THE LITTLE GOD AND DICKY

“Where are you going?” said somebody, as he slunk out toward the hatrack.

“He turned like a stag at bay.”

“Oh, out,” he returned, with what a vaudeville artist would call a good imitation of a person wishing to appear blamelessly forgetful of something he remembered quite distinctly.

“Well, see that you don’t stay long. Remember what it is this afternoon.”

He turned like a stag at bay.

“Whatis it this afternoon?” he demanded viciously.

“You know very well.”

“What?”

“See that you’re here, that’s all. You’ve got to get dressed.”

“I will not go to that old dancing-schoolagain, and I tell you that I won’t, and I won’t. And I won’t!”

“Now, Dick, don’t begin that all over again. It’s so silly of you. You’ve got to go.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s the thing to do.”

“Why?”

“Because you must learn to dance.”

“Why?”

“Every nice boy learns.”

“Why?”

“That will do, Richard. Go and find your pumps. Now, get right up from the floor, and if you scratch the Morris chair I shall speak to your father. Aren’t you ashamed of yourself? Get right up—you must expect to be hurt, if you pull so. Come, Richard! Now, stop crying—a great boy like you! I am sorry I hurt your elbow, but you know very well you aren’t crying for that at all. Come along!”

His sister flitted by the door in an engagingdéshabillé, her accordeon-pleated skirt held carefully from the floor, her hair in two glisteningblue-knotted pigtails. A trail of rose-scented soap floated through the hall.

“Hurry up, Dick, or we’ll be late,” she called back sweetly, secure in the knowledge that if such virtuous accents maddened him still further, no one could blame her. His rage justified her faith.

“Oh, you shut up, will you!” he snarled.

“Secure in the knowledge that if such virtuous accents maddened him still further, no one could blame her.”

She looked meek, and listened to his deprivation of dessert for the rest of the week with an air of love for the sinner and hatred for the sin that deceived even her older sister, who was dressing her.

A desperately patient monologue from the next room indicated the course of events there.

“Your necktie is on the bed. No, I don’t know where the blue one is—it doesn’t matter; that is just as good. Yes, it is. No,you cannot. You will have to wear one. Because no one ever goes without. I don’t know why.

“Many a boy would be thankful and glad to have silk stockings. Nonsense—your legs are warm enough. I don’t believe you. Now, Richard, how perfectly ridiculous! There is no left and right to stockings. You have no time to change. Shoes are a different thing. Well, hurry up, then. Because they are made so, I suppose. I don’t know why.

“’Stop your scowling, for goodness’ sake, Dick.’”

“Brush it more on that side—no, you can’tgo to the barber’s. You went last week. It looks perfectly well. I cut it? Why, I don’t know how to trim hair. Anyway, there isn’t time now. It will have to do. Stop your scowling, for goodness’ sake, Dick. Have you a handkerchief? It makes no difference, you must carry one. Yououghtto want to use it. Well, you should. Yes, they always do, whether they have colds or not. I don’t know why.

“Your Golden Text! The idea! No, you cannot. You can learn that Sunday before church. This is not the time to learn Golden Texts. I never saw such a child. Now take your pumps and find the plush bag. Why not? Put them right with Ruth’s. That’s what the bag was made for. Well, how do you want to carry them? Why, I never heard of anything so silly! You will knot the strings. I don’t care if they do carry skates that way—skates are not slippers. You’d lose them. Very well, then, only hurry up. I should think you’d be ashamed to have them dangling around your neck that way. Because people neverdocarry them so. I don’t know why.

“Now, here’s your coat. Well, I can’t help it, you have no time to hunt for them. Put your hands in your pockets—it’s not far. And mind you don’t run for Ruth every time. You don’t take any pains with her, and you hustle her about, Miss Dorothy says. Take another little girl. Yes, you must. I shall speak to your father if you answer me in that way, Richard. Men don’t dance with their sisters. Because they don’t. I don’t know why.”

He slammed the door till the piazza shook, and strode along beside his scandalized sister, the pumps flopping noisily on his shoulders. She tripped along contentedly—she liked to go. The personality capable of extracting pleasure from the hour before them baffled his comprehension, and he scowled fiercely at her, rubbing his silk stockings together at every step, to enjoy the strange smooth sensation thus produced. This gave him a bow-legged gait that distressed his sister beyond words.

“I think you might stop. Everybody’s looking at you! Please stop, Dick Pendleton; you’rea mean old thing. I should think you’d be ashamed to carry your slippers that way. If you jump in that wet place and spatter me I shall tell papa—youwillcare, when I tell him, just the same! You’re just as bad as you can be. I shan’t speak with you to-day!”

“Going daintily and dutifully to dancing-school.”

She pursed up her lips and maintained a determined silence. He rubbed his legs together with renewed emphasis. Acquaintances met them and passed, unconscious of anything but the sweet picture of a sister and a brother and a plush bag going daintily and dutifully to dancing-school; but his heart was hot at the injustice of the world and the hypocritical cant of girls, andher thoughts were busy with her indictment of him before the family tribunal—she hoped he would be sent to bed. Life is full and running over with just such rosy deceits.

He jumped over the threshold of the long room and aimed his cap at the head of a boy he knew, who was standing on one foot to put on a slipper. This destroyed his friend’s balance, and a cheering scuffle followed. Life assumed a more hopeful aspect. In the other dressing-room his sister had fluttered into a whispering, giggling, many-colored throng; buzzing and chuckling with the rest, she adjusted her slippers, and perked out her bows, her braids quivering with sociability.

A shrill whistle called them out in two crowding bunches to the polished floor.

Hoping against hope, he had clung to the beautiful thought that Miss Dorothy would be sick, that she had missed her train—but no! there she was, with her shiny high-heeled slippers, her pink skirt that pulled out like a fan, and her silver whistle on a chain. The little clicking castanets that rang out so sharply were in her hand beyond a doubt.

“Ready, children! Spread out. Take your lines. First position. Now!”

The large man at the piano, who always looked half asleep, thundered out the first bars of the latest waltz, and the business began.

“A line of toes rose gradually.”

Their eyes were fixed solemnly on Miss Dorothy’s pointed shoes. They slipped and slid and crossed their legs and arched their pudgy insteps; the boys breathed hard over their gleaming collars. On the right side of the hall thirty hands held out their diminutive skirts at an alluring angle. On the left, neat black legs pattered diligently through mystic evolutions.

The chords rolled out slower, with dramaticpauses between; sharp clicks of the castanets rang through the hall; a line of toes rose gradually towards the horizontal, whirled more or less steadily about, crossed behind, bent low, bowed, and with a flutter of skirts resumed the first position.

A little breeze of laughing admiration circled the row of mothers and aunts.

“Isn’t that too cunning! Just like a little ballet! Aren’t they graceful, really, now!”

“One, two, three!One, two, three! Slide, slide, cross;one, two, three!”

There are those who find pleasure in the aimless intricacies of the dance; self-respecting men even have been known voluntarily to frequent assemblies devoted to this nerve-racking attitudinizing futility. Among such, however, you shall seek in vain in future years for Richard Carr Pendleton.

“One, two, three!Reverse, two, three!” If you want your heels clipped, step back inadvertently into Master Pendleton’s domain. No matter how pure your purposes, you will illustratethe inevitable doom of the transgressor against nature’s immutable limitations; you will be severely nipped. And it will be just—he is triumphantly following the rules.

The whistle shrilled.

“Ready for the two-step, children!”

A mild tolerance grew on him. If dancing must be, better the two-step than anything else. It is not an alluring dance, your two-step; it does not require temperament. Any one with a firm intention of keeping the time and a strong arm can drag a girl through it very acceptably. It was Dicky’s custom to hurl himself at the colored bunch nearest him, seize a Sabine, so to speak, and plunge into the dance. He had his eye on Louise Hetherington, a large, plump girl, with a tremendous braid of hair. She was a size too big for the class, but everybody liked to dance with her, for she knew how, and piloted her diminutive partners with great skill. But she had been snapped up by the six-year-old Harold, and was even now guiding his infant steps around the hall.

Dicky skirted the row of mothers and aunts cautiously. Heaven send Miss Dorothy was not looking at him! She seemed to have eyes in the back of her head, that woman.

“Oh, look! Did you ever see anything so sweet!” said somebody. Involuntarily he turned. There in a corner, all by herself, a little girl was gravely performing a dance. He stared at her curiously. For the first time, free from all personal connection with them, he discovered that those motions were pretty.

She was ethereally slender, brown eyed, brown haired, brown skinned. A little fluffy white dress spread fan-shaped above her knees; her ankles were bird-like. The foot on which she poised seemed hardly to rest on the ground; the other, pointed outward, hovered easily—now here, now there. Her eyes were serious, her hair hung loose. She swayed lightly; one little gloved hand held out her skirt, the other marked the time. Her performance was an apotheosis of the two-step: that metronomic dance would not have recognized itself under her treatment.

“Thethelia,” she lisped.

Dicky admired. But the admiration of his sex is notoriously fatal to the art that attracts it. He advanced and bowed jerkily, grasped one of the loops of her sash in the back, stamped gently a moment to get the time, and the artist sank into the partner, the pirouette grew coarse to sympathize with clay.

“Don’t they do it well, though! See those little things near the door!” he caught as they went by, and his heart swelled with pride.

“What’s your name?” he asked abruptly after the dance.

“Thethelia,” she lisped, and shook her hair over her cheek. She was very shy.

“Mine’s Richard Carr Pendleton. My father’s a lawyer. What’s yours?”

“I—I don’t know!” she gasped, obviously considering flight.

He chuckled delightedly. Was ever suchengaging idiocy? She didn’t know. Well, well!

“Pooh!” he said grandly, “I guess you know. Don’t you, really?”

She looked hopelessly at her fan, and shook her head. Suddenly a light dawned in her big eyes.

“Maybe I know,” she murmured. “I gueth I know. He—he’th a really thtate!”

“A really state? That isn’t anything—nothing at all. A really state?” he frowned at her judicially. Her lip quivered; she turned and ran away.

“Here, come back!” he called, but she was gone.

“Ready for the cotillion, children!” and Miss Dorothy, her arms full of long, colored ribbons, was upon him.

There was a rumbling chord from the piano, a mad rush for the head of the line. A rosy blonde, with big, china blue eyes, dragged her protesting sailor-suited partner to the front, and glared triumphantly at the roly-poly couple behind her. They stared at each other desperately—they had had their dreams of precedence—and suddenly,as the robbers stood far apart and swung their arms carelessly high, the roly-poly couple crouched down, slipped between them, and emerged at the head of the procession!

The march began. Dicky, linked to a tomboy in white duck, who whistled the march correctly as she swung along, had fought for a place behind his late partner, and as they clambered into adjacent chairs he nudged her violently and whispered, “I’m going to choose you!”

She smiled shyly.

“All right,” she said.

Miss Dorothy approached with the favors. A violent hissing and snapping of fingers burst out from the line. They wriggled on their chairs. Miss Dorothy paused, threateningly.

“Perhaps we had better not have any cotillion,” she said sternly. “If I hear another hiss—” There was a dead silence.

Dicky sat primly, looking at the ceiling. As he had expected, a broad violet streamer fell in his lap. He leaped to the floor, seized Cecelia by her skirt, hustled the tomboy, as in duty bound,within the purple leash, and beckoned to the next girl in the row. They arranged themselves three abreast, and he drove them, to the inspiring two-step, across the room, in line with two other drivers similarly equipped. On the return trip they were confronted by three bands of prancing little boys, perilously realistic in their interpretation of the pretty figure, and as they met in the middle, with a scramble of adjustment, the steeds paired off neatly, and the flushed drivers, more or less entangled in their long ribbons, accomplished an ultimate two-step.

“Now, you choose me,” he commanded, as they scrambled into the chairs. Again she smiled, again she hid her cheek with her hair.

“All right,” she said again.

In vain Louise Hetherington made signs to him; in vain the rosy blonde snapped her fingers—he was blind and deaf. He slipped into the broad blue ribbon she held out to him at arm’s length, and cantered cheerfully before her, her slave forever. How lightly she floated on behind them! Not like that tomboy Frances, who clucked ather team as if they were horses, and nearly ran them down; nor like that silly, fat, yellow-curled Gladys, who bubbled with laughter and hung back on the satin reins until her team nearly fell over. Cecelia swam like thistledown in their wake, and slipped the ribbon over their heads with all the effect of a scarf dance.

“How lightly she floated on behind them!”

“That will do for to-day,” said Miss Dorothy, gathering up the ribbons, and they surged into the dressing-rooms, to be buttoned up and pulled out of draughts and trundled home.

She was swathed carefully in a wadded silk jacket, and then enveloped in a hooded Mother Hubbard cloak; she looked like an angelicbrownie. Dicky ran up to her as a woman led her out to a coupé at the curb, and tugged at the ribbon of her cloak.

“Where do you live? Say, where do you?” he demanded.

Her hair was under the hood, but she hid her face behind the woman.

“I—I don’t know,” she said softly. The woman laughed.

“Why, yes, you do, Cissy,” she reproved. “Tell him directly, now.”

She put one tiny finger in her mouth.

“I—I gueth I live on Chethnut Thtreet,” she called as the door slammed and shut her in.

His sister amicably offered him half the plush bag to carry, and opened a running criticism of the afternoon.

“Did you ever see anybody act like that Frannie Leach? She’s awfully rough. Miss Dorothy spoke to her twice—wasn’t that dreadful? What made you dance all the time with Cissy Weston? She’s an awful baby—a regular ’fraid-cat! We girls tease her just as easy—do you like her?”

“She’s the prettiest one there!” he said.

His sister stared at him.

“Why, Dick Pendleton, she is not! She’s so little—she’s not half so pretty as Agnes, or—or lots of the girls. She’s such a baby. She puts her finger in her mouth if anybody says anything at all. If you ask her a single thing she does like this: ‘I don’t know, I don’t know!’”

He smiled scornfully. Did he not know how she did it? Had he not seen that adorable finger, those appealing eyes?

“And she can’t talk plain! She lisps—truly she does!”

Heavens! Was ever a girl so thick-headed as that sister of his! Brains, technical knowledge, experience of the world, these he had never looked to find in her; but perceptions, feminine intuitions—were they lacking, too?

Poor deluded sex! What shall emancipation, what shall higher education profit you that cannot even now discern what charm has entangled your brothers and husbands?

“She puts her finger in her mouth! She can’ttalk plain!” Alas, my sisters, it was Helen’s finger that toppled over Troy, and Diane de Poitiers stammered!

He listened calmly to his sister’s account of his infatuation and its causelessness.

“Why, she’s a nice little girl,” said his aunt, smiling, “but, really, she can’t be called exactly pretty. There is something rather attractive about her eyes.”

In this wise may Mark Antony’s aunt have dismissed the very Serpent of old Nile herself!

“I should like,” he said to his mother the next day, “to go and see her.”

“Well, you can go with me to-morrow, perhaps, when I call on Mrs. Weston,” she assented.

“What? Why, of course not! Men don’t go calling in pumps. Your best shoes will do. Are you crazy? A straw hat in February! You will wear your middy cap. Now don’t argue the matter, Richard, or you can’t go at all.”

Seated opposite her on a hassock, their mothers chatting across the room, his assurance withered away. There was nothing whatever to say,and he said it, adequately perhaps, but with a sense of deepening embarrassment. She took refuge behind her hair, and they stared uncomfortably at each other.

“Seated opposite her on a hassock.”

“And he has never condescended to have anything to do with little girls before, so we are much impressed.”

Oh, why did not the hassock yawn beneath him and swallow him up! To discuss him as if he were a piece of furniture! Laugh away! The crackling of thorns under a pot....

Day before yesterday he had been so easilygrand seigneur, so tolerantly charmed: to-day he wished he had not come. Why didn’t she speak? If only they were out of doors; in a room with pictures and cushions a man is at such a disadvantage.

“If you’ll come over to my house, I’ll show you the biggest rat-hole you ever saw—it’s in the stable!” he said desperately. It was a good deal to do for a girl, but she was worth it.

“Oh! Oh!” she breathed, and her eyes widened.

“Maybe you can see the rat—he doesn’t often come out, though,” he added honestly.

She shuddered and twisted her fingers violently.

“No! No!” she whispered revoltedly. “I—I hate ratths! I dreamed about one! I had to have the gath lit! Oh, no!”

Frightened at this long speech, she looked obstinately in her lap, though he tried persistently to catch her eye and smile.

Their mothers’ voices rose and fell; they chattered meaninglessly. Ladies talked and talked: they never did anything to speak of, they only talked.

She would not look at him: at his wits’ ends, he played his highest card. If she were of mortal flesh and blood, this would interest her.

“Look here! Do you know what Boston bull pups are? Do you?”

She nodded vigorously.

“Well, you know their tails?”

She nodded uncertainly.

“You know they’re just little stumps?”

“Oh, yeth!” she beamed at him. “My Uncle Harry’th got a bulldog. Hith name ith Eli. He liketh me.”

“Well, see here! Do you know how they make their tails short?A man bites ’em off!A fellow told me——”

“Oh! Oh! Oh!” She shuddered off the hassock, and rushed to her mother, gasping with horror.

“He thayth—he thayth—” words failed her. Broken sobs of “Eli! Oh, Eli!” filled the parlor. He was dazed, terrified. What had happened? What had he done? He was shuffled disgracefully from the room; apologies rose above her sobbing; the door closed behind Dicky and his mother.

Waves of rebuke rolled over his troubled spirit.

“Of all dreadful things to say to a poor, nervous little girl! I am too mortified. Richard, how do you learn such dreadful, dreadful things? It’s not true.”

“But, mamma, itis! It truly is. When they are little a man bites them off. Peter told me so. He puts his mouth right down——”

“Richard! Not another word! You are disgusting—perfectly disgusting. You trouble me very much.”

He retired to the clothes-tree in the side yard—there were no junipers there—and cursed his gods. To have made her cry! They thought he didn’t care, but oh, he did! He felt as if he had eaten a cold, gray stone that weighed down his stomach. The cat slunk by, but he threw nothing at her, and his neighbor’s St. Bernard puppy rolled inquiringly into the hedge, stuck there, and thrashed about helplessly, but he said nothing to frighten it. He thought of supper—they had spoken of cinnamon rolls and little yellow custards—but without the usual thrill. What was the matter? Was he going to besick? There seemed no outlook to life—one thing was as good as another. He regarded going to bed with a dull acquiescence. As well that as anything else. It might be eight o’clock now for all he cared.

At night his mother came and sat for a moment on the side of the bed.

“Papa doesn’t want you to feel too bad, dear,” she said. “He knows that you never meant to frighten Cecelia so. You know that little girls are very different from little boys in some ways. Things that seem—er—amusing to you, seem very cruel to them. To-morrow would you like to send her some flowers and write her a little note, and tell her how sorry you are?”

He could not speak, but he seized his mother’s hand and kissed it up to her lace ruffle. The cold, gray stone melted away from his stomach; again the future stretched rosily vague before him. In happy dreams he did the honors of the rat-hole to a sweet, shy guest.

In the morning he applied himself to his note of apology; his sister ruled the lines on a beautifulsheet of paper with a curly gold “P” at the top, and he bent to his task with extended tongue and lines between his eyes. Hitherto his mother had been his only correspondent. He carried her the note with a sense of justifiable pride.

“It’s spelled all right,” he said, “because every word I didn’t know I asked Bess, and she told me.”

My dear Cecelia:

I am going to send you some flowrs. I am sory they bite them of but they do. I hope you did not hafto lite the gas. we are all well and haveing a good time. with much love I am your loving son.

Richard Carr Pendleton.

“Bess did the periods, but I remembered the large I’s myself,” he added comfortably. “Is it all right?”

His mother left the room abruptly, and he, supposing it to be one of her many suddenly-remembered errands, was mercifully unconscious of any connection between himself and the roars of laughter that came from his father’s study.

“Just as it is, mind you. Lizzie, just as it is!” his father called after her as she came out again; and though she insisted that it was too absurd, and that something was the matter with her children, she was sure, nevertheless she kissed him with no particular occasion, and held her peace nobly when he selected a hideous purple blossom with spotty leaves, assisted by the interested florist.

His offering was acceptable, and if, on the renewal of an acquaintance destined to grow into a gratifying intimacy, he learned from bitter experience that more than one subject was tabooed, that more than one sudden emotion must expect no answering sympathy, how was he to evade the tribulations of his kind? This cup was prepared for them from the beginning. If earthly bliss were flawless, should we concern ourselves at all with heaven?

That day she met him on her walk, and smiling almost fearlessly, offered him a camel animal cracker! True, the most obvious projection was bitten off, and that process is the best partof animal crackers; but then, she was only seven! It is not an age to which one looks for the most brilliant altruism.

He gave her in return a long-cherished cane-top of polished wood, cut in the shape of a greyhound’s head, with eyes of orange-colored glass. She seemed almost to appreciate it. He had been offered a white mouse for it more than once.

For two long months the Little God led him along the primrose way. The poor fellow thought it was the main road; he had yet to learn it was but a by-path. But the Little God was not through with him.

Her brother, an uninteresting fellow at first, had improved on acquaintance, and though he scoffed at Dicky’s devotion to his sister—thinking her a great baby—he had come to consider him a friend. One day, late in April, he led Dick out to a deserted corner of the grounds, and for the sum of a small red top and a blue glass eye that had been a doll’s most winning feature, consented to impart to him a song of such delicious badness that it had to be sung in secret.He had just learned it himself, and the knowledge of it admitted one to a sort of club, whose members were bound together by the vicious syllables. Dicky was pleasantly uncertain of its meaning, but it contained words that custom has banished from the family circle. They crooned it fearfully, with faces averted from the house, and an exhilarating sense of dissipation.

“’Yelly belly, yelly belly.’”

“Yellow belly, yellow belly, come an’ take a swim!Yes, by golly, when the tide comes in!”

“Yellow belly, yellow belly, come an’ take a swim!

Yes, by golly, when the tide comes in!”

As he slipped back to the house alone, practising it furtively and foretasting the joys of imparting it to Peter, the stableman, Cecelia appeared suddenly from behind a large tree. She was all smiles—she was not afraid of him anymore. Dancing lightly on one foot, she waved her bonnet and began to sing, bubbling with laughter. Horror! What did he hear?

“Yelly belly, yelly belly, comin’ take a thwim!Yith, by——”

“Yelly belly, yelly belly, comin’ take a thwim!

Yith, by——”

“Oh, stop! Cissy, stop it! You mustn’t sing that!” he cried wildly.

She looked elfish.

“Why not? Dicky thingth it,” she said with a happy smile.

She had a heavenly habit, left from babyhood, of referring to her interlocutor and occasionally to herself in the third person.

“But girls mustn’t sing it,” he warned her sternly. “Don’t you dare to—it’s a secret.”

She danced farther away.

“Dicky thingth it. Thithy thingth it!” she persisted, and as he scowled she pursed her lips again.

“Yelly belly, yelly belly——”

“I won’t sing it! I won’t!” he cried desperately. “I won’t if you’ll keep still! So there! I tell you I won’t!”

She stopped, amused at his emotion. All ignorant of his sacrifice, all careless of his heroic defense of her, she only knew that she could tease him in an entirely new way.

And the Little God, knowing that Dicky would keep his word, and that Peter would never get the chance for the scandalized admiration once in store for him, strutted proudly away and polished up his chains. His victim was secure.

Her brother, on learning the facts, suggested slapping her well—good heavens!—and having nothing more to do with her, for a mean, sneaking tattle-tale. Here was an opportunity to break his bonds. But to those who have served the Little God it will be no surprise to learn that it was on that very evening that he made his famous proposal to the assembled family, namely, that he and Cecelia should be really engaged like her Uncle Harry and Miss Merriam, and in a little while marry and set up housekeeping in the guest chamber.

“That’s what Miss Merriam is going to do,” he explained, “and Cissy’s grandma is sorry, too;it doesn’t leave her any place for company but the hall bedroom. But they’ve got to have the room, she s’poses.”

“That will do, Richard! You are not to repeat everything you hear. And I am afraid I need the guest chamber. What should we do when Aunt Nannie comes?”

“Oh, Cissy could have her crib right in the room. She wouldn’t mind Aunt Nanny,” he replied superbly. “She always sleeps in a crib, and she always will. A bed scares her—she’s afraid she’ll fall out. I could sleep on the couch, like Christmas time!”

But in the manner of age the wide world over, they merely urged him to wait. There was plenty of time. Time! and she might be living in the house with them!

It was that very night that he reached the top of the wave, and justified the Little God’s selection.

He came down to breakfast rapt and quiet. He salted his oatmeal by mistake and never knew the difference. His sister laughed derisively, andexplained his folly to him as he swallowed the last spoonful, but he only smiled kindly at her. After his egg he spoke.

“I dreamed that it was dancing-school. And I went. And I was the only fellow there. And what do you think?All the little girls were Cecelia!”

They gasped.

“You don’t suppose he’ll be a poet, do you, Ritch.? Or a genius, or anything?” his mother inquired anxiously.

“Lord, no!” his father returned. “I should say he was more likely to be a Mormon!”

Dick knew nothing of either class. But the Little God knew very well what he was, and was at that moment making out his diploma.

The End

By A. Conan Doyle

THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

A Sherlock Holmes NovelIllustrated by Sidney Paget

A Sherlock Holmes Novel

Illustrated by Sidney Paget

The London Chronicle, in a review headed

“THE ZENITH OF SHERLOCK HOLMES,”

says:

“We should like to pay Dr. Doyle the highest compliment at our command. It is not simply that this book is superior in originality and construction to the earlier adventures of the great detective. Dr. Doyle has provided a criminal who, as Mr. Holmes admits, is indeed a foeman worthy of his steel.[1]Hitherto he has found it comparatively easy to unmask his antagonists. But in the present case he finds himself checkmated again and again. There is pitted against him a skill nearly equal to his own, and he wins the game almost by a hair.”

1.“I tell you, Watson, this time we have a foeman who is worthy of our steel.”—Sherlock Holmes.

$1.25

By Stewart Edward White

THE BLAZED TRAIL

A tale from beyond the bounds of civilization. The second in Mr. White’s series of thoroughly American stories.

The inspiriting breath of the great pine woods is in this dramatic novel of frontier struggle in which a green “land looker” plays a lone hand against a powerful and unscrupulous land company for a vast tract of timber land.

By the same author:

THE WESTERNERS

MR. WHITE shows us the rough-and-ready life of a Western mining camp.

“’The Westerners’ lays strong hold on the reader. The thing is vital. There is a force and a sincerity distinctly Western—of the frontier; the grim naturalness of elemental things. Furthermore Mr. White knows his West, his plains, his Indians and his mining camps.”

—Chicago Record-Herald.

By George Douglas

THE HOUSE WITH THE GREEN SHUTTERS

The first novel of a new master. The work has gained wide-spread recognition on both sides of the water. Three of the most conservative and authoritative publications in England include it among the first twelve of the year. In this countryHarper’s Weeklygives it as one of the two most interesting novels of the year.

The critics differ as to with what other master George Douglas should be compared:

The London Timessays: “Worthy of the hand that drew ‘Weir of Hermiston,’” and that “Balzac and Flaubert, had they been Scotch, would have written such a book.”

The Spectator: “His masters are Zola and Balzac, but there are few traces of the novice and none of the imitator.”

Vanity Fair: “It moves to its end with all the terrible unity of an Æschylean tragedy.”

Harper’s Weekly: “If Thomas Hardy had written of Scotland, instead of Wessex, it would have been something like ‘The House with the Green Shutters’.... If any man is his (Douglas’) master it is Thomas Hardy.”

Hardy, Stevenson, Zola, Flaubert, Balzac, and Æschylus.

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