WENT to Kennuit to be quiet through the summer vacation. I was tired after my first year as associate professor, and I had to finish my "Life of Ben Jonson." Certainly the last thing I desired was that dying man in the hot room and the pile of scrawled booklets.

I boarded with Mrs. Nickerson in a cottage of silver-gray shingles under silver-gray poplars, heard only the harsh fiddling of locusts and the distant rage of the surf, looked out on a yard of bright wild grass and a jolly windmill weather-vane, and made notes about Ben Jonson. I was as secluded and happy as old Thoreau raising beans and feeling superior at Walden.

My fiancee,-Quinta Gates, sister of Professor Gates, and lovelier than ever in the delicate culture she had attained at thirty-seven,-Quinta urged me to join them at Fleet Harbor. It is agreeable to be with Quinta. While I cannot say that we are stirred to such absurd manifestations as kissing and hand-holding,-why any sensible person should care to hold a damp female hand is beyond me,-we do find each other inspiriting. But Fleet

Harbor would be full of "summerites,' dreadful young people in white flannels, singing their jazz ballads.

No, at thought of my spacious, leafy freedom I wriggled with luxury and settled down to an absorbed period when night and day glided into one ecstasy of dreaming study. Naturally, then, I was angry when I heard a puckery voice outside in the tiny hallway: "Well, if he 's a professor, I got to see him."

A knock. I affected to ignore it. It was irritatingly repeated until I roared, "Well, well, well?" I am normally, I trust, a gentle person, but I desired to give them the impression of annoyance.

Mrs. Nickerson billowed in, squeak

ing:

1

ness:

"Are you a professor?"

"I teach English."
"You write books?"

I pointed to a box of manuscript. "Then, please, you got to help us. Byron Sanders is dying. He says he's got to see a learned man to give him some important papers." Doubtless I betrayed hesitation, for I can remember her voice rising in creepy ululation: "Please! He's dying— that good old man that never hurt nobody!"

I fluttered about the room to find my cap. I fretted that her silly phrase of "important papers" sounded like a melodrama, with maps of buried treasure, or with long-lost proofs that the chore boy is really the kidnapped son of royalty. But these unconscious defenses against the compulsion expressed in her face, with its taut and terrified oval of open mouth, were in vain. She mooned at me, she impatiently waited. I dabbled at my collar and lapels with my fingers, instead of decently brushing off the stains of smoking and scribbling. I came stumbling and breathless after her.

She walked rapidly, unspeaking, intense, and I followed six inches behind, bespelled by her red-and-black gingham waist and her chip of a brown hat. We slipped among the gray houses of the town, stumped into country stilly and shimmering with late afternoon. By a trail among long salty grasses we passed an inlet where sandpipers sprinted and horseshoe-crabs bobbed on the crisping ripples. We crossed a moorland to a glorious point of blowing grasses and sharp salt odor, with the waves of the harbor flickering beyond. In that resolute place my em

most laughed as I wondered:

"What is this story-book errand? Ho, for the buried treasure! I'll fit up a fleet, out of the six hundred dollars I have in the savings-bank, and find the pirates' skellingtons. 'Important papers!' I 'll comfort the poor dying gentleman, and be back in time for another page before supper. The harbor is enchanting. I really must have a sail this summer or go swimming.'

My liveliness, uneasy at best in the presence of that frightened, fleeing woman, wavered when we had dipped down through a cranberry-bog and entered a still, hot woods of dying pines. They were dying, I tell you, as that old man in there was dying. The leaves were of a dry color of brick dust; they had fallen in heaps that crunched beneath my feet; the trunks were lean and black, with an irritation of branches; and all the dim alleys were choking with a dusty odor of decay. It was hot and hushed, and my throat tickled, my limbs dragged in a hopeless languor.

Through ugly trunks and red needles we came to a restrained dooryard and an ancient, irregular house, a dark house, very sullen. No No one had laughed there these many years. The windows were draped. The low porch between the main structure and a sagging ell was drifted with the pineneedles. My companion's tread was startling and indecent on the flapping planks. She held open the door. I hesitated. I was not annoyed now; I was afraid, and I knew not of what I was afraid.

Prickly with unknown disquietude, I entered. We traversed a hall choked with relics of the old shipping days of Kennuit: a whale's vertebra, a crib

bage-board carved in a walrus-tusk, a Chinese screen of washed-out gold pagodas on faded, weary black. We climbed a narrow stair over which jutted, like a secret trap-door, the corner of a mysterious chamber above. My companion opened a door on the upper hall and croaked, "In there."

I went in slowly. I am not sure now, after two years, but I think I planned to run out again, to flee downstairs, to defend myself with that ivory tusk if I should be attacked by— whatever was lurking in that shadowy, silent place. As I edged in, about me crept an odor of stale air and vile medicines and ancient linen. The shutters The shutters were fast; the light was grudging. I was actually relieved when I saw in the four-poster bed a pitiful, vellum-faced old man, and the worst monster I had to face was normal illness.

I have learned that Byron Sanders was only seventy-one then, but he seemed ninety. He was enormous. He must have been hard to care for. His shoulders, in the mended linen nightgown thrust up above the patchwork comforter, were bulky; his neck was thick; his head a shiny dome an Olympian, majestic even in dissolution.

The room had been lived in too long. It was a whirl of useless things: staggering chairs, clothes in piles, greasy medicine-bottles, and a vast writingdesk pouring out papers, and dingy books with bindings of speckled brown. Amid the litter, so still that she seemed part of it, I was startled to discern another woman. Who she may have been I have never learned.

The man was ponderously turning in bed, peering at me through the shaky light.

"That depends upon what you mean, sir. I teach English. I am not " "You understand poetry, essays, literary history?"

"I am supposed to."

"I'm kind of a colleague of yours. Byron— He stopped, choked frightfully. The repressed woman beside the bed, moving with stingy patience, wiped his lips. wiped his lips. "My name is Byron Sanders. For forty years, till a year ago, I edited the 'Kennuit Beacon.""

The nauseating vanity of man! In that reverent hour, listening to the entreaties of a dying man, I was yet piqued at having my stripped athletic scholarship compared to editing the "Beacon," with its patent-medicine advertisements, its two straggly columns of news about John Brown's cow and Jim White's dory.

His eyes trusting me, Byron Sanders went on:

"Can't last long. It's come quicker -no time to plan. I want you to take the literary remains of my father. He was not a good man, but he was a genius. I have his poetry here, and the letters. I have n't read them for years, and too late give them to world. You must-”

He was desperately choking. The still woman crept up, thrust into my hands a box of papers and a pile of note-books which had been lying on the bed.

"You must go," she muttered. "Say, 'Yes,' and go. He can't stand any more.'