Wrapped in a gray blanket, she sat all day peering out through the curtains. morning as a matter of course and helped her to a rocking-chair by the window, where, wrapped in a gray blanket, she sat all day peering out through the curtains. And in the evening I stopped again and helped her back into bed. I could have carried her, she was so thin and frail. But I didn't. It would have seemed an insult. Otherwise I rather think I man aged her with a high hand. I had discovered her, saved her life, in a way, and though I had never heard of the oriental custom in such matters, I can easily see how it should have come about. For, after my first resentment, I rather enjoyed my job. And Old Jane came to belong to me as definitely as though I had created her that cold spring evening. How she felt about it did not worry me. I was too much wrapped up in my own reactions. Thinking of it now, it seems almost pitiful. What must have gone on in Old Jane's lonely heart during that illness! An ingrown, embittered woman left helpless in the hands of a complacent girl, who may have pleased-who knows? -by her very arrogance. She had changed a lot, too. I saw that. Once she asked me to bring a little trunk that she kept under her bed, and opening it she took out a beautiful old lace scarf, yellow and soft, a brooch made of a large black stone holding in its centre a tiny diamond, and a picture of herself when she was a girl, wearing the scarf. I asked her carelessly who it was, and felt embarrassed when she told me. She seemed surprised that I had not known at once. The girl was quite pretty. Later Old Jane gave me the scarf. I put it on and posed before her, laughing, and she dropped her face in her hands and cried. I couldn't imagine why, but I knew that I had in some way caused it, and was very quiet the rest of the evening. Old Jane didn't talk much. She had lived alone long enough to have forgotten the trick of conversation. Speech is mostly habit, anyhow. But she could listen. Strange as it seems to me now, I used to sit in her doorway those warm April evenings while the frogs sang along the river and the blacksmith clink-clinked in his shop down below us, and talk to her about everything that came into my mind. It must have been her stillness. Perhaps it was spring. Probably it was both. It was on one of these evenings that she mentioned the zinnias. She was sitting in the rocker, looking out of the window, and I could tell that she was troubled. She started by saying that she wouldn't be able to plant them this year, and she looked at me as though hoping for a contradiction. I couldn't say anything. She was hardly able to walk, much less to plant flowers. It didn't occur to me to offer to plant them for her. I didn't know then that they meant so much to her; and I let her stumble and grope for words to tell me what she wanted, while I sat stupidly, wondering what in the world she was trying to say, and watching her fingers play up and down the fringe of her shawl until I felt I should scream if she kept it up another minute. I didn't want to talk about the zinnias. I had almost forgotten them. I resented. them too, for they brought back the Old Jane of the past, and I did not like her. Reluctantly, I got the shoe-box from the cupboard as she asked me, and stood by her, impatient, while she opened it, her fingers shaking and fumbling at the knot in the string. I longed to break it. The box was full of zinnia seed, sorted and labelled and tied in neat packages. "But zinnias," I told her, "sometimes come up from dropped seed. You might not have to plant them this year." But she shook her head, and taking out the packages showed me that she had saved only the kinds she wanted. I was openly scornful that they should have been all reds and yellows-the brightest, most arresting, least attractive colors. I didn't want to plant them, but I did. It took me three days. Up the hill to the edge of the woods and around the vegetable-garden; beyond the lilacs and mockoranges clear down to the road-backbreaking, endless. I wonder what made me do it? I wouldn't have done it at home. Why didn't I ask some one to help me? I had two brothers, young enough to do as I told them-grudgingly. I don't know. Why do mothers work so zealously for their children? The answer to one will fit the other. After it was all over and every seed planted, I went back to the house and dropped on the doorstep at Old Jane's feet and asked her, irritably, why in the world she wanted so many zinnias. Her face grew puzzled and worried, like a child's when he does not understand you, and for a long minute she did not answer. I was sorry I had asked her. She looked so pitiful, and her lips quivered with the effort to find words that would tell me. "I-I-like zinnias. They are soso—" She stopped, looking down, her fingers again at the fringe of her shawl. I let it go at that, for she did not finish. But I wondered about it. They were soso-what? What did they seem to Old Jane that she wanted so many of them? I knew what they seemed to me: common and ugly, especially the reds and yellows. Why didn't she plant pansies, or iris, or forget-me-nots? Going home that night, stiff and sore, I decided that she was a foolish old woman with poor taste in flowers and that so far as I was concerned she could plant her own ugly old zinnias after this. But for a long time her words puzzled me. "I like zinnias. They are so-sowhat? I caught myself finishing the sentence this way-that way. But I did not ask her. Something told me that I should not learn any more if I did. In spite of my protest I was interested in the zinnias. I half-expected them to be up and growing the next morning, and was impatient that they were not. Flowers you have planted with your own hands never lose their hold upon you. I watched jealously for every new leaf on those zinnias, and ran to tell Old Jane when the first buds showed. I was disappointed that she appeared to feel no interest in them. These preliminaries to blooming that drew me out every morning to measure the growth of the day before seemed to have no attraction for her. But of course she hadn't planted these zinnias. I didn't go in to see her every day. Sometimes mother went, sometimes the doctor. But I made a point of going to school by her house and waving to her every morning. She was always at the window, watching, waiting. That was it -waiting. What was she waiting for? I wondered. A woman her age should have been done with waiting. Everything that could possibly happen to her had happened, it seemed to me. "Doc" Andrews, short and fat and bald, stopped oftener and oftener and swore his choicest oaths for her. But that did not seem to be what she wanted. It was quite a task for "Doc" to come so far, too, for he was club-footed, and walking wasn't easy. He always made me think of a chickadee, hopping about, twittering, busy. But Old Jane only looked at him blankly, and he left, grumbling and shaking his head and vowing to me, outside, that the woman wouldn't live a week. There was nothing left of her but eyes. She did, though. And at last the zinnias bloomed. There they were, deep orange and red against the woods on the hillside; bright yellow and red around the unplanted vegetable-garden; tumbling down the steep banks from the forest to circle like bright-frocked, dancing children about the mock-oranges and lilacs; falling in a mad and gorgeous cataract of color over the slope and down the road to the river. You had the feeling that only the water held them back, like a victorious army waiting a crossing; that at the first chance they would go on and on, rioting brilliantly up the other side and across the hills and out of sight in the distance. All that Old Jane had meant, they were-and more. It was as though some artist in a frenzy had splashed his colors helter-skelter upon a huge canvas of earth and sky and water, putting on shade after shade, more and more reckless, until no spot was left uncovered and he was forced to stop, astonished at the result of his own effort. That was the way I felt about the zinnias. They were breath-taking. Even I, who had planted them, found them decidedly disconcerting. I had planted zinnias, but instead of them unnumbered sunsets had drifted down to bloom forever in Old Jane's garden. The genie conjured from the shoe-box had outdone himself and gone, leaving the conjurer overwhelmed by his own magic. "Doc" Andrews, mopping his bald spot, vowed that it was dangerous to look at them without smoked glasses. Old Jane was another person. I knew now why she had been waiting. The morning the zinnias reached their fullest bloom she walked from the bed to the window without my help, and stood staring out like a person in a trance, until her knees gave way from weakness, and she stumbled backward into her chair, breathing rapidly. I noticed a little pulse in her throat beating like the heart of a bird when you hold it close in your hand. All day her cheeks were flushed and her eyes brilliant. But her hands were like leaves in the wind when she moved them. I wonder now why I didn't think of the revivals and of Old Jane's shouting. It is strange that I didn't, for the effect of the zinnias was exactly the same: the suppressed exultation, the light back of her face, the glow in her smoky eyes; the same sense of drama, of something well done, of fulfilment. I don't see how it escaped me, but it did. It was as though the zinnias were merely the shouting expressed in color, like that delicate instrument which can chart the distant planets for us: red for this and blue for that and green for something else. Why not? I remember telling "Doc" Andrews that Old Jane was lots, lots better since the zinnias bloomed. He should see her. He did, and shook his head. There must have been something about her that I did not see. He got it, though. He got a great deal that other folks missed. Physical deformities sometimes do that to people. The next week they sent me to my aunt's in Boston, to be outfitted for school. The family had decided that I was ready for more than Stony Valley could give me. I remember that my young brothers were very happy when I left, though they tried not to show it too plainly. I cried a little on the train, and decided that boys were ungrateful and that I should never marry. In September mother wrote me that Old Jane had died, just after the frost took the zinnias. She was sorry they did not have any for the funeral, since Old Jane was so fond of them. I can't tell you just how I felt about Old Jane's death. I cared for her, in a way, but my feeling had not been exactly affection. I don't know just what it was. I do remember that I was glad the frost had taken the zinnias. I didn't want them used for the funeral. I don't believe Old Jane would have, either. They were so much alive. That was it! They were so much alive! So intense, so vivid, so dramatic, so everything that, with the revivals, had ceased to be in Old Jane's life and in Stony Valley. Ships in the Fog BY JULIET WHITON I HEAR them through dark streets along the town Black ships, that sail up all the seas and down, Some warm still night when stars and planets sleep, I hope that I shall find on a far deep A ship at anchor, waiting, tall and lone, To take me from a round of time well lost, To high adventurous days, wind-swept, wave-tossed. Gold from Salt Water EPISODES IN THE CAREER OF THE KING OF RUM ROW BY WALTER KARIG THIS is the biography of an anonymous man, who has held tremendous power in this country, and who has left the stamp of his influence indelibly on contemporary civilization in the United States. His anonymity is dictated not by modesty, for he is not a modest man, but by expediency. Circumstantial evidence alone supports the statements set forth here as facts, but circumstantial evidence has established the existence of unseen planets and satellites before this. The biographer is a newspaper man who obtained his material at the culmination of an adventure which began as a midnight assignment and developed into a hare-and-hounds chase in which he was the at once eager and unwilling hare. The rôle of the hounds was taken by a corporal's squad of the private army mentioned below, who misinterpreted the professional scrutiny the writer bent upon their mysterious maritime activities. JOMEWHERE along the Atlantic, where salt sea-breezes blend with the scent of pine, or, perhaps, hibiscus, to form an ozone cocktail heady enough to turn the head of Coral Gable's nativest son, a king is living in retirement. His was a kingdom, until he recently dissolved it, which appeared on no official maps, but which was recognized, and that most vigorously, by the United States. He is merry, is this ex-monarch. He can afford to be, now. He is living in one of his three bungalow palaces, over a wellstocked cellar, surrounded by rare paintings, fabulous rugs, and a library the contents of which reflect the same catholicity and good taste as the aforementioned cellar. His windows overlook the ocean, where once the ships of this monarch's fleet lay on the horizon and made war with the United States. Oh, yes, he was a regular king; an absolute monarch, with an army, a navy, and an air fleet. His royal arms, though, are nowhere in evidence. They were emblazoned on a field of gold, an old-fashioned mahogany bar, sinister; crest, a non-refillable bottle embattled, with the motto "Two pints make a gallon." For he was King of the Rum-Runners, a despot who waged only aggressive war fare, yet with the enthusiastic assent of his subjects. A warrior who sportingly helped support, through taxes, the armaments of his foe. But then, he derived all his wealth from that foe's own citizenry. An American, this ex-king, and something of a Babbitt; born a thousand miles from the sound of the surf, townsman and boon companion of one of our late Presidents, with whom he played poker. Since giving up his kingship a few months ago, the royal buckeye has succeeded to his former titles of churchman and "joiner." But let's begin at the beginning. His name no matter. It's a typical mid-Western name, plain and unregal as an Ohio farmhouse. His youth was that of any middling well-to-do, small-town boy's. His public-school education completed, there came the question of college. The home State had several universities, and a college at every other stop on the Interurban, so of course the lad was sent East to complete his studies at a college known for the brand of engineers, and not football teams, it turns out. The future monarch, not dreaming of the impending purple, studied and played and took part in beer-drinking excursions to a near-by seaport, which is to say Hoboken. By judiciously applying himself to these pursuits he graduated as a fairly reliable mechanical engineer, and in that field was making a good income and a better |