at that first "Friday evening" at the Mazers' those forebodings received the most deadly confirmation.

Mrs. Smythe-Clythering was a WOman of middle age who dressed and comported herself like a sweetly fluttered débutante. When she read love passages, she was kittenish. To put it with all brevity, she dulled the edge of chivalry. As for Velvyn d'Auvergnay, he was a young man who carried himself with an air of wan and drooping world-weariness. He had eyes, to use one of his own phrases, "of tristful dusk." When, at that first evening, he began to read his manuscript epic, "Cadme in Celadon," he "spoke to the inward soul" in a deep, soughing wind-harp voice, which made Messrs. Joseph Jones, Mossop Wallingham, Talbot Smith, Major Deming, and old Colonel Culverhouse from the South, long to rush forward and beat him to death with clubs.

The second and third evenings were even more harrowing than the first. The ladies of the Heights, with perhaps the exception of a Mrs. Beetson and a Miss Treffle, no longer even feebly argued that they ought to enjoy it. More and more palpably were they of the opinion of their husbands and brothers. Admittedly it was

May Wilom Preston

quite time that the Heights possessed some social organization, and possibly the plutocratic, but not lovable, Mrs. Mazer had meant well, she, also, looked vaguely unhappy, but decidedly the Poetical Culture Club was a false start.

Ir was about this time that Charley G. Mazer himself said his last good-by to Wastigon. He was a large, clumsy, freckle-handed man. He had jacked logs with a pike-pole before he had sent them through his mills by the million feet. For thirty years he had been the best-known man in Wastigon, the "biggest" man in town. He had been "Charley G." to every one, from kindergarten children to mayor. He was the kind of man who has family affection enough, but whose soul really calls out for the grasp and intercourse of numbers. Within ten days after his arrival in Greater New York he felt so uprootedly, so benumbingly lost and friendless that he could not eat his meals. Lonesomeness engulfed him.

What hurt him most was that the bars appeared to be up against all natural methods of getting acquainted. The second time he saw Mrs. Simpson and her small son entering "Hill Crest," next door, he

smiled at them. Both smiled back at him; but five minutes later Mrs. Mazer and Edytha were giving the big man a lesson in the way people do things in New York which drove him in upon himself for the rest of the week.

By the following Monday night, however, the loneliness had again become too much for him. He stopped his march up and down the "small drawing-room," and said he guessed he 'd go out for a while and see if he could n't "get next to some of the man bunch over the back fences."

When he said that for the fifth time that week, Edytha gave up. "Fawther!" she said.

"Yes," echoed her mother, but more from nerves than ill nature, "a speech like that, 'Dithy, shows just exactly how much your father's learned, even after all we 've told him."

It was three days before he made another attempt. This time he opened his soul with a project to fix up one of the empty rooms in the attic,-any old room at all, and get in that whole "man bunch" together-get them by the proper society form of invitation, of course; only when they had got them, let them be free to smoke up, and swap the kind of yarns

worth swappin', and have some kind of a time."

"Fawther!" said Edytha once more. As for Mrs. Mazer, she merely set her lips tight, and said now that his dress-suit had come home, he 'd have a chance to have some kind of time at their club evening next Friday.

THAT "evening" was at Talbot Smith's, and the big man drew the eyes of the room from the first. He had been seated among the ladies, between Mrs. Mazer and Edytha. He held his daughter's centertable Browning much like a condemned criminal reading the Scriptures at a penitentiary service. His evening clothes were the first he had worn in his life, and he was certain that every one there knew it, and was thinking about it. When he sat down, he had lifted his "scissor-tails" as if they were in some way sacred, and whenever he dared to move, his shirt-bosom crackled threateningly like white sheetiron. It pinched him in the girth, it oppressed the folds of the back of his neck, and it tightened on his throat till he felt himself slowly choking. He was sweating at every pore, and could not remember into which pocket-if he had any pockets -the women had put his handkerchief. But, more than all, that "evening," and the next, and the next, seemed to put him a thousand miles farther from being able to "get next to that man bunch" than he had been in the beginning. He now began to spend his days sitting out in the stable with the English coachman and the French chauffeur; but in time he came to see that for some reason they considered this bad form on his part, and after that he had no one at all. As far as he could see, this was to be his portion for the rest of his life.

Meanwhile the men, though still loyally accompanying their respective womankind, were raising such outcry against poetical culture as could have been adequately echoed only from Blackwell's Island.

"Lord help us!" they cried; "they won't even give us anything to eat! Break away! For heaven's sake, break away!" But how were they to break away? As Alicia Deming said to her uncle, the major, "To drop out of it now, when we have n't given our own evening, would be simply impossible; and to do so as soon as we have would be only less glaring.

"In that case," said the Falstaffian and once jovial major, "I can only say that I see no hope whatever in the future."

WHEN, on the night of Major Deming's "evening," Charley G. helped Mrs. Mazer and his daughters out of the big red car at the major's gate, the air was one blur of fog and rain. He had his own shadowed and inward meditations, and he had been spoken to twice before he comprehended that the dripping figure that had cowered in out of the darkness was trying to speak to him at all.

"Beggin' your parding, sir-beggin' your parding-"

The big ex-lumberman came to a halt. "Now, can't you see what he is?" asked Mrs. Mazer, and tried to start him on again.

"Yes," said Mazer, heavily; "and I ain't got so much to do these times but what I can pull up for long enough to hear what he has to say."

"Why, thankin' you kindly, and if you will permit the libe'ty-honly this, friend, I've seen a mort o' people goin' in there,"

he pointed to the Deming gate,-"and takin' it as it 's some kind of entert'inement, I thinks as maybe I might have a chance, at the hend of it, to give a little hexibition I 'ave of my own-a bit of an invention, so to speak, and 'ighly respectable. And after I shows it, sometimes I