it otherwise, of what would not only childhood, but the world be robbed, that we would not have eliminated!

The lilliputian baskets which schoolboys carve out of peach, plum, and even cherry stones are sometimes really works of art, and when such a little ornament, given as keepsake a generation ago by some deft-fingered schoolfellow, turns up, in clearing out a bureau drawer or an old box, there are brought to mind a host of associations of the old-fashioned district school, where one learned much of greater value than book-lore. There come back the morning walks to school along dewy roadsides; the noon-times in the adjacent woods; the swings made by interweaving low-hanging beech boughs; the going, at the call of school, with one's particular comrade to some well or spring to bring a pail of fresh water. What teacher with a heart might not be placated by a nosegay of wild flowers, if the water-carriers did take their own time! From the opening of the first bloodroot, how sweet we made the bare schoolroom with flowers from garden, roadside, and woods! The teacher's desk overflowed with them, and empty ink-bottles served the girls as vases for their desks. When the petals fell from poppy or peony or fragrant rose, it was a rest from partial payments or the meaningless chant of "I write, thou writest, he writes," and so on, to put them to press inside a book. The dried leaves, petals, wreaths, or what-not, of no herbarium worth, had a value of their own to us young things; they were the symbols of what youth sought, ever will seek, and ever should find, - the bloom, the color, the perfume of life. To-day, when on opening a long-disused book one chances upon them, grown brown with

the lapse of years, one feels like kissing them and the discolored pages. Dear ashes of roses!

One of the last of the long pageant of out-of-door amusements was the making of pumpkin lanterns, in early autumn. We counted it a great frolic to carve out the grotesque faces, without the knowledge of the elders of the family; then, after nightfall, to steal out, light the candle within each head, and suddenly hold the grinning hobgoblin, with its fiery eyes and mouth, in front of the window of a room where sat some of those who were not in our secret. Oftentimes we decorated the top of each post of the front gate with one of the flame-eyed monsters. After the home fun was over, perhaps we might dance off, carrying our illuminations to some of the neighbors. Then home at last, with pulses all a-tingle, to go to bed in an unconscious rapture over the soft darkness, full of nameless autumnal scents, that we had just left, to lie building air-castles, while through the now half - sere morning- glory vines crept in the entrancing pathos of the music of myriads of crickets; starting now and then, as slumber stole on, when an apple fell to earth with a dull thud.

Thus waned the sylvan year. The long evenings came, when we sat about the home fireside, playing morris or foxand-geese, with red and white grains of corn for men; cracking nuts; eating apples and counting their seeds, while we repeated the old divination rhymes; telling oft-told riddles; between whiles recalling the good times of the past season, planning new ones for next year, and reckoning the months until the opening spring should begin another round of rural pastimes.

Fanny D. Bergen.

V.

"I'LL give up the house if they'll let me take what I require!" That, on the morrow, was what Mrs. Gereth's stifled night had qualified her to say, with a tragic face, at breakfast. Fleda reflected that what she "required" was simply every object that surrounded them. The poor woman would have admitted this truth and accepted the conclusion to be drawn from it, the reduction to the absurd of her attitude, the exaltation of her revolt. The girl's dread of a scandal, of spectators and critics, diminished the more she saw how little vulgar avidity had to do with this rigor. It was not the crude love of possession; it was the need to be faithful to a trust and loyal to an idea. The idea was surely noble : it was that of the beauty Mrs. Gereth had wrought. Pale but radiant, with Pale but radiant, with her back to the wall, she rose there like a heroine guarding a treasure. To give up the ship was to flinch from her duty; there was something in her eyes that declared she would die at her post. If their difference should become public, the shame would be all for the others. If Waterbath thought it could afford to expose itself, why, Waterbath was welcome to the folly. Her fanaticism gave her a new distinction, and Fleda perceived almost with awe that she had never carried herself so well. She trod the place like a reigning queen or a proud usurper; full as it was of splendid pieces, it could show, in these days, no ornament so effective as its menaced mistress.

Our young lady's spirit was strangely divided; she had a tenderness for Owen which she deeply concealed, yet it left her occasion to marvel at the way a man was made who could care in any relation for a creature like Mona Brigstock, when he had known in any relation a creature

like Adela Gereth. With such a mother to give him the pitch, how could he take it so low? She wondered that she did n't despise him for this, but there was something that kept her from it. If there had been nothing else, it would have sufficed that she really found herself from this moment the medium of communication with him.

"He'll come back to assert himself," Mrs. Gereth had said; and the following week Owen in fact reappeared. He might merely have written, Fleda could see, but he had come in person, because it was at once "nicer" for his mother and stronger for his cause. He did n't like the row, though Mona probably did; if he had n't a sense of beauty, he had after all a sense of justice; but it was inevitable he should clearly announce at Poynton the date at which he must look to find the house vacant. "You don't think I'm rough or hard, do you?" he asked of Fleda, his impatience shining in his idle eyes as the dining-hour shines in clubwindows. "The place at Ricks stands there with open arms. And then I give her lots of time, and tell her she can remove everything that belongs to her." Fleda recognized the elements of what the newspapers call a deadlock in the circumstance that nothing at Poynton belonged to Mrs. Gereth either more or less than anything else. She must either take everything or nothing, and the girl's suggestion was that it might perhaps be an inspiration to do the latter, and begin again on a clean page. What, however, was the poor woman, in that case, to begin with? What was she to do at all, on her meagre income, but make the best of the objets d'art of Ricks, the treasures collected by Mr. Gereth's maiden aunt? She had never been near the place: for long years it had been let to strangers, and after that the foreboding

that it would be her doom had kept her from the abasement of it. She had felt that she should see it soon enough, but Fleda (who was careful not to betray to her that Mona had seen it and had been gratified) knew her reasons for believing that the maiden aunt's principles had had much in common with the principles of Waterbath. The only thing, in short, that she would ever have to do with the objets d'art of Ricks would be to turn them out into the road. What belonged to her at Poynton, as Owen said, would conveniently mitigate the void resulting from that demonstration.

The exchange of observations between the friends had grown very direct by the time Fleda asked Mrs. Gereth whether she literally meant to shut herself up and stand a siege, or whether it was her idea to expose herself, more informally, to be dragged out of the house by constables. "Oh, I prefer the constables and the dragging!" the heroine of Poynton had answered. "I want to make Owen and Mona do everything that will be most publicly odious." She gave it out that it was her one thought now to force them to a line that would dishonor them and dishonor the tradition they embodied, though Fleda was privately sure that she had visions of an alternative policy. The strange thing was that, proud and fastidious all her life, she now showed so little distaste for the world's hearing of the squabble. What had taken place in her, above all, was that a long resentment had ripened. She hated the effacement to which English usage reduced the widowed mother: she had discoursed of it passionately to Fleda; contrasted it with the beautiful homage paid in other countries to women in that position, women no better than herself, whom she had seen acclaimed and enthroned, whom she had known and envied; made, in short, as little as possible a secret of the injury, the bitterness, she found in it. The great wrong Owen had done her was not his "taking up" with

Mona,- that was disgusting, but it was a detail, an accidental form; it was his failure from the first to understand what it was to have a mother at all, to appreciate the beauty and sanctity of the character. She was just his mother as his nose was just his nose, and he had never had the least imagination or tenderness or gallantry about her. One's mother, good heavens, if one were the kind of fine young man one ought to be, the only kind Mrs. Gereth cared for, was a subject for poetry, for idolatry. Had n't she often told Fleda of her friend Madame de Jaume, the wittiest of women, but a small, black, crooked person, each of whose three boys, when absent, wrote to her every day of their lives? She had the house in Paris, she had the house in Poitou, she had more than in the lifetime of her husband (to whom, in spite of her appearance, she had afforded repeated cause for jealousy), because she had, to the end of her days, the supreme word about everything. It was easy to see that Mrs. Gereth would have given again and again her complexion, her figure, and even perhaps the spotlesss virtue she had still more successfully retained, to have been Madame de Jaume. She was n't, alas, and this was what she had at present a magnificent occasion to protest against. She was fully aware, of course, of Owen's concession, his willingness to let her take away with her the few things she liked best; but as yet she only declared that to meet him on this ground would be to give him a triumph, to put him impossibly in the right. "Liked best"? There was n't a thing in the house that she did n't like best, and what she liked better still was to be left where she was. How could Owen use such an expression without being conscious of his hypocrisy ? Mrs. Gereth, whose criticism was often gay, dilated with sardonic humor on the happy look a dozen objects from Poynton would wear, and the charming effect they would conduce to when interspersed with the peculiar features of Ricks.

What had her whole life been but an effort toward completeness and perfection? Better Waterbath at once, in its cynical unity, than the ignominy of such a mixture!

All this was of no great help to Fleda, in so far as Fleda tried to rise to her mission of finding a way out. When at the end of a fortnight Owen came down once more, it was ostensibly to tackle a farmer whose proceedings had been irregular; the girl was sure, however, that he had really come, on the instance of Mona, to see what his mother was doing. He wished to satisfy himself that she was preparing her departure, and he wished to perform a duty, distinct but not less imperative, in regard to the question of the trophies with which she would retreat.

:

The tension between them was now such that he had to perpetrate these offenses without meeting his adversary. Mrs. Gereth was as willing as himself that he should address to Fleda Vetch whatever odious remarks he might have to make she only pitied her poor young friend for repeated encounters with a person as to whom she perfectly understood the girl's repulsion. Fleda thought it nice of Owen not to have expected her to write to him; he would n't have wished any more than herself that she should have the air of spying on his mother in his interest. What made it comfortable to deal with him in this more familiar way was the sense that she understood so perfectly how poor Mrs. Gereth suffered, and that she measured so adequately the sacrifice the other side did take rather monstrously for granted. She understood equally how Owen himself suffered, now that Mona had already begun to make him do things he did n't like. Vividly Fleda apprehended how she would have first made him like anything she would have made him do ; anything even as disagreeable as this appearing there to state, virtually on Mona's behalf, that of course there must be a definite limit to the number of articles

appropriated. appropriated. She took a longish stroll with him in order to talk the matter over; to say if she did n't think a dozen pieces, chosen absolutely at will, would n't be a handsome allowance; and above all to consider the very delicate question of whether the advantage enjoyed by Mrs. Gereth might n't be left to her honor. To leave it so was what Owen wished; but there was plainly a young lady at Waterbath to whom, on his side, he already had to render an account. He was as touching in his offhand annoyance as his mother was tragic in her intensity; for if he could n't help having a sense of propriety about the whole matter, so he could as little help hating it. It was for his hating it, Fleda reasoned, that she liked him so, and her insistence to his mother on the hatred perilously resembled, on one or two occasions, a revelation of the liking. There were moments when, in conscience, that revelation pressed her; inasmuch as it was just on the ground of her not liking him that Mrs. Gereth trusted her so much. Mrs. Gereth herself didn't, in these days, like him at all, and she was of course on Mrs. Gereth's side. He ended, really, while the preparations for his marriage went on, by quite a little custom of coming and going; but on no one of these occasions would his mother receive him. He talked only with Fleda and strolled with Fleda; and when he asked her, in regard to the great matter, if Mrs. Gereth were really doing nothing, the girl usually replied, "She pretends not to be, if I may say so; but I think she is really thinking over what she 'll take." When her friend asked her what Owen was doing, she could have but one answer: "He's waiting, my dear, to see what you do!"

Mrs. Gereth, a month after she had received her great shock, did something abrupt and extraordinary: she caught up her companion and went to have a look at Ricks. They had come to London first and taken a train from Liver

pool Street, and the least of the sufferings they were armed against was that of passing the night. Fleda's admirable dressing-bag had been given her by her friend. 66 Why, it's charming!" she exclaimed a few hours later, turning back again into the small prim parlor from a friendly advance to the single plate of the window. Mrs. Gereth hated such windows, the one flat glass, sliding up and down, especially when they enjoyed a view of four iron pots on pedestals, painted white and containing ugly geraniums, ranged on the edge of a gravel-path, and doing their best to give it the air of a terrace. Fleda had instantly averted her eyes from these ornaments, but Mrs. Gereth grimly gazed, wondering of course how a place in the deepest depths of Essex and three miles from a small station could contrive to look so suburban. The room was practically a shallow box, with the junction of the walls and ceiling guiltless of curve or cornice, and marked merely by a little band of crimson paper glued round the top of the other paper, a turbid gray sprigged with silver flowers. This decoration was rather new and quite fresh; and there was in the centre of the ceiling a big square beam papered over in white, as to which Fleda hesitated about venturing to remark that it was rather picturesque. She recognized in time that this remark would be weak, and that, throughout, she should be able to say nothing either for the mantelpieces or for the doors, of which she saw her companion become sensible with a soundless moan. On the subject of doors, especially, Mrs. Gereth had the finest views; the thing in the world she most despised was the meanness of the single flap. From end to end, at Poynton, there were high double leaves. At Ricks the entrances to the rooms were like the holes of rabbit-hutches.

It was all, none the less, not so bad as Fleda had feared; it was faded and melancholy, whereas there had been a dan

ger that it would be cheerful and loud. The house was crowded with objects of which the aggregation somehow made a thinness, and the futility a grace; things that told her they had been gathered as slowly and as lovingly as the rarities of Poynton. She too, for a home, could have lived with them: they made her like the old maiden aunt; they made her even wonder if it did n't work more for happiness not to have tasted, as she herself had done, of knowledge. Without resources, without a stick, as she said, of her own, Fleda was moved, after all, to some secret surprise at the pretensions of a shipwrecked woman who could hold such an asylum cheap. The more she looked about, the surer she felt of the character of the maiden aunt, the sense of whose dim presence urged her to pacification the maiden aunt had been a dear; she would have adored the maiden aunt. The poor lady had had some tender little story; she had been sensitive and ignorant and exquisite was a sort of origin, a sort of atmosphere for relics, though different from the sorts most prized at Poynton. Mrs. Gereth had of course more than once said that one of the deepest mysteries of life was the way that, by certain natures, hideous objects could be loved; but it was n't a question of love, now, for these; it was only a question of a certain practical patience. Perhaps some thought of that kind had stolen over Mrs. Gereth when, at the end of a brooding hour, she exclaimed, taking in the house with a strenuous sigh, "Well, something can be done with it!" Fleda had repeated to her more than once the indulgent fancy about the maiden aunt, she was so sure she had suffered. "I'm sure I hope she did!" was, however, all that Mrs. Gereth had replied.

VI.

that too

It was a great relief to the girl at last to perceive that the dreadful move would