Mr. Parker's voice was persuasive. "I can't explain things here, though. I'll tell you what you do. Come up to the office to-night, and we'll talk this outjust you and me- -see. I've got a little business idea for you, too."

Morgan grinned and stuck a derisive thumb in Mr. Parker's chest.

"You bet I'll come. I'm a reasonable man, I am."

"All right. Eight o'clock."

"Sure. I'm a reasonable man." Edward Parker turned away with a feeling of sick disgust. Morgan of all men! Smart, lying, drunken, willing to put anything in that dirty sheet of his. Not that he cared about being mayor; but it would hurt the folks to have anything said against him. Well, he could take care of Morgan, all right. Spend a little money for advertising. Anyway, it wouldn't be long before he'd drink himself to death. Nothing to worry about. Just something to handle the right way. He saw Grace Ann's trim little figure walking sedately in the next block. Her curls were bobbing within their confining ribbon. Little pink and white and gold thing. Just a baby. He hurried until he caught up with her.

"Well, honey, did you get scared?" "Sort of, daddy. I was afraid he'd hurt you."

"Not him. Men talk a lot when they're drunk. Not nice for little girls." He tucked her cool fingers in the crook of his arm. "Guess we better hurry a bit. It's getting late and mother will be worried."

"Is it? I was so busy I didn't know." "That's good. I wouldn't like you getting chummy with the Morgan girl. People say she runs pretty wild.".

"But I can't help her coming to the libarry, daddy."

"Of course not. I wasn't blaming you a bit. Always be nice when you see her; but-well, you understand."

"Yes, daddy."

"That's a good child." Mr. Parker patted her hand awkwardly. After a moment he added: "Maybe we better not say anything to mother about Mr. Morgan. Might worry her, you know, hearing he'd been drunk and sort of disagreeable."

Grace Ann nodded gravely. They were

nearing home now. The big, white house with green blinds stood a little apart from other houses. The lawn was bigger, the grass greener, and its great maples more thickly leaved. The windows and doors were open, hospitable; and Mrs. Parker waited at the gate to greet them.

"Well, mother." It was the beginning of a formula. So was Mrs. Parker's "Well, daddy," and Grace Ann's kiss. Then they moved slowly up the walk with Mr. Parker in the middle making a joke about his two girls.

Outwardly Mrs. Parker was smiling and placid; but inside she seemed made of jelly. If he knew, how could Edward say, "Well, mother," that way. They must never know. She wanted to pray, but it was hard to do it and keep on talking.

There was more of the formula at the supper-table.

"Well, mother, did you tell the ladies what was what?"

"It was the Ladies' Aid, Edward, and they all know what is what." She smiled across the table with pretended reproof. Wonderful that her voice did not shake; that she could smile. She served the asparagus with a steady hand. 'Help me, God,' she was thinking. 'Help me. Help

me.

"Just the same they're always making you president- Ladies' Aid— Woman's Club-everything in town it seems to me." Mr. Parker tried to put Morgan, with his sneers and threats, out of his mind; but the oddest things reminded him of them-the innocent curve of Grace Ann's chin, the way his wife's hair folded about her face. That dirty cur, trying to tell Louella and Grace Ann their daddy was a crook! Well, he'd stop that, all

right!

Back and forth they talked, their words slipping easily through the grooves of habit. Between them sat Grace Ann, feeling their presence like something protecting and sheltering, but something that bound, too. They couldn't see how excited she was. If they knew what she was going to do they would be shocked and hurt. Their faces would change and they wouldn't look at her, smiling and proud, like they did now. She couldn't

bear to have them change! As she thought of how dreadful it would be, she almost renounced her plan. She would stay with them every minute, forget everything in the comfort of being just Grace Ann.

"I think Grace Ann's working too hard, mother." Mr. Parker had guessed the origin of the cake, and now he smiled expansively upon his family. "You better pick her up at the library and take her to a movie. I've some business to attend to; but I might join you later." "No, daddy. I can't go, possibly." Revolt stiffened Grace Ann. Crazy to think she could give things up. Nan would be waiting and the boys-and the river slipping under the moonlight, lapping against the boat. Then dancing, and the ride home with long silences. Nothing could keep her! Nothing! "When I get through at the libarry I got to go to Lucy's and do some work."

"All right, baby. School won't last much longer now." Mrs. Parker's heart was in her throat. She would be alone for an hour. She could see the "Hummer" leave, and be sure

Some way she got them out of the house, saw them down the steps, down the walk, and then the shade-trees hid them. She waited till eight o'clock before she herself hurried out into the summer dusk.

Across the park she went, past the grand stand, past benches filled with young people. She was only half conscious of them, meaningless voices, figures made of shadow. What had they to do with her?

It was near train time when she reached the station. Baggage was hurried forward, groups of men and women talked under the arc-lights, stray ones wandered up and down impatiently. She couldn't see Monty! The train came roaring in, long lines of lighted windows, noises, peering faces. There he was, in his brown suit and derby, a suitcase in either hand. He was climbing aboard. The train was starting.

"Oh, thank you, God," she half whispered. "Thank you!"

Jubilantly, tirelessly now, she started toward home. On the way she passed within ten feet of Grace Ann.

Grace Ann walked with a boy, her hand on his arm; and as they moved, their young shoulders touched and their talk and laughter broke. When they reached a lonely corner his arms went about her, roughly, hungrily. Through the thin summer darkness she could see his face, changed, alive. Something in her answered him, something frightened, retreating, but never withdrawing. A moment later they sauntered down to the river-bank.

At home Mrs. Parker waited for Edward. It was after ten before he came; he, too, had walked jubilantly, with the taste of victory on his lips. Only when he reached her did he realize that he was tired.

"We'll go right to bed," said Mrs. Parker firmly. "Working all day and all evening is too much."

Mr. Parker agreed, and as he lay stretched beside his wife he smiled in the darkness. It was just a question of handling it right, as he had thought. He slept heavily, and only half awakened when Grace Ann came in.

No one saw her tiptoe down the hall, her hands over her flushed cheeks, her eyes shining, starlike.

"It's just Grace Ann going to bed," said Mrs. Parker. "That's good." His voice was indistinct with sleep. "Always like to have her in early."

Breakfast next morning was like every other breakfast. Grace Ann was fresh for school and Mr. Parker read aloud from the out-of-town paper. From behind the percolator Mrs. Parker smiled at the two of them happily. Sometimes she stopped to sniff the fragrance of honeysuckle which drifted in through the open window. It was like a benediction.

"Get your work done last night, baby?" Mr. Parker put down the paper.

"Yes, daddy." Grace Ann bent over her plate. Last night! Had it really happened? The wonder of it, and the terrifying sweetness! It seemed unreal now, like a dream. They would never know, these two beside her; and they couldn't ever understand. She was sorry for them, suddenly.

"What say we all go to a movie tonight?" Mr. Parker beamed on them

both. "Or would you rather do something else?"

"I'd like to stay home." Grace Ann's voice was soft. "I'd like to just stay home with you and mother."

The Parkers smiled at each other, knowingly.

Grace Ann jumped up. She kissed her mother, sweetly, for the pity she had felt.

"Right on the bald spot, daddy." In the doorway she whirled. "Too-deloo dears, and also pip-pip."

A flutter of skirts and she was gone.
"Blessed baby." Mr. Parker cleared

T was in a soft and open meadow just behind the river hills in Iowa-a country hardly twenty years earlier won from the Indians -and yet it seemed to me, a child of six, immeasurably old. The level Western sunbeams slanted through a forest to the old board house, unpainted, weather-stained -to fall on the few acres of home-grown grass, where the water came from the mossy wooden pipe, let in the hillside. The low hills encircled it, and it was quiet. MacKnight, my father told me, had long since gone away, and the farm was abandoned. High hollyhocks were in the dooryard, but the wild things were already creeping in. I drank of the water, and dreamed, as a child can dream-more easily than a man, for life is still so dreamy -of who was MacKnight, and why had he gone, and had he come before the Indians. I did not know the word, romantic, but I felt the thing. The window was already gone, the roof partly fallen in, and no wreck of tower or ivied window gave me, in later days, on Rhine or Tiber, a deeper VOL. LXXXII.-47

sense of immemorial age. I remember that I hated to leave, but the night was falling.

We had twenty miles to go, with the span of black horses, through grass-grown track in forest, then along the still Maquoketa River, so different from a New England clear brown water, black and silent between its high muddy banks, beneath the giant tree-trunks that fell across it dying of old age. No one ever cut them, and so we forded the river and came through a glen between the bluffs to the outer liberties of the city, where the Indians were camped-they were Siouxand so to the Main Street, where a regiment of soldiers were marching to the "slew" to get the ferry-they were a Minnesota regiment, my father told me, splendid men, "going to save the Union"

for the war between the States was on. I had not yet known a time when there was not war, or talk of war, my father and my uncle Ben having conducted a vigorous conversation upon it at Detroit that very last month as we were coming home to Iowa from our summer East. The talk began at supper and continued through most of the night, as I judged from sounds below, and might conceivably have ended

in direct action (for my uncle was a bluff sailor, companion of Richard H. Dana on his famous trip "Two Years before the Mast") but that he hurried off at dawn to secure the reinstatement of a railroad clerk whose discharge he had insisted upon the afternoon before for failing to expedite a freight-car, my uncle having been, as he explained later, "unable to sleep for thinking of his wife and family." For Ben Stimson, after his two years before the mast, having before that time twice tried to run away to sea and being finally sent off by my grandfather with young Dana to give him his full of it, had got so completely full of it that he settled as far as he could then be from the Atlantic Ocean, which was in those days, Detroit; but the fondness for ships persisted and he had become a shipper on the Great Lakes.

Seeing that my uncle had not been able to sleep, my father magnanimously forbore to clench his conclusion that the Abolitionists were a pack of hasty fanatics determined to break up the Union, or my uncle his conviction that the underground railway to Windsor, Canada, was but an imperfect remedy for the evils of slavery. In those days people who were Unionists were called copperheads, in Boston; yet it was only twenty years since my wife's great-grandfather, Josiah Bradlee, meeting Mr. Edmund Quincy coming out of an Abolitionist meeting in Faneuil Hall, had pulled his ear, with the admonition "never to let him see him come out of such a place again!"

Indian camps were not unusual in the vacant lots outlying Dubuque, which lay at the base of the high bluff where our house stood. I do not remember their having regular teepees-usually common tents, or, in the summer, a pair of crossed poles with a bar across, whence hung their blankets or buffalo-skins. The faces, in the city, were seldom painted, though I remember occasional head-feathers and fringed leggings. There was no shade where they camped, only scanty bushes with a large purple and white bell-shaped flower: I think it was "jimson-weed"Datura stramonium? No one told me it was poisonous and I am no botanist. (I think with Ruskin of Oxford, that Harvard "might have taught me that fritil

laries grew in Iffley meadows," but of course it was my fault. I might have elected botany, geology, natural history; which would have delighted one's life on earth; but I chose to elect metaphysics instead, futile gropings into the Beyond.) But I had as a child no fear, only a friendly interest, for these Indians.

In the spring of 1862 my father made a party for his "house-guests" (what other variety does journalese dialect count?) to go up the river. Up the riverto the very navigable head of Mississippi, the Falls of St. Anthony, St. Paul already named, but still called "Fort Snelling. Four hundred and fifty miles of voyaging, on a lofty, tall smoke-stacked steamboat-not even a stern-wheeler-but open from stem to stern, with a grand saloon of stained-glass windows and all the inward machinery lying frankly open on the forward main deck, for a boy's delightwith the roaring flames fed under the boilers, the great thrust of the pitman and the slide of the piston and the turning of the great mainshaft-and the paddles churning the tawny water-colored like a lion's mane, my New York cousin said. Most of all I watched to see the flames coming out of the two tall chimneys, as I had often seen in pictures; but alas! we had no race; and I suspect that only occurs in the grand moments. So we went up by Dunleith and Eagle Point and La Crosse and Lake Pepin and then bang! and a dull thump, a shock, a strain-and we were upon a sand-bar; but this was best of all-it gave Mississippi steam-voyaging all the charm of a canoe trip-we boys rushed forward to help; two great thrusting poles were hung at the bow all ready; swinging down like catapults, we all lent our weight-even to Eric's and my seven years (but I suspect the kindly mate only permitted this when we were well off the bar)-the great paddle-wheels churned the brown flood to chocolate-and we slid back and off-from four feet of water safely into five-which was what we drew. And Eric and I went back to the ladies with all the swagger of achievement.

Eric was seven and had blue eyes—all I remember of him now-save that he was going with his family-father, mother, perhaps a grandmother, and many sisters to settle on their farm-ninety miles