covered with a piece of delicate, faded Chinese embroidery; his hair in its careful disorder as amazing as ever; his monocle in place; his finger-nails polished, he would receive as might have received an old fellow such as Louis the Sun King. And his courtiers stood around the bed in quite as awe-struck a silence as might have stood the courtiers of the great Louis. Strange, I would think as I looked around, that these members of his household were afraid of him. I knew what a good playfellow he was. I would gaze with scorn at the awestricken faces, at the mouths which were hastening to say, "Oh, yes!" "Oh, no!" as he seemed to them to indicate that they must say.

"Poor Cousin Butterfly!" I thought. "He must be dreadfully lonely, with no one around who is n't afraid to death of him."

I thought a great deal about this, and became more and more sorry for him. He needed to be looked after, I decided, by some one who was not afraid of him. I told him so frankly. "That is a beautiful little scheme, missie. Only, you see, you are the only person on earth now who is not afraid of me! And some day you will be going off and marrying when you find a man who is nicer than your cousin. So who will take care of me?"

That seemed to be aw

fully hard luck.

"I shall take care of

you-when your family

agree with you about English women; I do not think that you would get on very well with any whom I have seen."

The day was wearing on; the studio was growing dim and ghostly. We always talked more confidentially at this hour, when the palette was being scraped and the tubes of paint being put away in their table drawers.

"You smell like pressed violets!" I said with conviction. "Like violets which have been pressed for years and years in an old Bible. Old paper, and old printer's ink, and old violets-all together in an old leather book. Years and years old; and saved by somebody who loved those violets."

"That is quite a flight of fancy," he replied. "Am I really so good as all that to a jeune fille?"

"Awfully good, although you try your best to look wicked, with that white feathery lock of hair sticking up, and your evil little tie quirking its two ends so maliciously. You are really good, you know, Cousin Butterfly."

Christmas came, and I was home

A greeting sent with white lilacs

English women."

"That is very nice of you. And I

land where they have the Christmas trees on New Year's eve? Atrocious!

I was sitting in front of the dying fire. It was midnight; Christmas eve was stopping and Christmas day beginning.

Behind me I smelled pressed violets, a whiff, passing along in the dim fire light, dying away, coming back.

I was afraid to look around. The room was very cold, and the fire was dying, and I was alone. I would not look over my shoulder. I knew that it was my Cousin Butterfly, and he must be in league with the devils to be frightening me this way. But it could not be the devils, for throughout the city the bells were tolling for the midnight mass. And the violets were again passing behind me! It was the angels, and this was the smell of heaven.

On that Christmas of 1898 I hurried to the rue Notre Dame des Champs with my present for my Cousin Butterfly-papillon orchids. They looked like him. They were incredibly mystifying, those small white papillon orchids. I arranged them in a jar that I had brought along, a gray jar with white butterflies in flight about it.

In the daylight I was no longer frightened about the experience of the night before; I was again the investigating young person of my country. I fixed him with a stern eye.

"Cousin Butterfly, were you thinking about me at twelve o'clock last night?"

Over his face, which had worn a pleased smile at the little flowers, and the white butterflies on the gray jar, there passed a shade, a shadow of a certain apprehension. He lifted both hands in protest.

"Missie, if it is anything supernatural, don't tell me! Don't tell me a word of it! I will not hear it! Not

another word! You hear me? Not another word!"

This dropped a pall over our Christmas. I could not understand it. But many years after I understood. My Cousin Butterfly had been so much a believer in the supernatural at one time that he had forever washed his hands of it.

The last week of that winter I was in deep trouble. My father had died suddenly, and I was trying to get home. It was a gray day. The amethyst color of the spring in Paris was under a cloud. And I was under the first cloud of my life, and my Cousin Butterfly, from deep sympathy, was under a cloud also. We were very quiet as we stood and looked at the portrait of the Honorable Mrs. Farquhar. She was in an awful mess by this time. A dual personality had been the ruin of her. I knew by the way in which my Cousin Butterfly was tugging at his lower lip that he was despairing. I could not leave him in trouble, too.

"You want me to get into that frock and pose for a little while?"

"No, missie, you nice child! That would never do. It would be too selfish of me to let you do that to-day." This seemed to me to be the most unselfish thing of him, to ruin his wonderful picture because I was in trouble. I could not consent to that sacrifice. I slipped behind the screen and got myself into the costume. Carmen was not there, for this was to be our private farewell; I had a difficult time with the pins. Holding it together as best I could, I hurried out from the dressing-corner and took the pose.

He had remained in front of his picture without moving. He opened his mouth in protest.

Ab

"Missie, my dear child, no!" stractedly, he went closer to the portrait. He shook his head. "No, I could never look myself in the face if I did." He took up a paint-brush. He began to touch delicately at the canvas. "Stand there for just a minute, as you are already in the costume. Just a minute. This one bit here; it would be a crime to leave it as it is. Just a minute. Missie, don't move! I-just this one place." In another moment he was painting furiously; he was yelling at me when I moved, he was brandishing the brush at me, he was a thousand leagues away from the world.

I understood him. I knew that he did not intend to be unkind. He was as sorry for me as any friend could be; but he was also sorry for the hurt to his soul if that beautiful picture were never to be the perfect thing which his eyes saw when he shut them. I knew how he felt. So I stood up there all the afternoon. Occasionally, in the silence of the room, I would find my thoughts wandering homeward, and I would weep silently, that it might not disturb my Cousin Butterfly at his work.

Just before our hour for confidences he looked straight at me-his friend's eyes, not the eyes of the painter of the beautiful picture. The tears were at that moment rolling down my cheeks. Remorsefully, he threw down his brushes. In a frenzy he rushed me behind the screen.

While I was struggling out of the costume, he called to me at intervals.

"I am putting my things away, missie! No more posing, you poor little thing!"

But when I came out from behind the screen he was again standing before the picture, white painting-jacket removed, black coat on, and nails cleaned and polished, but in dark despair.

"It will have to be scraped, after all. Yes, it will have to be scraped. Too bad! too bad!”

Down from the heights of Montparnasse, with my Cousin Butterfly beside me in the fiacre, for the last time. He did not quarrel with the cocher; I did not stare from the window of the fiacre. We were silent. Down to the neighborhood of the Légion d'Honneur, to the corner house-the house to which I was to bid farewell in the morning.

"I shall take you to the train, missie," he assured me. "And I shall bring you a little present, a beautiful little etching, by which to remember your cousin. Which shall it be?"

I stopped sobbing long enough to say: "A Venice one, please, Cousin Butterfly? I love the 'Little Venice." "

With the 'Little Venice' clasped in my arms, and the cold of the early morning striking into my heart, I told him good-by.

"Of course you are coming back," he reassured me as he carefully wrapped me in twice as many rugs as I needed. "Of course you are coming back. Who is to look after me, otherwise? Who that is not afraid of me?"

I smiled bravely from the window as the train pulled out, but I felt that I was not to get back, and that this was my last sight of my Cousin Butterfly.

HE professor and I were visiting a

Tcotton-mill man. He was sitting

behind his polished desk in a large room, a kindly, interested, and public-spirited man who spoke feelingly about the mill-workers; a middleaged man who had seen much of the world and who gave evidence of being personally concerned with the welfare of the men and women working for him. The questions and answers proceeded smoothly for a considerable period, but the man behind the desk apparently felt that I was asking too many questions, that if I was not unfriendly, at least I was inquisitive. Leaning over the desk, he pointed his finger at me, and said:

"I want you to understand, Mr. Tannenbaum, that our workers down here are not like the people who work in the mills up North. The people we have are just as good Americans as any. The best blood in the country flows in their veins. They are the people who made this country. Good, sturdy Anglo-Saxon stock, much better than the rich loafers who spend their time playing billiards and pool."

He kept this up for a while. There was in his voice a tone of aggrieved perplexity combined with a feeling of pride. But something happened to his brain. Suddenly he bent a little farther over the desk and, lowering his voice a trifle, said, "But they are like

children, and we have to take care of them."

"But they are like children." That phrase illuminated much that had been obscure. It explained many things. I understood the solicitude, the care, the interest in the life and destinies of the mill-workers. It became clear why the mill people are recorded in a book owned by the mill man—a kind of Doomsday Book, where the child a day old is set beside the grandfather of sixty.

As soon as you are born you are recorded. After that all your destinies find a place in this long black book. There are written the name of the father, his age, his occupation, how many times he has been sick, where he came from, the room he lives in, the name of his wife, how many children she has had, the number that are still alive, how many of them are too young to work, how many of them are in school, how many are at work and what they are doing. If the family keeps boarders, they, too, are in the long black book of the mill man. Their names, their number, and their occupation are set beside those of the people they live with. The mill man can, by turning the pages of this book, tell the age of all the people that live in the village, their occupation, their health or disease, their marital condition, their education, and their room number. Not even a baby is unre