"SIR GLADYS ESCORTED THE LADY FLORETTA HOME""SIR GLADYS ESCORTED THE LADY FLORETTA HOME"Away back in the past so dim and distant that only the most learned can talk of it intelligently, away in the time after the earth had risen from the warm waters and when the great reptiles had given place to animals, something like those which exist to-day, the hoofs of all the quadrupeds were split. The land was low and marshy then, and the split hoof best supported its owner on the yielding surface. As the earth protruded more and more, and dry and sometimes rocky land uprose, such beasts as frequented the hills found that their hoofs were changing slowly with the centuries. Hard and round the hoofs became as was best for the hill dwellers, but the beasts of the shores and lowlands retained the split hoof and still can tread the morass. This the Enchanted Cow knew. This, Sir Gladys Rhinestone, who had studied natural history, knew as well.It was four in the morning by the great clock of the Castle when Sir Gladys stood in the center of the stone-paved courtyard and wound his horn. At the sound every man in the Castle and its surrounding buildings, and on the farms about, became astir, and soon Sir Gladys had his trusty henchmen a dozen deep about him. His words of command sent them scattering in all directions, and sunrise beheld a sturdy band, headed by Sir Gladys, leaving the Castle Gate and turned in the direction of the Black Tarn. With the men marched fifty of the great red oxen of Rhinestone, and upon their mighty shoulders they bore the heavy nets and boats of the once lucky fisherman of Ken Water.Sir Gladys had taken the White Cow's hint, and set the split hoof to do what the whole hoof could not accomplish.A messenger was sent to the Moated Grange requesting the Lady Floretta to visit the shore of the Black Tarn, and thither the procession moved and soon the Tarn was reached. Then followed a scene of which the story was told for years, for it was something worth the seeing. The great tractable oxen, encouraged doubtless by the Enchanted Cow who stood knee-deep in the oozy margin awaiting them, bore outbravely into the black waters through reeds and sedge and yielding mud and made a mighty splashing toward the center of the lake where in a semicircle were gathered the fishermen with their boats and nets. The waters near the shore were churned into a foam, and the watchers looking outward could see the long wakes of the frightened sturgeon as they fled to certain capture.And the nets were filled to the overflowing; so heavy were they that the great oxen could scarcely draw them to firm land. So the great work was accomplished, the Lady Floretta and her maidens coming in time to see it all. There were fish enough to furnish caviare enough it would seem for half the world.It was well that their two estates joined, for while during the fishing, the Lady Floretta and Sir Gladys had been sitting on the strand of the Black Tarn—Sir Gladys' cloak around the Lady, for the day grew chill—they had declared each to the other their determination to join their lives and their fortunes together from that hour, and so it came to pass that, by the time the fish eggs were turned into caviare and sold and the money was in hand to pay Prince Rugbauer's taxes, Sir Gladys Rhinestone had made theLady Floretta Beamish his bride, and what was good or ill fortune for one was the same for the other.And this is also told, that, as for the Enchanted Cow, ever afterward she wandered at will on the moors in summer, and was well cared for at the castle or the Moated Grange in winter. And ever on the night of the Witch's sleep, the cow was visited in state by fair Sir Gladys and Lady Floretta, for nothing is more excellent than gratitude.CHAPTER XVIIILOVE AND A ZULUMrs. Livingstone, who had become accepted, by this time, to the Colonel's great delight, as a sort of lovingly hesitant chaperon and hostess of the accidental House Party, was now, doubtless to her own surprise, the one to take the initiative:"Did I understand you to say, Mr. Poet, that what you just related was strictly true?""Yes, Madam, certainly," was the calm and unabashed reply of the person addressed."Thank you," was the gentle answer, "it was beautiful," and then she turned to her husband, "Colonel, won't you please request one of the stern business men here to tell something, something reliable, and of the present time?"The Colonel's quizzical eye had, for some moments rested upon the Broker, to the evident disquietude of that gentleman, though it was clear that he would not seek to avoid the issue when his time for effort came. He had notlistened to the tale which had been told as intently as he might and there was a look upon his face as of a man recalling memories. He was mentally preparing himself for the Colonel's onslaught—and it came."Mr. Broker," said the genial tyrant, "gentlemen of your type in the business world are about the best fellows going, and, as I know, from listening interestedly a thousand times, are always telling good stories, when not going crazy 'on 'change.' Your turn has come and your fate is sealed beyond all peradventure. Sir, we await you."The Broker "accepted the situation:" "I've been anticipating this emergency and have been preparing for it as much as possible. I don't know that it is what might be called a strictly business story, but it is that of how a friend of mine—an admirable man—made a lot of money and gained one of the prettiest wives in the world. I think we might call itLOVE AND A ZULUIn every drop of the blue blood of St. Louis there is a bubble of sporting blood. This is a love story of St. Louis, with filaments of fact entwining themselves with the lighter filamentsof fancy. The St. Louis lover—of course, there are exceptions—loves with his whole heart, and in his constant heart, with every pulsation, throbs the idea of chance. So, the great city on the banks of the Father of Waters is a city of honorable betting.John Driscoll was in trouble. John Driscoll, aged twenty-seven, was a lone scion of one of the best families of St. Louis, a city where they have good families, certainly. Driscoll's trouble was of the sort which tries a man. He was desperately in love with a fair young woman, but consent to the marriage was absolutely refused by the young woman's father until Driscoll should be worth at least twenty thousand dollars; and a very obstinate old gentleman was Mr. Cameron, who owned much real estate and was looked upon as one of the solid men of a solid city. It was not altogether a harsh impulse which had brought this decree from him. He wanted Driscoll to show that he had business ability, for Driscoll had been something of a figure socially and not much of a figure otherwise. Mr. Cameron was very fond of his daughter Jessie. John Driscoll had been left, on the death of his mother, with a fortune of only eighteen thousand dollars;two thousand dollars were already gone and he had earned nothing. In order, therefore, to meet the requirement of his prospective father-in-law, he must, somehow, make four thousand dollars. It may be said to his credit that he lacked neither earnestness nor courage. He devoted himself at once to a vigorous endeavor to gain the required sum. He worked with feverish earnestness. He became solicitor for an insurance company, and, with his wide acquaintance, made a moderate success of the business from the beginning. It was hard to endure—for love is impatient—but the man did not flinch. At the end of a year he had a little over eighteen thousand dollars in bank and admirable prospects. But, as above wisely remarked, love is exceedingly impatient. He was offered a chance in a speculation which promised to gain for him two thousand dollars at once, and yielded to the temptation—though persuaded against it by the girl he loved and who loved him. Instead of gaining two thousand dollars, he lost two thousand, and was back at the sixteen thousand dollar notch again. A year had been wasted.At the northeast corner of Elm Street and Broadway is a famous place—half restaurant,half summer garden—where theatre parties go, and where the gilded youth of the city eat, drink and are merry. Nonsensical propositions arise among these young gentlemen with money and, in many instances, with brains as well. One evening at one of the tables there arose a discussion over the old problem of whether or not the ordinary man could eat thirty quail in thirty days. The discussion became warm. "It is absurd," said a young man named Graham—"the whole idea of it. Why, after a hard day's shooting in Texas, I once ate six quail at a single meal. That means that even a man of my size can eat thirty quail in five days, doesn't it?""Well, it may or may not," was the response of a youth named Malvern, one of the group; "but eating six quail in one day, or thirty quail in six days, is not the matter under discussion. One of the most exquisite forms of torture known to the Chinese, is to bind a prisoner so that he cannot move his head, and then, from a reservoir above, allow drop after drop of water to fall upon his head. At first it is nothing, but, finally, there comes an uncomfortable sensation, then pain, and, in the end, an exquisite agony. The victim dies or goes insane. Abarrel of water poured upon him at once would not have affected him at all. So it is with eating thirty quail in thirty days. It is the monotony for all those days—the thing that cannot be avoided—that tells.""Bah!" said Graham. "I don't take your view of the case. I've the courage of my convictions, and I'll bet you five hundred dollars that I will eat thirty quail in thirty days, breakfasting here at nine o'clock each morning and eating my quail then.""Done!" was the prompt reply. "You're not the only fellow who has the courage of his convictions. We'll appoint a committee of observation, and breakfast here together regularly. There'll be fun in the thing, whatever the outcome."The committee was appointed, and the next morning saw a hilarious group seated about the table. Graham was full of confidence and jest. He ordered his quail broiled, and his companions, out of compliment, ordered the same thing. It was a breakfast enjoyed by all. Here follows a summary of what happened on succeeding mornings:Breakfast Second.—Graham came in, still confident, and had a good appetite, as appearedwhen he ordered broiled quail again and ate it with much gusto. Of the five men at table two ate quail as well; the others ordered beefsteak.Breakfast Third.—Graham's serenity was still unruffled. He ate his quail broiled, as usual, and seemed to enjoy it, but he noticed that none of his friends took quail. "I must have variety," said one of them.Breakfast Fourth—Graham said he must have indulged in too much champagne the night before. He ordered his quail roasted for a change, and ate it slowly—the committee of three watching him like hawks, to see that he picked the bones clean.Breakfast Fifth.—The events of the meal were almost identical with those of the day before, save that Graham required a little more time in which to consume his bird.Breakfast Sixth.—Graham declared that, after all, we were behind the English in our manner of cooking birds. They boiled two fowls to our one. He ordered his quail boiled and picked away at it with some energy. He certainly cleaned the bones with more ease than before.Breakfast Seventh.—Graham came in, looking bilious. He hesitated before ordering, but finally decided that he would take his quailchopped up into stew. There was some debate over this, and the committee finally went into the restaurant kitchen, to see that nothing got away. The stew seemed to please Graham and he made numerous jests at the expense of the men, "who," he said, "had no stomachs."Breakfast Eighth.—Graham ordered quail stew again, but did not get along so well as he had on the previous morning. He declared the bird to be stale and said that it smelled "quailly." As a matter of fact, it was a plump young bird, shot only the day before.Breakfast Ninth.—To the astonishment of everybody, Graham, who looked more bilious than ever, ordered quail hash. The committee was indignant, but there was no recourse, and so they were compelled to visit the kitchen again and watch the career of the quail from plucking to plate. Graham became furious. He said it was a shame to doubt the honesty of the establishment. He ate the quail.It is unnecessary to continue in detail the story of the breakfasts in the great restaurant. Each day Graham became more petulant and unreasonable. All ways of cooking quail were at last exhausted, and there was a compelled return to some of those already employed.Graham by the fifteenth day had become haggard and the very odor of the delicate bird, as it came in, brought to him a feeling of utmost nausea. He was brusque with the faithful waiter, and took no interest in the conversation of his friends. He was plucky, though, and managed, by sheer force of will, to consume the distasteful ration. Meanwhile, the wager had become the comment of the town, especially among the wealthy youth, and thousands of dollars were staked upon the issue. The restaurant was thronged each morning, and the proprietor wished he had some such attraction to such a class throughout all the rotund year. This notoriety but made the case of poor Graham worse; it made him more anxious to succeed, but it unnerved him.On the twentieth day the odds, which had at first been in favor of Graham, dropped to no odds at all, and on the twenty-second they were against him. He came in with a pallid look upon his face and sat down before his dainty fare. He took up his knife and fork; then suddenly laid them down and left the place. Within ten minutes he returned with a set face and resolutely performed his task. Where he had been was not known at the time, but it wasrumored, later, in the Southern Hotel (which was in the same block) that there had been sold a half-pint bottle of champagne that morning to a gentleman in a hurry.So, worse and worse became the man's condition, greater and greater his abhorrence of what is counted a delicate bit of eating. On the twenty-sixth morning he came in with a more closely hovering look of apprehension than had yet been noticed. He sat down before the bird, picked at it for a moment, rose from the table walked about for a while; then came back, again and again, and considered what was before him. He gasped, and, as he arose to his feet and started from the room, exclaimed huskily: "It's no use, boys. I was mistaken. I can't do it. I give up!"There was pity for him, especially among the minors, for he had done his best. Many cheques were drawn that morning.Driscoll always breakfasted at this restaurant and had, naturally, become interested in this droll struggle between man and quail. For a day or two after his own loss he had been dazed and discouraged haunting the lobbies of the Planter's, the Southern or the Lindell, and pitying himself amazingly. All at oncehe braced up, to an extent, through the influence of plucky little Jessie Cameron. "We must begin again—that's all," said she, resolutely and cheerily. "Surely, you love me as much as Jacob, who served twice seven years, for Rachel, and I admire you more than I do Jacob—though I never liked his device concerning Esau. Begin again, dear, and all will come right."And Driscoll did begin again with a vigor, though henceforth he referred to Mr. Cameron as Laban to the indignation of the fair and filial Jessie.The lover settled down to earnest work, did well and was becoming contented and hopeful. This condition of mind enabled him to speculate in his hours of ease upon something outside of his personal affairs. The quail-eating contest had interested him, because he was an educated man, and something of a student of the body. Why had Graham failed in the eating of thirty quail in thirty days? Men eat thirty breakfasts in thirty days and do not know they have done it. Hunters and miners eat bacon alone—that is, as far as their meat goes—for months at a time and think nothing of it. Why had Graham failed?Just as a matter of amusement, Driscoll tried to study the thing out: "Man is omnivorous," he thought; "not a flesh-eater alone, and his range of consumption is wide. He must have variety, even in flesh, as a requirement of his stomach. Furthermore, man alone, among all creatures, is imaginative, and, when forced to eat a certain thing, develops a thousand fancies against it until it becomes revolting. It might be so, very likely would be so, in the case of the beefsteak or the bacon. The only animal which can live easily and uncomplainingly upon one kind of flesh alone, live cheerfully and healthfully, like the lion or the tiger or others of the carnivora, must be one accustomed to such purely flesh diet and one without imagination." And Driscoll was right in his conclusions.There existed at this time on Fourth Street, near Walnut, a dime museum of the better sort. Among the attractions for the season were five Zulus from Barnum's Circus—Zulus, most graceful of all savages, with their incurved backs, broad chests, and the step of him of Kipling, who"Trod the lingLike a buck in spring."and who, daily, for the edification of the populace, gave a great exhibition of the throwing of the assegai. One of them was a woman and she could speak English."A human being accustomed to a flesh diet and without imagination, wouldn't he be a wonder to these joyous bettors?" thought Driscoll. Then he almost gasped as he leaned back. He had dropped into the dime museum on Fourth Street that morning, having business with the proprietor, and had noted the performance of the Zulus admiringly. "A human being living on flesh exclusively and without imagination almost concerning food." Here were a group, all of whom had throughout their lives, until imported, lived, practically, upon flesh alone—the half-cooked flesh of the herds. Flesh alone was what their stomachs craved. Additionally, they had no imagination concerning food—no morbid fancies. They only wanted meat and plenty of it—and the rest be hanged! Driscoll saw it all. He thought for an hour and then there came upon his face the look of a man who is going to break a jam of pine logs in some Northern river or drown beneath the timber. He called at the dime museum."Gregory," said he, "I want to borrow your best Zulu.""Borrow what?" said Gregory."A Zulu.""What do you mean? Tell me about it.""I'll explain. You know all about the quail-eating contest, where Graham failed. You've got a man who won't fail." Then he explained all he had thought out. The museum proprietor—acute man—became excited: "I'll do anything you say," he promised.The next morning, Driscoll was breakfasting as usual in the swell restaurant with the usual group—Graham, somewhat recovered, among them. They were still talking of the recent eating exploit, when, in the midst of the debate, Driscoll spoke, calmly: "I'll wager that I can produce a man who can eat thirty quail in thirty days. The committee who served in Graham's case shall serve in this. The only thing that I ask is that the eating be done upon the stage in the dime museum near the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets, and just after we have had breakfast here each morning. I'll provide tickets for all those directly interested in the result."There arose a clamor. Not a man amongall the gilded young men present believed now that any man could eat thirty quail in thirty days. Driscoll had deliberated and had dared. He had brought with him two thousand dollars of his remaining fortune. He got odds at first of four to one; then three to one; then two to one. He stood to lose two thousand dollars, or win between five and six thousand.There was among the Zulus a stalwart young man whose assegai sank deepest into the wooden target, who was a model of strength and wild, unknowing lustiness, and who had but lately left his tribe in Southern Africa. Little but flesh had ever passed his mouth as food. He was told, through the English-speaking woman, that there was a little bird—the sweetest in the country—one of which would be given him each morning because he had thrown the assegai so well for the white man's edification. He smacked his lips, strutted and became excited.Next morning occurred a scene heretofore unknown to the dime museum. In the front seats was the cream of society, so far as young men were concerned, and all the other seats were filled, because the wise proprietor of the place had seen to it that news so important hadgone abroad. No theatre in all the town drew such a fashionable audience as did this dime museum. It was a scene most edifying and altogether blithesome and lighthearted, and one having a special interest.There was not much of a pause. The Zulu, accompanied by the committee, came upon the stage—the gentleman from South Africa with glittering eyes and a look of hungry expectancy upon his face. Then, a moment later, came in a waiter with a quail—roasted whole and temptingly displayed upon a tray. The Zulu gazed at it for a minute; then suddenly picked it up by the legs; thrust the head and breast of the bird into his mouth and crunched savagely. He was delighted. A moment later, he tossed the legs away and looked for more. He had simply chewed the bird and swallowed bones and all!And so, each day, for twenty-nine days the absurd performance was repeated. It was quite unnecessary to change the style of cooking, though the breast bones were removed by order of the committee, out of a probably unnecessary regard for the digestion of this human personage brought up on meat half raw. He but clamored for more on each occasion andwas pacified only through the intervention of the woman who promised that soon he was to have a feast. She was telling him the truth. Driscoll and Gregory had arranged upon a spectacular termination of the contest—a contest which already, as everybody saw, was determined as to its issue. Through the interpreter, the Zulu was informed that on the thirtieth day he was to have, not only the quail, but a large bird—one worthy the appetite of a warrior—a bird known in this strange country as turkey and very good to eat. The strong thrower of the assegai could hardly restrain himself. He was to have a feast at last!The thirtieth morning came, and the quail disappeared as usual. Then, in a stately procession, came waiters—the first bearing a huge roast turkey. Behind him came others with the American accompaniments to the roast turkey, and all was set before the Zulu. There followed a sight worth seeing. The turkey was utterly demolished; the contents of the side dishes were consumed and the dishes themselves licked to a housewifely cleanness. For the first time in thirty days the Zulu gave a grunt of satisfaction. When all accounts were settled, the fortune of John Driscoll amountedto just twenty-two thousand one hundred and eighty dollars and twenty-seven cents.And so ended the second of the great quail-eating contests in St. Louis. Perhaps it was wrong, perhaps Driscoll shouldn't have won his money in the way he did; but in St. Louis there remains, as said in the beginning, much of the venturesome but always clean and honorable sporting spirit of the South, and in this case nobody was hurt, to speak of. They could afford it, and all, winners and losers, had enjoyed themselves.But facing Driscoll were still two appalling situations. There were Jessie and Mr. Cameron. Here the young man conducted himself with a diplomacy which was vastly to his credit. He went to Jessie, threw himself on her mercy and confessed all in detail—confessed everything. She was confused and maybe shocked; but a woman in love is kindly, and a woman in love with a man of force wants to become his wife."How will you explain to Father?" said the thoughtful maiden."I'll arrange it, somehow," said the now confident and buoyant Driscoll.He visited Mr. Cameron and gave satisfactory proof to the old gentleman that he wasnow the possessor of over twenty thousand dollars."But how did you gain the money so soon, boy?" said Mr. Cameron. "I heard that you lost a thousand or two."Driscoll's face sobered. "I should think that no one better than you, Mr. Cameron, would understand the necessity on the part of a business man of keeping secret his methods and the relations of his business affairs. Pardon me—I am not yet your son-in-law.""Right you are, Driscoll!" was the immediate response. "You're a business man, after all!"It was not long before Driscoll became the son-in-law in fact. Then he told the whole story to his father-in-law."Hum! ha!" said the old gentleman, musingly.CHAPTER XIXAT BAY SOFTLYStafford had at frequent intervals during the day been in communication with the relief train and had received neither encouragement nor the opposite. There had been a sharp questioning of a new man in charge, a person who seemed to know his business thoroughly, but who was far from voluble in conversation. Evidently the emergency had been thought such as to require the presence of someone of greater versatility than was likely to be possessed by the train crew, but from this new overseer the questioner received but little satisfaction. In fact the boss had seemed not altogether open and candid in his statements and Stafford had become a trifle irritated. He put the case lightly, for the man to whom he was talking was evidently bright:"I'm not altogether satisfied with your answers. We people imprisoned here have a right to know exactly what the outlook is. Why don't you come to me more like a child to itsmother? We are cutting wood for fuel, and the food supply is getting low. What are you doing over there?""Are you a railroad man?""Well, I've seen a railroad.""You ought to know what this job is then. It's a pretty tough one.""I know it, but why don't you answer my questions more definitely? Have you anything up your sleeve?""Possibly; my sleeves are pretty big. This I'll tell you, though, that I think we're all right. I'd tell you more if I felt sure myself. We're going to try something. That's all."Somehow, this elated Stafford. He felt that he had been talking to a man who knew what he was about and he became confident that release was close at hand. But was he elated, after all? Release would mean that there would remain but two more days of Her, for, in such event, within two days the train would be in Chicago. He was in a most uncertain mood.He was restless and unreasonable. Why to him should come such perplexity in life, such trial to one who had banished himself to avoid temptation? Yet, here it was, thrust in his way again, and he must be once more a Tantalus.He became mightily impatient as he brooded and wished that he had Fate where he could punish her. Just what he would do with that lady in such contingency he hardly knew. He got to speculating upon that and had all sorts of fancies. He conceived the grotesque idea that the ducking-stool would be about the thing. The association of Fate with the ducking-stool seemed somewhat incongruous, it is true, something in the way of an anachronism, it was such a far cry from Homer to New England, but that didn't matter. She certainly deserved the ducking-stool,—and then he could not but laugh at himself and his vexed fancies. It was a trait of Stafford that, whatever the situation, he was certain in turning it over in his mind, to give it some fantastic sidelight, which diverted his attention, and that generally relieved him. The idea of having Fate in the ducking-stool appealed to him just now and smoothed his mood. How would that arbitrary lady, she who had had her own way with the world so long, conduct herself under such trying circumstances, for trying he inferred they were, from old prints which he had studied with great interest in his childhood. He imagined the way in whichher long hair would float out upon the water as the shore end of the board went up and she, in the chair at the other end, went down and under water, and, in imagination, he could hear her gasp a little, stubborn as she is reputed to be. How would she behave and comport herself after the third or fourth dip? Would she prove amenable and, when she had got her breath, pledge herself to be henceforth and for all time a little more considerate of the comfort of humanity? For lovers especially would she exhibit a more kindly and understanding regard? If not, why, then, under she must go again!So he ambled on foolishly and to his own relief. An admirable thing for Stafford was it that these whimsies so often seized upon him, equally when he was enraged or distressed, it didn't matter which. They helped to tide him over the mental emergency. Happy the man who has such an odd streak in the composition of his under-nature."Still," Stafford laughed to himself, "I am an abused man. I am a victim of atrocious circumstances. I'm an injured being, and I'm at bay! I'm going to turn and make the best of it savagely. I'll have, at least, thecomfort of looking into a pair of eyes and listening to a voice. I'll go and talk to Her."And he went into the next car and seated himself beside the Far Away Lady, who received him kindly. He resolved to indulge himself in her companionship for a time, though against his better judgment. He knew that he was but making his trial the harder to bear."Do you know," he said, after the first greeting, "that I wish I could sing?""And why do you wish that?" she queried."Because, if I could, I would get off the train and wade through the snow away out to that clump of evergreens you see there two-thirds of the way up the slope—which would be out of hearing from here—and I would get behind the evergreens, out of sight, and sing something dolorous.""Why would you do that?""I hardly know myself. I suppose it would be something in the mood and the way of the old troubadours, who, when things went wrong, murmured 'Alack' and sought the silent places and engaged in dismal vocalism.""But don't you think it was rather foolish of them?" ventured the Far Away Lady."I don't know about that. It must have beena sort of relief. Groaning is a great relief when you are hurt. I noticed that particularly among my workmen in Siberia, whenever one of them had been injured in an accident. Very fine groaners they were, too.""But what nonsense you are talking"—there was a note of more than anxiety in her voice—"has something happened? Tell me, John. Has anything occurred to-day to disturb you?""Nothing, madam, nothing at all. Do you know what is meant by 'cumulative repression?' Well I'm suffering from 'cumulative repression.' That's all. There are different kinds of the disease and mine is of the sort for which there is nothing one can take.""I don't understand you, John.""No? Well, I don't seem to make myself very clear, it is true. I didn't explain 'cumulative' as thoroughly as I might have done. It's this way: Suppose you were compelled to take some drug the effect of which is known as 'cumulative.' The first dose would have little effect, and so on, up to a certain time. Then something would happen, and that something would be a result just the same as if you had taken all the doses at once—mighty serious,possibly. In my case I don't, as yet, know just how serious the effect is. I think—at least I hope—that I will recover. I seem to feel it wearing off a shade, but I'm not quite sure. The consequences of 'cumulative repression' are sometimes most serious. Insanity has been known to come. But, as for me, 'I am not mad, I am not mad,' I'm only a little—I'm only wandering in my mind."Then, all at once, his mood changed to something absolutely earnest and his look was pitifully appealing as he leaned toward her:"Oh, Lady Leech, can you do nothing for me?"She did not answer him. She understood. She knew, as well as if he had told her in simpler words, that he had almost failed in his high resolve and that he had come to her, feverish, in a half madness, to be upheld and strengthened, or otherwise to be dealt with, as she would. She realized it all, and thought silently, struggling with herself as he might never know. But the good, both for his sake and hers, was strong within her and finally came her soft reply:"You know, John, that I would help you if I could, but you know that I cannot, that I must not, even a little."Her's was a great sympathy, yet, in the midst of it all, there was something she could not understand. She had heard that of him, from China, which made this scene incomprehensible. She knew that there was not a trace of acting, that there was no craft nor design about him, and she was but lost in a maze of troubled doubt. There was her own heart. An overwhelming pity overcame her, but she could not express it.He sat looking at her, silent, sad, studying. Then, suddenly, he returned to earth again; his face lightened:"What nonsense I've been talking to you! I will go into the other car and encourage the Colonel in the arena," and so he left her.But there was a mist in her eyes as he went out. How he had reminded her of the Stafford of old, in the days when they were careless!CHAPTER XXLOVE WILL FIND THE WAYThe Colonel was royally in his element now. On no occasion before during all the time of detention had he played with so free a hand or felt himself so much an element of good among his fellow creatures. The psychological hour had come for him."We should congratulate ourselves," he resonantly declared. "Where else or under what other circumstances could have been accidentally assembled such a number of people so qualified to minister mentally to each other and make otherwise dead hours breathe as we who are here now looking into each other's eyes?" Then, very properly, feeling that he had expressed himself rather finely, he continued, "We will not waste the shining hour. We must have other stories. Mr. Showman, have you anything to say?"Had the Colonel not known very well what he was about his last sentence would have been as tactless as it seemed to everybody cruel,and even his trusting and admiring wife looked upon him in a startled way as he thus addressed himself to an exceedingly florid man in somewhat florid garb, but with, nevertheless, an air of intelligence of the better sort and one of general understanding. He had been a not infrequent visitor and had listened quietly and with evident delight to what he had heard. The Colonel had not offended him in the least by the blunt application of the word "showman." The two knew each other and, besides, the title belonged to him properly and he was not at all ashamed of it. On the contrary, he was rather proud of it. He looked at the Colonel in a meditative way and took his time. He had faced audiences—though, perhaps, none quite so select, before—and finally remarked, very simply and to the admiration of everybody:"You can't expect much of a plain, uneducated showman, but I know of one story, a sort of love story, too, which a friend of mine who owns a dime museum told me. I'm in the circus business myself, so do not know as much about what you might call family details as he would, but this is what he gave me. He was tickled and used some large words:LOVE WILL FIND THE WAYThe Ossified Man was in love with the Fat Woman. Such things happen. Men are falling in love with women every day and apparent absurdities and incongruities do not count. Love asks no odds. The Ossified Man was in love with the Fat Lady. She weighed six hundred and eighty-three pounds; he weighed just eighty-three. It may have been that this singular coincidence, as shown on the billboards throughout the city, first drew the two together. Who can tell? They became acquainted and then began one of the love affairs of the thousand myriads, with which the world is at all times occupied.The Fat Lady was fair to look upon. She had the tremendous advantage of being a landscape as well as a personality. She was, somehow, healthy, and her far-outstanding flesh was firm and white, despite her mountainous proportions. She rose and fell rythmatically as a mass with each inhalation of her fortunately great lungs and reminded one, in a way, of a volcano half quiescent. This, though, would be an utterly wrong simile. There was nothing fiery about her. Her round face showed but a somewhat intensified benevolence. Upon second thought—because she had what she deemed taste in dress andwore a variety of outside ribbon things upon her looming corsage and vast flowers upon her hat—she reminded one, billowy and heaving and with green and flowery things atop her, of the ever soft and rolling and lifting Sargasso Sea. She was a good girl in her way and had come from Indiana.The Ossified man was nearly six feet in height, was one of the best known specimens in the show world of what may be called an animated stalactite and could scarcely be called ungraceful though a slightly too robust skeleton. His joints were singularly flexible yet and his digestion and his mind were active. "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Thus he explained the quality of the personality of the two.The wooing of the Ossified Man was in the nature of an innovation. He recognized the attitude in the community occupied by his inamorata and himself, not merely toward each other but with relation to all the outside world, and he conducted himself accordingly.What the Ossified Man did—and it is greatly to his credit—was to do what any other man of his grade would do. Neither he nor the Fat Woman were highly educated but each had beenthrough a school and each had read and could understand things and each had intelligence and no little sentiment. As remarked, the Ossified Man made his advances as would any other man of his degree. The two came to understand each other in a way and the Fat Woman began to feel somewhere, far away in her system, something she had never felt before. In truth she was beginning to fall in love with the Ossified Man. Not being a fool, the Ossified Man knew it. He realized the fact that he had found another being of the other sex, of good sense, though out of the common in appearance, as sentimental as he, the great heart once fairly stirred. Affairs drifted. He knew that he was going to propose to her and she knew that he was going to ask her to be his wife. That reflection, somehow, startled her throughout all her vast being, though a dim sub-consciousness told her that she liked him much. As for him, he resolved to stake the future upon a single poem he sent to her, confident that she would accept it gravely. And these are the few lines she received:"All flesh is grass, and grass must turn to clay;All bones must turn to dust, and we are they!Since thus we turn, my own, my Colleen Bawn,Why not unite before our breath is gone?It is the judgment ever of the sageThat happiness is in the average;What better equipoise than you and I,What more assured? O, sweetheart, let us try!"The Fat Woman was impressed but, more than that, and better in ten thousand ways, she was delighted that the man she realized she loved had finally dared to express himself, though in this odd, sentimental way. She thought much and then—there is shade of correction added—she wrote this letter:Dear Jim:—I understand your poem. I won't fool a bit. I care for you, Jim, as you care for me. But we will be a joke if we get married now. Can't you see that, Jim? Can't we get more like each other before we get married? We have both saved quite a lot of money. Oh, Jim, if you'll try to get thicker, I'll try to get thinner.Lovingly,Sarah."The Ossified Man read that letter and went out and walked up and down the streets for hours. He was the happiest and most perplexed man in all the big city. His heart at least wasn't ossified.He remembered a professor who had studied him and whom he had heard say to those about that there was no occasion for the continuedossification in such a subject, provided the stomach was all right. "I'll go to that old professor," he said, "and I'll put the case to his giblets in a way to make him salty round the eyes. And I'll write all about it to my little girl, God bless 'er!"So his "little girl" got the letter and cried largely and with vast resources and, as we say, "braced up." "He is good, my Jim," she said to herself; "and I'll meet him half way, God bless him! I know a professor too, and I'll see him."So each went to a professor.Professor McFlush was the doctor whose portrait accompanied an advertisement regularly in the Sunday papers, and whom the Ossified Man had in mind. He didn't hesitate an instant after an examination of what there was of his patient. "I'll cure you in no time if you follow my directions," he declared. "My Sulphuretted Tablets will knock out the ossification and as for the rest it's all diet.""What diet?" asked the Ossified Man."Hash!" roared the doctor. "Do you drink much?""Naw," said the Ossified Man."Well, you've got to—hash—hash and porter.Hash is fattening, the potatoes in it does it. Porter is fattening, the malt in it does it. Them and my tablets together will do the business—seventeen tablets a day—dollar a bottle, thirty-four in a bottle. Five tablets before breakfast, and for breakfast hash and two bottles of porter. Dinner the same; supper the same. Anything else you want eat or drink all day long. Last two tablets just before you go to bed. Get your prescriptions filled here. Get your porter over at Johnson's wholesale grocery, I've made an arrangement with him. Ten dollars. Report weekly. Good day."And the Ossified Man took up his task for Love's sake.It was to Professor Slocum that the Fat Woman went. Professor Slocum was brisk and small but he had a way with the ladies.The Fat Woman believed in him implicitly from the moment they met."Do you eat much?" was the first query of the Professor."Yes sir, considerable.""Do you drink much?""Yes sir, some ale, and water most all the time.""Madam, I am astonished! Keep on withthat diet and you'll weigh half a ton before you die, and you'll die within six months."The Fat Woman gasped and turned pallid. She was influenced not only by love but by acute alarm.The Professor looked upon her benignly."Madam," he said, "I can save you. My condensed Food Tablets and my Spirituelle Waters will do the business. The tablets will afford you sufficient sustenance for existence without affording any element for the increase of adipose tissue, while my Spirituelle Waters will gratify your thirst—the more you drink of them the better—while, at the same time, they will exercise an influence of their own. Get your tablets here at this office—fifty cents a hundred—Spirituelle Waters here too—quart bottles, twenty-five cents a bottle. Prescription: ten tablets and one bottle of the water to a meal; another bottle of the Waters before retiring. Drink all the Spirituelle Water you want during the day. Ten dollars. Report fortnightly. Good afternoon."The professors knew their business. There could be no doubt of that. Not with any sunburst, so to speak, but steadily and day by day, the Ossified Man increased in flexibility andtissue and the Fat Woman decreased in fat.There came a day when the Museum manager observed the change and sent for the Ossified Man."What's the matter, Jim?" asked the potentate."Nothing that I know of," was the answer."Do you weigh any more than you did, Jim?""About twenty-five pounds, I believe," was the hesitating answer."I'll see you in my Office at two o'clock this afternoon."Then the Fat Woman was sent for and questioned."How much do you weigh, Sarah?" was the first query."Six hundred and twenty-three pounds, sir," was the truthful answer."Huh!" said the manager. "Sixty pounds gone Sarah! I'll see you in my Office at two o'clock this afternoon."An hour later the Ossified Man and the Fat Woman were engaged in earnest conversation. After a pause the Fat Woman remarked thoughtfully:"Jim, we're going to get the g. b.""Looks that way," said the Ossified Man."Do you care much?""Nope," said the Ossified Man, "only I wish we each could have gathered in our fifty per for another six months or so.""Well, I don't care!" said the Fat Woman, lovingly and desperately. "I've saved up about six thousand and you've got about five, and the three or so can go.""Suits me," said the Ossified Man.The meeting in the manager's office that afternoon was spirited but good-natured."Heard you'd got stuck on each other and were trying to size up together," said the manager."About the size of it," said the Ossified Man."Well, it strikes me that there are two sizes yet," said the manager, "but that doesn't matter. You are knocking out two of my attractions. I'll have to let you both go at the end of the week.""All right," said the Ossified Man, good-naturedly. "But," he added, as a second thought struck him, "say, Sarah is going one way and I'm going the other and there is no telling how far we may happen to pass. It might happen that we might want a job again. Now whenI come back as the Fat Man, and she as the Ossified Woman, will you take us on?"The manager roared: "Yes, when you come back weighing six hundred and eighty-three, and Sarah eighty-three, I'll engage you, you bet!"The Fat Woman listened approvingly.And now the two are on a fine farm in Indiana and are happy. She still takes Professor Slocum's Condensed Food Tablets and Spirituelle Waters, and he still takes Professor McFlush's Sulphuretted Tablets and porter, and they are growing more and more alike in appearance, as they are in thoughts and aims, and have the best and most comfortable understanding. But they'll never get back to the Museum. They wouldn't if they could.Isn't it wonderful what love can do!CHAPTER XXIA LITERARY LOVE AFFAIRThere was laughter, naturally, over the Showman's absurd, yet not altogether unsentimental story and, after its recital he stood, undoubtedly, more nearly on a social footing with the others. There were his clothes, of course, and another excrudescence or two, but these were incidentals. The wayfarers did not even yawn, but looked inquiringly at the beaming and bestowed-by-Providence Colonel.After all, it is doubtful if there be anything better in the world than a spinster—if she be of the right sort. Of course all spinsters are not of the right sort; few of us are. When this one especially fine spinster was called upon by the Colonel she did not know exactly what to do. She should have been as perfectly at ease and as possessed of aplomb as any voluptuously beautiful poser in a ball-room, yet she was somewhat embarrassed. She should not have been. She was an exquisitely beautiful woman, in the view of those who know things.With her thin nose and thin lips and general expression of cultivation and eyes in which showed loving regard and thinking, she was adorable to those upon whose eyes had been rubbed the great ointment of perception. Her one hundred and twenty-five pounds of existing womanhood, neat and good, was worth far more than its weight in gold or any other metal. When called upon this is what the spinster said most bravely:"Colonel Livingstone, there is but one untold story of which I know and I wish I were capable of explaining to all of you how full of real life it was. Yet it seems so simple and silly that it is commonplace, though it isn't. Do you remember, Colonel, about the great tower of the Campanile, in Venice and the square down upon the pavements of which the pigeons flutter to be fed? Well this is a story—a true one—of something like those same pigeons and the Doge who first instituted the feeding of them, five hundred years ago, or something like that, only the scene and time are different. As you know, Colonel, I live in Chicago, and this is but the story of the pigeons of St. Mark's transferred to the corner of Clark and Madisonstreets in a city in another hemisphere. And, as I said, it is all true. This is what actually happened."A LITERARY LOVE AFFAIRThis is a love story of two of the class who know things. Margaret Selwyn was a graduate of one of the bluest women's colleges between the two seas, and, more than that, she had a background of home culture and refinement, having parents of brains. She came from college with those acquirements, which shine exteriorly, and had an incurved back, and was "tailor made" from head to heel, yet having within her all that gentleness and greatness of heart which make a woman better than anything else, not even excluding the strawberry upon which the Right Reverend Bishop pronounced such a sincere eulogy.As to the man, Henry Bryant, he belonged socially and in all other ways to the same class as the woman, even in brains and goodness, considering, of course, the limitations of sex. Each of these two occupied a social position—if such a thing as recognized social position be defined enough in the United States—distinctly understood by the people who knew them. Each was arrogant and self-sustained, and eachthoroughly and admiringly in love with the other. It was wonderful how these two, each accustomed to be obeyed, and each, in a gentle way, unconsciously dominant with those about, grew close and yielding together. Each recognized the masterfulness, feminine or masculine, of the other, and there came a great sweetness to the understanding. Yet to these two, well-poised and mentally well-equipped, came gusts and showers of difference of opinion. The man tried to be dignified and self-contained upon these occasions, but, as a rule, failed miserably. The woman didn't even try.But these differences throughout the months of their engagement resulted in no tragedy of importance. They both had so much of the salt of humor in their composition that they recognized the folly of even a momentary antagonism, and each laughed and begged the other's pardon or rendered the equivalent of that performance. They smiled together over their mutual short lapses of realization of what it is that makes the world go round.At such times as they quarreled the man would tell her the foolish but probably true story of the Irishman who came annually whooping into town at fair time in some old Irish village,whirling his shillalah above his head and announcing to all the world that he was "blue-mouldy for want of a batin'." And, after this comparison, Bryant would announce, in strictest confidence, to his sweetheart, that this blessed Irishman never failed to get his "batin'," and that there were "others" even unto this day.And so it came, in time, that this man, in love with a woman, called her his "blue-mouldy" girl, and this came to be the sweetest title in the heart of each.With all the saving grace of the sense of proportion, which is a good part of the sense of humor, and with all their love and understanding of each other, with such characters it was inevitable that something must happen. There are laws of Nature. Vesuvius gets dyspeptic. Certain Javan islands spill up into the sky and the world has red sunsets for a while. One day, this woman, good product of a good race, sat in her parlor awaiting her lover. She was reading a book as she waited.Now as to certain facts: Miss Selwyn was in her literary tastes an Ibsenite, Hardyite, Jamesite, or something of that sort. Bryant was a Kiplingite or Conan Doyleite. She trimmedclose to something sere, and where nerves were. He was chiefly in his literary tendencies "Let her go, Gallagher!"Margaret, having become absorbed in her book, looked up with saddened eyes from her literary draft of wormwood and tea, with the beginning of beautifully creased brows, to note the entrance of some lusty flesh and blood. Less in accord in mood and thought than were these, for the instant, never existed two people on the face of the earth, earnest lovers though they were and of about the same quality of thought and being. Something had to happen."Why weep ye by the tide, Ladye?" began Bryant, glancing at the face of his sweetheart, and from that to the book she had laid aside. As she did not reply immediately, he continued, taking up the volume:"Is it The Han't that Walks or The Browning of the Overdone Biscuit that has lowered your spirits?""I don't know what you are talking about," she said."Neither do I," said he.There they were, he, overcoat still on and hat in hand, and she sitting there and looking up at him but still enwrapped in a more or less emotionalfeverishness contracted from the volume in his hand. Any purely objective onlooker would have required no announcement of the approaching "circus."The girl made an effort to recover command of herself. "Leave your hat and overcoat with the maid," she said, "and come and sit here in the window and look at the lake, while I read to you the beautiful ending of the story I have just finished.""I will stay," Bryant declared; "I was going to ask you to go with me to the park and idle among the chrysanthemums, but this will be better." And he seated himself near the window. "May I be allowed to look at you, instead of following your advice to the letter and keeping my eyes upon the cold, gray lake water outside?" he continued. "No matter what I hear, I shall be content if I can see you."Miss Selwyn flushed a little, but laughed good-humoredly.Here the purely objective looker-on afore-mentioned might murmur over the foolhardiness of man when he meets, unawares and all uncomprehendingly, one of the bewildering moods of an impressionable sweetheart. The contented male creature rushed blindly to his fate."Before you begin, dear, tell me; tell me it is not Tolstoi or Ibsen you are going to read, nor yet George Meredith or Sarah Grand!"At the last reference Miss Selwyn's eyes began to flash dangerously."You know I detest her!" she exclaimed."Do you refer to all four of the writers I mentioned as of the feminine gender?" inquired Bryant with an appearance of fervid interest. The fool was actually enjoying it all.Seeing that her lover was only chaffing, Margaret made a brave effort, settled herself in her chair and found the place in her book."Before you begin—I beg your pardon," said Bryant deferentially, "but let me say that I was up late last night, and if I can't keep awake under the spell of your voice, don't blame me. Wake me up at the catastrophe, when the distant door slams or somebody breaks a teacup."Miss Selwyn laid the volume down again, and, still smiling, answered quietly but a shade frostily:"It would take something written with a mixture of raw brandy, blood and vermilion paint to arrest your attention, I believe! Your authors write with—with—an ax in place of a pen. But I can't harrow up my own imaginationwith their horrors, much less read them aloud!""An exclusive régime of problem novels, plays and moralizings on pessimistic lines is bad for the mental digestion," admitted Bryant in judicial tones. "Poor girl! I must teach you to live in and love this beautiful, violent, sweet and good old world of ours—the world of real nature, real men and women, and real literature!""I thank you for your indulgent, patronizing intentions," she flashed back at him. "You would feed butterflies on brawn, teach the bluebird to scream like a macaw, make the trembling, silver-leaved white birches all over into oaks.""My dear Margaret—" stammered Bryant, starting up, but he could not lay the spirit he had raised."There are questions in life that cannot be settled by the stroke of a sword or ax," she went on. "Your favorite writer has smirched the fair figure of childhood in his brutal pictures of boys' life. He has made an unwholesome, disgusting thing out of what should be and is healthful and fine. How can you, who read him with patience, carp at my taste for what seems to me well thought and well expressed?""The effect of your favorites upon you to-dayhas not been particularly reassuring," said Bryant, more stirred by Margaret's tone and manner than by her words. Seeing that he had angered her, and trying to stem the tide of her indignation, he still blundered most flagrantly, and within a half hour the quarrel had culminated in an avowed separation for the rest of their lives, Bryant leaving the house in a state of indignant misery such as fond and over-confident lovers alone may know.Not a word had been said, this time, about the "blue-mouldy" girl. The atmosphere had been too electric, the mood too tense for a laughing word.Then followed silence between these two. Stubborn pride on the part of the woman, proud stubbornness on the part of the man. They were earnestly and faithfully in love, but each waited to hear the first word of forgiveness.Bryant did write, but in his preoccupation left his letter upon the desk unposted, and in a day it was snowed under by his unopened or carelessly glanced at mail. Of course he misunderstood Miss Selwyn's silence and she resented his.One Sunday morning Margaret, with an innate grasping and running back to the faith inwhich she had been bred, sought help at the source which best suited her—the relief which comes from religion.It so chances that there is a shrine upon the bank of the Ganges. It so chances that there is what we call a Mecca. It so chances that we all occasionally seek our shrines.Margaret Selwyn sat in her shrine, the outgrown old Episcopal Cathedral on Washington Boulevard, and listened to her pastor, one of the great old men who have grown up with a creed, but with thought and lovingness; one who has learned how to heal wounds, the wounds of which no tongue can tell, and how to advise genially and generally as to the affairs of life. Somehow, the old gentleman, with his white hair and robes, his simple, clean, old-fashioned honesty, had imparted to her a strength and faith in God which calmed and helped her. It may be there could not have been imparted to her by any one else in the world, politics and power and inherited splendor all considered, as much as could this plain old man.The white-robed boys sang their recessional, and she became perhaps clearer and more comprehensive of mind than before she enteredthe church—certainly more equipoised than she had been for days.Meditatively alive to the quiet of this Sunday noon, Miss Margaret Selwyn, as she neared the centre of the city, stopped short and looked about her. Where was she?The pavement of the street was gray-blue, spotted with white, and gleaming here and there with the iridescent living tints of bird plumage. The air was winged by soft forms, and a crowd of idlers were scattering grains of corn upon the ground to lure and keep in sight the most graceful creatures that live between the sky and earth.Against a sky as blue as that of Venice two snow-white pigeons were flying straight down the street toward their companions. A swarthy Italian stood with the birds almost under his feet, but, save the dark face of the street-vender, the pigeons and the perfect sky, the picture involuntarily imaged in Miss Selwyn's mind was all away and awry.Here was no stately tower, remote and solitary as a recluse in a worldly throng; no Byzantine temple delighted her eye with its warm and gracious humanity of suggestion. The vast sunny space of the Venetian square, with itscolumned coffee-houses and shops, was in spirit and in truth far removed from here. St. Mark's, and the place where the dream of a moment had arisen in an impressionable mind, might have been on two different planets, so opposed were they in every outline, spirit and detail—save one: the fluttering, flying, eager, unafraid pigeons.The sun shot side glances down through the thoroughfare and really did some good on this day, because this was the day of the Nazarene, and even the money-seekers on this day had abandoned in their affairs the consumption of bituminous coal. That is why on Sunday, in one of the greatest cities in the world, the air is clear and the breath better. That is one reason why, on Sunday, the American cousins of the "pigeons of St. Mark's" come fluttering from somewhere about the city, from only the Maker of them knows where, and dip downward out of the ether trustingly to the feet of the passer-by, be he thug or preacher.Miss Selwyn had never heard of the vast flock of doves which dwell in security among the towering buildings of the city. Their wings flash across wide darkling streets all day, welcome to every careworn man whowatches, for a moment, their graceful flight. They were here before her now—there, parading strutting, looking up hopefully toward the men about them, each eagerly seeking the next flip of the corn. They were—and are to-day—because of some gracious instinct in humanity, the best casual street exemplification of what is best in human nature.They dripped and dropped from somewhere almost simultaneously. There was one who strutted the most struttingly and whose only really justifiable claim was that from crown to midway of his body he had such iridescent purple as all the shell-opening fishermen of Tyre and Sidon never devised half-way. There was another one, a quaint little maiden, who will probably marry some English nobleman of the birds, snow-white, with strange geometrical lines crisscross about her back, and who was almost duplicated by a dozen or two others of her breed. There were two rufous things, the red of whose top and back lapsed into a white beneath, almost as exquisitely as blends the splendid red hair of a woman into the ever accompanying white of the skin beneath. There were little drizzled things, pert, like bantams, off-breeds which had introducedthemselves into the community. And there was nothing but just a tossing about among those beautiful creatures upon the pavement there, nothing but an Oliver Twistish clamor for "more" from those who stood above them, to whom they were doing more good than they could know.On week days the pigeons fly out in foraging parties to the railway yards and the neighborhood of the huge grain elevators. They can be seen glancing above the tall buildings, far flying, specks of gleaming light, along the hollow spaces above the streets as they go and come from their feeding places. The crowded masses of wagons, street cars, carriages, horses and hurrying people keep the pigeons from the street where they are most at home together for six days. But on the seventh, when the burden of labor is lifted or a brief space from the shoulders of toiling mankind, the pigeons rally in force upon one of the most busy, prosaic, care-breeding corners in the great spreading city by the lake. And every Sunday come, as surely, men and boys to feed the air-travelers and look at them with the worship all men feel for natural beauty and grace.
"SIR GLADYS ESCORTED THE LADY FLORETTA HOME"
"SIR GLADYS ESCORTED THE LADY FLORETTA HOME"
Away back in the past so dim and distant that only the most learned can talk of it intelligently, away in the time after the earth had risen from the warm waters and when the great reptiles had given place to animals, something like those which exist to-day, the hoofs of all the quadrupeds were split. The land was low and marshy then, and the split hoof best supported its owner on the yielding surface. As the earth protruded more and more, and dry and sometimes rocky land uprose, such beasts as frequented the hills found that their hoofs were changing slowly with the centuries. Hard and round the hoofs became as was best for the hill dwellers, but the beasts of the shores and lowlands retained the split hoof and still can tread the morass. This the Enchanted Cow knew. This, Sir Gladys Rhinestone, who had studied natural history, knew as well.
It was four in the morning by the great clock of the Castle when Sir Gladys stood in the center of the stone-paved courtyard and wound his horn. At the sound every man in the Castle and its surrounding buildings, and on the farms about, became astir, and soon Sir Gladys had his trusty henchmen a dozen deep about him. His words of command sent them scattering in all directions, and sunrise beheld a sturdy band, headed by Sir Gladys, leaving the Castle Gate and turned in the direction of the Black Tarn. With the men marched fifty of the great red oxen of Rhinestone, and upon their mighty shoulders they bore the heavy nets and boats of the once lucky fisherman of Ken Water.
Sir Gladys had taken the White Cow's hint, and set the split hoof to do what the whole hoof could not accomplish.
A messenger was sent to the Moated Grange requesting the Lady Floretta to visit the shore of the Black Tarn, and thither the procession moved and soon the Tarn was reached. Then followed a scene of which the story was told for years, for it was something worth the seeing. The great tractable oxen, encouraged doubtless by the Enchanted Cow who stood knee-deep in the oozy margin awaiting them, bore outbravely into the black waters through reeds and sedge and yielding mud and made a mighty splashing toward the center of the lake where in a semicircle were gathered the fishermen with their boats and nets. The waters near the shore were churned into a foam, and the watchers looking outward could see the long wakes of the frightened sturgeon as they fled to certain capture.
And the nets were filled to the overflowing; so heavy were they that the great oxen could scarcely draw them to firm land. So the great work was accomplished, the Lady Floretta and her maidens coming in time to see it all. There were fish enough to furnish caviare enough it would seem for half the world.
It was well that their two estates joined, for while during the fishing, the Lady Floretta and Sir Gladys had been sitting on the strand of the Black Tarn—Sir Gladys' cloak around the Lady, for the day grew chill—they had declared each to the other their determination to join their lives and their fortunes together from that hour, and so it came to pass that, by the time the fish eggs were turned into caviare and sold and the money was in hand to pay Prince Rugbauer's taxes, Sir Gladys Rhinestone had made theLady Floretta Beamish his bride, and what was good or ill fortune for one was the same for the other.
And this is also told, that, as for the Enchanted Cow, ever afterward she wandered at will on the moors in summer, and was well cared for at the castle or the Moated Grange in winter. And ever on the night of the Witch's sleep, the cow was visited in state by fair Sir Gladys and Lady Floretta, for nothing is more excellent than gratitude.
LOVE AND A ZULU
Mrs. Livingstone, who had become accepted, by this time, to the Colonel's great delight, as a sort of lovingly hesitant chaperon and hostess of the accidental House Party, was now, doubtless to her own surprise, the one to take the initiative:
"Did I understand you to say, Mr. Poet, that what you just related was strictly true?"
"Yes, Madam, certainly," was the calm and unabashed reply of the person addressed.
"Thank you," was the gentle answer, "it was beautiful," and then she turned to her husband, "Colonel, won't you please request one of the stern business men here to tell something, something reliable, and of the present time?"
The Colonel's quizzical eye had, for some moments rested upon the Broker, to the evident disquietude of that gentleman, though it was clear that he would not seek to avoid the issue when his time for effort came. He had notlistened to the tale which had been told as intently as he might and there was a look upon his face as of a man recalling memories. He was mentally preparing himself for the Colonel's onslaught—and it came.
"Mr. Broker," said the genial tyrant, "gentlemen of your type in the business world are about the best fellows going, and, as I know, from listening interestedly a thousand times, are always telling good stories, when not going crazy 'on 'change.' Your turn has come and your fate is sealed beyond all peradventure. Sir, we await you."
The Broker "accepted the situation:" "I've been anticipating this emergency and have been preparing for it as much as possible. I don't know that it is what might be called a strictly business story, but it is that of how a friend of mine—an admirable man—made a lot of money and gained one of the prettiest wives in the world. I think we might call it
LOVE AND A ZULU
In every drop of the blue blood of St. Louis there is a bubble of sporting blood. This is a love story of St. Louis, with filaments of fact entwining themselves with the lighter filamentsof fancy. The St. Louis lover—of course, there are exceptions—loves with his whole heart, and in his constant heart, with every pulsation, throbs the idea of chance. So, the great city on the banks of the Father of Waters is a city of honorable betting.
John Driscoll was in trouble. John Driscoll, aged twenty-seven, was a lone scion of one of the best families of St. Louis, a city where they have good families, certainly. Driscoll's trouble was of the sort which tries a man. He was desperately in love with a fair young woman, but consent to the marriage was absolutely refused by the young woman's father until Driscoll should be worth at least twenty thousand dollars; and a very obstinate old gentleman was Mr. Cameron, who owned much real estate and was looked upon as one of the solid men of a solid city. It was not altogether a harsh impulse which had brought this decree from him. He wanted Driscoll to show that he had business ability, for Driscoll had been something of a figure socially and not much of a figure otherwise. Mr. Cameron was very fond of his daughter Jessie. John Driscoll had been left, on the death of his mother, with a fortune of only eighteen thousand dollars;two thousand dollars were already gone and he had earned nothing. In order, therefore, to meet the requirement of his prospective father-in-law, he must, somehow, make four thousand dollars. It may be said to his credit that he lacked neither earnestness nor courage. He devoted himself at once to a vigorous endeavor to gain the required sum. He worked with feverish earnestness. He became solicitor for an insurance company, and, with his wide acquaintance, made a moderate success of the business from the beginning. It was hard to endure—for love is impatient—but the man did not flinch. At the end of a year he had a little over eighteen thousand dollars in bank and admirable prospects. But, as above wisely remarked, love is exceedingly impatient. He was offered a chance in a speculation which promised to gain for him two thousand dollars at once, and yielded to the temptation—though persuaded against it by the girl he loved and who loved him. Instead of gaining two thousand dollars, he lost two thousand, and was back at the sixteen thousand dollar notch again. A year had been wasted.
At the northeast corner of Elm Street and Broadway is a famous place—half restaurant,half summer garden—where theatre parties go, and where the gilded youth of the city eat, drink and are merry. Nonsensical propositions arise among these young gentlemen with money and, in many instances, with brains as well. One evening at one of the tables there arose a discussion over the old problem of whether or not the ordinary man could eat thirty quail in thirty days. The discussion became warm. "It is absurd," said a young man named Graham—"the whole idea of it. Why, after a hard day's shooting in Texas, I once ate six quail at a single meal. That means that even a man of my size can eat thirty quail in five days, doesn't it?"
"Well, it may or may not," was the response of a youth named Malvern, one of the group; "but eating six quail in one day, or thirty quail in six days, is not the matter under discussion. One of the most exquisite forms of torture known to the Chinese, is to bind a prisoner so that he cannot move his head, and then, from a reservoir above, allow drop after drop of water to fall upon his head. At first it is nothing, but, finally, there comes an uncomfortable sensation, then pain, and, in the end, an exquisite agony. The victim dies or goes insane. Abarrel of water poured upon him at once would not have affected him at all. So it is with eating thirty quail in thirty days. It is the monotony for all those days—the thing that cannot be avoided—that tells."
"Bah!" said Graham. "I don't take your view of the case. I've the courage of my convictions, and I'll bet you five hundred dollars that I will eat thirty quail in thirty days, breakfasting here at nine o'clock each morning and eating my quail then."
"Done!" was the prompt reply. "You're not the only fellow who has the courage of his convictions. We'll appoint a committee of observation, and breakfast here together regularly. There'll be fun in the thing, whatever the outcome."
The committee was appointed, and the next morning saw a hilarious group seated about the table. Graham was full of confidence and jest. He ordered his quail broiled, and his companions, out of compliment, ordered the same thing. It was a breakfast enjoyed by all. Here follows a summary of what happened on succeeding mornings:
Breakfast Second.—Graham came in, still confident, and had a good appetite, as appearedwhen he ordered broiled quail again and ate it with much gusto. Of the five men at table two ate quail as well; the others ordered beefsteak.
Breakfast Third.—Graham's serenity was still unruffled. He ate his quail broiled, as usual, and seemed to enjoy it, but he noticed that none of his friends took quail. "I must have variety," said one of them.
Breakfast Fourth—Graham said he must have indulged in too much champagne the night before. He ordered his quail roasted for a change, and ate it slowly—the committee of three watching him like hawks, to see that he picked the bones clean.
Breakfast Fifth.—The events of the meal were almost identical with those of the day before, save that Graham required a little more time in which to consume his bird.
Breakfast Sixth.—Graham declared that, after all, we were behind the English in our manner of cooking birds. They boiled two fowls to our one. He ordered his quail boiled and picked away at it with some energy. He certainly cleaned the bones with more ease than before.
Breakfast Seventh.—Graham came in, looking bilious. He hesitated before ordering, but finally decided that he would take his quailchopped up into stew. There was some debate over this, and the committee finally went into the restaurant kitchen, to see that nothing got away. The stew seemed to please Graham and he made numerous jests at the expense of the men, "who," he said, "had no stomachs."
Breakfast Eighth.—Graham ordered quail stew again, but did not get along so well as he had on the previous morning. He declared the bird to be stale and said that it smelled "quailly." As a matter of fact, it was a plump young bird, shot only the day before.
Breakfast Ninth.—To the astonishment of everybody, Graham, who looked more bilious than ever, ordered quail hash. The committee was indignant, but there was no recourse, and so they were compelled to visit the kitchen again and watch the career of the quail from plucking to plate. Graham became furious. He said it was a shame to doubt the honesty of the establishment. He ate the quail.
It is unnecessary to continue in detail the story of the breakfasts in the great restaurant. Each day Graham became more petulant and unreasonable. All ways of cooking quail were at last exhausted, and there was a compelled return to some of those already employed.Graham by the fifteenth day had become haggard and the very odor of the delicate bird, as it came in, brought to him a feeling of utmost nausea. He was brusque with the faithful waiter, and took no interest in the conversation of his friends. He was plucky, though, and managed, by sheer force of will, to consume the distasteful ration. Meanwhile, the wager had become the comment of the town, especially among the wealthy youth, and thousands of dollars were staked upon the issue. The restaurant was thronged each morning, and the proprietor wished he had some such attraction to such a class throughout all the rotund year. This notoriety but made the case of poor Graham worse; it made him more anxious to succeed, but it unnerved him.
On the twentieth day the odds, which had at first been in favor of Graham, dropped to no odds at all, and on the twenty-second they were against him. He came in with a pallid look upon his face and sat down before his dainty fare. He took up his knife and fork; then suddenly laid them down and left the place. Within ten minutes he returned with a set face and resolutely performed his task. Where he had been was not known at the time, but it wasrumored, later, in the Southern Hotel (which was in the same block) that there had been sold a half-pint bottle of champagne that morning to a gentleman in a hurry.
So, worse and worse became the man's condition, greater and greater his abhorrence of what is counted a delicate bit of eating. On the twenty-sixth morning he came in with a more closely hovering look of apprehension than had yet been noticed. He sat down before the bird, picked at it for a moment, rose from the table walked about for a while; then came back, again and again, and considered what was before him. He gasped, and, as he arose to his feet and started from the room, exclaimed huskily: "It's no use, boys. I was mistaken. I can't do it. I give up!"
There was pity for him, especially among the minors, for he had done his best. Many cheques were drawn that morning.
Driscoll always breakfasted at this restaurant and had, naturally, become interested in this droll struggle between man and quail. For a day or two after his own loss he had been dazed and discouraged haunting the lobbies of the Planter's, the Southern or the Lindell, and pitying himself amazingly. All at oncehe braced up, to an extent, through the influence of plucky little Jessie Cameron. "We must begin again—that's all," said she, resolutely and cheerily. "Surely, you love me as much as Jacob, who served twice seven years, for Rachel, and I admire you more than I do Jacob—though I never liked his device concerning Esau. Begin again, dear, and all will come right."
And Driscoll did begin again with a vigor, though henceforth he referred to Mr. Cameron as Laban to the indignation of the fair and filial Jessie.
The lover settled down to earnest work, did well and was becoming contented and hopeful. This condition of mind enabled him to speculate in his hours of ease upon something outside of his personal affairs. The quail-eating contest had interested him, because he was an educated man, and something of a student of the body. Why had Graham failed in the eating of thirty quail in thirty days? Men eat thirty breakfasts in thirty days and do not know they have done it. Hunters and miners eat bacon alone—that is, as far as their meat goes—for months at a time and think nothing of it. Why had Graham failed?
Just as a matter of amusement, Driscoll tried to study the thing out: "Man is omnivorous," he thought; "not a flesh-eater alone, and his range of consumption is wide. He must have variety, even in flesh, as a requirement of his stomach. Furthermore, man alone, among all creatures, is imaginative, and, when forced to eat a certain thing, develops a thousand fancies against it until it becomes revolting. It might be so, very likely would be so, in the case of the beefsteak or the bacon. The only animal which can live easily and uncomplainingly upon one kind of flesh alone, live cheerfully and healthfully, like the lion or the tiger or others of the carnivora, must be one accustomed to such purely flesh diet and one without imagination." And Driscoll was right in his conclusions.
There existed at this time on Fourth Street, near Walnut, a dime museum of the better sort. Among the attractions for the season were five Zulus from Barnum's Circus—Zulus, most graceful of all savages, with their incurved backs, broad chests, and the step of him of Kipling, who
"Trod the lingLike a buck in spring."
"Trod the lingLike a buck in spring."
and who, daily, for the edification of the populace, gave a great exhibition of the throwing of the assegai. One of them was a woman and she could speak English.
"A human being accustomed to a flesh diet and without imagination, wouldn't he be a wonder to these joyous bettors?" thought Driscoll. Then he almost gasped as he leaned back. He had dropped into the dime museum on Fourth Street that morning, having business with the proprietor, and had noted the performance of the Zulus admiringly. "A human being living on flesh exclusively and without imagination almost concerning food." Here were a group, all of whom had throughout their lives, until imported, lived, practically, upon flesh alone—the half-cooked flesh of the herds. Flesh alone was what their stomachs craved. Additionally, they had no imagination concerning food—no morbid fancies. They only wanted meat and plenty of it—and the rest be hanged! Driscoll saw it all. He thought for an hour and then there came upon his face the look of a man who is going to break a jam of pine logs in some Northern river or drown beneath the timber. He called at the dime museum.
"Gregory," said he, "I want to borrow your best Zulu."
"Borrow what?" said Gregory.
"A Zulu."
"What do you mean? Tell me about it."
"I'll explain. You know all about the quail-eating contest, where Graham failed. You've got a man who won't fail." Then he explained all he had thought out. The museum proprietor—acute man—became excited: "I'll do anything you say," he promised.
The next morning, Driscoll was breakfasting as usual in the swell restaurant with the usual group—Graham, somewhat recovered, among them. They were still talking of the recent eating exploit, when, in the midst of the debate, Driscoll spoke, calmly: "I'll wager that I can produce a man who can eat thirty quail in thirty days. The committee who served in Graham's case shall serve in this. The only thing that I ask is that the eating be done upon the stage in the dime museum near the corner of Fourth and Walnut Streets, and just after we have had breakfast here each morning. I'll provide tickets for all those directly interested in the result."
There arose a clamor. Not a man amongall the gilded young men present believed now that any man could eat thirty quail in thirty days. Driscoll had deliberated and had dared. He had brought with him two thousand dollars of his remaining fortune. He got odds at first of four to one; then three to one; then two to one. He stood to lose two thousand dollars, or win between five and six thousand.
There was among the Zulus a stalwart young man whose assegai sank deepest into the wooden target, who was a model of strength and wild, unknowing lustiness, and who had but lately left his tribe in Southern Africa. Little but flesh had ever passed his mouth as food. He was told, through the English-speaking woman, that there was a little bird—the sweetest in the country—one of which would be given him each morning because he had thrown the assegai so well for the white man's edification. He smacked his lips, strutted and became excited.
Next morning occurred a scene heretofore unknown to the dime museum. In the front seats was the cream of society, so far as young men were concerned, and all the other seats were filled, because the wise proprietor of the place had seen to it that news so important hadgone abroad. No theatre in all the town drew such a fashionable audience as did this dime museum. It was a scene most edifying and altogether blithesome and lighthearted, and one having a special interest.
There was not much of a pause. The Zulu, accompanied by the committee, came upon the stage—the gentleman from South Africa with glittering eyes and a look of hungry expectancy upon his face. Then, a moment later, came in a waiter with a quail—roasted whole and temptingly displayed upon a tray. The Zulu gazed at it for a minute; then suddenly picked it up by the legs; thrust the head and breast of the bird into his mouth and crunched savagely. He was delighted. A moment later, he tossed the legs away and looked for more. He had simply chewed the bird and swallowed bones and all!
And so, each day, for twenty-nine days the absurd performance was repeated. It was quite unnecessary to change the style of cooking, though the breast bones were removed by order of the committee, out of a probably unnecessary regard for the digestion of this human personage brought up on meat half raw. He but clamored for more on each occasion andwas pacified only through the intervention of the woman who promised that soon he was to have a feast. She was telling him the truth. Driscoll and Gregory had arranged upon a spectacular termination of the contest—a contest which already, as everybody saw, was determined as to its issue. Through the interpreter, the Zulu was informed that on the thirtieth day he was to have, not only the quail, but a large bird—one worthy the appetite of a warrior—a bird known in this strange country as turkey and very good to eat. The strong thrower of the assegai could hardly restrain himself. He was to have a feast at last!
The thirtieth morning came, and the quail disappeared as usual. Then, in a stately procession, came waiters—the first bearing a huge roast turkey. Behind him came others with the American accompaniments to the roast turkey, and all was set before the Zulu. There followed a sight worth seeing. The turkey was utterly demolished; the contents of the side dishes were consumed and the dishes themselves licked to a housewifely cleanness. For the first time in thirty days the Zulu gave a grunt of satisfaction. When all accounts were settled, the fortune of John Driscoll amountedto just twenty-two thousand one hundred and eighty dollars and twenty-seven cents.
And so ended the second of the great quail-eating contests in St. Louis. Perhaps it was wrong, perhaps Driscoll shouldn't have won his money in the way he did; but in St. Louis there remains, as said in the beginning, much of the venturesome but always clean and honorable sporting spirit of the South, and in this case nobody was hurt, to speak of. They could afford it, and all, winners and losers, had enjoyed themselves.
But facing Driscoll were still two appalling situations. There were Jessie and Mr. Cameron. Here the young man conducted himself with a diplomacy which was vastly to his credit. He went to Jessie, threw himself on her mercy and confessed all in detail—confessed everything. She was confused and maybe shocked; but a woman in love is kindly, and a woman in love with a man of force wants to become his wife.
"How will you explain to Father?" said the thoughtful maiden.
"I'll arrange it, somehow," said the now confident and buoyant Driscoll.
He visited Mr. Cameron and gave satisfactory proof to the old gentleman that he wasnow the possessor of over twenty thousand dollars.
"But how did you gain the money so soon, boy?" said Mr. Cameron. "I heard that you lost a thousand or two."
Driscoll's face sobered. "I should think that no one better than you, Mr. Cameron, would understand the necessity on the part of a business man of keeping secret his methods and the relations of his business affairs. Pardon me—I am not yet your son-in-law."
"Right you are, Driscoll!" was the immediate response. "You're a business man, after all!"
It was not long before Driscoll became the son-in-law in fact. Then he told the whole story to his father-in-law.
"Hum! ha!" said the old gentleman, musingly.
AT BAY SOFTLY
Stafford had at frequent intervals during the day been in communication with the relief train and had received neither encouragement nor the opposite. There had been a sharp questioning of a new man in charge, a person who seemed to know his business thoroughly, but who was far from voluble in conversation. Evidently the emergency had been thought such as to require the presence of someone of greater versatility than was likely to be possessed by the train crew, but from this new overseer the questioner received but little satisfaction. In fact the boss had seemed not altogether open and candid in his statements and Stafford had become a trifle irritated. He put the case lightly, for the man to whom he was talking was evidently bright:
"I'm not altogether satisfied with your answers. We people imprisoned here have a right to know exactly what the outlook is. Why don't you come to me more like a child to itsmother? We are cutting wood for fuel, and the food supply is getting low. What are you doing over there?"
"Are you a railroad man?"
"Well, I've seen a railroad."
"You ought to know what this job is then. It's a pretty tough one."
"I know it, but why don't you answer my questions more definitely? Have you anything up your sleeve?"
"Possibly; my sleeves are pretty big. This I'll tell you, though, that I think we're all right. I'd tell you more if I felt sure myself. We're going to try something. That's all."
Somehow, this elated Stafford. He felt that he had been talking to a man who knew what he was about and he became confident that release was close at hand. But was he elated, after all? Release would mean that there would remain but two more days of Her, for, in such event, within two days the train would be in Chicago. He was in a most uncertain mood.
He was restless and unreasonable. Why to him should come such perplexity in life, such trial to one who had banished himself to avoid temptation? Yet, here it was, thrust in his way again, and he must be once more a Tantalus.He became mightily impatient as he brooded and wished that he had Fate where he could punish her. Just what he would do with that lady in such contingency he hardly knew. He got to speculating upon that and had all sorts of fancies. He conceived the grotesque idea that the ducking-stool would be about the thing. The association of Fate with the ducking-stool seemed somewhat incongruous, it is true, something in the way of an anachronism, it was such a far cry from Homer to New England, but that didn't matter. She certainly deserved the ducking-stool,—and then he could not but laugh at himself and his vexed fancies. It was a trait of Stafford that, whatever the situation, he was certain in turning it over in his mind, to give it some fantastic sidelight, which diverted his attention, and that generally relieved him. The idea of having Fate in the ducking-stool appealed to him just now and smoothed his mood. How would that arbitrary lady, she who had had her own way with the world so long, conduct herself under such trying circumstances, for trying he inferred they were, from old prints which he had studied with great interest in his childhood. He imagined the way in whichher long hair would float out upon the water as the shore end of the board went up and she, in the chair at the other end, went down and under water, and, in imagination, he could hear her gasp a little, stubborn as she is reputed to be. How would she behave and comport herself after the third or fourth dip? Would she prove amenable and, when she had got her breath, pledge herself to be henceforth and for all time a little more considerate of the comfort of humanity? For lovers especially would she exhibit a more kindly and understanding regard? If not, why, then, under she must go again!
So he ambled on foolishly and to his own relief. An admirable thing for Stafford was it that these whimsies so often seized upon him, equally when he was enraged or distressed, it didn't matter which. They helped to tide him over the mental emergency. Happy the man who has such an odd streak in the composition of his under-nature.
"Still," Stafford laughed to himself, "I am an abused man. I am a victim of atrocious circumstances. I'm an injured being, and I'm at bay! I'm going to turn and make the best of it savagely. I'll have, at least, thecomfort of looking into a pair of eyes and listening to a voice. I'll go and talk to Her."
And he went into the next car and seated himself beside the Far Away Lady, who received him kindly. He resolved to indulge himself in her companionship for a time, though against his better judgment. He knew that he was but making his trial the harder to bear.
"Do you know," he said, after the first greeting, "that I wish I could sing?"
"And why do you wish that?" she queried.
"Because, if I could, I would get off the train and wade through the snow away out to that clump of evergreens you see there two-thirds of the way up the slope—which would be out of hearing from here—and I would get behind the evergreens, out of sight, and sing something dolorous."
"Why would you do that?"
"I hardly know myself. I suppose it would be something in the mood and the way of the old troubadours, who, when things went wrong, murmured 'Alack' and sought the silent places and engaged in dismal vocalism."
"But don't you think it was rather foolish of them?" ventured the Far Away Lady.
"I don't know about that. It must have beena sort of relief. Groaning is a great relief when you are hurt. I noticed that particularly among my workmen in Siberia, whenever one of them had been injured in an accident. Very fine groaners they were, too."
"But what nonsense you are talking"—there was a note of more than anxiety in her voice—"has something happened? Tell me, John. Has anything occurred to-day to disturb you?"
"Nothing, madam, nothing at all. Do you know what is meant by 'cumulative repression?' Well I'm suffering from 'cumulative repression.' That's all. There are different kinds of the disease and mine is of the sort for which there is nothing one can take."
"I don't understand you, John."
"No? Well, I don't seem to make myself very clear, it is true. I didn't explain 'cumulative' as thoroughly as I might have done. It's this way: Suppose you were compelled to take some drug the effect of which is known as 'cumulative.' The first dose would have little effect, and so on, up to a certain time. Then something would happen, and that something would be a result just the same as if you had taken all the doses at once—mighty serious,possibly. In my case I don't, as yet, know just how serious the effect is. I think—at least I hope—that I will recover. I seem to feel it wearing off a shade, but I'm not quite sure. The consequences of 'cumulative repression' are sometimes most serious. Insanity has been known to come. But, as for me, 'I am not mad, I am not mad,' I'm only a little—I'm only wandering in my mind."
Then, all at once, his mood changed to something absolutely earnest and his look was pitifully appealing as he leaned toward her:
"Oh, Lady Leech, can you do nothing for me?"
She did not answer him. She understood. She knew, as well as if he had told her in simpler words, that he had almost failed in his high resolve and that he had come to her, feverish, in a half madness, to be upheld and strengthened, or otherwise to be dealt with, as she would. She realized it all, and thought silently, struggling with herself as he might never know. But the good, both for his sake and hers, was strong within her and finally came her soft reply:
"You know, John, that I would help you if I could, but you know that I cannot, that I must not, even a little."
Her's was a great sympathy, yet, in the midst of it all, there was something she could not understand. She had heard that of him, from China, which made this scene incomprehensible. She knew that there was not a trace of acting, that there was no craft nor design about him, and she was but lost in a maze of troubled doubt. There was her own heart. An overwhelming pity overcame her, but she could not express it.
He sat looking at her, silent, sad, studying. Then, suddenly, he returned to earth again; his face lightened:
"What nonsense I've been talking to you! I will go into the other car and encourage the Colonel in the arena," and so he left her.
But there was a mist in her eyes as he went out. How he had reminded her of the Stafford of old, in the days when they were careless!
LOVE WILL FIND THE WAY
The Colonel was royally in his element now. On no occasion before during all the time of detention had he played with so free a hand or felt himself so much an element of good among his fellow creatures. The psychological hour had come for him.
"We should congratulate ourselves," he resonantly declared. "Where else or under what other circumstances could have been accidentally assembled such a number of people so qualified to minister mentally to each other and make otherwise dead hours breathe as we who are here now looking into each other's eyes?" Then, very properly, feeling that he had expressed himself rather finely, he continued, "We will not waste the shining hour. We must have other stories. Mr. Showman, have you anything to say?"
Had the Colonel not known very well what he was about his last sentence would have been as tactless as it seemed to everybody cruel,and even his trusting and admiring wife looked upon him in a startled way as he thus addressed himself to an exceedingly florid man in somewhat florid garb, but with, nevertheless, an air of intelligence of the better sort and one of general understanding. He had been a not infrequent visitor and had listened quietly and with evident delight to what he had heard. The Colonel had not offended him in the least by the blunt application of the word "showman." The two knew each other and, besides, the title belonged to him properly and he was not at all ashamed of it. On the contrary, he was rather proud of it. He looked at the Colonel in a meditative way and took his time. He had faced audiences—though, perhaps, none quite so select, before—and finally remarked, very simply and to the admiration of everybody:
"You can't expect much of a plain, uneducated showman, but I know of one story, a sort of love story, too, which a friend of mine who owns a dime museum told me. I'm in the circus business myself, so do not know as much about what you might call family details as he would, but this is what he gave me. He was tickled and used some large words:
LOVE WILL FIND THE WAY
The Ossified Man was in love with the Fat Woman. Such things happen. Men are falling in love with women every day and apparent absurdities and incongruities do not count. Love asks no odds. The Ossified Man was in love with the Fat Lady. She weighed six hundred and eighty-three pounds; he weighed just eighty-three. It may have been that this singular coincidence, as shown on the billboards throughout the city, first drew the two together. Who can tell? They became acquainted and then began one of the love affairs of the thousand myriads, with which the world is at all times occupied.
The Fat Lady was fair to look upon. She had the tremendous advantage of being a landscape as well as a personality. She was, somehow, healthy, and her far-outstanding flesh was firm and white, despite her mountainous proportions. She rose and fell rythmatically as a mass with each inhalation of her fortunately great lungs and reminded one, in a way, of a volcano half quiescent. This, though, would be an utterly wrong simile. There was nothing fiery about her. Her round face showed but a somewhat intensified benevolence. Upon second thought—because she had what she deemed taste in dress andwore a variety of outside ribbon things upon her looming corsage and vast flowers upon her hat—she reminded one, billowy and heaving and with green and flowery things atop her, of the ever soft and rolling and lifting Sargasso Sea. She was a good girl in her way and had come from Indiana.
The Ossified man was nearly six feet in height, was one of the best known specimens in the show world of what may be called an animated stalactite and could scarcely be called ungraceful though a slightly too robust skeleton. His joints were singularly flexible yet and his digestion and his mind were active. "Stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage." Thus he explained the quality of the personality of the two.
The wooing of the Ossified Man was in the nature of an innovation. He recognized the attitude in the community occupied by his inamorata and himself, not merely toward each other but with relation to all the outside world, and he conducted himself accordingly.
What the Ossified Man did—and it is greatly to his credit—was to do what any other man of his grade would do. Neither he nor the Fat Woman were highly educated but each had beenthrough a school and each had read and could understand things and each had intelligence and no little sentiment. As remarked, the Ossified Man made his advances as would any other man of his degree. The two came to understand each other in a way and the Fat Woman began to feel somewhere, far away in her system, something she had never felt before. In truth she was beginning to fall in love with the Ossified Man. Not being a fool, the Ossified Man knew it. He realized the fact that he had found another being of the other sex, of good sense, though out of the common in appearance, as sentimental as he, the great heart once fairly stirred. Affairs drifted. He knew that he was going to propose to her and she knew that he was going to ask her to be his wife. That reflection, somehow, startled her throughout all her vast being, though a dim sub-consciousness told her that she liked him much. As for him, he resolved to stake the future upon a single poem he sent to her, confident that she would accept it gravely. And these are the few lines she received:
"All flesh is grass, and grass must turn to clay;All bones must turn to dust, and we are they!Since thus we turn, my own, my Colleen Bawn,Why not unite before our breath is gone?It is the judgment ever of the sageThat happiness is in the average;What better equipoise than you and I,What more assured? O, sweetheart, let us try!"
"All flesh is grass, and grass must turn to clay;All bones must turn to dust, and we are they!Since thus we turn, my own, my Colleen Bawn,Why not unite before our breath is gone?It is the judgment ever of the sageThat happiness is in the average;What better equipoise than you and I,What more assured? O, sweetheart, let us try!"
The Fat Woman was impressed but, more than that, and better in ten thousand ways, she was delighted that the man she realized she loved had finally dared to express himself, though in this odd, sentimental way. She thought much and then—there is shade of correction added—she wrote this letter:
Dear Jim:—I understand your poem. I won't fool a bit. I care for you, Jim, as you care for me. But we will be a joke if we get married now. Can't you see that, Jim? Can't we get more like each other before we get married? We have both saved quite a lot of money. Oh, Jim, if you'll try to get thicker, I'll try to get thinner.Lovingly,Sarah."
Dear Jim:—I understand your poem. I won't fool a bit. I care for you, Jim, as you care for me. But we will be a joke if we get married now. Can't you see that, Jim? Can't we get more like each other before we get married? We have both saved quite a lot of money. Oh, Jim, if you'll try to get thicker, I'll try to get thinner.Lovingly,Sarah."
The Ossified Man read that letter and went out and walked up and down the streets for hours. He was the happiest and most perplexed man in all the big city. His heart at least wasn't ossified.
He remembered a professor who had studied him and whom he had heard say to those about that there was no occasion for the continuedossification in such a subject, provided the stomach was all right. "I'll go to that old professor," he said, "and I'll put the case to his giblets in a way to make him salty round the eyes. And I'll write all about it to my little girl, God bless 'er!"
So his "little girl" got the letter and cried largely and with vast resources and, as we say, "braced up." "He is good, my Jim," she said to herself; "and I'll meet him half way, God bless him! I know a professor too, and I'll see him."
So each went to a professor.
Professor McFlush was the doctor whose portrait accompanied an advertisement regularly in the Sunday papers, and whom the Ossified Man had in mind. He didn't hesitate an instant after an examination of what there was of his patient. "I'll cure you in no time if you follow my directions," he declared. "My Sulphuretted Tablets will knock out the ossification and as for the rest it's all diet."
"What diet?" asked the Ossified Man.
"Hash!" roared the doctor. "Do you drink much?"
"Naw," said the Ossified Man.
"Well, you've got to—hash—hash and porter.Hash is fattening, the potatoes in it does it. Porter is fattening, the malt in it does it. Them and my tablets together will do the business—seventeen tablets a day—dollar a bottle, thirty-four in a bottle. Five tablets before breakfast, and for breakfast hash and two bottles of porter. Dinner the same; supper the same. Anything else you want eat or drink all day long. Last two tablets just before you go to bed. Get your prescriptions filled here. Get your porter over at Johnson's wholesale grocery, I've made an arrangement with him. Ten dollars. Report weekly. Good day."
And the Ossified Man took up his task for Love's sake.
It was to Professor Slocum that the Fat Woman went. Professor Slocum was brisk and small but he had a way with the ladies.
The Fat Woman believed in him implicitly from the moment they met.
"Do you eat much?" was the first query of the Professor.
"Yes sir, considerable."
"Do you drink much?"
"Yes sir, some ale, and water most all the time."
"Madam, I am astonished! Keep on withthat diet and you'll weigh half a ton before you die, and you'll die within six months."
The Fat Woman gasped and turned pallid. She was influenced not only by love but by acute alarm.
The Professor looked upon her benignly.
"Madam," he said, "I can save you. My condensed Food Tablets and my Spirituelle Waters will do the business. The tablets will afford you sufficient sustenance for existence without affording any element for the increase of adipose tissue, while my Spirituelle Waters will gratify your thirst—the more you drink of them the better—while, at the same time, they will exercise an influence of their own. Get your tablets here at this office—fifty cents a hundred—Spirituelle Waters here too—quart bottles, twenty-five cents a bottle. Prescription: ten tablets and one bottle of the water to a meal; another bottle of the Waters before retiring. Drink all the Spirituelle Water you want during the day. Ten dollars. Report fortnightly. Good afternoon."
The professors knew their business. There could be no doubt of that. Not with any sunburst, so to speak, but steadily and day by day, the Ossified Man increased in flexibility andtissue and the Fat Woman decreased in fat.
There came a day when the Museum manager observed the change and sent for the Ossified Man.
"What's the matter, Jim?" asked the potentate.
"Nothing that I know of," was the answer.
"Do you weigh any more than you did, Jim?"
"About twenty-five pounds, I believe," was the hesitating answer.
"I'll see you in my Office at two o'clock this afternoon."
Then the Fat Woman was sent for and questioned.
"How much do you weigh, Sarah?" was the first query.
"Six hundred and twenty-three pounds, sir," was the truthful answer.
"Huh!" said the manager. "Sixty pounds gone Sarah! I'll see you in my Office at two o'clock this afternoon."
An hour later the Ossified Man and the Fat Woman were engaged in earnest conversation. After a pause the Fat Woman remarked thoughtfully:
"Jim, we're going to get the g. b."
"Looks that way," said the Ossified Man.
"Do you care much?"
"Nope," said the Ossified Man, "only I wish we each could have gathered in our fifty per for another six months or so."
"Well, I don't care!" said the Fat Woman, lovingly and desperately. "I've saved up about six thousand and you've got about five, and the three or so can go."
"Suits me," said the Ossified Man.
The meeting in the manager's office that afternoon was spirited but good-natured.
"Heard you'd got stuck on each other and were trying to size up together," said the manager.
"About the size of it," said the Ossified Man.
"Well, it strikes me that there are two sizes yet," said the manager, "but that doesn't matter. You are knocking out two of my attractions. I'll have to let you both go at the end of the week."
"All right," said the Ossified Man, good-naturedly. "But," he added, as a second thought struck him, "say, Sarah is going one way and I'm going the other and there is no telling how far we may happen to pass. It might happen that we might want a job again. Now whenI come back as the Fat Man, and she as the Ossified Woman, will you take us on?"
The manager roared: "Yes, when you come back weighing six hundred and eighty-three, and Sarah eighty-three, I'll engage you, you bet!"
The Fat Woman listened approvingly.
And now the two are on a fine farm in Indiana and are happy. She still takes Professor Slocum's Condensed Food Tablets and Spirituelle Waters, and he still takes Professor McFlush's Sulphuretted Tablets and porter, and they are growing more and more alike in appearance, as they are in thoughts and aims, and have the best and most comfortable understanding. But they'll never get back to the Museum. They wouldn't if they could.
Isn't it wonderful what love can do!
A LITERARY LOVE AFFAIR
There was laughter, naturally, over the Showman's absurd, yet not altogether unsentimental story and, after its recital he stood, undoubtedly, more nearly on a social footing with the others. There were his clothes, of course, and another excrudescence or two, but these were incidentals. The wayfarers did not even yawn, but looked inquiringly at the beaming and bestowed-by-Providence Colonel.
After all, it is doubtful if there be anything better in the world than a spinster—if she be of the right sort. Of course all spinsters are not of the right sort; few of us are. When this one especially fine spinster was called upon by the Colonel she did not know exactly what to do. She should have been as perfectly at ease and as possessed of aplomb as any voluptuously beautiful poser in a ball-room, yet she was somewhat embarrassed. She should not have been. She was an exquisitely beautiful woman, in the view of those who know things.With her thin nose and thin lips and general expression of cultivation and eyes in which showed loving regard and thinking, she was adorable to those upon whose eyes had been rubbed the great ointment of perception. Her one hundred and twenty-five pounds of existing womanhood, neat and good, was worth far more than its weight in gold or any other metal. When called upon this is what the spinster said most bravely:
"Colonel Livingstone, there is but one untold story of which I know and I wish I were capable of explaining to all of you how full of real life it was. Yet it seems so simple and silly that it is commonplace, though it isn't. Do you remember, Colonel, about the great tower of the Campanile, in Venice and the square down upon the pavements of which the pigeons flutter to be fed? Well this is a story—a true one—of something like those same pigeons and the Doge who first instituted the feeding of them, five hundred years ago, or something like that, only the scene and time are different. As you know, Colonel, I live in Chicago, and this is but the story of the pigeons of St. Mark's transferred to the corner of Clark and Madisonstreets in a city in another hemisphere. And, as I said, it is all true. This is what actually happened."
A LITERARY LOVE AFFAIR
This is a love story of two of the class who know things. Margaret Selwyn was a graduate of one of the bluest women's colleges between the two seas, and, more than that, she had a background of home culture and refinement, having parents of brains. She came from college with those acquirements, which shine exteriorly, and had an incurved back, and was "tailor made" from head to heel, yet having within her all that gentleness and greatness of heart which make a woman better than anything else, not even excluding the strawberry upon which the Right Reverend Bishop pronounced such a sincere eulogy.
As to the man, Henry Bryant, he belonged socially and in all other ways to the same class as the woman, even in brains and goodness, considering, of course, the limitations of sex. Each of these two occupied a social position—if such a thing as recognized social position be defined enough in the United States—distinctly understood by the people who knew them. Each was arrogant and self-sustained, and eachthoroughly and admiringly in love with the other. It was wonderful how these two, each accustomed to be obeyed, and each, in a gentle way, unconsciously dominant with those about, grew close and yielding together. Each recognized the masterfulness, feminine or masculine, of the other, and there came a great sweetness to the understanding. Yet to these two, well-poised and mentally well-equipped, came gusts and showers of difference of opinion. The man tried to be dignified and self-contained upon these occasions, but, as a rule, failed miserably. The woman didn't even try.
But these differences throughout the months of their engagement resulted in no tragedy of importance. They both had so much of the salt of humor in their composition that they recognized the folly of even a momentary antagonism, and each laughed and begged the other's pardon or rendered the equivalent of that performance. They smiled together over their mutual short lapses of realization of what it is that makes the world go round.
At such times as they quarreled the man would tell her the foolish but probably true story of the Irishman who came annually whooping into town at fair time in some old Irish village,whirling his shillalah above his head and announcing to all the world that he was "blue-mouldy for want of a batin'." And, after this comparison, Bryant would announce, in strictest confidence, to his sweetheart, that this blessed Irishman never failed to get his "batin'," and that there were "others" even unto this day.
And so it came, in time, that this man, in love with a woman, called her his "blue-mouldy" girl, and this came to be the sweetest title in the heart of each.
With all the saving grace of the sense of proportion, which is a good part of the sense of humor, and with all their love and understanding of each other, with such characters it was inevitable that something must happen. There are laws of Nature. Vesuvius gets dyspeptic. Certain Javan islands spill up into the sky and the world has red sunsets for a while. One day, this woman, good product of a good race, sat in her parlor awaiting her lover. She was reading a book as she waited.
Now as to certain facts: Miss Selwyn was in her literary tastes an Ibsenite, Hardyite, Jamesite, or something of that sort. Bryant was a Kiplingite or Conan Doyleite. She trimmedclose to something sere, and where nerves were. He was chiefly in his literary tendencies "Let her go, Gallagher!"
Margaret, having become absorbed in her book, looked up with saddened eyes from her literary draft of wormwood and tea, with the beginning of beautifully creased brows, to note the entrance of some lusty flesh and blood. Less in accord in mood and thought than were these, for the instant, never existed two people on the face of the earth, earnest lovers though they were and of about the same quality of thought and being. Something had to happen.
"Why weep ye by the tide, Ladye?" began Bryant, glancing at the face of his sweetheart, and from that to the book she had laid aside. As she did not reply immediately, he continued, taking up the volume:
"Is it The Han't that Walks or The Browning of the Overdone Biscuit that has lowered your spirits?"
"I don't know what you are talking about," she said.
"Neither do I," said he.
There they were, he, overcoat still on and hat in hand, and she sitting there and looking up at him but still enwrapped in a more or less emotionalfeverishness contracted from the volume in his hand. Any purely objective onlooker would have required no announcement of the approaching "circus."
The girl made an effort to recover command of herself. "Leave your hat and overcoat with the maid," she said, "and come and sit here in the window and look at the lake, while I read to you the beautiful ending of the story I have just finished."
"I will stay," Bryant declared; "I was going to ask you to go with me to the park and idle among the chrysanthemums, but this will be better." And he seated himself near the window. "May I be allowed to look at you, instead of following your advice to the letter and keeping my eyes upon the cold, gray lake water outside?" he continued. "No matter what I hear, I shall be content if I can see you."
Miss Selwyn flushed a little, but laughed good-humoredly.
Here the purely objective looker-on afore-mentioned might murmur over the foolhardiness of man when he meets, unawares and all uncomprehendingly, one of the bewildering moods of an impressionable sweetheart. The contented male creature rushed blindly to his fate.
"Before you begin, dear, tell me; tell me it is not Tolstoi or Ibsen you are going to read, nor yet George Meredith or Sarah Grand!"
At the last reference Miss Selwyn's eyes began to flash dangerously.
"You know I detest her!" she exclaimed.
"Do you refer to all four of the writers I mentioned as of the feminine gender?" inquired Bryant with an appearance of fervid interest. The fool was actually enjoying it all.
Seeing that her lover was only chaffing, Margaret made a brave effort, settled herself in her chair and found the place in her book.
"Before you begin—I beg your pardon," said Bryant deferentially, "but let me say that I was up late last night, and if I can't keep awake under the spell of your voice, don't blame me. Wake me up at the catastrophe, when the distant door slams or somebody breaks a teacup."
Miss Selwyn laid the volume down again, and, still smiling, answered quietly but a shade frostily:
"It would take something written with a mixture of raw brandy, blood and vermilion paint to arrest your attention, I believe! Your authors write with—with—an ax in place of a pen. But I can't harrow up my own imaginationwith their horrors, much less read them aloud!"
"An exclusive régime of problem novels, plays and moralizings on pessimistic lines is bad for the mental digestion," admitted Bryant in judicial tones. "Poor girl! I must teach you to live in and love this beautiful, violent, sweet and good old world of ours—the world of real nature, real men and women, and real literature!"
"I thank you for your indulgent, patronizing intentions," she flashed back at him. "You would feed butterflies on brawn, teach the bluebird to scream like a macaw, make the trembling, silver-leaved white birches all over into oaks."
"My dear Margaret—" stammered Bryant, starting up, but he could not lay the spirit he had raised.
"There are questions in life that cannot be settled by the stroke of a sword or ax," she went on. "Your favorite writer has smirched the fair figure of childhood in his brutal pictures of boys' life. He has made an unwholesome, disgusting thing out of what should be and is healthful and fine. How can you, who read him with patience, carp at my taste for what seems to me well thought and well expressed?"
"The effect of your favorites upon you to-dayhas not been particularly reassuring," said Bryant, more stirred by Margaret's tone and manner than by her words. Seeing that he had angered her, and trying to stem the tide of her indignation, he still blundered most flagrantly, and within a half hour the quarrel had culminated in an avowed separation for the rest of their lives, Bryant leaving the house in a state of indignant misery such as fond and over-confident lovers alone may know.
Not a word had been said, this time, about the "blue-mouldy" girl. The atmosphere had been too electric, the mood too tense for a laughing word.
Then followed silence between these two. Stubborn pride on the part of the woman, proud stubbornness on the part of the man. They were earnestly and faithfully in love, but each waited to hear the first word of forgiveness.
Bryant did write, but in his preoccupation left his letter upon the desk unposted, and in a day it was snowed under by his unopened or carelessly glanced at mail. Of course he misunderstood Miss Selwyn's silence and she resented his.
One Sunday morning Margaret, with an innate grasping and running back to the faith inwhich she had been bred, sought help at the source which best suited her—the relief which comes from religion.
It so chances that there is a shrine upon the bank of the Ganges. It so chances that there is what we call a Mecca. It so chances that we all occasionally seek our shrines.
Margaret Selwyn sat in her shrine, the outgrown old Episcopal Cathedral on Washington Boulevard, and listened to her pastor, one of the great old men who have grown up with a creed, but with thought and lovingness; one who has learned how to heal wounds, the wounds of which no tongue can tell, and how to advise genially and generally as to the affairs of life. Somehow, the old gentleman, with his white hair and robes, his simple, clean, old-fashioned honesty, had imparted to her a strength and faith in God which calmed and helped her. It may be there could not have been imparted to her by any one else in the world, politics and power and inherited splendor all considered, as much as could this plain old man.
The white-robed boys sang their recessional, and she became perhaps clearer and more comprehensive of mind than before she enteredthe church—certainly more equipoised than she had been for days.
Meditatively alive to the quiet of this Sunday noon, Miss Margaret Selwyn, as she neared the centre of the city, stopped short and looked about her. Where was she?
The pavement of the street was gray-blue, spotted with white, and gleaming here and there with the iridescent living tints of bird plumage. The air was winged by soft forms, and a crowd of idlers were scattering grains of corn upon the ground to lure and keep in sight the most graceful creatures that live between the sky and earth.
Against a sky as blue as that of Venice two snow-white pigeons were flying straight down the street toward their companions. A swarthy Italian stood with the birds almost under his feet, but, save the dark face of the street-vender, the pigeons and the perfect sky, the picture involuntarily imaged in Miss Selwyn's mind was all away and awry.
Here was no stately tower, remote and solitary as a recluse in a worldly throng; no Byzantine temple delighted her eye with its warm and gracious humanity of suggestion. The vast sunny space of the Venetian square, with itscolumned coffee-houses and shops, was in spirit and in truth far removed from here. St. Mark's, and the place where the dream of a moment had arisen in an impressionable mind, might have been on two different planets, so opposed were they in every outline, spirit and detail—save one: the fluttering, flying, eager, unafraid pigeons.
The sun shot side glances down through the thoroughfare and really did some good on this day, because this was the day of the Nazarene, and even the money-seekers on this day had abandoned in their affairs the consumption of bituminous coal. That is why on Sunday, in one of the greatest cities in the world, the air is clear and the breath better. That is one reason why, on Sunday, the American cousins of the "pigeons of St. Mark's" come fluttering from somewhere about the city, from only the Maker of them knows where, and dip downward out of the ether trustingly to the feet of the passer-by, be he thug or preacher.
Miss Selwyn had never heard of the vast flock of doves which dwell in security among the towering buildings of the city. Their wings flash across wide darkling streets all day, welcome to every careworn man whowatches, for a moment, their graceful flight. They were here before her now—there, parading strutting, looking up hopefully toward the men about them, each eagerly seeking the next flip of the corn. They were—and are to-day—because of some gracious instinct in humanity, the best casual street exemplification of what is best in human nature.
They dripped and dropped from somewhere almost simultaneously. There was one who strutted the most struttingly and whose only really justifiable claim was that from crown to midway of his body he had such iridescent purple as all the shell-opening fishermen of Tyre and Sidon never devised half-way. There was another one, a quaint little maiden, who will probably marry some English nobleman of the birds, snow-white, with strange geometrical lines crisscross about her back, and who was almost duplicated by a dozen or two others of her breed. There were two rufous things, the red of whose top and back lapsed into a white beneath, almost as exquisitely as blends the splendid red hair of a woman into the ever accompanying white of the skin beneath. There were little drizzled things, pert, like bantams, off-breeds which had introducedthemselves into the community. And there was nothing but just a tossing about among those beautiful creatures upon the pavement there, nothing but an Oliver Twistish clamor for "more" from those who stood above them, to whom they were doing more good than they could know.
On week days the pigeons fly out in foraging parties to the railway yards and the neighborhood of the huge grain elevators. They can be seen glancing above the tall buildings, far flying, specks of gleaming light, along the hollow spaces above the streets as they go and come from their feeding places. The crowded masses of wagons, street cars, carriages, horses and hurrying people keep the pigeons from the street where they are most at home together for six days. But on the seventh, when the burden of labor is lifted or a brief space from the shoulders of toiling mankind, the pigeons rally in force upon one of the most busy, prosaic, care-breeding corners in the great spreading city by the lake. And every Sunday come, as surely, men and boys to feed the air-travelers and look at them with the worship all men feel for natural beauty and grace.