nessing the broad, free life of the Pilgrim children reading the Bible with their muskets in their hands, the Indian perhaps went back to the wigwam and told his father he "could n't stand it any longer," so to please let him have his allowance of wampum, and he would cut loose and see life as it was. That would have been the effect of window-yearning on the first yearner.

It is a somewhat similar feeling that makes me love, on winter nights, in one of those light, delicious falls of snow, to look through my neighbor's window into the comfortable heart of civilization just so savingly withdrawn. For the illusion is always there. As the pedestrian flits along the pavement in elastic rubbershoed tread, he reads the house windows as he would read a fairy-tale, unquestioningly, and with as much sense of magic. It is poetry to peer into these warm human nests of one's neighbors as one hurries by to a warm human nest of

"If my neighbor pulls down his shades, well and good"

one's own. At the Juretts they are wiggling a planchette. See young Dr. Jurett laugh! See his wife's pretty, wondering face! Who is that other young man? The dog is rather cunning; I did n't know their aunt had come yet. The house-light splashes on the

books; there is shine of silver on the dining-table, a clean, withheld, sacred look in the home arrangements. She does her own work, they say. On such occasions my brother sets his face dead ahead; he pulls me by the coat-sleeve; he is afraid, he says, that some one will catch me at it. No matter how I pause and plead and delightfully whisper, my reproving brother will not look.

I exhort my brother that if we only had just these detached window glimpses of one another's lives, we would all be more charitable and optimistic for the human race. It seems to me that one's raised window-shade reveals one properly and complacently with a mellow sort of shine on one. Now, my acquaintance Mr. Brend, who on the morning train I count a dull man, invariably leaves his living-room window-shades up; and to what everlasting profit! Between the white ruffled curtains made by Mrs. Brend you can see the little Brends at their evening hour around the livingroom-table. There is a nickel lamp with a green glass globe; it is a good thing to see. Little Mabel Brend has a large pink bow on her head; this bow nods and flops and gives one a sense of Mabel's well being and comfort. It would be a pity if the passers-by could not register that pink bow. Young Paul Brend, animal book in hand, is sliding up and down his father's fat legs with the absorbed enjoyment of the monkey which Paul for the moment really believes he is. Somehow I think the street outside gets a new warmth over Mr. Brend's placid endurance of Paul's slides. And there is David Brend (Lord! how intelligentlooking!), with his shell-rimmed spectacles reading some scientific magazine. The street sees what sort of eldest son Mr. Brend will live up to. If the shades were pulled down, one could not get this picture of average American felicity. True, the upraised shade reveals Mr. Brend's bald spot. But he is not sensitive about it at church, at the movies; why should he be in his own home?

In the Flavver home there are three front bay-windows that have purpleand-yellow stained-glass borders, very rich to see. One catches sight of a chenille portière that is the supreme glory of the department-store elegance of the

Flavver "residence." It has large tassels, like the old-time netting funeral horses used to wear. But there is nothing funereal about this portière; if my brother does not drag me by too quickly, I am sometimes able to distinguish, through its bosky plushiness, two young heads very close together. It is reasonable to believe that this is the regular night of Nordice Flavver's young man.

One assumes that everything is going on well, and hopes they will live to a good old age and achieve a gas-range, a fireless cooker, a vacuum-cleaner, and a mangle. The sight of Paw and Maw Flavver listening to the phonograph in the "front" room proves that people do sometimes stay married. The phonograph is now rendering to maw's critical ears the last expensive, mellow shriek of the latest prima donna. Paw Flavver, moist with emotion, stares into the occult machine whence issue the oily shrieks. Paw Flavver is trying to visualize the opera lady. He concludes that she is a fine figure of a woman; that she, at the moment of singing, is wearing a scarlet satin gown and a "rope of pearls," with a black picture hat, and carries a green feather fan. No one but the window-yearner can guess what all this means to Paw Flavver, who, occasionally rising, arranges, like a pie in a refrigerator, a cylinder that will give forth another more mellow and still more expensive shriek.

In a wide, low house set well back from the street the windows are lancetshaped and the lights are an orange glow. Through the trees this light streams rich and alluring, and calls to me like a full contralto voice. I halt by iron gates where, amid a clump of bushes, a little globe is blown like a fiery bubble through the long tube of a lamp-post; the cedars near by make on the driveway a pointed cave of shadow.

The doors of the house suddenly swing open, and one sees for a second into a hall, where there is a glimpse of broad stairs and a fire with snapping logs. I catch a bar of music; it is a boy's strong handling of the sunstruck chords of "To a Wandering Iceberg." I do not know this boy; he may be a dreadful little snob, but in that one sec

of Yule logs, and winding horns of adventure. The toppling chords of the "Iceberg" take me under the ice-maiden's white wing. I think of Kay and Gerda, and then curiously enough of "La Cigale," dying, poor dear, lost in the winter just outside of the wellstored house of the comfortable "Fourmi."

How is it possible to be human and not yearn over the interiors of other peoples' houses? For therein one sees the graphic embodying of the life we have all been more or less concerned with. If my neighbor pulls down his shades, well and good. I respect his action; maybe he has a headache or a bottle of gin or money-bags, a scolding wife or shirt-sleeves or poor relatives. One understands his modest wish to be left alone with any of these. But if he leaves his window-shade up, what is it but an invitation to me? Then I know he wishes to take me into his confidence, and knows that I will understand the sentiment of those two decanters on the sideboard. If there is the white shine

of a new little crib in that pink-ceilinged room up-stairs, he has no objection to my seeing; if there is new linoleum in the kitchen, he wants me to care. Window-yearning is the most sympathetic

"The doctor's shades are flung up to the four winds of criticism'

pastime in the world, the most ungrudging. One could n't bear to have one's acquaintance tell one all about the new gas-range; it would bore one to hear his detailed brag: but if, when turning a corner, you see it, pompous black and shining nickel, with all its ivory handles like stops on a sort of cooking organ, you carry the triumphant news home to your wife. "And the new kitchen sink is white porcelain," you add; "and I see they now have a fireless cooker and a mangle," and are rewarded by her stimulated smile.

I think my brother ought to amend his amendment to this window-yearning. I swear it 's not curious or malicious or prying or trivial, as he seems to think. One brings the heart of a child to it; it's the lovingest, most trusting pastime in the world. Life, normal and well rounded, shimmering through well-cleaned windows, makes a pleasant motion-picture of itself; windowed-indorsed persons are so far subordinated to the unconscious art of the window

yearner that their identities are no longer purely local; one beholds through the enchanted glass not Mr. Brown, Mr. Smith, Mr. White, all rather difficult and trimming persons, but one beholds humanity, the citizen, the American.

In the casements of a fine, solid house, conventional and correct in every inch of its well-groomed expansiveness, there are no window coquetries; but toward the back, in a basement window, there is a little gray calico cat that sticks out its tongue at the world. I love to think of toddling little window-yearners getting the quality of that cat.

Here is the home of an artist, a spinster with a rich nature; maternal, tender, as few married women know how to be. This is not a young woman, but her heart is a rose of dawn, her hands are always out in greeting, and her dark near-sighted eyes see only well enough to get the general smile and wisdom that is back of things. Why does this dear soul have gold curtains, rich and silken, in her dark-paneled rooms? They are never drawn. There is a candle that burns all evening before her glowing paintings of rolling moors; and the flowing lines, the bursts of ecstatic sky and field, give to the passer-by the elemental joy that she is generous enough not to shut away for the mere buyer of canvases. Many an evening have I stealthily crept along the narrow streets and leaned on the fence to gaze through her windows. They are to me a kind of Song of Solomon.

And this kind of thing goes on even in the professions, to whose frank window-admissions I direct other yearners. Through my lawyer's conventional écru curtains I caught the other night the smiling cheek of a Sicilian head, a sweet, wind-blown dancing bit of girl to comfort poor logical Mr. Blackstone amid his dreary deductions. The doctor's shades are flung up to the four winds of criticism. There he sits, once in a while, tired-faced, smiling over the last detective-story, all his library of diseases at his back, his golf-sticks ready for the first hint of a few days off. And the minister-well, you must know that the minister is in secret a lover of ceramics; this might not be judicious to tell his congregation, who

have always understood that there is something shameful about a Greek shape, even that of a bowl. But the naughty minister! He loves that old clay-colored, faintly painted crock! He proudly puts it on a shelf near the window!

In Contradictory Town, a place rosetwined and honeysuckled, where the old white doorways are exquisite panel and pilaster, and the sound of the sea beats in from the "North Shore," there is a spirited little window coquetry, a narrow-paned display of window flowers that is as delicate and fugitive as the sentiment of the Japanese flower ceremonies. In a way it has kinship with the ikons of Russian windows, the little window shrines of Italy, and the wreaths that keep evil spirits from the doorways of Thessaly and the Peloponnesus; only here, in Contradictory Town, the thing is spicily furtive, almost stealthy in its rivalry. If fine old Mrs. Barton puts a potted white lily on the window-ledge that all the world may see, Mrs. Morsell, her trim neighbor, instantly plants on her sill the sauciest little geranium. Then Mrs. Nabob, as one who should say, "I still have my conquests," displays between her blazoned lace curtains a pink azalea, sent down from the city. But the pink azalea, in its gilded basket, with the gorgeous satin bow, does n't efface the poetry of Mrs. Skrimshander, who lives opposite; that spry little lady hies her out to the swampy fields of a wet spring day, and brings home a few brown rods that she sticks in a glass bottle and props up between the dictionary and the cook-book in her kitchen window. In a few days the passing school-children, seeing the first silver glint of furry "pussies," register Mrs. Skrimshander as a person of comprehensions.

There are, I am glad to say, so few people like my brother in his sad and virtuous abstemiousness from window revelations that I like to think that nearly the whole world is secretly or openly on my side, and here I take my chance of forming a society of windowyearners. It is agreeable to think how far our circle might extend; for when one comes to inquire into the thing,

there are a great many windows in the world. Are there as many yearners? Shall we not organize? In this paragraph I greet window-yearners, past, present, and future, known and unknown. We shall be for our contribution to psychology as impudent and daring as the futurists and vers-librists; we shall peer and prowl and exultingly imagine. We shall wallow in sentiment. We shall read into, elaborate, and divine.

But my brother has a way of coming back at me. Sometimes as we have motored together over brown country roads he will see my eyes straying windowward and as we pass gaunt farmhouses anemic of paint, gray and haggard before approaching winter, but surrounded with flowing fields of stacked color and piled fruitage, he will point to a lean-to window where a row of green tomatoes and green peppers sun behind the dingy glass, remarking

certificates, the passionate service flags, the braggart posters-all gave sense of an enormous window unity, an assembling that shall have been achieved, please God for a less wasteful and less cancerous growth than war.

Another solemn kind of windowyearning may be indulged in from the elevated roads, from the windows of those strange serpents that crawl through city cañons bear

dows, ashamed of looking, ashamed not to look; but on certain nights in early October, when the whole outlying, frostsmelling country-side is shot with opal fires, the windows of these same city windows are also shot with poetry such as could have come only from the Orient. Yom Kippur, with its sacred observations, glows like a coal carried from the altars of the lost tribes down hundreds of years to the modern tenement. The Jewish home, amidst all its cheapness and shrewd money-getting, becomes mystical and holy.

ing

ing their load of humanity. Where the trains coil and crawl around the corner of tall buildings, the yearner has both sweet and bitter nourishment. Sometimes he is aware only of the pert insistence of the business idea, in its thousands piebald dresses, its tongue-inthe-cheek insistence upon his need or his desire; but sometimes the city windows are human to an awful degree. As the yearner peers into city tenements, rooms wedged between cindery heat and black narrowness, he is suddenly brought face to face with that side of poverty which the most scorching word or pen has never been able to make him feel. As he peers along these honeycombed vaults and cañons, he apprehends such squalor, such crowdedness, such helplessness of washing hung out in the cinders to dry! He sees such defrauded children peering from tenth-story windows to the streets that are their strange book of knowledge, such young people trying to make the best of that "antique universe" which is to be their lasting habitation! All such discouraging and sordid sights are there for the window-yearner, who, try as he will, has no formulated attitude to these swift visions of tousled heads on filthy pillows; pathetic beds draped in coarse, cindery lace; a half-nude, rolling body sick with heat; staring, bloated, desperate faces; little pale eyes looking out between paler, more disinherited plants.

One may grow ashamed of such win

Here the passing yearner has his grand opportunity, for in these windows he finds what he has missed at all the other windows, the quality of ancientness. Sweet smelling woods, myrrh, and spices, the purple and scarlet curtains, gold, silver, and brasshow vividly he sees the poetry of the building of the tabernacle in these sordid New York burrows! The dingy city windows sparkle with colored tapers, the tables are spread with fast-breaking delicacies.

Of course, it is the unconscious quality of the glimpse that makes its charm for the professional yearner; yet once in a while one comes across the confession, made through a pane of glass, that the window-owner would like to challenge the attention of those who pass his home. No reference need be made here to the dreary reasons for certain tawdry window-signals; Algiers and Chinatown have their sad window beckonings, and I saw once in a mountain village of Greece the red cord of Rahab hung out by a Turkish woman.

But it is with a smile of tender sympathy for justifiable ego that one remarks the star hung in a child's window, showing how well some little girl has behaved at Sunday-school.

One used to pass the home of an old scholar, a Frenchman, whose Paris garret was not far from the square named