A READY LETTER-WRITER

"Spit, spit, spider!If you show me where my pencil isI'll give you a keg of cider!"

Then note the direction which the escaping particles of saliva take, and there you are! or, rather, there it is—the lost article.

Or there it ought to be, unless you have been guilty of some inexcusable act, such as omitting to wish at the very instant a star is falling, or the first time you taste each new fruit in season, or if you have forgotten to say:

"Star light, star bright,First star I've seen to-night,I wish I may, I wish I mightHave the wish I wish to-night!"

It was Bep who taught Frank to count white horses; to pick up a pin when its head was turned toward her, to let it lie when it pointed the other way; to bite the tea-grounds left in a cup, and declare gravely, if soft, that a female visitor might be expected, and, if hard, a male; never to cut friendship by giving or accepting a knife, a pin—indeed, anything sharp; and never, by any chance, to tempt the devil of bad luck by going out of a house by a different door than that by which she had entered.

The versatile Frank was most teachable. When Bep was "collecting bows," Frances would obligingly bow and bob for her minutes at a time, like a Chinese mandarin, or like some small priestess observing a solemn rite. What the Bad Luck was, the terrible alternative of all these precautions, poor Frank could form no idea. But she had come to associate it with the babbling tank, which seemed at night, when all was still, to be gurgling, "Bad Luck—Bad Luck!" threateningly at her.

Then she would go over her conduct during the day, carefully scrutinizing her every action that might have given this chuckling Bad Luck a hold over her.

Not a crack had been stepped on that she could remember; not a pin picked up that should have been let lie; not—

The scream that burst from Frances one Sunday night during this self-catechism brought Madigan and all the family to her bedside.

"What is it—what is it, child?" demanded her father.

And Frank repeated like a Maeterlinck or a bobolink, holding up a shaking small hand whose nails Aunt Anne had trimmed that very morning:

"Monday for health,Tuesday for wealth,Wednesday the best day of all.Thursday for cwosses,Fwiday for losses—Saturday no day at all.And better the child had never been bawnThat pared its nails on a Sunday mawn!"

"And fa-ther tooked Bep," remarked Frank the next day, the light of desire fulfilled in hereye, "and he said 'You ox!' and smacked her wif two fingers!"

Miss Madigan, who was a congenital sentimentalist, her tendency confirmed by a long course of novel-reading, would have loved a female Fauntleroy, and hoped to find it in each of her brother's children in turn—only to be bitterly disappointed when they came to an expressing age.

It occurred to her once to satisfy her maternal cravings—so perversely left ungratified amid much material that lacked mothering—with an imported angel-child. She chose Bombey Forrest's three-year-old brother for the purpose; a small manikin manufactured according to recipe by his mother, whom he had been taught to call "Dear-rust" in imitation of his pernicious progenitor; whose curls were as long, whose trousers were as short, whose collars were as big, whose sashes were as flaunting as feminine folly could make them.

The Madigans hailed his advent with delight the night he was loaned to their aunt, in their mistaken glee fancying his visit was to themselves. Miss Madigan soon undeceived them. At table he sat next to that devoted lady, whoheaped the choicest bits upon his plate of a menu which had been ordered solely with regard to infantile tastes. Afterward this maiden lady (whose genius for mothering cruel fate had condemned to waste its sweetness upon half a dozen mere Madigans) built card houses for her borrowed baby, read him the nursery rhymes that Sissy used to tell to Frances, confiscated Fom's Dora for his pleasure, and Split's book of interiors made of illustrated advertisements of furniture, which she had cut out and arranged tastefully upon a tissue-paper background. She dangled her old-fashioned enameled watch before his jaded eyes, and even permitted him to hold Dusie, the canary, who pecked furiously at the presuming hand that detained her.

At this the borrowed baby set up a howl of alarm, whereupon he was given Sissy's jackstones—not altogether to that young lady's sorrow, for at that moment Split was collecting a cruel pinch or bestowing a stinging slap for every point in the game she had just won.

To the bathing of the child Miss Madigan gave her personal attention, while Kate waited for the tub, into which it was her nightly task to coax Frances. Then, when her charge was ready for bed, the devoted aunt of other children sat rocking the borrowed baby softly till he fell asleep. The whole household hushed that night when Baby Fauntleroy Forrest's eyelids fell. An indignant lot of young Madigans were hustled off to bed that his slumbers might not be disturbed; and yet the moment Miss Madigan laid him, with infinite care and a sentimental smile, in her own bed, his eyes flew open, like the disordered orbs of a wax doll that has forgotten it was made to open its eyes when in a vertical position and keep them shut when placed horizontally. He saw a strange face bending over him, and he howled with terror.

Miss Madigan tried to comfort him, babbling fondest baby-talk in vain.

"I yant to go home!" wailed Aunt Anne's Fauntleroy.

Why, no; he didn't want to go home, the lady to whom he had been loaned assured him. Mama was asleep and daddy was asleep and Bombey was asleep and the pussy was—

"I yant to go home!" bellowed the borrowed baby.

But how could he go home? the lady, a bit impatiently, demanded. Wasn't he all undressed? Did he want to go through the streets all undressed—fie, fie, for shame!

"I yant to go home!" screamed Fauntleroy Forrest.

"Sissy—Irene—some one come here and amuse this child!" called Aunt Anne, at her wits' end. Fauntleroy was black in the face from holding his breath, and his borrower was nervously exhausted by the tension of a day spent in attendance upon the lovely child.

A troop of nightgowned Madigans came joyously in. For the edification of Fauntleroy, sitting up wide-eyed now in Aunt Anne's big bed, the tears still on his cheeks, the Madigans made monkeys of themselves till he dropped off asleep at last, when they were dismissed by a frazzled maiden lady, who was left looking at the small thing lying in her bed as at some strange animal whose waking she dreaded.

In the middle of the night and again toward morning the Madigans heard Fauntleroy's frightened scream, and chuckled like the depraved young things they were. But when Francis Madigan got up and, candle in hand, his queer nightcap tumbling over his left eye, and his gaunt shadow covering the wall and wavering over the ceiling, came to demand of Miss Madigan what in thousand devils was the matter, the borrowed baby was thrown into convulsions; while Don, the big Newfoundland, awakened by the din, burst into hoarse barks that the mountains echoed and reëchoed. After this it seemed best to Aunt Anne to sit up in bed for the rest of the night, making shadow-pictures on the wall for Fauntleroy.

Miss Madigan's high color had faded the next morning. Accustomed to unbroken sleep, she had not rested half an hour the whole night. It seemed that Fauntleroy Forrest was in the habit of lying across his bed instead of along it, and he had so terrorized the poor lady that she had not dared to move him, when he did fall asleep toward morning and she felt his toes digging into her ribs, lest he wake.

"Hurry with your breakfast, Sissy," she said faintly, sipping her tea, "so that you can take him home before school."

"Don't yant to go home!" whimpered the baby, whom the morning light and the presence of many small Madigans had reassured.

"He could stay and play with Frank, couldn't he, Aunt Anne?" suggested Sissy, sweetly.

Miss Madigan's look spoke volumes.

"Yes, yes," cried Fauntleroy. "Don't yant to go home!"

His papa would be lonesome, Miss Madigan told him, archly; and his mama would be lonesome, and Bombey—

"Don't yant to go home!" wept the baby.

"There! There!... Take him, Frank, into my room and amuse him—anything, only don't let him cry!" exclaimed Miss Madigan. "I'm going into Kate's room to lie down. I'm exhausted and—"

"Did Fauntleroy disturb you, Aunt Anne?" asked Kate, sympathetically.

But Miss Madigan hurried away. She was so unnerved she feared that she might weep. But, after nearly half an hour's trying, she found she was too tired to sleep, after all, and rising wearily, she went back to her room for the book she had been reading.

The sight that met her eyes, as she opened the door, completed her undoing. There was Fauntleroy, with an uncomprehending grin on his cherubic face, pinching each separate leaf of her cherished sensitive-plant. Evidently the borrowed baby did not exactly understand the desperately funny quality of the act, but he knew it must be the funniest thing in the world, for the Madigans were writhing grotesquely in the unbounded merriment it caused.

With a cry, Miss Madigan flew forward and sharply slapped the destructive baby hands.

"I yant to go home!" screamed Fauntleroy.

"Yes; and I want you to go, too," Miss Madigan declared, incensed. "Get his things, Sissy, this minute."

"But I want him to play wif," whimpered Frank. She was not so slow but that she could learn the lesson Fauntleroy's success taught.

Miss Madigan looked at her a moment. "Oh, you do!" she ejaculated sarcastically. "You haven't sisters enough—you want more noise and confusion in this house!"

The wise Madigans looked from her to one another and merely thought things. There was sadly little of the "angel child" about them. Their intuition was keen enough to penetrate their aunt's secret wishes and tastes, and they were occasionally tempted, for the spoils to be gotten out of it, to play up to that lady's ideals. But Aunt Anne was considered almost too easy by the Madigans, whom honor restricted to those foemen worthy of their steel. Frances was the only one who could, without losing caste, cater to her aunt's well-known and deeply detested sentimentality.

She did for a time, and it was from Miss Madigan that she learned her famous accomplishment. It was sung, or rather droned, and it went like this:

"B—A—Ba,B—E—Be,B—I—Bi—Ba—Be—Bi;B—O—Bo,Ba—Be—Bi—Bo,B—U—Bu,Ba—Be—Bi—Bo—Bu!"

Intoxicated by success, Frank sang this subtle ditty one day for Francis Madigan. He listened to it with that puzzled expression which his children's vagaries brought to his lined, stern face.

"Who taught you that nonsense, Frances?" he demanded sternly when she had finished.

Frank began to whimper. This was not the effect she had intended to produce.

"Who told you to say that gibberish?" her father repeated angrily.

Frank stammered the answer.

"And he tooked her—" she began her account of the incident afterward.

"Oh, you awful little liar!" interrupted a chorus of Madigans.

And Frank laughed with them. How she would have completed the sentence, if she had been permitted, she herself did not know.

Split threw herself with a bump against Miss Madigan's door. It remained unansweringly closed.

"Where's Aunt Anne?" she asked Sissy, whom she had nearly walked over as she sat playing jackstones in the hall.

Sissy looked up. Assuming a rigidly erect position and scholastically correct finger-movement, she mimicked her aunt at her desk so faithfully that Split could almost see the close-lined pages of Miss Madigan's ornate handwriting on the carpet where her disrespectful niece pretended to trace it.

"Scribbling, huh?" Split asked.

Sissy nodded.

Split shrugged her shoulders impatiently. She had intended to ask a favor of Aunt Anne, but she knew how useless it would be now. So she pushed past Sissy, entered the room softly, and returned with a long-trained grenadine skirt.

Sissy's round eyes opened enviously. "Did she say you could have it?" she asked.

A muffled sound which could be variously interpreted came from Split, who was throwing the skirt over her head.

"Did she?" persisted Sissy, putting her jackstones in her pocket and rising emulatively.

But Irene was doubling fold after fold of the skirt in front to shorten it; behind her the train billowed with an elegance that sent ecstatic thrills through her and a passion of envy through her sister.

"Is she writing yet?" Sissy asked at length.

Irene nodded. She was cinching her sash tight about the waist, so that her trained skirt might not come off in the ardor of "playing lady." When Sissy disappeared, and reappeared with her aunt's claret-colored poplin, Split was catching up her train with a grace that was simply ravishing as she rustled away.

"What'll you say to her—afterward?" called Sissy after her, prudently facing the future, even in the height of delight induced by feeling ruffles about her feet.

A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy

"A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry"

"Pouf!" A train meant domesticity and dignity to Sissy. In Split it bred and fostered a spirit of coquetry; she believed herselfto be very French in long skirts. "I'll just say she said 'Yes' when I asked her. She never knows what she says when she's writing."

Sissy nodded understandingly, and rustled in a most ladylike manner after her senior. The twins saw the two beautiful creatures swishing down the front steps, bound for the street to show their glory and feel the peacock's delight in dragging his tail in the dust.

"Did she say you could have 'em?" they shrieked.

And Sissy responded with that quick imitative gesture that signified scribbling.

With a light on their faces such as the Goths might have worn when pillaging Rome, the twins made for the treasure-house. A few moments later they rustled gorgeously down the steps, followed by Frances, wearing her aunt's embroidered red flannel petticoat. Unfortunately, Frank's heels caught in this, as she too strutted worldward, and down she fell, bumping from step to step, gaining momentum as she bumped, and threatening to roll clear down to Taylor Street, and so on down, down into the cañon, if she had not bumped safely at last into the twins. They, hearing her coming, had turned their backs and joined hands,and catching hold of the shaky banister on each side, presented a natural bulwark beyond which Frances and her bumps and shrieks might not pass.

And through it all Miss Madigan wrote.

Miss Madigan was writing letters. Indeed, Miss Madigan was always writing letters. In any emergency she might be trusted to concoct a long and literary epistle, which she rephrased, edited, and copied till she felt all an author's satisfaction.

For the Madigans' Aunt Anne was afflicted withcacoëthes scribendi, and was never so happy as when there was a letter to be written—except when she was actually writing it. But the heartlessness of the merely literary was very far indeed from Miss Madigan's ideal. She had the happiness to believe that, besides being very beautiful, her letters were most useful—in fact, indispensable. When everything else failed she wrote a letter. When that failed she wrote another.

A Malthusian consequence of her epistolary fertility, it might be feared, would be the necessary exhaustion of correspondents. But Miss Madigan's was a soul above the inevitable, as well as a pen divorced from the practical.On those occasions when the future of her nieces pressed itself questioningly upon that lady's mind she met the threat by declaring firmly to herself that she would "do her duty to those motherless children." It happened that her duty was her pleasure. It was her dissipation to suffer—on paper. In letters she enjoyed being miserable. No relative, therefore, however distant, no acquaintance, however slight, was exempt from this epistolary plague. To take the darkest view, most genteelly expressed; to make the most forthright and pitiful appeal in a ladylike and polished phrase; to picture the inevitable and speedy alternative if her plea were disregarded; and then to sign herself, "With a thousand apologies, and the assurance that only the extreme need of some one's doing something for poor Francis's children would bring me to trouble you again,"—this was Miss Madigan's vice. And she was as intemperate in yielding to it as only the viciously good can be.

A rebuff, absolute silence, even the return of her letter unopened, produced in her not the slightest diminution of faith in the power of her pen. Invariably when she mailed a letter she was so struck by her own summing upof the situation that she felt there could not be the smallest doubt of a favorable response. He who read it must be convinced. If he was not, why, there was but one thing to do—write to him again. If not to him, to another. And the Madigans were a prolific family, its members widely scattered and differentiated—an ideal clientele for a ready letter-writer.

So Miss Madigan wrote. Her wardrobe was pillaged, her privacy violated, yet she knew it not, or knew it only as one is aware of the buzzing of gnats when he rides his hobby through a cloud of them.

But there came an interruption which she was compelled to heed.

"Anne, I say!"

Miss Madigan's busy pen paused. It seemed to her that there was unusual irritation in her brother's irascible voice. Was it possible that he had knocked before, or was there—

The door opened in answer to her call, and Madigan stalked in. At sight of the open letter he held, Miss Madigan hastily covered the one she was writing.

Stamping ... in a frenzy

"Stamping ... in a frenzy"

"Perhaps," said her brother, suppressed rage vibrating in his voice, "it may be a change for you toreadletters. Read that!" Hethrew the page on the desk before her, banging his knuckles upon it in an excess of fury.

She took up the letter, a pretty rosy pink dyeing her cheeks (she was one of those old maids whose exquisitely delicate complexions retain a babylike freshness) as her eyes met the expression:

Anne was always a sot where her pen was concerned. The habit's growing on her; she can evidently no more resist it than Miles could the bottle.

"It must be from Nora Madigan," she exclaimed, recognizing the touch.

"Yes, it is from Nora, and it incloses one of your own. There it is."

He threw down before the ready letter-writer a composition which had cost her much labor, the thought of many days, upon which she had based unnumbered hopes and built air-castles galore, none of which, to do the poor lady justice, was intended directly for her own habitation.

She took the letter and spread it out carefully before her; these epistolary children of hers were tenderly dear to Miss Madigan. Her eye caught a phrase here and there that appeared to be singularly felicitous. This one, for instance:

Poor Francis, of course, knows nothing about this letter. I am writing to you, my dear cousin, relying as much upon your discretion as upon your generosity.

Or this one:

And Cecilia—she is really talented, though a commonplace creature like myself can hardly give you an idea in just what direction.

Or this one:

As to Irene, apart from her voice, which is really exceptional, she is Francis over again—Francis as he was, a high-spirited, reckless, devil-may-care fellow, winning and tyrannical, as we all remember him in the old days when the world was young.

Or even this:

I am afraid Kate will have to teach school, young as she is. I can't tell you how I dread the long years of drudgery I see before this slender, spirited child—she is little more than that. Think, Miles, of these motherless children growing up in this wretched hole without the smallest advantage, and, if you can, help them; or get some one else to. Couldn't you take Kate into your own family? I'm sure she'd marrywell, and Nora wouldn't be troubled with her long. She's really very pretty. Or couldn't you send me a little something to spend on clothes for her? Or couldn't Nora be persuaded to send her—

"Well," thundered Madigan, standing over her, "it must be pretty familiar to you. Suppose you read what Nora says."

Miss Madigan put her own letter away with a sigh. It was really unaccountable that Miles could have resisted it.

"Miles passed away six weeks ago,"

she read aloud in an awed voice.

"He had been ailing all spring. This letter, which came a fortnight since, I opened, of course, and return it to you that you may be made aware (if you are not already) of the demands Anne makes upon comparative strangers."For myself, I regret very much that your affairs are in such a bad state. Anne says that there are six of your children, all girls; but that can't be true—she always loved to exaggerate miseries; it must be that her writing is so illegible that—"

"For myself, I regret very much that your affairs are in such a bad state. Anne says that there are six of your children, all girls; but that can't be true—she always loved to exaggerate miseries; it must be that her writing is so illegible that—"

Miss Madigan's voice rebelled. She could read aloud adverse opinions upon her common sense, her judgment, or her pride, but to impugn her penmanship was to commit the unforgivable.

"I think Nora is distinctly insulting," she declared.

"No!" Madigan laughed wrathfully. "Do you, now? Why, what has she said? Only that you're a beggar, and I'm a coward as well as a beggar, because I don't dare to beg in my own name."

"Does she say that?" exclaimed the literal Miss Madigan, shocked. "Where?" Her eyes sought the letter again.

"'Where'! Thousand devils—'where'!" Madigan tore it from her and threw it to the floor, stamping upon it in a frenzy.

Sighing, Miss Madigan leaned her head on her hand. It was hard enough to find one's most hopeful appeal wasted, without Francis's flying into such a rage.

A silence followed.

"Look here, Anne,"—Madigan's voice was manifestly struggling to be calm,—"you must quit this infernal letter-writing. How could you write to Miles Madigan for charity, knowing that he cheated me out of my share of the Tomboy? Half the mine was mine. You know that, and yet you hurt my—"

"I fail to see," responded Miss Madigan,with dignity, "why I should not write to my own relatives; why I should not try, for my nieces' sake, to knit close again the raveled ties which your eccentricities have—"

"In order to get a box of old duds sent clear from Ireland!"

"Has Nora sent a box?" asked Miss Madigan, eager as a child. "You see, my letter did touch her, in spite of herself. And they won't be old duds. They'll be handsome garments, Francis, just the thing for the girls' winter wardrobe. Now that Nora's in mourning—"

With a crash that sent Miss Madigan's sensitive-plant rolling from its stand to the floor, Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled.

Miss Madigan flew to the rescue, and she had begun to scoop up the scattered earth when her eye lighted upon a line at the end of Nora's letter:

As you know, Miles had only a life-interest in the estate. At his death everything went to Miles Morgan. Perhaps Anne would do well to apply to him. The little matter of her never having seen him would not, of course, stand in her way.

"Of course not. Why should it?" Miss Madigan asked herself.

She knelt down upon the floor in the midst of the debris and took from her pocket the letter that Miles Madigan had never read. With the slightest change, the recopying of the first page or so, why could not—

Miss Madigan sat down at her desk. In a moment the steady, slow, studied pace of her pen was all that was heard in the disordered room, where the sensitive-plant lay half uprooted on the floor.

The Madigans were up and out. All A Street was alive with tales of them. In a cloud of dust due to their sweeping trains, they had swooped down like the gay Hieland folk they were, and captured the admiration and imitation of the slower, prosaic Lowlander.

They had not intended to go so far, accoutred as they were; but the attention they attracted first challenged, then seduced the vain things farther and farther, till they threw caution to the winds (and a boisterous Washoe zephyr was abroad) and sallied shamelessly forth. In their immediate train they carried Jack Cody, clothed and in his right sex, and Bombey Forrest, beating her drum. Crosby Pemberton slunk unrecognized in the rear.

Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled

"Madigan banged the door behind him as he fled"

In the van was Sissy victrix. She had cuther adorer dead, dead, dead, and she now felt that resultant reckless uplift of spirits which is the feminine corollary to demonstration of power (preferably unjust and tyrannical) over the other sex.

"Let's try to see the walking-match," she suggested to Split.

"How can we, with all that tagging after us?"

With a sweeping gesture to the rear, Split indicated the trained twins and Frances holding up her torn petticoat. Frank was bruised but beaming; in fact, she had never felt so much a Madigan, for she had never before been out on a raid.

"Let 'em tag," cried Sissy, gaily; her blood was up, and she knew no obstacles.

Down a clay-bank, into a vacant lot strewn with tin cans, slid the Madigans. Their trains hampered them, and, once started, only speed could save them. But they were not Comstockers and Madigans for nothing. Jack Cody, who had arrived first on the field, caught each whirling, dwarf-like figure as it came flying down, holding it a moment to steady it before he put it aside in order to receive the next female projectile.

Sissy was the last, and Cody, by way offlourish to mark the conclusion of his labors, lifted Split's little sister, train and all, as he caught her, with a whoop of satisfaction.

His whoop was cut short abruptly, and he set her down, his ears tingling. For Sissy, outraged in her sense of dignity as well as in the offish prudery that characterized her, declined to accept patronage as anybody's little sister, and boxed his ears as well as she could in the short time given to her.

Cody looked at her. It was really the first time he had regarded her as an unrelated individual. "Ye know what a boy does when a girl st jump.

But she held herself very primly, and the masking puritan in her voice quelled him. "If he's a coward—yes," she responded haughtily, hurrying on.

The boy looked after her as he joined Split. "She's funny—your sister," he said lamely.

"Who—Sissy? Oh, she's always cranky," said Irene, with Madigan candor when a relative was criticized.

They hurried on. The barn-like opera-house is built uphill, like all buildings on Virginia City's cross-streets, and it seems to burrowinto as well as climb the hill. In the rear, on the side where its boards were unpainted and unplaned, certain knots had been converted into knot-holes by the initiated.

Sissy was already on her knees, her eye glued to one of these apertures. All she could see was a short curve of empty seats, a man's shoulder and another's hat, a long space, and then the passing of a neat, long pair of women's gaiters unhidden by skirts, and soon after the nervous following of a smaller pair of women's ties.

"Why," she said, with a deep blush, fixing one eye upon the company, while the other blinked from the strain put upon it, "they're women! It's a women's walking-match."

"Sure," said Cody, without withdrawing his attention for a moment from the view inside. "The big, long feet belong to the one they call La Tourtillotte. She's French. The German one's Von Hagen."

"I think it's a shame," gasped Sissy. "Let's go home, Split."

Split, at her own particular knot-hole, affected not to hear. But Crosby Pemberton, perched in the elbow of some long scantlings bracing the building, took heart at Sissy's words.

"It isn't respectable, Sissy," he called to her. "No ladies go. Your aunt wouldn't like it."

This was fatal. At his voice Sissy hardened, and with a gulp of disgust she resolutely turned her attention to her knot-hole. In fact, as Crosby reiterated his advice, she felt called upon more spectacularly to ignore it, and seeing a more commanding and spacious knot-hole farther up, she mounted upon a big dry-goods box, and from there seated herself in a lone poplar, the apple of the proprietor's eye.

This was better, and in a sense it was also worse; for Sissy could plainly see La Tourtillotte, a gaunt, businesslike creature in short rainy-day skirt and sweater, her long, thin arms going like pump-handles, her dark, tense face set upon a goal which seemed ever to flee before her as her weary feet carried her slowly and still more slowly around the circular track.

Despite her shocked sense of propriety,—and the lawless young Madigans had very strict ideas as to the conventions for adults,—the ardor of the struggle, the uncertainty of the issue, seized upon Sissy. She heard a swift call from Irene, some distance below, and was vaguely aware that the company, skirted and otherwise, was beating a retreat. But thesmaller of the two contestants, on the other side of the knot-hole, had just come within the field of Sissy's rude lens. It was pitiable to see the haggard look on the German woman's plump face, the childish breakdown imminent behind the woman's staring eyes that met the bored glance of the male spectators doggedly, though her stout little body was still being carried resolutely, sluggishly, painfully along.

Sissy's hands flew to her breast. Something hurt her there, cried out to her, threatened her. She was furious with rage and choked with sympathetic sobs. She wanted to hurt somebody, and Jack Cody's insistent whistle, which kept sounding the retreat, so irritated and confused her that she fancied it was he that she would have liked to beat, as a representative of his cruel sex. But when she looked down, at last awake to the world on this side of the knot-hole, she saw Crosby Pemberton on the box at her feet, and knew who it was that she longed to punish for his own sins and every other man's.

"Quick—quick, Sissy! He's coming!" he cried, tugging at her skirt.

"Who? Go 'way!" Sissy stamped viciously, as she stood clinging to a limb; yet in that very instant she had seen that all the Madigans and their train had fled, save this poor servitor at her feet.

"Jan Lally—oh, hurry!"

Around the corner of the opera-house came a short-legged, bald little German, so stout and so loosely put together that, as he ran, his jelly-like flesh shook as though it was about to break the loose bag of skin that held it. It was Lally's opera-house, and Lally was come to catch trespassers in the act of seeing without paying.

Sissy's heart jumped to her throat. In the course of their maraudings, the Madigans were not unaccustomed to a stern-chase and a lively one, yet now it seemed to her that strategy was the watchword. Perched high up in the tree, hidden by its foliage, who would notice her—if only Crosby would go away!

But Crosby would not budge. He begged, he implored, he became confused in trying to explain to her her danger, and at last burst into bitter tears as he felt Lally's fat, moist hand upon his collar, and saw a hereafter peopled with wrathful motherly faces in various stages of disgust and despair.

"You come vid me. I gif you to Riddle. He lock you oop, you bat boy!"

A suppressed giggle of pleasure, at thethought of neat little Crosby in the hands of the constable, shook Sissy, perched snugly like a malicious little bird in the tree. It served him right, she said to herself gleefully, ascribing the basest motives to Crosby, as one loves to do when one's friends are not in good standing with one's self. He had had no business to hang around and point the way to her hiding-place!

"Oh, I say, Jan, let me off!" begged Crosby, white with terror of the jail—and his lady mother. "I'll never peek again, sure I won't!"

"Nu! You come vid me. Andyou, too!"

Sissy looked down. Was it possible there was another laggard whom she had not seen?

"I say—you, too!" bellowed Lally. "Vill you come now?"

In the very certainty of security a sudden panic fell upon Sissy. If she only dared to move, to reassure herself! Of course it couldn't mean herself—oh!

She felt a sudden tug that almost dislodged her. "You t'ink I don't see—huh?" shouted the perspiring Teuton below. "What for you leave dis trail hang down den—hey?" And he tugged again.

With a sickly remnant of dignity Sissystepped down and out. She had forgotten her train—the train that had been at once her pride and her undoing.

"We—I was playing lady," she explained, trembling.

"Oop a tree—huh? Peeking t'rough knot-holes—yes? A fine lady! I fix you."

A glow of defiance came to Sissy's cheeks. "I don't care," she cried, stamping her foot as she stood enthroned on the dry-goods box, her train about her. "It's a nasty, cruel show, anyway, and you couldn't hire me to come and see it. You ought to be ashamed, Mr. Lally! How'd you like it if your wife was staggering along in there without sleeping or eating for six days?"

Mr. Jan Lally's purple face looked as though it had been slapped. What had Mrs. Lally, with all her babies and busy housekeeping, to do with business? He was so astonished and perplexed by the sudden onslaught that the wriggling Crosby managed to slip out of his grasp, and got to a safe distance before Lally realized it.

"Nu!" he grunted. "I cou'n't hire you—no? Vell, you come mitout hire. I showyou."

Sissy felt herself lifted down without ceremony and dragged off. Her round face waswhite, her heart was beating like the stamps at the Chollar pan-mill. Yet her train trailed after her still in mock dignity. So did Crosby, at a respectful distance, fearing to follow, yet, though helpless, incapable of desertion. But at the entrance to the opera-house the door was shut in his face.

Sissy and her captor entered. The stage had been built out over the pit, and in the very first row of the dress-circle, the rim of which was the boundary of the contestants' suffering feet, Jan Lally sat down, with Sissy at his side.

Ah, to sit in the front row of the dress-circle! To feel the opulence of one's enviable position, as well as the artistic delight of being properly placed where one could miss nothing, while the brass band outside the opera-house played its third and last quick, jubilant invitation to pleasure—so tantalizing to the outsider, so gratifying to the fortunate one within!

Many and many a time had Sissy Madigan waited, during first and second bands, for some miracle to set her where she now sat! Many a time had the third selection been played, the players with their instruments filed into Paradise, and the poor Madigan peri remained shut outside.

But now Cecilia hung her head, shamed bybeing caught; shamed by punishment; shamed trebly by the fact that, apart from those poor sexless, half-maddened machines tottering feverishly around and forever around, she, Sissy Madigan, the proud, the pure, the proper, was the one thing womanly in the house!

It was not a full house by any means, and only the men immediately next to her seemed aware of her presence. Yet, with a consciousness that seared her soul and humbled the pride of the childish prude as with a stain upon her purity, Sissy felt the compounded, composite gaze of man upon woman out of place. It withered, it scorched, it stung her.

But finally Von Hagen, the little German woman, going the round of her maddening treadmill, reached the spot where Sissy sat. The sight of a child there, of a bare, bowed, neat little head in the midst of that inclosure of men's cold eyes, seemed to be the last touch needed to overthrow her tottering reason. She stopped, swaying from the unaccustomed cessation of motion, and held out her arms, smiling vacantly and babbling baby-talk in German as though to a dearly loved littleMädchenof her own.

Swift horror piled on Sissy. She had never looked into eyes from which sense had fled,and the sight stamped itself upon her brain with terrible vividness as food for future nightmares. So frightened was she that she was not aware of Jan Lally's relaxed hold upon her arm, which ached from the tight grip he had had upon it. But when the overtaxed body of the German woman fell in a heap almost at her feet, fright became action in Sissy. She flew past old Jan (his one concern now being for his walking-match), past the knees of the staring men, up the interminable center aisle, her poor train switching behind her as she stumbled, yet ran on, so absorbed by her suffering that she was unaware of the attention her queer little figure attracted, till she was out at last in the free air.

"Well, punish me!" she said, when she found Aunt Anne waiting for her at the head of the long steps fifteen minutes later.

It was a good deal for a Madigan—the nearest they ever got tomea culpa: they were not Christians.

Sissy's arrival was hailed by a populous nightgowned world, sent, like herself, supperless for its sins to the purgatory of early bedtime. Split came stealing in from the other room,bringing Frank along that she might not cry and betray her elder sister's movements—a successful sort of blackmail the youngest Madigan often practised. And later, Kate, looking most conventional and full-dressed in this nightgowned society, brought succor for the starving. They munched chocolate and camped comfortably, three on each bed, while Sissy told her adventures. When she came to the description of Von Hagen's fall, though still shuddering at the memory, she acted the incident so dramatically that Frances set up a howl, which was, however, most fortunately drowned by the ringing of the front-door bell.

Split started to answer it, but her nightgowned state gave her pause. "Perhaps father'll go," she suggested.

Kate shook her head. "He didn't come to dinner; he's been shut up in his room all day."

"What's the matter?" asked Sissy. An old look, that washed all the self-satisfaction from her round face, came over it now.

Kate shrugged her shoulders. "Something he and Aunt Anne talked about to-day," she answered, as she went out into the hall with the air of a martyr.

Sissy looked owlishly after her. Though Francis Madigan rarely ate anything that wasprepared for the family dinner, she could remember the rare times when he had absented himself from it, and feel again the usually ignored undercurrent of the realities upon which their young lives flowed full and free.

But things happened too quickly at the Madigans', and to be preoccupied to the exclusion of one's sisters was one of the forms of affectation not to be tolerated. Split threw a pillow at her head, and the fight was in progress when Kate called for volunteers to bring in a big box from Ireland, left by a drayman who was fiercely resentful of the extraordinary approach to the Madigan house.

Like a lot of white-robed Lilliputians, they tugged and hauled till they got it into the parlor. But when they had lighted the tall, old-fashioned lamp that they called "the lighthouse" they were disgusted to find that the box was addressed to "Miss Madigan, Virginia City, Nevada, California, U. S. A."

"Some people don't know anything about geography," sniffed Sissy.

"Well,—" Kate had been thinking,—"I'm Miss Madigan."

"Whoop—hooray!" The shout came from the twins. They were off into the kitchen for Wong's hatchet, and when they pressed itobligingly into Kate's hand, that young lady saw no way but to make use of it.

"Girls—it's clothes!" she exclaimed, her starved femininity reveling in the quantity of material before her.

"Boys' clothes," said Split, holding up a full-kneed pair of knickerbockers and a belted jacket. "Well!" With a philosophical grin, she began to put them on.

"And ladies' clothes!" cried Sissy, dragging forth a long black cape. "'Here would I rest,'" she chanted, draping it about her and lugubriously mimicking Professor Trask as the Recluse in "The Cantata of the Flowers."

"Let's do it! Let's sing 'The Flowers,'" cried Irene, shaking herself into some Irish boy's jacket.

"Not much!" Sissy planted herself against the door, as though physical compulsion had been threatened.

"Oh, yes, Sissy," begged Fom. "Bep and I can sing the Heliotrope and Mignonette. Frank can be a Poppy, and we can double up and—"

"I'll be the Rose," put in Kate, quickly. She had a much-feathered hat on her head and a crocheted lace shawl about her shoulders.

Here would I rest,

"'Here would I rest,' she chanted"

"I'll be the Rose." Split, corrupted byher body's boyish environment, stretched her legs apart defiantly. "You can't sing it; you know you can't, Kate. You never could get up to G. If I'm not the Rose—"

"Oh, well," said Kate, drawing on a pair of soiled, long light gloves she had pulled out of the box, "I'll be the Lily, then. Come on, Sis."

"I won't," said Sissy, almost weeping. She knew she would. "I won't be the Recluse! I won't be the Recluse every time, just because you two are so greedy and—"

"You know," said Kate, smothering a giggle, but not very successfully, "no one can do it as well as you."

"And it's really a very important part, and the very first solo," chuckled Irene. "Else why did Professor Trask take it himself?"

"If it's so important," put in Sissy, grasping at a straw, "you'd better take it yourself. Why must I always take a man's part? And I can't sing, anyway."

"Why, Sissy!" Split's tone was flattery incarnate, but the irony in her eye made her junior dance.

"You know I can't," she sniffled.

"But my voice and Split's go so well together in the Rose and Lily duet," said Kate,putting the book of the cantata upon the piano-rack and opening it persuasively.

"You promise me every time," wailed the downtrodden Recluse, reluctantly moving forward, "that I won't have to be it the next time."

"Well, you won't next time," said Kate, generously. "Will she, Split?"

"Well, I won't sing it this time," declared Sissy, seating herself at the piano, yet making a last stand at the very guns.

But Kate and Irene burst forth in the opening chorhat they were acting. And the twins, still pulling stage properties out of the box, and even Frances, fantastically decorated with a torn Irish lace fichu over the bifurcated, footed white garment she still wore o' nights, joined joyfully in:

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