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showed here and there a receptive, bald hollow untufted with beach-grass, and resigned myself to an intermittent doze, waking after a time to the roar of gratified mosquitoes from the marsh, who in the breathless dawn were having a fiesta over this unexpected meal spread upon the dune. Across the bay a red ball was rolling up behind a blue bar of distant shore. Sunrise!

A puff of air, foretelling the wind that comes up with the sun, met me as I ran down to the edge of our creek where it widened invitingly toward the harbor. It was running swiftly out, well on the ebb. The light glinted on the sandy bottom through the clear water; I looked at it longingly a moment, then seized my supine bag and fled up the path to the wooded hill.

Far out in the marsh a figure swathed in trailing white presently picked its way through the stiff-bladed grass to the edge of the upper creek. Splash! and down the deep channel it gleefully drifted, over great holes scooped by the current, a wall of bright-green reeds on each side, rosy clouds overhead, and the tips of the grass-wall becoming charmingly alight with sunrise; on and on, around a bend, hurrying with the serene hurry of the tide. The slit of sky above was changing to fiery red; the push and sweep of the water was delicious. Perhaps, I thought, as it curled around my chin, even Ophelia may have exulted in that brief moment in the "weeping brook" when

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for it is told of her that as they did, poor maid, "she chanted snatches of old tunes."

I, too, should have very much liked to chant or to shout, but was quite breathlessly busy steering around turns and over deep spots where one glanced thrillingly down and saw the delightful scary green depths below, with dim eels. wriggling, and great crabs parading about. The strong-willed tide twisted freakishly, trying to cast me up on sand-bars, as all proper drift should be

cast; and once it impelled me enough out of my course, so that I brushed against the bank of the marsh and felt its crabby breath in my face as I looked far into its mysterious, cathedral-like dusk between the stems of the reeds, which in the distance stirred slightly with the passing of some unseen watercreature. Near by, small brown crabs were scrabbling through the roots of the grasses, happy and light-hearted in their mud, just like biologists!—and waving their nippers ferociously at one another.

With only the sweep of the tide about me, an unearthly glow from fiery cloud overhead, and the green, fast-flying walls on each side, the world was utterly shut out; indeed, after indefinite drifting, it had almost begun to seem as if there were no world but this one of silence and swift waters, when, swinging around a familiar bend, I found myself at last grounding on familiar sands.

Snatching my linen coat from its twig in the cherry-tree, I hastened gladly across the reassurance of stolid sand-flats under discouraged willows. The surface of the sea was wrinkling; a sailing-breeze had sprung up. I felt damp and cool and very salt, and ravenously hungry not so much for food as for mere, priceless speech with my kind, having lived through in that one night, it seemed, considerably more than my desired year of solitude.

From the harbor came inspiriting sounds: a competing chock of oars; ropes running through blocks as schooner-sails went up, the retrogressive rat-tatting of gasoleners already on their way to sea.

The good sunshine lay on white fences and houses, smoke soared ingratiatingly from many small chimneys, and as fishermen hurried back and forth from the shore, I found myself actually clutching at snatches of their rough talk and laughter, listening eagerly as to something precious.

By a familiar, gray wharf, which wandered seaward from the heart of the town, I stopped, staring at a line of busy figures in oilskins bent absorbedly over a row of tubs that stood besides the wall of a fish-house. Pickling had begun!

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"In her own strength lies her pride. She is not a woman. beauty, loneliness, cruelty and the ultimate passion of all life."

T

HE prisoners who were to die by the queen's command at the rising of the sun (her brother) lay face downward in the sand, some of them drunken, and others sober despite the wine that the guards had permitted them on their last night on earth, and told the strange histories of their wayward souls-the histories that were to end at dawn.

There were twelve of them. They had come from all parts of the queen's kingdom to this moon-lit prison-yard, set about by insurmountable walls so thickly built that soldiers paced their heights three abreast. The prisoners, The prisoners, if they cared to look, could see them up there, their arms and armor glinting in the moonlight as they moved back and forth, so far above that they seemed to promenade among the stars. One date

tree in the distance beyond spread its palms against the moon-washed sky. The youngest prisoner, the silent and imperturbable boy who often smiled at his own thoughts, had a special name for the date-tree; "the queen's fan," he called it. The soldiers on the wall laughed and talked, but the prisoners could not hear them, and the soldiers could not hear the prisoners, who also talked and sometimes laughed.

Only the beasts slept, the great beasts from the jungle who paced by day the broad area that circled the deep-walled yard, and kept a watch that the most desperate man, even though condemned to die by torture, would hesitate to chance even in a drunken dream of freedom. And beyond the vast ring of the beasts there was still another

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circle, broad, and defined by sharp walls set within the higher outer wall. Here, where there were only sand and rocks, and about a spring a few low trees and some rank grass, lived the reptiles, long, evil snakes, forever athirst for the blood of man or horse or bird, or low-lying, prowling, seeking, hateful, forever waiting to whip his life from some intruder.

He

An ascetic young man, always pale and wet with a continual sweat, wiped the cold moisture from his eyelids, dried his hand in the sand, and then turned on his back to look up at the stars. was from another land, a land to the north; he had come preaching a strange religion. religion. The sun, he had preached, was not God. The sun could not be God; the sun was only the sun. God was a mighty being who kept himself in a silver heaven, and with a million eyes looked down upon this world; God, he preached, had a million hands with which to scourge the wicked and the unbelievers and from which to pour benefits upon the righteous and the meek. The queen herself did not hesitate to listen to the strange prophets and priests that now and then came down the great yellow road that ran through her kingdom. They amused her; sometimes they excited her: but she felt that it was very bad for the morale of her subjects to have the validity of her religion debated. Her brother, the sun, whom all men and women and even the littlest children, worshiped as the giver of all good things, was not to be spoken of skeptically by strange young men from the north. So this white and feverish one was taken and flogged and

starved and ordered to speak no more. When, after only a few days, upon leaving the prison he resumed his blasphemy, he was again taken, and this time sentenced to die.

Of the other eleven who this midnight awaited their last dawn only the youngest was noteworthy. The murderers, the thieves, the traitors, and the fool who had milked the sacred white cow and given the milk, in the jeweled bucket of goid, to a beggar woman and her baby, all, however, had done deeds in some way curious or violent or mad. They were men who had been without proper respect for the laws; they talked viciously, with many oaths; they drank deeply of the wine; they laughed and scoffed; they spoke of women with a strange blindness in their eyes; they told the most dreadful things. One

man who had gone to sea and had been a pirate repeated for the last of many hundred times a tale at which even these others shuddered.

"I tell you, my brothers," said the fool, presently, "that men who have never lain together under the shadow of death and waited for the dawn to pour like blood along the sky do not know what life can hold. It is as well not to be afraid to milk the sacred cow."

"Come, boy," said another to the youngest, "talk. Amuse us. The night passes. Live again in words as well as in your dreams. All that is secret and incommunicable in life will go with us into our graves like shadows that God, the sun, himself could not banish. But the other things, the deeds, the crimes -come, talk. Share your secrets with friends whose tongues you may safely trust."

He laughed at this; they all did, except the youngest, who sat up suddenly, shook the sand from his hair, and spoke.

"I will tell you my secret, my crime," he said. They were surprised, he had been so reticent during his month among them. "I will tell you not to amuse you, for I will choke the man who smiles. I am very strong, really." He spread out his hands and looked at them as if examining a weapon. Then he resumed, smiling himself. "I will tell you because I must tell myself

again; that is all. It was not a great crime, my crime; it was a beautiful crime. I loved-I dared to love, the sister of the sun."

He paused. The men lying in the sand stirred, and burrowed a little closer, making a smaller circle, drawing more intimately together, for his last words had come a little faintly. The silence held for a second. The palmtree against the stars (the queen's fan) stirred as if the queen had barely moved her hand.

"I am a boatman," the youngest prisoner continued presently, "but I was brought up in the household of a philosopher, and I know more, perhaps, of what has been taught and written by the wise than any of you here, unless it is you," he allowed, looking at the one who maintained that the sun was not God.

"Also I am a poet; I have made very beautiful songs. How I happened to be a boatman is not the story I shall tell you to-night. Indeed, it is not a story at all. The sister of the sun is very capricious. One night I saw some one standing on the white steps leading from one of the city gates down to the river, waiting, I thought, for a boat. I rowed closer. I thought it was a young man, for although it was the queen herself, as I came to know, she wore the dress of a man. Her cloak was of white silk, very simple and without embroideries, but heavy and rich, and tied about her with a gold cord. And slung about her shoulders, held in place also by a gold cord that crossed the first, was the skin of a lion. It was exactly like the sky in color, for it was the hour of sunset, and you know what sunset is like on our river. Her legs were bare beneath her white cloak, but on her feet. and reaching half-way up to her knees. were curious shoes of scarlet leather laced about with silver. Her head was bound with a turban, not exactly like a man's turban; in fact, I have never seen anything quite like it. It was an invention of her own, I suppose, designed to hold up and conceal her hair. Her hair is a torrent when it ripples down her back; there is an enormous mass of it. It is very tawny; gold and red, like the lion's skin and the sunset on our

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from this gateway, but looking back, one can see the city shining in the afterglow. The river, too, as golden as a dagger-a curved dagger in the hand of the night. Then the white walls and the towers and the minarets seem to come loose from the land in the gradually growing darkness, and there is no more a golden city by a golden river, but a garden carved out of pearl, rising from purple shadows toward the first stars. When the gate-keepers hang out the red lanterns, which look like small dragons of fire, I return. But there is one wonder there on my hill by the river of which it is difficult to speak.' "I paused.

""The fragrance,' I explained; 'a fragrance of many strong, sweet odors that no one can describe. The early night winds, blowing in from the desert, bring the aroma of thousands of herbs pressed between the hands of the day and the night. And along the river the slopes covered with sweet grasses seem to awaken at the cool urge of the dew and send out of their soil a scentsomething like the scent of the earth after the first spring rains. From the groves of camphor-trees to the south, far to the south, the winds bring a faint, poignant odor more delicate and yet keener than that from the sweetgum-trees just beyond the city walls. Yet that is not all, for about one's feet

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