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Digitized by

Google

vGooQle

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kiJ-i

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Gee-Boy

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Gee-Boy

Cyrus Lauron Hooper

New York

and

London

John Lane

MDCCCaU

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k:p ^foas-

4^A^

HARVARD

.UNIVERSITY

LIBRARY

First Edition, October, 1903

The Publishers* Printing Co.
New York, U. S. A.

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Contents

I. Gee-Boy and the World

PAOB

II. A New Nomenclature

III. The Beast with the Crinkly

Horn

IV. The Grain of Mustard Seed

V. The Flight of Pilate

102

VI. The Birth and Death of Au-

chophet-Man

122

VII. Pieces of the True Cross

136

VIII. Amo, l.V.A.

^53

IX. Apples of Sodom

182

X. The Pains of Death and of

Life

199

XL The Last Word of the Pines

210

XII. The Little Room

226

XIII. Before the Charge

236

XIV. The World Goes By
S

255

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The Reason

THAT THE SAYING MAY BE FULFILLED :

it OF THE MAKING OF MANY BOOKS THERE SHALL

BE NO END**

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GEE-BOY AND THE WORLD

"^rOW Gee-Boy had much ado to know
himself and the world. What with
considering such marvels as stars and lilies,
and what with muttering intermittently,
in a tone of abstraction and mystery, " I am
me, I am me,'* he was often dreamy by day
and wakeful by night. There would have
been no perplexity if the process of acquaint-
ance-making had been as easy as when he
met other children, to whose souls he could
grapple his own with hooks of steel by such
confidences as "Fm goin' to git some new
feesh hooks," or "You cain*t guess what
our cat's got"— confidences tenderly and
timidly given as he swayed from side to
side with his finger in his mouth. But know-
ing himself and the world seemed a far more
complicated process, involving the mutual

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Gep-Boy

revelation of- three entities, which, by some
metaphysical confusion, were made to appear
juggled into two. First, there was the World,
wonderful, silent, eternal; second, I, pondering
all things, communicative, and, like the first,
without end; '^finally, Me, whose qualities
were, by conjecture merely, the same as I's.
It stands to reason, doubtless, that any
entity ought to be single, but it does not
stand to fact; if so, how could Gee-Boy or
any other man, big or little, even in a
blasted ecstasy, say, " I am me '* ?

To be sure, Gee-Boy was not able to state
with philosophic definiteness the perplexities
set down here and hereafter— crude, incom-
plete, boyish, as they were, and not half under-
stood; mere elusive shadows all, which lurked
in dark comers of his soul and played hide-
and-seek there ; hidden, yet powerful in their
hiding, and making riot in that boundless
realm— his consciousness. Such as they were,
however, elusive shadows yet rigorous reali-
ties, they had their genesis on a night when
he was awakened by the cry of a night-
8

fby Goodr • • •

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Gee-Boy and the World

bird just outside his dormer-window, through
which, as he moved in bed, he saw the dark
silhouette of one of the four pines that sen-
tinelled the house, and beyond that, infinitely
beyond, the deep star-set sky, in which one
particularly bright sun beilrkoned to him.
Had the bird called him out of the visions
of the night to invite him to a meditation
upon his own individuality as apart from
that of the unfathomable blue silence? Just
little him in the bed there, and the sky
above? A speck and an immensity? Then
it was that he first said, awe-struck, " I am
me:'

Such the genesis was ; but not so the devel-
opment, into which there crept a new
emotion— one wholly alien to that of the first
revelation of himself and the world. He was
sitting idly the following day under a great
oak in the comer of the orchard, sedately
smoking a corn-cob pipe filled with mullein
—a pipe in which the Julep-Devil (of whom
hereafter) had burned many a fragrant
Kentucky leaf, and to which the scent of

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Gee-Boy

the brown rOSes still clung lovingly. As the
boy puffed contentedly, the great bole screen-
ing him from prying eyes at the house, he
hummed absently a little jingle,—

'' Buckwheat cakes and Injun batter
Make yoU fat, and a little fatter"

(the fact is mentioned merely for the sake
of precision and accuracy), when he suddenly
threw down the pipe; he felt something
groping up out of the penumbra of his con-
sciousness, which led him to repeat, "I am
me.'' The observation moved him profoundly,
even painfully, especially when he felt the idea
piercing the very central light of his being,
where it was subjected to his most sceptical
scrutiny. He stood up and leaned against
the tree. " And yet,'' he said (or would have
said, had he been able to express himself
as clearly, as completely, and as intelligently
as other Stagirites), " it cannot be. It seems
improbable on the face of it. It is just as
likely as not that I am somebody else. But
I can't prove even this, for it is clear that if

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Gee-Boy and the World

I were somebody else, I should still think I
am myself. And whether I am Me or some-
body else^ what am I anyway but"—- He
could pursue the strange feeling no further;
his head was filled with milUons of tortuous
spirals that ran out in attenuated waves
to the boundaries of his little brain, burning
it into sparkling coruscations, and making
the world seem a wilderness of teeming
wraiths. Then terror seized him lest he were
not at all, and lest the world about him were
not real, but only a dream or a dream's
shadow. He put out his hand, and even
his head, with a sudden convulsive movement,
and felt the rough bark of the oak; then
fell upon all fours and groped along the
grassy earth, trying in vain, as it ^wayed to
and fro beneath him, to convince himself
of its substantiality. Now, all this was mere
plagiarism on the part of Gee-Boy; Plato,
Wordsworth, Emerson, and others of the
world's great, whose finer pates were fuller
of finer dirt than his, had felt the same
fears; but, truth to say, had pursued them
II

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Gee-Boy

no further; for he who treads this world
and gazes fixedly into the one unseen, be-
tween bumping his shins against one and
dimming his vision in the other, is likely
to fall into much confusion.

The remembrance of this agony was long
a source of torture to Gee-Boy. He recalled
all too vividly how his inmost being seemed
the prey of volcanic forces; how weak his
limbs when the paroxysm was gone; how
tottering his steps, how faint his voice, how
cold his head—such were the birth-throes of
philosophy. At a distance lay the pipe, and
the mullein leaf with its edge burnt to a crisp
and curly ash. He had petulantly thrown
an acorn at them, prompted, doubtless, by
that new emotion so wholly alien to that of
the first revelation— a feeling that Something
had used him and his inmost life for its
sport. Hitherto he had felt that the world
was his playground; now he suspected that
the world used him for a bauble, and slyly
derided him. Unfortunate child— not to have
felt the portent of it! Heu vatutn ignare

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Gee-Boy and the World

tnentes! However, he must have been be-
holden to that day's events, for in memory
of his meditations there, and those in his
bed the night before— meditations than which
no others in his whole after-experience struck
more fundamentally at the questions that are
eternal— he dubbed the tree Pimpernock, a
name indicative, perhaps, of its happy state
of woodenness, its enforced innocence of such
vain speculations as "I am me"; and under
its green dome he loved to loaf and invite
his soul.

And he invited his soul to a feast of strange
riddles— mere trivial riddles, which come as
naturally as measles to a child six years
old going on seven; riddles about this impos-
sible universe, and this wildly tragic comedy
we call life. Did the morning stars actually
sing together? Was the moon angry with
him that it would not let him catch up with
it, though he ran as long as his breath
lasted? And this same moon— when it turned
to blood and came dribbling down to fill
the rivers, would all the fishes turn red?

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Gee-Boy

Sometimes he feared this homed rover of
the nighty thinking it a devil. There were
other devils, too, no doubt, cavorting among
the worn-out suns and moons beyond the
edge of the world, where the river, the sky,
and the setting sun met; he was determined
to go there when he became older and braver,
peep over and have a look at them, frolicking
down there in the dusky abyss. The light-
ning, too, and the thunder, troubled him»
Santa Claus had lighted a candle, perhaps,
and God, rushing home hurriedly to blow it
out, drove furiously over a bridge whose
planking was loose. Heavens I What if the
bridge should break and let Him through !
This world, he thought, was no place for so
holy a person; and in order to avert such
a fall, he felt the need of a new theory.
Fanfinx, the little girl next door, could for-
mulate no hypothesis as to the lightning;
but the thunder, she siu-mised, was the noise
the angels made in drawing their chairs up
to the dinner-table— a theory that Gee-Boy
very properly rejected. Grieved at the poor

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Gcc-Boy and the World

reception of her postulate, Fanfinx specu-
lated anew. Thunder and lightning occurred
only in summer, and after they were gone
the sky was brighter than before— conclusive
proof that a storm was house-cleaning time
in Heaven. This, too, was scorned. " Then,"
said Fanfinx, angrily, "it muth be the
angelth grinding com." Gee-Boy was now
compelled to say to his fellow-searcher after
truth that her conjectures savoured too much
of domesticity to have a place in his theory
of the cosmos. Let it be understood that
Gee-Boy did not express himself with words
so Brobdignagian as domesticity and so eso-
teric as cosmos; to do so, taxes even the his-
torian. Indeed, it is to be feared that he
spoke blimtly, even ungallantly, for Fanfinx,
vexed prodigiously, stamped her foot, and
shrieked out, "Then itth a giant kicking
hith bootth off before he goth to bed. Tho,
there now!" Do what he would, Gee-Boy
could devise no satisfactory hypothesis; and,
compelled to fall back on his first, he resolved
never again to step on a spider, which, if

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Gee-Boy

local superstition had any foundation in
truth, was sure to cause a storm, and there-
by precipitate the deity upon his fallen chil-
dren.

Then, too, the very existence of this God
was a transcendent mystery, an enigma, a
paradox. Fanfinx suggested that perhaps
he was moulded by a machine that worked
all by itself. " Nonsense ! " answered Gee-Boy.
" You are a very bluxy child. Do you think
God was made like a pot or a jug? Besides,
who made the machine?" And when theHttle
girl showed pique, he reproved her by saying,
" There is things, Fanfinx, 'at no girl can find
out." He gazed regretfully after her when
she went away with her pretty nose tilted
up at its most scornful angle, and deter-
mined to solve the problem himself. Other
men, too, have tried; and many have made
themselves famous immortally by telling us
what they didn't know; but the Sphinx still
sits by oiu* path and fearlessly propounds
the riddle.

Taking him all in all, Gee-Boy would have
i6

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Gee-Boy and the World

delighted the heart of Teufelsdrockh, who
could, doubtless, have pulled him up out of
many a slough of despond, where, in his weak-
ness and ignorance, he became hopelessly
begrimed. Yes, old Teufelsdrockh would have
loved him. He did not live at ease "in the
midst of wonders and terrors"; for him the
rising of the sun never lost its mystery;
man was more to him than a lay figure
adorned with clothes-thatch; and he would
have scorned the dictum of Swift, had he
ever heard it, that the lord of creation is
"a forked straddling animal with bandy
legs," unless indeed it were supplemented by
the observation of the Philosopher of Old
Clothes. It was Gee-Boy's burning desire
to find out why things are as they are, to
put his ear to the Sphinx's lips, hear the
whispered truth, and do something about
it; and to this end he devoted his young
Hfe.

Under such impulse it was but natural
that he should find the smaller enigmas of
existence almost as imperative in their
2 17

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Gee-Boy

demands upon him as the great ones. For
instance, did God put sand in Adam when
he made him ? In the light of the famous
blame-shifting answer, "The woman whom
thou gavest to be with me, she gave me of
the tree, and I did eat," it seemed improbable.
And how did it happen that he, Gee-Boy,
was born on a knob above the little metrop-
olis of Hoosierdom rather than in some
other place, as India or China? By what
pre-natal luck had he been saved from a
pigtail and a diet of rats? Was it true
that horses (" to-block-kos," he called them)
sprang from the roots of horse-radish?
Strange, insane idea! How could it ever
have popped into his little noddle? Again,
how could the small white birch at the foot
of the knob stir up just as big a wind as
Pimpernock or the four pines that stood
before the house? Did a sheep-dog ever
wonder why he was not a sheep? When he,
Gee-Boy, shrivelled to a leathern figure smok-
ing a clay pipe in the chimney comer, would
be grow young again? Would Potchy and
i8

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Gee-Boy and the World

Monna grow young again— as young as
when they were "bornd"? Which naturally
suggested the questions : " What makes us
bornd? How do we do it? What are we
bornd for?" He sometimes thought, too,
that dishonest people lived in crooked streets;
that a twin was always a thief; that Mrs.
Lamb, the minister's wife, looked like a
sheep; that when a star shot across the sky,
some one was going to Heaven ; that a wart
would disappear if he buried, secretly, a
piece of raw beefsteak ; that something terri-
ble would happen when time leaped from the
nineteenth to the twentieth century; that
it must have hurt the little chickens when
God thrust the feathers in; that all men who
wore pulse-warmers were kidnappers; that
women were very brave for not screaming
when they thrust the hat-pins through their
heads ; that the river-bed must be very tired
of its burden; that the man who played the
trombone in the band thrust the brass rod
down his throat; that the monkeys in the
cocoanut-trees stared so long at the growing

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Gee-Boy

nuts that their pictures were taken on them ;
that niggers were black because God ran out
of common white dust and had to use river
mud; that the marriage knot was in the
minister's handkerchief; that doctors never
die; that if he should plant a feather a
chicken would grow; that Httle pitchers have
big ears; that he could catch a bird by put-
ting salt on its tail ; that horse-hairs would
turn into little wriggling snakes if put
into the rain-barrel; that the little clouds
were sheep hurrying home before a storm;
that a wish made on a new sidewalk would
always come true; that he could prevent
the cat from mewing by pouring oil down
its throat; together with other common
beliefs of gullible childhood, which it were a
weariness to enumerate all in one breath.

Did Gee-Boy think over all these things
at once, and in such wild disorder? Yes,
for he frequently conned over his stock of
perplexities, wonderments, and strange be-
liefs, both those self-generated and those
acquired by forgotten accidents— took an

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Gee-Boy and the World

inventory, as it were, as he sprawled on the
grass by Pimpemock's great bole; and one
order was as good as another. The weari-
ness of futile wonder overtaking him at last,
a few scattering queries would follow at
intervals until he fell asleep. For a taste :
Why didn^t the fish drown? Their condition
was a sad one and a parlous, and to be met
only by fasting and prayer. Fasting was
easy, for no baited hook hung before them
by night, and then there was the winter,
when no man fished. But prayer involved
an attitude of suppHcation, and, reflecting
that fins could not be clasped and tails
kneeled upon, he foimd himself confi-onted
by the same stone wall that he encountered
in every excursion he made into the nature
of things. Then, who named the flowers?
and by whom did the forget-me-not wish to
be remembered? And how could any one
possibly tell when a baby was a year old?
What, too, would Monna, the trousers-mender,
do (the thought was alarming as well as
curious) if the hole should ever be bigger

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Gee-Boy

than the patch? He believed, too, that an
angel followed him wherever he went; and
when he passed through a door he closed it
carefully and slowly, lest he should crush
his heavenly guard. Down in the town was
a narrow way that he called New Moon
Street, because he had once seen at its end
the great orange disk. Here he said he
had a house in which he kept many wonderful
things, and to which he would take Fanfinx
to live some day when he married her. No
new thing could be mentioned but he would
say, "Yes, I have that in my little house
in New Moon Street." Houses in general
were sacred to him ; and he always dedicated
new ones in the vicinity by going there
under the escort of the Julep-Devil, and eating
a little lunch among the shingles and shav-
ings, thereby enshrining the new abodes
and giving them. his benediction.

Finally, in all his perplexities, there was
none stranger than the feeling he had about
the three steps that led down a tiny bit of
hill between the kitchen door and the wood-

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shed. If he approached from the left, by the^
well and the locust-stump, there was nothing
unusual about it all; but if he came from
the right, by the rain-bari'el, the whole place
seemed to have a mist of unreality about it,
as if a dream of a place visited long before.
An unaccountable thing— to think of one
place as two ! The impression had a giant
grip upon him. A moment's loitering by the
rain-barrel was a flight into distant lands,
lands hallowed by romance, and was followed
by a feeling of homesickness, which could be
dispelled quickly by a circuit of the woodshed
and a touch of the well curb.

Yet one thing more must be said, and with-
out flippancy or irreverence — ^that Gee-Boy
loved the Night. From his window he could
drink in her Stygian beauty. This was a
dormer-window in his Potchy's house, a long,
half-frame, half-brick dwelling, topping Blue
Knob, one of a wide semicircle of abrupt
hills that shut in a town upon a wide river.
Before the house, and just beyond the old-
fashioned Greek porch, were four great pines

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Gee-Boy

whose trunks exuded gum that puflfed out
in sticky bubbles and ran down in resinous
streaks, and whose boughs were always
sighing a mournful story that the child could
not understand. Perched in his window-seat
when he should have been asleep, he would
listen to their whispers and watch the fire-fly
lights of the town below, the fierce columns
of solid flame that shot up from a long
line of foundries on the water's edge, the
thousand reflected lamps of the steamboats,
and the sparks from their stacks; while
beyond the river he could see a large city
with its faint twinkle of street lamps in
orderly files, and two or three illuminated
clock-dials glowing Uke moons hid in mists.
Here in his window, too, he heard the Night's
thousand mystic noises—before and below
him the shouts of belated workmen to their
horses, the cries of mothers caUing their
broods to rest, the drone of steel rollers
shaping white-hot ingots of metal between
their grooved surfaces, and the unearthly
bellow of steamboats ; while close about him,

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Gee-Boy and the World

and from the orchard and the knob behind
him, came somnolent wood-notes— the chatter
of black birds in their rookery, the distant
hoot of prowHng owls, the rasping song
of crickets, and the unceasing susurrus of
the pines. If he leaned out of the window
and looked up, there was the sky alone,
deep-blue, and star-set; full of mystery
and wonder, infinite in its deeps, not to be
pierced by human eye. At length the sand-
man would send him to bed, happy that
he was alive, and happy that he could sleep
with the sights and sounds of the city before
him, and the voices of the fields and woods
about him; and the sombre Night above
him.

But alas! Unhappy he, yes, thrice and
four times unhappy, who takes the advice of
the sage and hitches his waggon to a star !
he must .ride alone. One night when Fanfinx
was allowed to play with Gee-Boy beneath
the pines much longer than the custom
was, they wearied at last of childish gambols,
and sank down to rest upon the thick carpet

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Gee-Boy

of pine needles. At that instant the Queen
of the Night appeared to the left, just over
the roof of the house, looking more soft
and sentimental than ever before. Her
yearning face was obscured by thin wisps of
frothy vapour, her own fine-spun exhalations
perhaps, or, perhaps, nebulous whiffs from
the milky-way ; and her own light was softly
filtered through. Into Gee-Boy's heart came
a tender burning that would have been suf-
ficient unto itself; but the feminine presence
beside him threw fuel upon it, and it blazed
up fiercely, and permeated to the very centre
of his soul; for Fanfinx was passing fair to
look upon, sitting there beneath the pines
with her face saddened o'er with beams of
the shrouded moon. An unutterable some-
thing within the boy panted and struggled
for utterance; but all he could say, with his
voice a-tremble, was,—

"Oh, Fanfinx! Don't the moon look
bee-yoo-tiful?"

Now Fanfinx was slow of speech, but her
words were Hybla music: thee had the
26

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Gee-Boy and the World

thweeteth Kttle lithp *at ever wath. A
moment she twitched and squirmed as the
responsive sentiment worked its way up
from the abyssmal recesses of her conscious-
ness outward to her twisted tongue, and the
chiid-lover felt her fervour pulsing and ting-
ling.

"Yeth," she said, "it lookth juth like a
pancake comin' up out of the tchimbly.'*

Gee-Boy recoiled. The night breezes ca-
ressed him unperceived. He had thought
that Fanfinx was riding behind him, trailing
along behind the star; but lo! she was only
dragging after him in the dirt, innocent of
celestial towage. A wild, revengeful, choking
paroxysm seized him; it painted and strug-
gled for utterance, but found no voice. Vox
faucibus haesU, He dug his hands into the
ground in his wordless exasperation; his
heart pained him, and his head grew hot.
Vain, vain I Fanfinx laughed, thinking, no
doubt, he was playing mumblety-peg, or
digging worms for bait. When his passion
had spent its force, he simmered down into
27

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Gee-Boy

a silent lassitude, and realized in his childish
way what he was destined to know more
clearly as the years went by —that the paths
of dreaming youth lead but to the sordid
world.

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A NEW NOMENCLATURE

TT was not through any conscious disre-
spect for the nomenclature of Adam
(here the narrative plays the crab a little)
that Gee-Boy rechristened the beasts of the
field and the fowls of the air, to say nothing
of many individuals of God's noblest crea-
tion, but rather in obedience to a strong
creative impulse that had been dormant
until he had discovered certain incongruities
in the existent system of naming. To be
sure, Gee-Boy would have had as much dif-
ficulty in explaining chronologically all his
mental processes in making his designations
for God's creatures as in making clear to
the unphilosophical mind his perplexities
concerning his oft-repeated dictum, "I am
me." He was dumb therefore to all querists,
big and Uttle. Had he had Shylock's quick-
ness of retort, he might have answered,
29

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Gee-Boy

"'Tis my humour"; but silent he was before
the inquisitorial; and a mystery began to
film about the names he made—a mystery
he shrewdly accepted, and even cultivated
by mumbling strange things over his blocks.
Like his metaphysical speculations, his
nomenclature had a beginning worthy of
notice. From the first he had had a keen
sense of the value of a word; as witness his
very first utterance, on the occasion of being
stuck by a pin. It was no other word than
"Ouch!" (he said it afterward, when the
World hurt him); a strong and pregnant
word! And when he was just beyond that
happy and careless age during which people
vibrated his tubby little tum with spread
fingers, and said, "Kitchie, kitchie!" with
affected spasms of merriment—that is to say,
in the semi-articulate stage of infancy, the
age in which his words were such as Adam's
journeymen might have made— he was much
put to it for a vocal symbol of a sound he
heard— a soimd heard before, but not pon-
dered upon; it struck his ear with all the

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force of a wholly new thing. This was the
very first sign of approaching maturity in
Gee-Boy; for, look you, a baby, like a colt,
at first accepts all the world as strange, and
shies at it or not, as the whim moves him ;
it is only when some things begin to pall by
custom that he detects strangeness in others.

Now this sound was a long-drawn raucous
blast, mellowed by distance and by something
that found no answering word in the child's
slender vocabulary— echoes, in ours; rever-
berations along miles and miles of wooded
hills. He opened his eyes and listened. All his
being was alert. His look and attitude, as the
lengthened trumpet was twice repeated, said
more plainly than words, " What was that? "

The knob-top until recently had been
covered with snow for so far back that Gee-
Boy's mind ran not to the contrary, and
cold winds had sung fiercely in the chimneys
and pushed the fine white crystal-dust under
the doors. As he had pressed his nose flat
against the window-pane to see the white
drifts in the fence corners, and to wonder

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sometimes at the sudden blotting out in
white flakes of town and river below, now
for many happy days he gazed from the
window, sometimes open, upon the active
disappearance of the drifts in runnels, upon
the sprightly new-come green of grass and
trees, and listened to the song of the robins
that hopped across the yard. And out into
this new riotous-hearted spring weather,
the sweet young mother took the small boy,
hooded and rubber-booted, on a pilgrimage
to find the source of that long succession of
reverberations.

They left: the yard and threaded a berry
patch, whence, crossing the orchard, they
reached the wood-clad edge of the knob.
Far below, down over the tree-tops, was the
yellow river ; and half-way across, ploughing
fiercely along, was a long narrow house,
with many long porches; and up fi*om its
middle stuck two long chimneys with serrated
tops, from which rolled columns of smoke as
black as black. Suddenly, from the roof of a
little house or coop in front of the stacks

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came a white burst of steam, and two seconds
later that long-drawn raucous blast that set
the knobs to bellowing, until Gee-Boy's ear
received the message in successive and over-
lapping reboundings from every hill as far
down the river as he could see. This thing,
he was told, when the dumbness of his won-
der wore off, was called a steamboat.

Meagre name for such a marvel ! A Kttle
pain began to clutch at his hitherto unsad-
dened heart.

The steamboat had scarcely quieted herself
at her wharf, when the heavens leaped into
flame and universal detonation, followed by
stunning reverberations; something had
burst terrifically; and afterward there was
a mighty grumbling about it. In it all was
that riotous gladness; Spring had broken
the last bonds of Winter. Gee-Boy was
unafraid; the riotous gladness had broken
into his heart. "Id dit a teamboat too?"
he asked, low-toned and solemn-eyed.

"It is the first thunder of Spring," said
the sweet, young mother.

3 33

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That day was the first never to fade from
Gee-Boy's memory. The whistle of a steam-
boat and the first thunder of Spring ! The
day seemed almost too heavily laden with
treasure. Those voices were the voices he
loved best in all the world, except—but of
that anon.

Yet he went home with the little pain
clutching at his full heart. Thunder was a
good name for the sound from Heaven; but
steamboat ! It hurt him strangely, and he
didn't know how to ease him of the hurt.
Had he had a riper understanding, he would
have said : Life is a poem whose theme is
the beauty of the world; and the words must
be well chosen.

That words should be chosen at all soon
came to be a wonder to him. "Mamma,
what makes us talk?" he asked. "How
can we talk? What makes me go wiggle
here (finger on stomach) when I laugh?"
All day mamma went to and fro at her
duties, vainly endeavouring, between times,
to explain to her small son this world of

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mysteries; her duty, too, for had she not
brought him into them?

A great wonder —this wonder of a word !
He would ponder over one till it seemed
unreal; and if he did not think it a good
one, he would use it no more.

When Gee-Boy had spent more than a year
in intermittent rumination upon the matter,
he began to feel sure that something would
come of it; and at this time his parents
took him on a long journey into a distant
region called Texas. His eyes grew big
when they drove away to the wharf where
the Tarascon (^^ Scarascon^^ he called her)
stood blowing black smoke from her stacks,
for he had no hope of seeing again his own,
his native land. Texas was a country of
Cimmerian darkness, far beyond the place
where the river slid treacherously over the
edge of the world; and how could the chug-
ging leviathan that carried him ever sound
the abyss, unless it should unfurl wings then
concealed and float down upon the murky
air? There passed a weary time, a time

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infinitely lengthened with big-eyed expectation
of a death plunge every time the shock of a
sand bar was felt, until sleep soothed the
little brain and calmed the little heart. The
morning brought courage, and the next
morning more; but the evening ushered in
a dark forest of steamboat stacks along a
curving shore, upon which was such a wilder-
ness of twinkling houses, and such a Babel
of soimds, that new and nameless terrors
beset the child's breast. The perils he
threaded in the next half-hour in the progress
to a hotel peopled his dreams that night
with fearsome shadows; and early the next
day, when speeding Texasward, he saw the
sun rising in the north ; the moon, too, was
there when night came. Columbus and his
mariners were not more justly alarmed at
the freaks of the compass. It was yet night
when the three left the train. They were
met by a man named Ecker, were driven a
thousand miles or so in a carriage, through
night, night, night, until they reached a
house far away, and very, very near the edge

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of the world, which was to be expected of
a land where there was no day ; and Gee-Boy
was put to bed holding his mother's hand,
saying, "Now I lay me" again and again,
with the fervour of one who never expects to
awake.

But morning came, bright-eyed; and the
sky was blue, the air pure, the prairie wide
and beautiful, the edge of the world farther
away than ever before; and Gee-Boy was
amazed, and knew that the Lord was
good.

This day among all the hypocritical
daughters of Time was destined to be the
beginning of Gee-Boy's renaming of all crea-
tioii ; for it happened that his little unskilled
tongue could not say Mr. Ecker and Mrs.
Ecker; and it was only after many repeated
trials and many spasmodic hitches and
twitches in his brain-works that he substi-
tuted Deckee and Decko. Note the inflections,
philologists all; this is no fable.

Bubbling over with contentment at having
discovered a way to circumvent the impedi-

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ment in his speech, Gee-Boy went into the
farmyard on a voyage of discovery. Among
the currant and gooseberry bushes he dis-
covered a strange race of beings that he
supposed were little Texas boys and girls,
and no doubt the progeny of his host and
hostess. " Id you Deckee's an' Decko's iddle
boyd an' dirld?" he shouted, rushing upon
them ; and so greatly to their consternation
that they scattered with strange cries — all
but one, the Alexander of his race; nothing
daunted, he turned upon Gee-Boy, shut up a
great fan he carried behind him, stretched
forth an isthmian neck, at the end of which
was a little head most unartistically adorned
in red flannel, and said something in a loud,
tremulous throaty quaver— Texas lingo, no
doubt. " Gooble-ooble-ooble," were the exact
words. " Dooble-ooble-ooble," quoth Gee-Boy,
mockingly; and then ran at the creature,
flaunting his arms and shouting defiance.

"Hi there, you little stick-in-the-mud,'"
bellowed a big voice, "leave them turkeys
alone. Skedaddle now."

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"Turkeys," then, they were called. How
absurd to apply such a name to creatures
that could say nothing but " Dooble-ooble-
ooble!" And the man had accosted him
with a most inappropriate epithet, inasmuch
as he had ever escaped quagmires. This
person, he saw on turning, was clothed in
leather, was topped by a hat like the moon,
wore an enormous pistol and a great knife
in his belt, and had spurs on his feet. He
glared at Gee-Boy savagely.

"I ain't afwaid o' you," said the child,
with a strut; "you nuddin' but a bull-boy."
Whereat the armoured gentleman laughed
immoderately, that the sa)dng might be ful-
filled,— a bumptious answer tumeth away
wrath.

In his exploration of the place Gee-Boy
discovered other strange inconsistencies,
disproportions, and dissonances between Kfe
and names—mere trivial ones, and not vital,
yet of weight enough with the child mind.
This bad bull-boy was called John Good.
And another of the breed, whom he had

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seen that morning astride a pony that he
nearly weighed to the earth, was designated
Tom Little. The black mammy, whose colour
stuck in spite of the spume of the tubs, was
called Aunt Lucy White; while Mrs. Brown,
the wife of a neighbour, was very pale; and
her " hard girl," who, by the way, was very
soft, though called Sally Green, was the
colour of the afterglow. And there came
that day rumours of a person whose official
title was the Texas Essor — ^a nomination
whose meaning Gee-Boy accurately con-
jectured; he had a playmate at home, a
little Dutchman, who used a word similar
to the second, and it meant to eat. What
was Gee-Boy's disgust, then, on the man's
arrival, to find that instead of proving
himself the greatest eater in the land, he
did nothing but talk of money and the rate
in Texas, whatever that was, and went away
declining an invitation to dinner.

After observing such manifest imbecilities,
and coming to the conclusion that most
words were "up tide wrong," Gee-Boy was
40

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pleased to find a person who had discarded
conventional speech, preferring his own,
which, though perhaps not euphonious, was
certainly free, so far as observable, from
foolish incongruities. This person was a boy
somewhat in advance of Gee-Boy in years,
and much in advance in Knguistic attain-
ments. He lived by a gully down the road,
where a creek crossed, and by way of intro-
ducing himself, remarked sociably and with
evident excitement, "Paw teh tat teh muh
wah; tau ole Tah Whihnan yeh cah; Gaw
gang, deh way heh !" This enigmatic confi-
dence was accompanied by gestures toward
the gully, whence came cat yells and howls
sufficiently interesting to induce Gee-Boy to
accompany his new acquaintance thither.
Near a hut that served as a stable, the two
found a yellow cat caught in a steel trap
set in the edge of the muddy stream. " Gaw
gang, deh way heh !" repeated the boy, •
excitedly ; and the two, at the expense of a
picturesque spattering, released the poor
animal, which ran away at once, limping,

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Gee-Boy

and returning no thanks. It was only after
much questioning and the closest considera-
tion of the circumstances that Gee-Boy made
English out of his friend's chatter, thus,
"Pa set a trap to catch a muskrat; it
caught old Tom Whistnand's yellow cat," . .
But the import of the rest this deponent
sayeth not.

Now Gee-Boy's observation of the incon-
gruities of his native tongue, his own chance
successes in improvements, and his admira-
tion for the boy who had invented a new
language moved him to attempt the making
of new words whenever he had a feeling,
however vague and intangible, that existing
ones were less good than they should be.
Soon after the return from Texas he heard
his mamma say, "Of all the nasty words,
nasty is the nastiest," and the saying rein-
forced his belief that there is a best sound
to represent any given idea. And again,
his papa tried to teach him a poem beginning

" I'm not a chicken ; I have seen
Full many a chill September,"

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a poem that he memorised, under protest,
imtil he reached the hnes,—

" I saw them straddling through the air,
Alas! too late to win them,"

when he rebelled outright, maintaining that
no one ever said such a silly word as " Alas" ;
and this recollection reinforced his behef that
there was a worst sound to represent any
given idea. To cast out the bad and to sup-
plant them with the best possible sounds,
and even to create new words for their own
beauty, now became Gee-Boy's dearest em-
ployment.

Even into advanced manhood he remem-
bered with approval these experiences, and
had no sympathy with those unmusical
souls (God save the mark!) who see no
beauty in a word. He even grew to Uke
sounds unassociated with their meaning,
and once made a list of the words he loved
most, as doubloon, squadron, thatch, fanfare
(he never did know the meaning of this one),

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Gee-Boy

Sphinx, pimpernel, Caliban, Setebos, Carib,
susurro, torquet, Jungfrau. He was laughed
at by a friend, but logic was his as well as
sentiment; an Italian savant maintained
that the most beautiful combination of
English sounds was cellar-door; no associa-
tion of ideas here to help out! sensuous
impression merely ! the cellar-door is purely
American.

As Gee-Boy grew older a dissonance of
sound or sense gave him a pain, and made
him petulant. He could not endure the
jingle beginning, "The north wind doth blow,"
for "warm" does not rhyme with "barn,"
nor "wing" with "then." Nor could he per-
mit himself to say " horse" when " to-block-
ko" was the precise word. And when some
one called him "Bub," he threw a stone at
the offender, and went away to the great
oak in the orchard, beneath which he fumed
and fretted himself into a whirl of corybantic
antics until he had attained an ecstasy that
would have been the envy of a Neo-Platonist.
Out of his mental turmoil came a new name

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for himself— Gee-Boy, a far more expressive
denomination than " Bub," or " Turner Dex-
ter Brown," the name in the birth record in
the family Bible; and his papa became
Potchy-Potchy Fat Man, and his mamma
Monna-Monna SUm Lady, and his Irish
nurse Goo-Goo (if Nora could have felt the
contempt!), and the knob Widje, and the
great oak Pimpemock, as before men-
tioned.

At other times, with less wear and tear
of body and mind, other coinages were struck
from the die of his fancy, of which no cata-
logue need be made. But he could never
devise a good word for steamboat. Despair-
ing thus of a complete nomenclature for the
concrete, how much greater his difficulty
in renaming the abstract! And feeling at
times the necessity of suggesting an idea
which passed the power of speech to utter,
or of describing something too remarkable
for good or bad to be fittingly described in
words of definite meaning, he coined a word
of wide significance— ^/wjiy', containing x^

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Gee-Boy

expressive of the unknowable, a fact that
Gee-Boy, seer that he was, divined.

To this account of likes, dislikes, and coin-
ages must be added his satisfaction in a cer-
tain word, but his aversion to hearing it
pronounced— a word which, for Gee-Boy's
sake, the biographer would gladly refrain
from writing; it was— necessity being the
spur — ^Jesus; for the pious pronounced it
oilily, in a manner to bring twitches of apol-
ogetic self-consciousness about the mouthj
corners of the listeners; and the vulgar said
it profanely. True reverence should enshrine
the word, and speak it not.

Now one day Gee-Boy discovered a new
star, vagrant from the skies. A doctor,
a man who could not die, moved into the
one other house on the knob, and our hero
soon found himself looking through the fence
at a little girl somewhat younger than him-
self. His look was not direct or ingenuous;
in truth, he was sprawling and squirming on
the grass in pure love of life and joy at the
touch of earth, when he saw her first; and
46

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he continued by way of attracting attention,
perhaps admiration, thus aiding himself
by song,—

"Gee-Boy is my name;
Bluxy is my nation;
Widje is my dwelling place,
And Potchy's my salvation."

She, on her side the pickets, with an exag-
gerated look of unobserved innocence, was
flitting about, munching an apple and
singing lispily,—

"Lady bird, lady bird, fly away home,
Your houth ith on fire and your tchildren alone."

"Hello, Red Head," said he, amiably.

"Hello, Angle Worm," she retorted.

For a moment Gee-Boy was amazed at the
peculiar wingedness of her words; then he
rolled in laughter on the grass, while she
gazed solemnly through the pickets. Soon
he propped his chin in his hands,- dug his
toes into the cool earth, and observed,—

"You musn't call me Angle Worm."

"You muthn't call me Red Head."

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Gee-Boy

" You must c^tU me Gee-Boy, and I will call
you Fanfinx; but I won't tell you what it
means."

"My name ith Grathe Helen Grubbth."

" Pooh ! It's an ugly name. Fanfinx is
much prettier, and it means something nice.
Ask your mamma if you can come over and
play." He made up his mind that he would
marry this little girl when he grew up and
was a pilot on the river; for that was the
ambition of every boy who did not want
to become a stage driver or a clown.

With mamma's permission that she might
stay "a nour," she scaled the fence (prefer-
ring it to the gate), tearing her dress on the
pickets; and the two went away into the
orchard and began to construct a farm imder
Pimpernock— a farm with fences (kleptotch-
es), houses (thatchflips), stables (eevers),
horses (translated before), cows (moogers),
and so forth (iddle wattle klammer; Kterally,
ever3^hing else). Gee-Boy found Fanfinx a
creature of delightful moods; sometimes no
screaming jay-bird could be saucier; some-
48

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times her tones were as plaintive as a pee-
wee's, when its nest is robbed; sometimes she
was as bluxy as heart could wish. And
when she talked or ate, her nose winked
just hke a rabbit's— in the fetchingest way.
A vagabond star, surely! And so they
played happily ever after.

" What maketh you make names for efery-
body, Tjee-Boy?" she asked one day.

Gee-Boy squirmed. This was the question
he always evaded. " I don't,*' he said.

"Yeth, you do. You call your papa
Potchy, and your mamma Monna, an' me
Fanfinkth; an' nen you call Tom Hook the
Tjulep Deffil."

" Pooh ! That ain't a name."

"Whatithit, then?"

"It's just a— well, anyway, I didn't make
that one. Tom ain't worth a name. I just
heard a man he was talking with at the barn
say he was a devil of a fellow for mint juleps,
so I called him the Julep Devil; an' he
laughed— glub-glubbed, I mean— awful."

"What ith a mint tjulep, Tjee-Boy?"

4 49

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Gee-Boy

" Oh, it's green, and it makes you drunk."
"Oh, oh!" Fanfinx opened her eyes very
wide, and of her mouth she made a horrified
little hole. Then she put a Pharisaical ex-
pression on her small face, and added,
"You'th wicked; you thaid deffil."

Gee-Boy was about to retort, "You did
too," but the pleasure that every healthy
male creature feels at being thought a trifle
Satanic, stopped his speech and brought
tremulous Hnes of sly gratification about
the corners of his mouth. Indeed, the one
redeeming trait of Tom Hook, hostler to
Potchy-Potchy Fat Man, was a certain uncon-
ventionality in matters ethical, a studious
rendering unto Caesar of the things that are
God's. Tom smoked, chewed tobacco like
a grasshopper, swore, drank the green intoxi-
cant, was a patron of dog-fights, even fought
himself, and few there were who had the
temerity to tread on the tail of his coat.
From his associates he had received the
name of Dutch, though why, no man
knoweth; his dog, from a reason more appa-

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rent, was called Low Dutch; and the two
beUeved in that most ancient of beatitudes,
Blessed are the war-makers, for they shall
inherit the earth. Gee-Boy's sense of the
necessity of public morality made him shrug
his shoulders with grave concern, when the
Julep Devil's peccadillos were stigmatized;
but in his secret soul he thought they were
all more or less admirable, just as many
grave and reverend citizens pubhcly denounce
lynchings, when in their hearts they think
the rope deserved its victim. He had an
innate abhorrence of the showily righteous,
those who made yielding not to temptation
the principal enjoyment of life, those who
delighted to say sanctimoniously, "Beware,
young man, the rapids are below you;"
and if politeness permitted, he kept out of
the way of their caresses and their patronage.
Once, when a pious person with a creviced
countenance and a leathern neck presented
him with a cup inscribed with the legend^
" For a Good Boy," he received it demurely,
left the room after a courteous delay, and

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Gee-Boy

with an ostentatious display of accident,
dropped it down the well. A similar fate
was awarded a primer some one had thrust
upon him. It was stained with age, was
very ugly, and venerable. It attracted him
little. A faint praise rose to his Ups when
he read the jingle,—

"Zaccheus he
Did climb a tree
Our Lord to see;"

but when he painfully spelled out,-—

"Young Obadiasy
David, Josias,
All were pious,"

and was told to be emulous of them, he clan-
destinely tore out the leaf, mended his kite
with it, and thrust the volume under the
big bookcase in the sitting-room, pretending
that it was lost. Being pious, then, not even
as much as Peter Cartwright was sanctified
—in spots— he had a sneaking admiration
for the merry hostler who comforted him

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with pipes and fights, and stayed him with
mint juleps; yet he did not hold this bibu-
lous person sufficiently high in his regard
to coin him a name, cultivating him rather
for his own mirth than the other's virtue.

As the stream of Gee-Boy's consciousness
became wider and deeper and swifter, the
words he made became so numerous that
his conversation was often imintelligible even
to Fanfinx, to whom his sayings sometimes
seemed freighted with all the mystery of an
oracle— an effect he delighted to produce,
his only regret being the frequent failure
from his inability to find suitable names
for some things. There were the pine trees
and their mournful whispers, the impression
the night made upon him with her thousand
still voices and her stiller silences, the per-
plexing doubt as to the identity of "I'' and
" Me," and the shadowy, creepy feeling that
he and all about him were a dream— these
things were beyond expression. This he
had learned one day when he attempted to
explain to Fanfinx the foundations of his

m^r

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Gee-Boy

philosophy. Now her problems of human
destiny were summed up in two words, dolls
and preserves; and all of her trials came
from the maternal assurance that most of the
things she wanted to do were either unhealth-
ful or wicked; so, confused by the identity
of " I " and " Me,'^ perplexed, hopelessly mud-
dled, Fanfinx stared at the young meta-
physician, groped about for a clew, and after
a dull drag of silence, asked him, her under-
lip inundated the while, whether he didn't
wish gooseberries were ripe. So he kept all
these secreter and profounder things nameless,
and alone in his own soul.

Here only did Gee-Boy have something
like his will— in this sporting with words;
and long after, he looked back upon the
days that made them as happy days. All
other things he attempted came to naught :
he asked of the Infinite what it was, and
was not answered ; of the finite what it was,
and received no reply but a threat of death ;
he begged love of a woman, and received it
not; he sought fame, and found failure;

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he asked of everything that his power as a
being be felt, but in the end he found himself
limited by all things, defeated by all things,
all but thrust aside by all things. This one
little whim was his one possession — ^the bud
of a poetic genius, afterward nipped— with
which he might work his pleasure. Later,
the impress of civiHsation was felt too keenly;
had he been a savage, he would have begun
a mythology; which is to say— a religion.

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Ill

THE BEAST WITH THE CRINKLY
HORN

^T'HERE was a little nitty road that ran
round the northern side of the knob, and,
twisting along a ragged stone wall that bor-
dered a branch where the water quarrelled with
the calamus, entered a clump of brush and
disappeared into the unknown. Gee-Boy had
ever longed to follow it, beHeving that it
ran in dark and sinuous ways to the end of
the world, and plunged off into that region
so densely populated with horrors for which
he had ho adequate name, but which a
greater than he has called Gorgons, and Hy-
dras and Chimeras dire. Had the ambitious
young Frobisher waited until his courage
were equal to the task, he would have delayed
until the visions of childhood had been dissi-

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pated by the skepticism of boyhood; but
circumstances were destined to drive him
into a mood in which he underrated dangers,
—nay, even courted them.

The circumstances were nothing less than
these— that he had widened his Hfe and nar-
rowed his Hberty by beginning to go to
school; and the things he learned there
(to say nothing of the things he didn't
learn) drove him to believe that the world
is one great aggregation of paradoxes and
perplexities. True it is that the consciousness
of knowledge, and therefore of power, was
growing in him — ^power evidenced in many
ways, as, for example, in writing, from dicta-
tion, love letters for Sally, the dusky one
that presided over the pots and pans— letters
always beginning " Respected Sir," and always
ending,—

j " If you love me as I love you,

No knife can cut our love in two."

On the other hand, not a day passed but
some obstinate little obstruction appeared

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Gee-Boy

in his path, perked up its saucy head and
said, "What are you going to do about it?"
And Gee-Boy longed for the old unillusioned
days when there was no law but his own
fancy, and Monna taught him out of
McGuffy's First Reader and Ray's Elementary
Arithmetic. In those days he had entertained
the belief that teachers were some sort of
spectacled old maids with supernatural powers
of knowledge, and the less truthful convic-
tion that the highest class at school was
fastened to the ceiling. Reading he had
learned with such ease that before he went
to school the first day, trembling and breath-
ing like the bellows in the blacksmith's shop
at the foot of the knob, he had gone through
Robinson Crusoe twice, and nearly through
the Arabian Nights, both written in words
of one syllable, or, at most, two or three,
with hyphens between. And arithmetic was
his, even to the Newtonian task of writing
978, 273, 969, 231; but when it came to
subtracting 987 from 5,876, his perplexity
made his back grow hot and prickly all the

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The Beast with the Crinkly Horn

way down. Now here are the figures properly
placed for the calculation—

5,876
987

It is plain that 7 cannot be taken from 6,
8 from 7, and 9 from 8; but the all-wise
teacher and the all-wise rule taught him to
borrow and pay back, something like this :

"If the right-hand figure in the subtrahend exceed
the figure above it in the minuend, borrow one from
the next higher column in the minuend, prefix it to
the right-hand figure in the minuend, and subtract,
setting the figure below in the result; then add one
to the next higher figure in the subtrahend, and
subtract it from the figure above it in the minuend;
and so proceed."

This, aside from the incongruity of the
smaller number having the longer name,
was the very button on the cap of Folly;
for did he not take 7 from 16, 9 from 17,
o from 8, and i from 5, which is to say, he
subtracted 1,097 from 581,716 and had only
4,889 left? Thus was the arithmetic of his
memory dizzied.

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Gee-Boy

And there was elementary geography,
which provided him with untruthful ideas
of the world's surface; he had travelled in
one direction as far as Texas, and there
had been no sudden transitions from green
to pink, from pink to red, and from red to
yellow; while, as to the other directions,
there was nothing but the lower deeps pro-
found, as everybody knows. The idea of the
rotundity of the earth he scouted as fit
only for fools and mad— spectacled school-
marms in short, who took one thousand
odd from five hundred thousand odd, and
had left only four thousand odd. He would
rather be a child at play, and sing " One-ry,
o-ry, ick-ry Ann," than to juggle with truth
so shamelessly. Yet he admitted one com
of truth in all this chaflf of lies— that there
was suitable correspondence between the
name of this strange lore called elementary
geography and the size of the book that
contained it.

Gee-Boy's sadness, no doubt, was in part
the premonition of disillusion. As gleefully
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The Beast with the Crinkly Horn

as he "sicked" his snarling dogs of raillery
upon school lore, he could not but admit
some changes of opinion wrought in his way
of thinking. "Spell caty^ he remembered
to have demanded of Goo-Goo once, when
he was yet in a primal state of innocence
as regards slates and pencils. " C-a-t," the
erudite maiden answered. It seemed to be
a feat to be proud of— to spell so gUbly,
until Gee-Boy reflected that a cat was a very
small thing, and he determined to test the
nurse's powers on the name of a much larger
object. "Spell waggon^^ he commanded.
" W-a-g-g-o-n," she returned. The child opened
his eyes wide for a moment, and then, nerv-
ing himself for the giving of a Herculean
labour, said, "Well, I bet you can't spell
world,** And to Gee-Boy's utter rout, Goo-
Goo replied, " W-u-r-r-u-1-d." Later, when
school lore had begun to penetrate, and the
illusion under which he had laboured had been
dissipated, he felt a strange uneasiness, such
as must come over a traveller on feeling
his feet pushing through the crust of a
6i

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Gee-Boy

floating prairie. A fit of trembling seized him
one day, when, on seeing the bHnd stagger-
ing of a man who, as he ,was told, had
"been out all night," he wondered whether
such were the result of walking upside down
during the dark hours; and when, the next
night but one, below in the town, he saw
a man going down through a circular open-
ing in the street, with a lantern in his hand
(if not to hang the lantern out over China,
what then?), he felt one of the most cherished
articles of his cosmic theory slipping away
from him; perhaps the world were round,
and fleeing half-shadowed through boundless
emptiness. "Things may not be what they
seem," he whispered fearsomely; and he
took a pumpkin from the garden, and left
it on the locust-stump by the well, to see
whether it would fall off" into space in the
night. The result was reassuring; but in
obedience to a feeUng that the test was not
sufficient, he began, after consultation with
Fanfinx,to dig a hole in the pasture, exercising
great care as he progressed, lest, as he broke
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through the crust on the other side, he should
fall into the sea or upon a mountain; or,
if it should be night there, go hurtling off
into the Qiinese Heaven. Finally, the boil-
ing energy with which he began the labour,
simmered down, and he left oflf digging,
not asserting success, yet denying failure.
There was no outcome to all but a hole in
the ground, and a sense of shame for having
doubted a conception which was really his
own. He would permit no more of his arti-
cles of beUef to totter. Yet he did not de-
spair of school ; he hoped that he could learn
something true there, and in this hope he
was not betrayed.

By the rare condescension of a boy older
than himself, a boy who drank from the
fount of learning two stories up, near the
source, our young searcher after truth was
permitted to ascend the stairs one day after
school, to peep into the noble science of
grammar, a most profound and exacting
science, whose laws are as inflexible, and
often as intelHgent, as the royal will of

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Gee-Boy

George III., renowned in history. The very
air was laden with dusty wisdom; there
was a large globe by the teacher's desk;
and the seats were three inches higher than
those in his own room. Gee-Boy's soul
was profoundly stirred. A moment of awed
silence nerved him to ask his guide for some
crumb picked from the six-hour refection
of the day. The boy shook his head gravely.
"Oh, no," he said, "you couldn't under-
stand it; it is all I can do to understand
it myself." But he gjraciously read aloud
a sentence written, with Spencerian accuracy,
on the blackboard behind the teacher's desk.

"/j is always a verb."

It was a noble verity; and Gee-Boy treas-
ured it in his heart as unassailable. So
much, and even more, he owed to his precep-
tors. They are dead now— all dead. Some
were men, and death was all they had to
look forward to; and some were women,
and they had both death and marriage to
look forward to; but now they rest from

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their labours, and their works do follow
them.

Gee-Boy's confidence in the verbal nature
of is, would have covered a multitude of dis-
crepancies between life and learning, had he
not been driven to desperation by the person
who compelled him to subtract one thou-
sand odd from five hundred thousand odd and
have less than five thousand left. The task
made his back feel hot and prickly all the
way down, and one day he put up his slate
in disgust. In the moment of idleness, mis-
chief began to brew in his little noddle; when
the teacher's back was turned, he kissed the
little girl with a gray waist, who sat across
the aisle (a sweet lass and rich : her father
owned a line of packets, and two stone
lions guarded his door). Every child in the
room either snickered or said, "Oh— oh!"

"Turner Dexter Brown," said Miss Prim,
without turning her head, "come to the
desk."

Gee-Boy obeyed.

"Why did you kiss Ruth?"

5 65

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Gee-Boy

"Because I couldn't do that example, I
guess."

Miss Prim turned around, chalk in one
hand, book in the other. " Turner," she said,
"I am very jealous of Ruth. You must kiss
me too. And twice to-morrow if you fail to get
that problem— three times, maybe. Now!"

The boys of that school feared the sound
of kisses more than they dreaded death
and always played Adonis. What then was
the teacher's surprise to receive a most
chaste and courteous salute! She was
abashed; Gee-Boy calm.

Although the culprit felt that he had ac-
quitted himself like a man, he knew he could
not face the ordeal the next day; so he
sought Potchy that evening as the great
man read his paper at ease in his hickory
chair on the front porch, and displayed his
slate, on which the problem was arranged
his way and the teacher's, thus,—

5,876 581,716

987 and 1,097

4,889 4,889

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The Beast with the Crinkly Horn

"Potchy," he said, "you'll have to do
it; I can't."

"How often have I told you, my son,
that there is no such word in the dictionary
as * can't'?" The judge took up the slate.
"What is it now?"

" Why, subtraction. Tell me why you bor-
row from one number, a number that isn't
there, and pay back to another number
that didn't lend anything. And how can
you make the big number so very much
bigger, and the Httle number only a Uttle
bigger? And when you take so little from
so muchj how can you have so Httle
left?"

The judge adjusted his spectacles two or
three times, then put on the look he wore
when he bade the Hoosiers mark him and
write his speeches in their books— a wise
look, accompanied by a profound flourish,
as if what he were about to say would pass
down to history.

"My son," he observed, "you must study
this out for yourself. You will learn to do

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Gee-Boy

by doing. Don't forget, now, you must
always take the dilemma by the horns."

Gee-Boy thought a long while, and the
paper crinkled unsympathetically. At last
he piped up a still small voice, "Potchy,
did Columbus learn to discover America by
discovering it?"

It was a bold question ; impudent, in fact,
as the still smallness of the voice admitted;
and was, moreover, pronounced contempt
of court, and punished as such by the judge
sitting on the case. But what is a poor
benighted searcher after truth to do? And
Gee-Boy was angry, and went out and broke
his slate on the locust-stump by the well,
and swore in good Hoosier oaths that he
would go to school no more.

The next morning he moped, feigned a
headache, and remained at home. Soon
Monna and Goo-Goo went away, leaving
him regent of the little kingdom. He
dreamed a while, enjoying his freedom, and
speculated upon the nature of the horned
beast that Potchy had mentioned. Dilemma I
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The Beast with the Crinkly Horn

A good word ! Except his own coinages, it
was the best word he had ever heard (Mug-
wump was not then invented). And he must
take its owner by the horns when he met
it. Then it suited his humour to read; but,
unable to find Robinson Crusoe, or the
Arabian Nights, he took the first book he
saw. "Sesame and Lilies" were the golden
words on the cover; and he knew them
both; for lilies were common, and had he
not read of Ali Baba and the Forty Thieves?
Yet when an hour had passed— an hour of
anxious search through the volume— he threw
it down in disgust, saying, "Huh! there's
nothing about se-same and lilies in that
book. Books are Hke other things— they
fool you. Well, who cares? I'm going to
lock up the house and follow the little rutty
road to the edge of the world ; and I don't
care if I never come back."

And all this was the reason that this
voyage was undertaken before the visions
of childhood were dissipated by the scep-
ticism of boyhood.

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Gee-Boy

He locked the house, left a note on the
door, as any thoughtful boy would, announc-
ing to Monna that the key was under the
step in the usual place, and left the yard-
perhaps forever.

Gee-Boy had not gone farther on his des-
perate adventure than the stone wall that
twisted along by the little rutty road, when
he heard a wee voice crying after him; and
Fanfinx came whirhng down the side of the
hill, holding up a long skirt above her knees
as she fled. She had on, besides, much of
her mother's finery— rings, watch with long
chain; carried an old-fashioned flowered
parasol; and her head was hid in a cavern-
ous red-and-yellow poke bonnet, a relic
of antiquity. Such was the state locally
known as being dressed up regardless.

"What's the matter, Fanfinx?" asked
Gee-Boy. "You look just like a bumblebee
in a hollyhock."

"Oh, Tjee-Boy; me tho thcared," she
panted, in a tone of petted petulance, at
the same time decorously letting down her
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The Beast with the Crinkly Horn

skirts so that they dragged the ground full
many a rood.

" Scared ? What about ? "

" There wath a nathty bad peddler-man at
the door, an' he athked mamma if thee had
any tchildren to thell, an' I runned. Oh, Tjee-
Boy, I wath tho thcared— you can't think."

Now Gee-Boy detected the pretence in all
this fright, and retorted, "Pooh! You're
not a bit bluxy, Fanfinx."

"Now — now — you muthn't thay that,
'cauth I am. You'd a been thcared too.
Me goin' with you, Tjee-Boy."

But Gee-Boy wanted no companion who
found sufficient satisfaction for her adven-
turous spirit in so hollow a sham. "I'm
going to the edge of the world, and I may
never, never come back"— a warning not a
little tinctured with hypocrisy in spite of
the present disapproval of Fanfinx; for
having long observed that the unexpected
unavoidably happens, he invariably expected
all possible contingencies, thus by tricking
Fate escaping disaster; so here.

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Gee-Boy

"Oh, dear! Oh, dear! what thall I do?"
Fanfinx bit her finger-nails and glanced
fitfully up the hill, in the prettiest perturba-
tion, toward her own mossy roof. "Well,
come on; I don't care; I'd ruther fall over
the edgthe than be in the peddler'th thack."

"I reckon you better hadn't; you'll back
out."

"No, I won't."

"Honest Injun?"

"Croth my heart."

They hastened on, halting only till the
young knight let down the bars beyond the
clump of brush; and here fair lady abandoned
old fears for new; she was told that they
were now in the region of the unknown,
and might at any moment be shrouded in
the billows of sulphurous mist and darkness
that rolled up from the under world.

They walked for hours and hours and
hours, crossed the branch three times on
stepping stones, climbed fences that strag-
gled along tortuous gullies, and fought
their way through clinging brier patches,
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until at last Fanfinx^s little body was so
weary, her skirt so torn, and her bonnet so
twisted and bent, that she sat down on the
ground and began to cry.

"Oh, Tjee-Boy," she sobbed, "thatnathty
peddler-man !"

They had come to a little valley-pasture
cuddled down among the knobs. In the
middle of it, standing very close together,
their branches intertwining in brotherly love,
were a chinquapin and a persimmon; and
Gee-Boy had a strange impression, such as
was no unusual thing with him, that he had
seen them before. He marvelled over the
matter for but a moment; for a flock of
sheep that lay strewn about chewing their
cuds in contentment, startled up, and after
a trembling retreat, nosed closer and cau-
tiously toward them.

" I gueth the end of the world ith a long
way off," sobbed the tearful Fanfinx.

"I don't see it anywhere," Gee-Boy was
forced to admit.

The little maid's woe softened to a red-

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Gee-Boy

eyed silence, which her loyal knight and true
did not know how to break. At last she
said,—

"Tjee-Boy, don't you think we'd better
thay 'Now I lay me'?"

"Pooh!" quoth the valiant one. "Who's
afraid?"
"Tjee-Boy, I wanth to go home."
"And let the peddler get you?"
"Oh, no, no; but, oh Tjee-Boy, I doth
want to go home; an' — oh, Tjee-Boy, look at
the Httle theep in front ;it'th got a bell on, an'
it lookth tjuth Hke the minithter'th wife."

Gee-Boy laughed aloud; it was very true,
and the lady's name (little lack of echo
here between sound and sense!) was Mrs.
Lamb, as before observed. A happy event !
In two minutes he and Fanfinx were playing
church under the chinquapin and the per-
simmon, while Mrs. Lamb, surrounded by
her brethren and sisters, listened with all
the interest the two youngsters bestowed
on her eloquent husband on Sundays. The
service was beg^n with song by a most

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The Beast with the Crinkly Horn

heavenly choir (Fanfinx), than whom none
could discourse more eloquent music; and
there was no falling into pitfalls of absurdi-
ties such as the real people of the Lord
fell into, when they sang, " We're going home
to-morrow," and then went home the same
day. With an air that was a most becom-
ing union of pious devotion and operatic
affectation, they (Fanfinx) warbled,—

"There ith a gate; there standth a tjar,
And through ith port holeth sthreaming,
Ta-ta, ta-tum, ta-too, ti-gar,
Ta-too, ta-tum, ta-dreaming"

(she never could understand the third and
fourth Hues), while the pastor (Gee-Boy)
stood with the tips of his fingers sancti-
moniously touching each other, and with eyes
steadily and holily piercing the blue firmament
and the leaves of the chinquapin. The hymn
reached its dying fall— piously, devotionally ;
and the sermon began. Now let Wesley,
Asbury, and Simpson hide their diminished
heads.

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Gee-Boy

No, the discourse cannot be given here;
for neither the chinquapin, nor the persimmon^
nor yet Mrs. Lamb, from all of whom came
faint and blurred echoes to the historian,
could recall an entire sentence of it; a mas-
terly sermon nevertheless; and it was com-
mon opinion that Gee-Boy spoke as no
mortal ever dared to speak before. The
simple children of nature who listened were
deeply moved by the unselfishness of his
admonitions— unselfish because the preacher
frankly said they were not for himself; other-
wise why should he give them away? And
the congregation listened, and made no
threats to withhold their quarterage or to
send a committee of the brethren to con-
ference "to tell the bishop there had better
be a change."

But what Gee-Boy said sank into insig-
nificance when compared with what he did
not say. Our best thoughts are those we
have not uttered; our best books are those
we have not written, and cannot write. (The
chronicler vouches for this, having seen it

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The Beast with the Crinkly Horn

in a book.) And, too, the young divine
knew what his elders did not know—that
there are things no earth-born simple Simon
should attempt to say. There has been but
one other who ever reached this mountain-
top of wisdom — she a woman, obscure
but brilliant, who, when the savants were
burdening the magazines with such themes
as "Why I am a Methodist," "Why I am
a Presbyterian," and " Why I am an Atheist,"
wrote her own mind on "Why I am an
Agnostic"; and the whole essay consisted
in this one sentence of Socratic sapience,
"Because, in using the mouth as an organ
of speech, the race has presumed." (Note :
the article was declined.)

But alas I the world has ever abused its
wisest teachers. Just as Gee-Boy was round-
ing his last and most eloquent period, the
flock suddenly divided, and a strange beast
appeared, and a passing ugly beast to look
upon. It was like a sheep, but larger ; it had
a wicked look in its eyes, and just in front
of each ear it had an enormous crumply-

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Gee-Boy

skinned corkscrew. It stamped the earth,
thus giving the challenge to battle.

"Oh, dear!" exclaimed Fanfinx, faintly.

Gee-Boy was slowly taking off his coat.

"What ith it, Tjee-Boy?" asked the little
maiden, lifting her skirts to run.

"Be still, Fanfinx; it's a Dilemma; and I
am going to take it by the horns."

Gee-Boy threw his coat to the ground
with a heroic swing. "Come on," he
shouted, making a rush.

"Ba-a-a," quoth the Dilemma, its voice
tremulous with emotion. It lowered its head,
made a counter rush ; and the battle was on.

No— it was off. The beast, by its habit,
which was an evil habit and a parlous, un-
sanctioned by the rules of modern warfare,
lowered its head as it rushed, and took its
adversary a mighty thump in his middle.

Never had the world seemed to Gee-Boy
so like a world of phantoms, so filled with
fleeting hallucinations, so peopled with
wraiths and shadows; it swam and twirled
about him and about itself with numberless

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convolutions and turbinations; it was a vast
Maelstrom, and he was its vortex. He heard,
dreamily, a voice shouting " Fanfinx," and
he thought it must be the Dilemma calling.
But Fanfinx had gone a-kally-whoopin' for
the fence, and heard it not. Then there
was a swirl of wild words that seemed far
away, words that came up from the abyss
beyond the edge of the world, perhaps, into
which he might be falling.

Suddenly the blur grew thicker, a spasm
passed through him, and the solid world
came back with a rush. There were the thin
branches above him, and the sheep huddled
at a distance, and the Dilemma cropping the
grass watchfully near by.

Gee-Boy made a sudden leap and a dash.
The beast plunged after; but its fleeing
enemy twirled around the chinquapin, made
a rush for the persimmon, and shinned up
it— swiftly, but with no more grace than a
Brahma rooster jumping up to pick the top
berry on a gooseberry bush. Safely perched
on the lowest branch, he took a little ease

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Gee-Boy

and had his reflection. The world was un-
commonly bluxy, and no mistake: every-
thing conspired to keep him from doing
what he desired; it was an evil world, and
a delusion.

"Tjee-Boy," cried a still small voice.

It was Fanfinx on the fence.

"Tjee-Boy, thay 'Now I lay me'."

"Pooh!" returned Gee-Boy, tenderly rub-
bing his stomach ; and the Dilemma butted
the tree beneath him.

Fanfinx blubbered on the fence for a time,
then dropped off on the safe side, and dis-
appeared over the hill.

"Just like a woman," muttered Gee-Boy;
for that's the way it always looks to a man
up a tree. He straddled the Umb, rested his
back against the trunk, and tried to whistle
"How tedious and tasteless the hours,"
but couldn't until he had taken a bite of a
green persimmon. The tune was not a merry
one, and it did not cheer the lonely watcher.
The sheep cropped the grass; the beast
^tood g^ard below; a locust sang his long
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The Beast with the Crinkly Horn

strident song in the chinquapin, and shot
away in a low curve to sing in another tree;
a katydid cut the summer silence above; the
sun rested his chin on the knob on the after-
noon side, grinned a moment, and dipped;
and Gee-Boy wished Potchy would come and
show him how to take a Dilemma by the
horns. Was it a thing that could be learned
only by doing?

"Well, I'll be dog gone!" exclaimed the
Julep-Devil, leaning his elbows on the fence.
"That durned ram's got him treed. Low
Dutch never done a better job on a coon."

A short tale to make, the Julep-Devil
routed the Dilemma with a neck-yoke he
chanced to be carrying, pulled Gee-Boy down
by the legs, and led him home.

"The jedge'd better do sumpin' with that
youngster," he said that night to a crony,
as his pipe bubbled reflectively; "he ain't
right bright; there's sumpin' wrong here
(tapping his forehead); the cogs slip, I'm
thinkin'— makin' all them highfalutin names
and doin' all them things he didn't ought
6 Sx

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Gee-Boy

to do. Went off on a lark to the edge of the
world; wandered miles, maybe, an' wound
up in the doctor's pasture just over the
knob, back of the stable ; got knocked galley-
west by Bates's ram that had butted a
rail outen the fence. I come acrost him by
chanct, an' brought him home 'th his gal-
luses busted. 'Fore he went away he left a
note on the door tellin' his maw the key
was under the step. She come back after
a right smart spell, an' found a tramp had
got in an' filled up his empty outen all the
pie an' kraut they was fer supper. Why,
that there boy's mental pro-cesses air as
crooked as a dog's hind legs; ain't they,
Dutch? (A nudge.) Did you ever see his
gran' mother? Well, she was that-a-way.
It was— let me see ; I disremember just when
it was— 'bout sixteen year back come next
autumn, I reckon. She went about with
her eyes on fire, mutterin' to herself Don't
yuh know when yuh go down to the river
in the mornin' early, before sun-up, when
the mist is risin' in curls, an' yuh look ahead,
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cautious-like, starin' at sumpin' yuh don't
see? Well, that's the way she done. I see
her a heap o' times. Onct, out by the ellum,
at the eend o' the house, I see her put her
hand to her head, an' say, *Lost, lost!'—
just like that, sad an' desp'rate. Well, well I
The youngster favours her. He'll come to
some queer eend — I don't know whut, but
some queer eend. God knows, God knows !"
The Julep-Devil indulged himself in a period
of gloomy reflection on the possible destiny
of the house of Brown, saying at its end,
*' I been feelin' donsy all day ; I reckon you'd
better go take a julep with me; no mint
julep never killed no man."

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THE GRAIN OF MUSTARD SEED

TTAVING swallowed a watermelon seed,
and being fearful that a long vine
would grow out of his throat (so local
tradition warned), Gee-Boy felt the call to
prayer. When the impulse struck him, he
was coming home from school at a swinging
trot, singing a httle song, which ran,—

"Did you ee-ver, i-ver, o-ver,
In your leef, lofe, life,
See the dee-vil, di-vil, do-vil
And his weef, wofe, wife?"

Now he had reached the third word in the
third line, when the profanity of the jingle
occurred to him with crushing force; and,
clipping the Stygian name suddenly, he
stopped, leaned his head against a con-
venient butcher shop, and said, "Now I lay

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me,'* a version revised by himself. After
this manner shall ye pray, said he,—

"Now I lay me down to sleep,
I pray the Lord my soul, to take;
If I should die before I wake,
I pray the Lord my soul to keep,"

which was good riddance of an obvious in-
congruity. To be sure, he was aware of the
absurdity of saying " Now I lay me,'* when
he was only leaning his head against a
butcher shop, but he intended the prayer
only as a temporary counteraction to the
rime of the " dee-vil," and thought it would
serve until he could make a more serious
effort.

But how to pray I Some prayers remained
unanswered, a little reminiscence whispered.
Dr. Grubbs, Fanfinx's father, had told Potchy
he once had treated an old blind beggar of
a mortal illness — a beggar old enough and
burdensome enough to die; with every dose
the humane practitioner had prayed God
to take the old man unto himself. "But
he got well,** said the doctor, laughing.

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Gee-Boy

"Can it be that pills are more potent than
prayer?" Offsetting this was an experience
of Gee-Boy's own — a, wild, night experience;
tempest and fire, and clanging engines in
the streets below; and on the knob his own
little white-robed figure in supplication at
his bedside. Reflecting on the success of his
own petition, he convicted the doctor of
a lack of faith.

"All you need is as much faith as a mus-
tard seed," said he to Fanfinx, as they
gathered their crops under Pimpernock, " and
you can make a mountain throw itself into
the sea."

" But we hathn't got any mountain."

"Then we can take a knob."

"Nor any thea, neither."

"Well, we can use the river; it's just the
same."

Fanfinx began to cry. "I don't want the
riffer filled up."

"Cry-baby," returned Gee-Boy, angrily.
" You haven't got any tehoojety. We can use
the crick, then."

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Fanfinx cheered up. "Leth do it."
"All right; an* nen Til fix the watermelon
vine all right. What knob shall we take?"
"The one where the Dilemma wath."
A slight timidity numbed Gee-Boy for a
moment; he had never before approached
the Lord save in the quiet of his own cham-
ber or in the sombre church, and he was
ignorant of the primeval sanctity of the
temple of the moment— the orchard. Prayer
here seemed bold and unreverential, until
he was reassured by one of the simplest
creatures of nature— a duck wading in a yel-
low puddle in the barnyard across the fence;
she dipped her bill into the mud, ploughed it
along an inch or two, gobbled something,
and raised her thankful head toward Heaven.
Gee-Boy plunged.

" O Lord, we know all thy tender mercies.
Please chuck the knob beyond the chinquapin
and the persimmon into the crick. Amen."
"That'll fetch it," he said, brushing the
dirt from his knees. "Come quick, Fanfinx;
let's see how it looks."

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Gee-Boy

They skurried through the orchard, scaled
the stake and rider fence, and fled down the
hill into a little gully with sides of yellow
clay and a bottom of gravel. At the end
they ran through a bunch of hickory and
pignuts, and came abruptly upon the creek.

Gee-Boy stopped and took in the scene in
a jiffy. He looked blank. There was the
stream, as placid as ever, save where it
sparkled over a riffle and eddied about a
half-sunken log. " It isn't come yet, Fanfinx,'*
he said, disconsolately. " We'll have to wait,
I reckon."

Fanfinx, less patient, observed that the
knob might be beyond the bend, nearer the
river. "You didn't tell the Lord where to
throw it in," she explained.

"That's so, I didn't," Gee-Boy replied,
reflectively; "it was very careless of me.
We've got to go 'round, I guess; but"

It was a long circuit, and through brier
patches and a wheat field, and over a branch
too deep to wade. Gee-Boy paused.

"I tell you what, Fanfinx," he said, with
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The Grain of Mustard Seed

the impetuous energy of a new thought,
"it's too far 'round; I'm goin' to walk across
the crick — aright on the water."

"Oh, oh! You'll get drownded."

Gee-Boy knit his forehead, and twisted im-
patiently. " You don't understand, Fanfinx.
Peter sunk because he didn't have faith; he
thought he could do it all by himself."

The little maid was silenced. She put the
comer of her apron into her mouth and
chewed it.

There was a fiat place in the bank down
the stream a bit— ^about as far as a bubble
floats while you are waiting for your cork
to bob on a day when the fish bite well;
it looked smooth and shiny, and it was
on a level with deep water. "It will be a
good place to get a running start from,"
said Gee-Boy to himself.

He sKd down the steep bank before him,
climbed over a fallen tree, and felt the gravel
crimching beneath his feet. Then he took
a run for the flat shiny place. At the first
fall of his foot, the sole of his shoe sunk

' 89

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Gee-Boy

its thickness into the soft surface; and by
the time he reached the creek's edge, he was
floundering ankle deep in a thick sticky sub-
stance. But if he could gain the water he
would be safe; he felt sure of that; so he
plunged hard. His feet came up reluctantly
from the water-soaked sand, which closed
after them with a chugging sound, and in
a second or two he had planted them on the
firm floor of water.

Firm? Floor? No, neither. His feet went
down until his knees were covered, and be-
neath was the treacherous yielding stuff"
that pulled at him. By a tug so lusty that
it seemed to burst his thews and sinews,
he pulled his right leg up only to find his
left sinking lower. He glanced anxiously
around, and wished the Julep-Devil were
there. Yet of what avail would that be?
This useful person had gone mysteriously
lame; a bone in his leg, he had explained
with a face painfully serious, was the cause.

Gee-Boy was sinking deeper. Now he could
withdraw neither foot; the water about
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him was severely calm, the yielding stuff
beneath slow and patient, and the tracks
on the sand were slowly smoothing them-
selves over.

Fanfinx fluttered along the high banks,
and shouted to him to get a little more
faith. But he shot at her a look of scorn;
already he had tried to pray ; it had flashed
upon him that this was a trial of facts,
not of faith.

Once more he made a desperate struggle,
and only sank deeper. He was up to his
thighs now.

At the instant a killing thought pierced
him. " Fanfinx," he shouted, " I know what
it is ; it's a quicksand — ^the one the roan colt
was lost in. Run; bring the Julep-Devil.
Run, Fanfinx, run."

There was a flicker of short draperies
among the pignuts and the hickories, and
Gee-Boy was alone, the two worlds he lived
in sadly mixed.

Alone ! It was a good word. Better than
any he had ever coined. As he thought of

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Gee-Boy

it, it dragged its slow sonorous length
through his mind. The riffles up stream
murmured sweetly and cruelly in his ears;
the water came relentlessly higher about
him, to his waist. A jay-bird perched in
a thorn tree a few feet away, and perked
its saucy head at him. A kingfisher shot
past and made a sudden dive into the water
down stream. And the water— his thoughts
could not long stray from this— seemed so
calm, so imperturbed, yet so firm in its mur-
derous malevolence. Again he made a Her-
culean struggle, only to sink deeper. He was
by this time sunk nearly to his arm-pits.
For about twenty heart-throbs he remained
silent, then waved frantically to and fro,
like a snag in swift water, and began to
cry. But the ripples ran away from him
with never an offer of help, and he stopped
his tears from the mere hopelessness of them,
and was calm. Gee-Boy had encountered
the Infinite and its immutable Law, and
it was but natural that he should think
about it there in the silence— seriously.
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God and his ways! And death! These
filled his being with darting thoughts. He
had had a flash vision of these subjects not
long before, walking on the river's edge
with Potchy and Monna, strutting mannishly
along with a silk hat (cut down from
Potchy's castaway), when the bank crum-
bled and would have let him down, had it
not been for the clutch of a fatherly hand
which saved him, but jarred the hat into
the stream. The shudder he felt when the
thought of what might have happened
flashed over him, was an ever unwelcome
remembrance; but the quick experience had
revealed to him nothing of Death. Now he
knew it is a quicksand— a slow relentless
quicksand— that brings its victim face to
face with a great Something unknowable
to man until his mortality has been swal-
lowed up in immortaUty. And God? A
vast bird with sheltering wings, Gee-Boy
had once thought him; and then a monster
to be feared— a hunchback monster with
projecting eyes, a skin of iron colour, and a

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Gee-Boy

bludgeon in his knotted hand. Finally there
came a kinder picture, mother-given, of a be-
nign-faced old man, who protected and loved
his people.

But was it protection to allow his faithful
ones to fall into quicksands? Why did not
God save him? Then came the first — and
the inevitable — doubt. Could God save him?
Might it not be that an impossibiKty is as
impossible to God as to man? It was the
more Kkely in the light of a past experience
of his own. When Potchy once told him
that God made light and darkness, he blew
out the candle, Ht it again, and said he was
a god; but he could not make it burn a
third time for lack of matches. Could God
himself— be it spoken reverently — ^run out
of matches ? It was a thought of despair,
and he strained his ears for a sound of the
Julep-DeviPs limp down the hill and along
the yellow gully; but there was only the
merry voice of the riffles, the slow swirl of
the water around the log, the leap of a fish,
and the chirrup of the crickets in the grass.

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Gee-Boy now thought old thoughts with
fearful rapidity; old brain paths felt anew
the old impulses darting through their long
spirals. Would the world come to an end
when he was dead? And would he see
Potchy's and Monna's souls in Heaven?
They would look very funny, he feared, for
there came an early impression (Heaven
only knows where he got it ! ) that the soul
is a brown substance about the size of a loaf
of bread, and that in the starry mansions
they are all packed away in decorous rows.
These, and more; swift thoughts, mind,
that take too long in the telling.

The water and the sand were pressing
against his breast now, and his breath came
hard. Heaven lay close about him. The
trees that shadowed the stream shook in
a Kttle breeze. To Gee-Boy the sound was
a rustling of wings. Again the winged im-
pressions, old and new! — ^he found himself
pitying the Kttle German children who died;
American was doubtless the language of
Heaven. A sudden revulsion of feeling

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Gee-Boy

brought bitterness into his heart; he did
not want to die. He had been told by peo-
ple old enough to know that God is good;
it seemed to him a thesis not proven; and
he wondered whether grown-up people
actually knew all they pretended to know.
Three impressions that the Dilemma episode
made on him suddenly took firm lodgment
in his mind— that things are not what they
seem, that they must always be "just so,"
and that something unseen made it im-
possible for him to do the things he most
wanted to do.

Thoughts of home rushed upon him — ^the
house perched upon the knob overlooking
the town, the broad river, the steamboats,
and the city beyond. In his strained con-
sciousness he heard the pines sighing, saw
Potchy reading his paper in the hickory
chair on the long porch, and heard Monna
in the sitting-room singing, " Roll on, Silver
Moon," to the accompaniment of the old
melodeon, above which hung John Wesley,
with his womanly face, his white clerical

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The Grain of Mustard Seed

cravat hanging down over his black vest-
ment, and his lily-and-rose hands poised
in a most ladyHke manner over the* Holy
Writ. In a corner was a what-not — a suc-
cession of three-sided shelves suspended in
a pyramid of green cords, holding such prime-
val treasure as a basket of alum crystallised
about woven strings, a candy dog, and an
elephant made of brown cloth. There, too,
were the family ambrotypes; set in little
cases of rubber, the pictures themselves sur-
rounded by little frames of ornamented
brass or copper. One especially dear was
that of Monna, her raven hair parted in
the middle and combed smoothly down
over her ears save for a little curl that
escaped and hung over her white forehead;
round neck and shoulders reKeved by a
black necklace; low-cut dress of jettest silk;
short sleeves ending in white under-sleeves ;
black bracelets of beads on the wrists;
hands white and graceful. There was, too,
the great fireplace that had burned a forest
behind the brass andirons brought from

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Gee-Boy

Maryland when all Hoosierdom was a leafy
wilderness. How could he leave these things
—these pictures of the instant, and gone
ere seen?

But endurance could endure no longer.
The heft of tons was on his breast; his
arms were numb; the water had reached
his neck. His brain teemed, but his ideas
had no more coherence than rain-drops drip-
ping from the eaves. His weighted heart
throbbed a death march. All would soon
be over; his little life would go out in pain
and struggle. A smoke suddenly filmed the
creek, the trees, the sky; sparks danced
through it; strange sounds pinged his ears;
he seemed to hear Potchy's big voice, the
Julep-Devil's limp, and the puffing of Dr.
Grubbs, who was ever fat and scant of
breath; but it could be nothing but the
fancy that comes from desire. The smoke
thickened; the sounds died as the woods
are hushed at evening; and Gee-Boy trem-
bled dreamily on the brink of the unknown.

Booby, booby I The stars are far away,

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and the earth is near; and yet you will
wander off to the unfirm ground between.

The Julep-Devil sat down on the edge of
the water-trough behind the barn, straight-
ened out the leg that had the bone in it,
gave Low Dutch a warning nudge with
his other foot, Kt his pipe with the air
of one that deserves his luxury, and pro-
ceeded to explain the affair to one of his
cronies— to explain with a bigotry too great,
a soul too practical and unsympathetic to
make a fair judgment of Gee-Boy's vagaries
possible ; he himself had never run after any
will-o'-the-wisp. Thus he spoke, with occa-
sional aid of the Pslangist,—

"It's whut I've pr^-dicted all the while;
that child is plum daffy, and he'll die with
his boots on. I tell yuh, I know beans when
the bag's open wide enough. He's peert,
though, if that was any goterion to cry by;
but, by hokey ! he ain't got no sense 'bout
common things. Yuh don't have to be no
great shakes to know 'at a feller kin know

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Gee-Boy

a heap outen school-books, an' still not know
enough to come in when it rains. You know
that yourself, Eddie, an' so does Low Dutch
(another nudge). This world ain't whut
that boy thinks it is — ^not by a jug full.
You ain't heerd about it? Well, it stirred
us up right smart. It was day before yis-
tiddy, 'bout an hour before the cows come
home. The doctor's little girl (you know
he cain't no more do 'thout her 'n a livery
stable kin do 'thout a goat; I reckon they'll
marry sometime— if he Hves; God knows!)
— ^the little girl, I say, come runnin' up the
hill beyond the orchard 'bout two-forty
on a plank road, climbed the fence mighty
nigh skeered inter kiniption fits, an' squealed
out 'at Gee-Boy was a-drowndin' in the
crick. Well, me an' the ole man an' Doc
run there an' found the little cuss stuck in
the quicksand where we lost the roan colt
in the Spring; he was up to his neck, an'
dreamy. I tell yuh whut, it was mighty
nigh a croak with him. We laid down a lot
of rails an' pried him out o' the chuggy

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sand, an* toted him home. He come to
after a spell, an* looked 'round. Blamed if
I could tell whether he keered much er not.
'Peared like he was a-sayin* to hisself, ^O
Death, where is thy stinger?* Didn't tell
yuh how he come to get stuck in the sand?
Oh, he was tryin* to walk on the water like
—like— well now, I disremember who it was;
some Bible feller, back in the days when
some things could be done as well as others;
Jonah, mebbe. Any way, the boy's daft,
clean daft; an* he'll die with his boots on er
die in the *sylum. Will you have a julep?
I've got some fresh mint. No mint julep
never killed no man."

When Gee-Boy was able to leave his bed
and roam about the all too-substantial
world, the Julep-Devil looked at him with an
eye of quizzical humour, and would have
spoken had not the boy stared at him in defi-
ance. Gee-Boy had no pearls to cast before
him, and turned away. Yet the look sank
into his soul and filled him with bitterness.

Wormwood ! Wormwood !

lOI

y Google

THE FLIGHT OF PILATE

/I S infancy retreated into the rear per-
spective and the earlier years of boy-
hood occupied the foreground of his life,
Gee-Boy gained powers of discrimination as
to the relative importance of the various
puzzles of existence. He concerned himself
no more with the inability of fish to assume
an attitude of prayer. If they could not,
it was their misfortune, and no concern of
his. He cared not a copper whether Adam
was filled with sand at the creation, nor
whether God hurt the chicks when he thrust
the feathers in. He had tacitly yielded,
too, to the scientific view of the earth's shape
and bothered himself no more with the end
of the world—at least in so far as end meant
edge. But the power of ripening years
showed the question of end in the sense of
purpose to be a matter of primal moment,
and one to be pondered over.

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Thus Gee-Boy's discriminative mental pro-
cesses at this time— yet exceeding crude and
boyish, neither coherent nor logical; after-
ward formulated retrospectively— led him in-
evitably to the old questions, " What makes
us bom? How do we do it? What are
we bom for ? " It was not the origin of the
soul that bothered him; that is easy to
any spirit like his, whose tendency is natu-
rally starward. Indeed, he too often felt an
uneasy fear that all things were alive; a
fear that struck him first with respect to
the gate-spring, which had been on a tension
for a whole morning when sand and brick
were being wheel-barrowed through for a
new addition to the kitchen. What if the
spring could feel ? Into the lifeless tensioned
metal he projected past agony of his own on
a day when he had been pinioned with a bent
back in a manger into which he had fallen
from the hay-loft, and had been taken out
fainting. If the gate-spring could feel ! Many
a time thereafter he had climbed the fence
out of sheer pity of the poor steel spiral.

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It was easy, then, indeed unavoidable, to
believe in soul; but whence the body? Per-
fectly natural questions to a thinking boy I
—just as, Who was the first dog? and. How
did he come to be? are doubtless inevitable
queries to the philosophic dog-mind. Such
answers as, God made us, The doctor
brought us, he confronted with a pouting,
frowning face; too well he saw the reluctance
of the replies, the pitiable evasion in droop-
ing eye and affected composiu'e. A trying
time for parent and child, and one when
judgment usually takes flight and leaves the
fight to delicacy!

In Gee-Boy^s lofty isolation on the knob-
top he was at times sought out by lads
from the town, who climbed the shaggy
sides of the great hill at the steepest places,
usually with some military pretence or other,
as the Montcalm episode at Quebec. Once
in the pasture above, with their host they
would roll small boulders to the edge, send
them over, and watch the path they made
in their rush, bound and roar through crack-
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The Flight of Pilate

ing brush and splitting trees. They killed
a heifer at the sport once. But no matter.
Something came of it all. For Gee-Boy,
on one fateful day, resting with his fiiends
after sending an imusually large stone on its
destructive descent, propounded the much-
evaded questions. It was behind the barn-
proper place for the revelation of mysteries !
"Huhl" exclaimed the biggest boy, in con-
tempt, "don't you know?" This biggest
boy was reputed bad, and deserved the re-
pute. Now be it known that a big bad boy,
carrion-wise, and a few small boys, innocent,
and inclined to hero-worship, assembled with-
in the privacy of that mischief-brewing region
behind the barn, make a coalescence for
evil.

In the whispered communication of the next
half-hour, Gee-Boy was infected with the
grossness of the flesh; scandal against the
race of fathers and mothers was buzzed into
his ear; weeds were sown in his fertile mind,
and much Rabelaisan compost was scattered
broadcast, with a dung-fork, to make them

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Gee-Boy

ranker. He had eaten of the fruit of the
tree of knowledge, and was as God, knowing
good from evil. The experience nearly un-
hitched him from his star.

His first feeling was the necessity of secrecy.
There was now a screen of silence between
him and the two whose child he was. He
could no longer question them with honest
interest. He had gained knowledge; know-
ledge imposed a mute retirement into him-
self; Hke God again, he was prone to keep
the secrets of the Infinite.

A second feeHng, that grossness had no
proper place in the scheme of things, led
him into a poorly defined belief that in
the act of creation the divine hand may
not always have done the best thing. Per-
haps God had not made the most of his
opportunities. It was a daring reflection,
had Gee-Boy known it; but the profoundest
regret filled him, to the exclusion of all fear.

A day or two of heavy-eyed pondering on
these matters exhausted Gee-Boy in part,
and allowed him to return to the original
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The Flight of Pilate

questions, when it occurred to him that
"What are we born for?" had not been
answered. Now, what is all this fuss about?
What is the use of so much humdrum hving?
Why so much rising and going to bed?
Why so much hewing of wood and drawing
of water? All one's life one eats, sleeps,
feeds the pigs, and finally lies down, dies,
and is carted away. What is the end of all
this doing and undoing? The answer did
not reveal itself to Gee-Boy ; he knew it was
useless to ask Potchy and Monna, and he
was afraid to ask the boys behind the barn.
Lo, how those who hunger and thirst
after knowledge are filled ! " The chief end
of man is to glorify God and to praise him
all the days of our Hves forever," was the
somewhat unrituaUstic answer. If this were
true, as the Sunday-school teacher had
averred— a sweet young miss she was ; flounced
and beaded; fanned with a turkey wing,
and silken-mi tted ; the adored of a dozen
giggling youngsters— then it fell to her to
explain why such a wide neglect of all such
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Gee-Boy

glorification. For, "My pa don't glorify
God," piped up a small voice; "he's first
mate on the Antelope^ and he cusses the
niggers." " He, he, he !" chuckled the dozen,
and put their hands over their mouths— lall
but the solemn-eyed searcher after Truth.

The teacher smiled with eyes and lips
fi-om out of her black bonnet. "You must
tell your pa," she said, "that God made
us all, and that we should praise him. You
should tell him, too, that he should n't swear."

"Nope," said the boy; "he'd lick me."

This irrelevant reply fell upon one pair
of deaf ears—their owner's shallow under-
standing was hurt by a seeming untruth.
^^ Did God make us?^' came the question,
low-toned and grave.

"Why, yes. Turner, he made us all. He
made the world. He made everything that
is— the mountains, the sea, the river, the
sky; and he can make anything he wishes."

"Could he make a rock?"

" Certainly."

"Could he make a rock so big that us
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The Flight of Pilate

boys could n't roll it to the edge of the
knob?"

"Why, of course; he could do it just as
quick as that." And the teacher snapped
her pretty silken-mitted fingers.

"Could he make a rock so big that our
horses could n't drag it to the edge of the
knob?"

" Of course — ^in a single second."

"Could he make a rock so big that all
the horses in the world could n't budge it ? "

" Yes, Turner, just as easy as the others."

" Wcll,"--and the questioner braced himself
for a final tug at obstreperous Truth—-" could
he make a rock so big that he could n't
move it himself?"

The teacher's poor little heart stood still;
the red blood dropped from her face and
dammed itself up in her full pulsing breast.
Her eyes looked wide and frightened within
her bonnet. "Why, Turner, how—how could
you?" she faltered, helplessly.

"I wanted to know," Gee-Boy answered,
hopelessly.

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"But how could you ask such a wicked,
wicked question?"

"Well," complained the boy, "when I ask
questions, either they don't know, or they
don't tell me the truth. And you say it's
wicked to ask. What's the use of asking?
I wish I was a Presbyterian, and didn't have
to come here ever again."

The sweet little teacher, stricken with the
consciousness of duty poorly done, gave way
to tears — tears that moistened her pale cheeks
all through the church service, after Sunday-
school. Perhaps it was all a judgment sent
against her for her sinful finery. She had
been warned. Gee-Boy watched her from
the family pew, as she sat in the Amen
corner with many less lovely but more strict
sisters in Israel, her head bowed, her lips
moving in prayer, her hands clasped. He
protested against the consciousness of wick-
edness within him; he was but a humble
searcher after Truth, and deserved no barbed
conscience.

The blind had led the blind, and the dirt
no

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The Flight of Pilate

of the ditch smeared them both. Nor was
there a helpful hand to raise them out of
the hopeless mire.

As the depressed Gee-Boy moped inwardly,
words from the unheeded pulpit began to
drift sluggishly into his mind, and then sud-
denly to flow in like an undammed torrent.

"I saw her here in the Sunday-school,''
said the preacher, " JUst on the eve of giving
her heart to God. But one more dance!
she said, and then her life would be given
to the service of the Master. The dance came
and she went. The next day she was sick;
the next worse; the next dead — oh, my friends,
sent to eternal damnation for the sin of
dance"

There was considerable of a clatter in the
judge's pew. It seemed that vigorous young
copper-toed boots had kicked the seat in
front, or had come down ungently on the
uncarpeted floor; perhaps both. While there
was some doubt as to this unimportant
detail, it was asserted, and in no wise dis-
credited, that four incisive words were heard
III

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Gee-Boy

from the same seat— "I don^t believe it."
Just as plain as that.

Now, you who listen respectfully and silently
to the word of God as it flows from authori-
tative lips, you who love the hysterics of
religion rather than its poetry, can you suflS-
ciently condemn such defiance? Neither could
they of the morning service. Craned necks,
eyes strained in their sockets with much
twisting, neck-cloths awry— such were the
signs of curiosity and indignation. The word
of fjod suddenly ceased in evident confusion,
faltered, and refused to flow again, even
spasmodically, until Gee-Boy, to the petri-
faction of his parents, arose and stalked
down the aisle and out of the church; then
the preacher wiped his damp brow, and
struggled vainly for a time to breathe life
into a dead inspiration.

There was a buzz from little swarms through-
out the church when the final Amen was
heard— a buzz followed by the wagging of
wise fingers and polls grown gray in wres-
tling with the spirit. " I tell yuh whut,''

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The Flight of Pilate

might have been heard, "that boy talks
scandalous; he*s an element that—well, have
yuh heerd whut he ast his teacher this
momin'? He's a bad element— mark my
word."

If the expression on the faces of Judge
Brown and his wife had given room for
belief that they were friendly to heterodoxy,
they would have been told their duty then
and there. But the expedition with which
they left the church— an expedition restrained
indeed by an evident severity and gravity-
left no doubt among the brothers and sisters
as to their having the proper conception of
their Christian obhgation toward their blas-
phemous son.

When Potchy and Monna reached the car-
riage, the Julep-Devil sat alone on the front
seat; Gee-Boy was not sighted until, at the
edge of the town, they saw him, a distant
speck, a mere fly, climbing the last stretch
of yellow road that threaded the knob-side.
At that moment he was brooding over his
self-expulsion from the church. At once

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Gee-Boy

Adam and the Angel of the Flaming Sword,
he had driven himself from Paradise and had
shut the clanging gates behind him. Time
had been, and not long slipped into the
past, when he had felt securely comfortable
to think how other people would be damned.
What a gratifying sight from the battle-
ments of Heaven ! And now ! Why, he was
even an " element," though the knowledge of
this sad condition had not reached him.
In his distress a thought came to him that
he had formerly— with the greatest compla-
cency—with regard to Tom Hook; if he was
to be damned, was it not better not to have
been born? And the young girl the preacher
had spoken of !— Gee-Boy had known her well
—would it not have been better had she not
taken the chances of coming into the world?
From which we may infer that Gee-Boy
was not so strong after all in the disbelief
that had burst from him in church. We are
told that the devils believe and tremble.
So with Gee-Boy in his momentary reaction.
Yet it was an unhappy lot, to be born with a
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The Flight of Pilate

desire to sin and to be punished for sinning.
He remembered, too, that a former Sunday-
school lesson had revealed questionable com-
pulsion of Pharaoh, who had been afflicted
with plagues because his heart was hardened
against the children of Israel; but both sin
and penalty had come from Jehovah, that
he might show his power and his might,
and that the Egyptians might know he was
the Lord. Unhappy Fate, to be thus beset !
If it were all true, he could not forgive the
Lord for his manifold transgressions. But
he had the saving doubt.

Gee-Boy's thoughts were somewhat ab-
stracted from this sceptical consideration
of God's powers and purposes by an episode
wholly earthly in its character — ^an impromptu
dramatic action (strictly in observance of
the unities), which was usually staged in
the stable, and, according to family tradition,
was corrective of moral shortcomings. At
such times the boy practised all the self-
restraint demanded by the canons of the
strictest art; there was no outcry, no such

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Gee-Boy

alarm as doubtless announced the fall of
Ilium, or followed daun Russel the fox, as he
fled with Chauntecleer from the povre widwe
and her doghtren two— only a writhing of
the face and a contortion of the body, with
spasmodic attempts at making a rear guard
with the hands; all being followed by a
prayerful look of relief when the thing ended.
But on this occasion Gee-Boy seemed pre-
occupied, and did justice neither to the occa-
sion nor to himself. He seemed to forget
all those Httle signs of restrained emotion
which he had formerly shown with admirable
skill under stress of the present circumstances.
When the curtain fell (so to speak; it was
not exactly a curtain, nor did it fall at the
end of the performance), he merely looked
up and asked, —

" Potchy, did God send Anna Marshall to
hell for dancing?"

"My son," said the judge, with signs of
failing gravity, "I don't know."

"Well, does th^t preacher know?"

"I don't know."

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The Flight of Pilate

"Well, who does know?''

"I don't know."

Gee-Boy looked despairful and hopeless.
The judge, to hide some fleeting emotion,
turned quickly, put the strap up on the rafter
and strode out, even forgetting the usual
words of love and admonition.

" The ole man didn't whup as hard as ordi-
nary," said the Julep-Devil. He sat on the
water-trough beside the stable; and his pipe
bubbled contentedly.

It was a forlorn hope to ask this conviv-
ial hostler anything, but Gee-Boy ventured.
**Does God do all the things they say he
does?"

The pipe ceased bubbling. " Whut ? " asked
its owner, in the faintness of extreme amaze-
ment.

"Does God do all the things they say he
does?" Gee-Boy emphasised every word.

Tom Hook, the Julep-Devil, gazed a mo-
ment in silence ; then set his pipe to bubbling
deliberatively ; at last he answered with sim-
ple finality, "That's whut they say."
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Gee-Boy

Here Gee-Boy became the victim of a
strange wild seizure— a whirl of all emotions
induced by defeat; the maddest exasperation
in the vortex. He spun about, and reeled,
and stamped his foot, and shouted out,
"Darn! Darn! — everybody, I say— every-
body]"

"Well, I'll be dog gone!" exclaimed the
Julep-Devil, with subdued astonishment,
as Gee-Boy staggered away. Then a pause,
and a judicial dismissal of the affair as he
knocked the ashes from his pipe. "That
kid's daffy ; no words cain't do him injustice."

As for the unfortunate one himself, he was
seen no more that day. Dinnerless, supper-
less, but for an ear of corn— good resistance
for his grinders — ^he remained in a nook
known only to himself— a recess between rocks
hidden by a low growth of evergreens on the
south side of the knob, and half-way down
its side; reached only by a narrow precipit-
ous path obstructed by stones and projecting
roots. Here he could look almost straight
down over a ledge of stone for a hundred
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The Flight of Pilate

feet; a few miles to his left the yellow river
disappeared in the white of its rapids and
the smoke of the city ; to his right its great
bend melted into the faint purple of mellow
distance; on its smooth current the steam-
boats, far and near, moved in their stately
fashion, bellowing their warnings, leaving
long paths behind them in the pathless water,
making for the wharves below, where a dozen
of their kind rested from their labours.

Gee-Boy's mind was racked long and fiercely
before the softening effect of this spread-out
picture wrought its will upon him, and his
grief at the limitations of divine power and
divine morality as revealed in the history
of the day— which might well shake so philo-
sophical an intellect— had ceased to fill him
with active misery. Before he reached a state
of quiescence, and resignation in ignorance,
he thought bitter things. Were we born to
glorify God? If so, why do we do so little
of it? Were we born to be damned eternally
for peccadillos? If so— but no degree of eu-
phemism would sufficiently soften Gee-Boy's
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Gee-Boy

words to the ears of those who cry " Sacri-
lege," and "He blasphemeth,*' when con-
fronted by the unanswerable question. They
have been busy in times past with rack and
screw. Let us respect them.

The utter defeats of the day wrought in
Gee-Boy a hopelessness of finding out the
Truth, and it became a habit with him
thereafter, when anybody spoke p)ositively
about things no fool mortal can know, to
turn away with a shrug, or with some such
ejaculation as "I want to know!" or "Do
teU I"-— bad conduct, no doubt, and contemp-
tuous; but the result of the defeat of an
honest endeavour to find out whatsoever
things are true. If you are satisfied with
less reason than he, if you are nearer to the
Unknowable than^e, why censure him?

The Biblical analogy, now, for an end;
for all experience is old— old. Pilate had
conducted himself in a similar unbecom-
ing manner ages before — ^turned away with
an impossible question for a jest; fled from
an answer he thought could not be given.

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The Flight of Pilate

"What is Truth? And when he had said
this, he went out again unto the Jews."

Be it appended that he said to them, "I
find in him no fault at all." Those who
crawl may read.

Which may be found, with much else of
divinely tragic interest, and masterfully
spoken, in the eighteenth chapter of the
gospel commonly attributed to Saint John.

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THE BIRTH AND DEATH OF AU-
CHOPHET-MAN

TXTHEN Gee-Boy turned nine, sad things
happened: an angular person from
Illinois was elected president, the roar of
cannon came up from Charleston, and the
premonitory hush of war and death fell upon
the land. Potchy's section of the State,
in party caucus, had asked him to be can-
didate for governor; but there was another
more able than he, as he knew, to guide her
through perilous straits; and he had chosen
to take part in the fight he knew would come.
So the day came when his little family saw
him ride away from the gate followed by his
orderly, and disappear in the streets of the
town. As the day waned, they saw him again
on the levee at the head of a thousand
horsemen; saw him and his regiment ferried

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Auchophet-Man's Birth and Death

across the yellow river and disappear in the
streets of the city. Then they heard the pine-
trees sing a requiem ; and the wife, who had
given up for her country one of the two
she loved best, found a woman's solace in
tears. But in the heart of the little son
a new strength welled up; and he said,
"Don't cry, Monna; I will take care of you."

Such were his new duties that he went into
the orchard and rechristened Pimpernock;
now the giant became the Blugg-Blugg Tree,
from the battles to be fought there; and
Fanfinx was taught how fields were won.

The months in their anxious march brought
news of victories and defeats, and Potchy
had become a general. Joy was keen in Gee-
Boy's breast, until two things happened.
He had thought that no one could fail to
love the man who was gallantly soldiering
in Dixie; but a boy from the town came up
one day, pressed his face against the pickets
that guarded the house from the big road,
and taunted him. "Your dad tried to be
gov'nor, an' could n't, an' you think you're
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Gee-Boy

smart. All he wants is to rob the rebs, an'
have a nigger fer tuh fan 'im. Come out-
side, an' m lick you."

Gee-Boy's courage came in a tidal wave.
Swearing a great oath he had made himself,
he scaled the pickets, thrashed the copper-
head black and blue, kicked him all the way
down the knob, and came marching back to
the eerie music of phantom fifes and drums.
This would have been a triumph but for the
sting left by the disparagement of the man
who was in the hero business, and but for
the ingratitude of Fanfinx, who, when he
peeked through the fence and told her of the
fight, suddenly announced that she would
thereafter — from what motive is not clear,
for Fanfinx was one of womankind — call her
own papa Potchy. It was more than heart
could bear, and Gee-Boy quite forgot him-
self. Potchy had often told him that no
gentleman ever loses his temper, and especi-
ally in the presence of ladies; yet now the
manikin cried and kicked the pickets in a
shameful fury. All his failures to do what
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Auchophet-Man's Birth and Death

he most wanted to do, had not pained him
like this. " You stole the name," he screamed;
"you stole my Potchy's name."

Fanfinx put the corner of her apron into
her mouth, glanced sideways, twisted one
way and another on her left foot, embar-
rassed, but stubborn. The more Gee-Boy
stormed, the more firmly she was determined
that from that day on her papa should be
Potchy — Potchy in spite of the world. If
Gee-Boy had invented the name for his own
papa— what then? Did that give him the
sole right to it? It was a free country,
she thought. So she kept the comer of her
apron in her mouth, twisted herself about,
and was silent.

Now Gee-Boy*s vials of wrath were empty
in two minutes, and his howls softened into
a querulous blubbering, and the blubbering
died away into pathetic whimperings that
would have melted any beating heart alive
but that of the stubborn little Miss Fanfinx.
"I'll not call you Fanfinx any more," he
sobbed, "for Fanfinx means something nice,

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Gee-Boy

an' now I'll never tell you what; but Fll
call you Spinxy, an' that means The Little
Girl that Steals Names; an' I'll not play
with you any more, an' I'll not marry you
when you grow up."

Fanfinx turned her nose up a trifle, and
muttered that she didn't care; but her looks
were sad, and she had told a lie. It is the
woman's way. As for Gee-Boy, he wiped the
tears from his face and turned aside; there
could be no solace for him except in a Httle
game he sometimes played beneath the
Blugg-Blugg Tree.

This game was to fight a bloody fight.
It was easy; anybody could play it; all you
had to do was to pretend a lot of things, and
by-and-by you forgot that all was pretend-
ing. Here by the Blugg-Blugg Tree was a
great plain that reached from the gnarled
bole of the oak itself to the orchard fence,
and from the hedge to the first row of apple-
trees— a plain fully fifty feet by thirty.
Through the middle ran a great river, the
raging Tuckanawdor, which rose in a moun-
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Auchophet-Man's Birth and Death

tain range running snakewise from the tree
to the hedge, and was capped with something
resembUng snow more or less eternal; both
had sprung into being at the creative touch
of Gee-Boy. Here a farm had been, but when
Potchy marched away at the head of his regi-
ment, the farm had suffered the ravaging
touch of war; house, bam, and rick had been
licked up by red tongues, and fences had gone
down beneath the tread of men with muskets.
To-day, as Gee-Boy had suddenly deter-
mined, was to be the greatest battle ever
fought; it needed smoke and flame and
thunder to make an inspiration out of which
was to come a new name for Potchy. So
all the long summer afternoon the small boy
toiled with his toy cannon and his regi-
ments of blue and gray soldiers, who, to the
vulgar eye, were nothing but coloured pegs
of wood set into long sticks, but to him
they were the most vaUant troops, except
Potchy's, that ever shouldered arms. Yet
all travail was in vain ; the armies could not
be driven into a great fight; they tumbled
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Gee-Boy

clumsily over the field or stood inertly
stupid. One brigade of grays, driven to the
fight, fell bodily, in perfect alignment, into
the foaming Tuckanawdor, and floated across
under the very guns of the foe. Neither the
blue general, who galloped his white tin
charger among the blue soldiers, nor the
gray general, who coursed his black among
the grays, could fire the troops to battle
pitch. 'Twas pity, too; for General Potchy,
the hero of a hundred fields of blood and
death, waited impatiently behind the moun-
tains with seven regiments of horse, ready
to save the day if it should be lost to the
blues. The failure was a sore trial to Gee-
Boy. Thinking that perhaps the rations
of himself and his armies were too rich, he
resolved that there should be nothing for
brexbux in the morning but hard-boiled
humpty-dumpties ; and when night fell he
went to the house with hopes of the morrow,
not deigning to notice, as he went, a little
figure that stood watching him sadly and
wistfully. Shame to her— to steal a name,
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Auchophet-Man's Birth and Death

and for a. man who was only a doctor,
and stayed home from the war ! But there
must be a new name, one worthy a soldier
and a hero who would not remain at home,
even to be governor; and there must be days
and weeks of toil, if need be, under the Blugg-
Blugg Tree, and nights of watching and wait-
ing until it should leap full-grown and armed
from a Uttle brain.

When Gee-Boy went that night to his half-
story room in the roof, he robed himself
for bed and curled up on a pillow in the deep
seat in his dormer-window, which looked
out upon the four pines with the mysterious
voices, and down the long hill across the
sleeping town to the great Ohio shining in
the moon's Hght. Many a night, before going
to sleep, he had sat there looking at the
magic scene, and listening to the eternal
whisper of the pines, wondering what they
said; but their secret was still unrevealed.
To-night he Ustened long, and at length fell
into a light sleep and many dream-battles.

Now there is danger in the Uttle game
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Gee-Boy

that Gee-Boy played; that is, if you prefer
to remain on the solid unghostly earth,
where everything is just what it seems and
the eyes do not go poking into those uncanny
regions so near at hand and yet so far away,
seeing things that are not there; for when
you are all alone, and you think of just
one thing and nothing else— think harder
than you ever thought before, and forget all
but this one thing, your soul may steal out
of you a little way, and know very strange
things, things close at hand, maybe, or far
away ; hidden things, not visible to the eyes
of the body. A new and keener sanity comes
upon you (perhaps, who knows?), in which
you see the truth as if it were a part of you
or you a part of it; the hallucinations of
substance vanish; what, in truth, is, lies
revealed. Else, where would Plotinus have
got his ecstasy?

So Gee-Boy slumbered but fitfully, the effect
of his loneliness and abstraction working
within him, until that dark hour that prowl-
ers say precedes the dawn, when he awoke
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Auchophet-Man's Birth and Death

conscious of a new vision into things; the
pines, shaken by a dank south wind, whis-
pered wild rumours of carnage; his heart
leaped at the utterance of tongues he knew.

They told of a dim night battle beyond
the Kentucky hills; he heard, or thought
he heard, the distant cannonading, and saw
long lines of fire flash before his eyes. He
looked and listened, and a strange inspira-
tion seized him. He climbed out upon the
roof, felt his way along the gutter and the
shingles, whose edges were curled and moss-
covered from long resistance to wind, sun,
and rain, to the little square porch, from
which he reached a limb of one of the pines,
and in half a minute he was on the ground,
standing ankle deep in the long brown
spikes and cones the trees had dropped for
seasons past. He listened a moment to the
elfin voice above him, and then glided away
to the Blugg-Blugg Tree; made, indeed, a
stolen night march into a world not earthly.

Then the soldiers were aroused from their
bivouac; they shook off Death's image,

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Gee-Boy

and wrestled with Death himself; the Infinite
touched them, and they were as gods. The
blues charged to the Tuckanawdor; forded it;
swam it; met the grays on the other shore,
and fell upon them in their might. Gee-Boy
saw and felt it all— the deadly grapple on
the wet bank, the long lines of flame when
the muskets volleyed, the pump and roar
of artillery, the charge of cavalry, the death
cries of mangled men and horses; and in
his heart he exulted. And not more than
when the blues were suddenly crowded back
to the bank, the savage enemy before, the
water behind; for the moment had come.
Far to the left were the seven regiments,
led by the hero of heroes, crossing the moun-
tains in the half-light of the shrouded moon.
Down they swept on the foe's flank, and the
fight was a rout. In after years Gee-Boy
could never think of this soundless, bloodless
battle without a feeling of the touch of
Infinity as he felt it then. Through it all he
heard the pine trees sighing to him; there
was something new in their voice that sent
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Auchophet-Man*s Birth and Death

a tremor shaking through his blood. When
the hero changed the enemy's half-victory
into a defeat, and cut his regiments into
flying fragments, the name Gee-Boy wanted
came— a very flash and roar of cannon in
his brain. But he did not shout it out in
triumph; he only stood in a daze, like one
half-awakened from a dream, saying, "Au-
chophet-Man, Auchophet-Man," for it was the
name of the dead. In the hush after the
battle, he heard, or thought he heard, that
distant sound of cannon beyond the Ken-
tucky hills; and he knew that a bullet had
found a brave man's heart in its path, and
that the name was for one who was no more.

In the morning when Monna found him
under the pines, ankle deep in spikes and
cones, Kstening still to the ghostly voices
above him, she was about to scold; but the
spirit of mystery brooded upon him, and
she was silent. She heard his prophecy,
half-believed, and trembled.

That night there were flying rumours of
battle. In the afternoon there came a yellow

^33

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Gee-Boy

envelope, and in it was the message Gee-Boy
had given— " Killed in a charge."

Three nights later, as the boy sat in the
dormer-window seat, he heard far down the
river the sound he was awaiting — ^the long-
drawn, deep, melancholy bellow of the Taras-
con. At last he saw her lights as she steamed
around the big bend, and his eyes followed
her to the wharf. In the gray of morning
they brought the soldier home, with dead
march and arms reversed; and in the after-
noon they laid him away in the little burying-
ground across the yellow g^Uy, on the next
knob; and he is tenting there to-night.

"Fanfinx," said Gee-Boy, speaking to his
little playmate that evening, as they looked
tearfully at each other through the fence,
"it was wrong for me to be so angry; no
gentleman would be so. And you may call
your papa Potchy and your mamma Monna;
for Potchy means a good papa, and Monna
means a good mamma. Now I will call my
papa Auchophet-Man; only I won't tell you

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Auchophet-Man's Birth and Death

what it means. But if you will come to the
Blugg-Blugg Tree, I will show you how the
seven regiments won the fight."

But Fanfinx only looked through the pal-
ings, and sobbed.

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VII

PIECES OF THE TRUE CROSS

'TT'HE Green Bullfrog— a captive from a
marshy spot in the creek— lived down
the dank cellar-way. It had a cool nook
under the bottom step, between two loosened
bricks; and here it luxuriated in the delicious
juicy damp that oozed from floor and wall.
By day it had little to do but to brood upon
its own being and to ponder the burly blue
flies that spotted the dark, red-walled moat,
and buzzed angrily when any forked crea-
ture from above opened the doors and let
down the sultry summer heat; but at night
it went up the steps, hop, hop, hop, and sat
on the well-curb near at hand, considered
the stars, how they were ordained, and
incidentally, as occasion offered, caught a
bug.
Hither, one night, its captor, a young
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Pieces of the True Cross

boy, brought a jar of strangely luminous
insects, whose fellows might be seen flying
about, having come down, doubtless, from
the sky. One of the winged stars was held
before the frog's mouth, and— gobble! it
was gone. Which seemed to please the small
boy mightily ; for with spasms of giggling,
he seized the little beast roughly, digging
his sweltering fingers into its soft clammy
stomach, and bore it away into a great
dark place called the house, where the air was
like a becalmed sirocco. The Green Frog felt
itself going up and up, until it was put into
a window where it could see some great
trees. Then the captor, the giggling con-
tinuing, opened the jar and fed the luminous
insects to his captive until all had gone down
into the ravening maw. He now closed the
wooden shutters, slid his fingers noisily along
the slats, and after a moment of silence
there in the darkness of Egypt, broke into
roars of laughter. Surely, there was the light
that never was in frog or toad. The thin
skin of the batrachian glowed from within

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with the light of a hundred lightning-bugs.

The boy rolled on the floor and shouted
out, "Oh, Monna-Monna Slim Lady, come
and see the green goblin, the bluxy Chinese
lantern." But the hot silence from below
returned no answer. The boy dragged his
bed across the floor to the window, propped
himself up on pillows and stared at the frog's
luminous pulsing throat; and the frog stared
toO; stolidly, with no diminution of dignity.

Long and long the boy watched, until
the light dimmed to a lustre, and the frog
began to take on the Egyptian hue about.
As it did so, it grew and grew, until it seemed
a great beast like Jonah's whale, with legs;
and its mouth was a door of a radiance so
inviting that the boy got up from his bed
and marched directly into it. Straightway
he found himself under a miniature sky with
stars strangely unfixed. The Pleiades were
flying about on their way to a picnic; and
the constellation of Orion, bands and all,
was loosed. The boy laughed loudly.
But even as he laughed the wandering stars

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grew dim, then went out, and all was as
dark as the river when at night it swirled
and eddied murderously in its blackness.
He could see it, by some necromancy, far
below him, over the dim edge of the bluff
where he stood with Potchy and Monna;
and suddenly he was falling over the edge.
Potchy clutched at him, but vainly; down
he went to muddy death.

He had shot about half-way down the
height of the bluff, counting, as he fell, the
holes the swallows made in the clay, when
he was stricken with remorse because he had
left behind him no memento; so off came his
hat— a silk one, cut down from Potchy's
castaway—and shot upward, and fell with
sure aim on the devoted head that had once
worn it, tilting a little toward the left ear,
jauntily. Duty done, the boy proceeded
onward in obedience to the uncompromising
law of falling bodies, and was about to
plunge into the river's deeps, when the Green
Frog came splashing up and caught him in
its mouth. The boy laughed aloud. Shade

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Gee-Boy

of Sam Patch ! Clearly it was a world where
some things could be done as well as others,
and where all need not be just so.

The Green Frog was sumptuously furnished
within — ^as much so as the Tarascon, There
was a cabin of priceless luxury, a table the
boy had all to himself, and forty nigger
waiters. The engines rumbled, and the smoke-
stacks wheezed hollowly, as only a Green
Frog's stacks can wheeze when it is steaming up
stream a thousand miles a minute, and the
paddles leaving two long curving lines of
foam behind. But then— the boy thought
of it with horror— the falls were above, and
no steamboat ever struck them and lived.
Smash! Bang! The Green Frog's nose
was against the rocks, and the boy began
to say, "Now I lay me," just as he had
once said it with his head against the bluxy
butcher-shop. The paint was almost worn
off it, and as it scratched his forehead he
stood up straight, and could n't help seeing
through the window that Potchy and Monna
were within. Entering, he stood by them
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before the counter, where they were buying
a Dilemma tenderloin. Some evil would
surely befall. Yes, there it was, coming in
at the back door— the Dilemma itself, head
lowered; and astride of it was the Julep-
Devil. The horned beast stood quite still
and said,—

"Let us sing hymn 581,716, * There is a
gate ; there stands a jar.' I will not read the
hymn. All sing."

"You can't work it yourself," screamed
the boy desperately.

"Ba-a-a-a," quoth the Dilemma, threat-
eningly.

" Come on," shouted the boy.

The Green Frog hung cut a green lantern
over one eye, and a red one over the other.

The Dilemma rushed, jolting the Julep-
Devil off behind the chopping block ; and as
he did so the Green Frog grew big, like
Jonah's whale, with legs; and the boy was
expecting to see himself avenged, when —
he felt something lightly touching his
shoulder. Unhappy dreamer — ^to be thus
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Gee-Boy

shaken out of starland! He hoped as he
opened his reluctant eyes, that it would all
be continued in his next; but alas! Gee-
Boy's banishment from the Eden of Dreams
was at hand; the angel with the flaming
sword — ^no, with chopping-block and cleaver,
stood by him.

"Why are you lying here stifling in this
hot room? And this nasty toad! — ^how did
the thing get up here?"

"Monna, you spoiled my dream."

"Yes," was the soft reply; then a medita-
tive pause, and,— "I am afraid I am going
to spoil all your dreams."

The boy looked up at her anxiously.

" Do you know how old you are to-day ? "

"Yes, twelve."

"Heavy, heavy hangs over your head,
my son. When papa went away to the war,
you said you would take care of me. Did
you mean it, dear?"

"Yes, I meant it — every bit." The words
came wearily.

"Then you must be a man, for you will
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have a man's burden long before you are
twenty-one. When the war broke out, the
rebels took the cattle and horses on the
Texas ranch, and we have nothing but the
store building down in the town, which pays
but Uttle rent now, the farm down the river
—and Morgan's men played havoc with it,
you know, and took the stock— and this
little place, and no Potchy to earn our
bread for us. We shall have to have a larger
garden, plant a field of potatoes in the new
clearing on the southeast slope of the knob,
keep more chickens, another cow, and raise
pigs."

" Pigs !" exclaimed Gee-Boy, in thoughtless
scorn.

"Don't turn up your nose that way, my
son; it is not like a man, and the country
needs men more than ever before— so many
lie dead under the battle-fields, and so many
have come home with empty sleeves. You
should not be ashamed of work, even of
caring for pigs. By-and-by you will want
to go to college to prepare yourself for a

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Gee-Boy

man's hard fight in the world, and there will
be a struggle to get the money, and it must
begin now. The way may seem hard; but
it is honourable."

"Hogs!" exclaimed Gee-Boy, under his
breath. "To raise hogs!" It was a menial
task for a boy whose father had scorned to
become governor, and had become a general.
The world a workhouse ! A piggery ! And
what would the girl in the gray waist think?
And Fanfinx? But Fanfinx didn't count
much; he had known her always.

Mother and son talked long; and when the
low hum of their voices ceased and Monna
went down stairs, Gee-Boy stole away, a
marsh of salt tears lying stagnant in his
soul. As he closed the garden gate, a dank
wind put a film of mist over his eyes; and
the smoke from the kitchen chimney hurried
over the sooty edge of the loosened bricks,
dropped, and rolled down over the rim of
the knob. But what did Gee-Boy care for
wind and weather? The serpent river could
be seen twisting along from the cave-like
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nook half-way down the knob's side; thither
he went with his burdens.

The river lacks the melancholy of the sea,
but has all its mystery. Like the human
soul, it comes from the unknown, and again
goes where no man can see. Like life, it
makes no explanation of its purposes. Like
death, it comes silently, and no man's hand
can stay it. Yet it has a voice to him who
listens and is patient— an admonition of
resignation to the powers that be, an accept-
ance of what is, a contentment in the will
of the Irresistible. If fretful man could only
heed!

A preliminary flurry of rain, wind-driven,
swept diagonally from the Kentucky shore
straight to the knob, leaving a long streak
of beaten white on the dun river; and Gee-
Boy cowered back under the ledge, watched
the rain spread and thicken until the wind
was smothered in it, thought of the cross
laid upon him, and of others that had been
but warnings.

It seemed that the world's work had to
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Gee-Boy

be done; and even the dreamers could not
escape. Softened by the picture before him,
he accepted the burdens with a sigh; if it
tasked Monna to appease creditors, it was
only right that he should help ; but it would
be better and pleasanter if these sordid peo-
ple needed no appeasing. What were they
good for but to serve folk made of finer
clay? He hated the breed — delvers in dirt,
biters of coin, liars, and thieves, and dirty
like the stuff they delved in ; they blew their
noses in a way most uglesome to behold,
and straightway shook hands with their
friends. He ruminated, too, on his interrupted
dream, on his past illusions, and their corre-
sponding disillusions. A natural pagan,
he gave up reluctantly the idea of the di-
vinity of Caprice. He knew nothing of the
word Law, but he had learned that things
had to happen "just so," and that no one
could possibly prevent them. He had once
confidently believed that the man in the
moon had been put there for burning brush
on Sundays; now this tenet of his religion
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had become a myth. Once he had believed
it easy for the faithful to move mountains;
now he feared that even the faithful had their
limitations. Once he had feared that the
world might be a great hallucination; now
he knew it was but too, too solid. Perhaps
Fanfinx was right in her apparent belief
that the destiny of woman was dolls and
preserves; only, to his sex, it would be
turnips and pigs. Pigs! The opposite be-
lief had yet only too strong a grip upon
him, in spite of the shades of the prison-
house. "You have but one life to live,"
Monna had said to him in parting, " so make
the most of it." He couldn't believe this;
and Monna could not have meant it. Life
evidently came from some unknown place,
just as the river did; and after flowing by
a long time, passed on forever to flow in
lands not disclosed to human view. Then
why labour for meat, which perisheth ? Why
bother one's self with trifles like— pigs, when
it was so much more agreeable just to drift
on, and play and dream and see the world go

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Gee-Boy

by ? True, his fathers had laboured, had done
their share in piling up the world's sum of
wealth ; but then, if we should all do just as
our fathers did, we should still be clad in fig-
leaves. To encourage him, Monna had said
that all things come to him who goes after
them. But he didn't want things; he wanted
thoughts. Thoughts were real; things, but
poor blind blundering imitations; thoughts
obeyed his will, but he obeyed the will of
things; a Green Frog that could turn himself
into a steamboat with hollow wheezing stacks
was a thing of more interest to him than any
number of grunting, face-making porkers.

There was another thing, too, that Monna
had mentioned incidentally — one of the little
burdens that had been warnings; the tyranny
of the moral law that the world had been
gathering in her six thousand years. As he
had grieved because things must be just so,
now he grieved because he must "behave"
just so. The frown of the righteous was to
be reckoned with — another restraint upon
hisHberty; another hurdle before his vaulting
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spirit. He had recently had a fight with a
young copperhead who had called him a
nigger-lover, had been beaten by a longer
reach and heavier fists, had come home
bloody but uncowed, swearing a renewal
of the battle at the first meeting with his
enemy. Monna had given him a long lecture
on the Christian doctrine of returning good
for evil and of turning the other cheek; and
now she had repeated it, hoping to fortify
him with self-restraint; but he had replied
with manifest protest in voice and face, "If
a fellow turned the other cheek, nobody
could tell whether he was a Christian or a
coward. '^ Monna was silent. It was but
too true doctrine. Gee-Boy did not forget
that she did not reply.

Rebounding from these unpleasant thoughts
his mind came back to the storm-beaten
river. Not long before, he had looked for-
ward to the time when he should be a pilot,
and guide steamboats up and down the
yellow stream. The future had looked like
a dream; life would be a game. Now it
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Gee-Boy

seemed that he was taking a last look at
all he held dear. Work, work ! A torture
devised by the devil— truly a creature more
subtile than any beast of the field which the
Lord God had made ! More pleasant far to
watch the rain on the water, or to sit under
a locust-tree, as he sat often for hours at
a time, away from sights of farms and work-
shops, to eat the long racemes of papilio-
naceous blossoms, and to watch the pelting
drops dimple the dust where the cattle had
trodden the grass dead. He had been, but
a few hours before, as chirrupy as a cricket
in the chimney comer; now he was dumb,
and had no more life than a grasshopper
climbing a stalk of com. When he awoke
hereafter, each morning, he would have to
think of coops and sties instead of lying
in a deHcious half-slumber, listening to the
wrens on the roof, or the jay-bird sharpening
his bill on the waterspout. He wished he
could shrivel to a beetle, and live in the
shadow of a dandelion; or a frog, yes, a
frog, and croak in a puddle.

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Life, then, as he grew older, appeared to
become more narrow and circumscribed, more
beset with difficulties, more full of incon-
gruities of things and even of thoughts.
Would these increase as he approached man-
hood? Had men done evil that they were
compelled to travel stony ways with burdens
on their backs, seeing no farther than their
noses? Gee-Boy began to wonder whether
God had actually made the world, so dis-
tinctly was the trail of the serpent over it.
Perhaps when God was resting from his
labours on the seventh day, the devil tried
his own hand by stealth.

The whirl of his thoughts went on, tumul-
tuously, disorderly; the hours fled unreck-
oned; night and clouds blotted out river
and farther shore; Gee-Boy was alone, re-
signed but unsatisfied — conscious of having
neither will nor way to cope with life's stub-
bom facts, defeated in his desire to create
his own environment, feeling the solution
of the problem of living as far away as the
edge of the world. That night he tossed

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Gee-Boy

with weary dreams^ and in the morning he
awoke to care.

There was a whisper outside his window.
He wondered how many leagues of wind he
had heard blow through those pines. He
wondered if he should ever know what the
Green Frog did to the Dilemma. He won-
dered if the Julep-Devil would help him build
a pig-pen.

Pigs! Pigsl

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VIII

AMO, l.v.a.

TF Nature had only vouchsafed conscious-
ness to old earth!— the power to feel
her youth renewed each returning Spring;
to know a second time, yes, for infinite times,
the ecstasy of violets bursting through her
gray winter thatch; to give birth to the
springing grass and the tender green of
budding trees; to be conscious of wayward
blossoms wavering downward through the
soft air to rest upon her bosom; to hear
in the trees the chat of newly awakened
squirrels; to see the lambent flit of red-birds
through the young foliage, and to be sensible
of the warmth of children's feet upon her.
What a privilege to die each year, and awake
again to an ever new surprise ! But Nature
has not been kind. Cruel — she never g^ves
her fullest. Earth feels no perennial joys

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trickling through her deep-laid veins; but,
dull and lifeless, whirls on through the weary-
cycles, bearing an ever-renewed happiness
she cannot feel; while to man, who wastes
his days in a vain search for the fountain
of youth, who would give the paradise to
come for a few Faust births, is grudgingly
given one poor little Spring, and this often
blighted by frost.

But this is mere sentiment; perhaps senti-
mentality; the rest is satire. In due time
Gee-Boy's Spring came on with violets in
her hand. The season was a riot of new-born
erotic emotion ; his mental images were eter-
nally cuddling and spooning. If he had
ever had a thought, it had left no trace in
his brain-works. It was enough to feel that
every drop of his blood had a bubble in it.
One day he found among his father's books
a little volume in which the first line of a
chapter caught his eye : "In this refulgent
Summer it has been a pleasure to draw the
breath of life." The one sentence was the
glorification of all that could be felt about

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Amo, l.v.a.

the knobs and the river in those happy days
of the young year; a happy background
of many simple dreams of nesting, and it
filled full his measure of delight. To such
uses are* put the words of the sage. "In
this refulgent Summer it has been a pleasure
to draw the breath of life,'* he repeated end-
lessly, as he looked out over the wonderful
picture at Blue Knob's foot—" a pleasure to
draw the breath of life." He made a futile
attempt or two to read the whole essay.
That required thinking. To feel was enough.
It was Gee-Boy's only Spring, and there was
a canker in its bud. This was the way of it :
A timid bounding of the heart seized the
witling when Fanfinx confronted him with
her saucy, half-suspicious look, or when Ruth
met him, shyly, with eyes that glowed ten-
derly from her alternately flushed and paled
cheeks; and he would leave the one afraid,
and the other— he knew not how; only
lightly, very lightly. In days but recently
gone by, his favourite flower had been the
spicy, heavy-odoured carnation; but his fickle

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Gee-Boy

faith now flitted to violets, and he wore them
in his buttonhole, fancying at times they
were for Fanfinx, and at times for Ruth;
scarcely conscious that the former was a
trivial effort.

"Why do you wear them— the violets, I
mean?" Ruth asked him one day.

They had met in front of the cottage in
New Moon Street, which was only across
the park from her father's great house, with
the crouching stone Hons keeping guard
before it.

"Because," he said, with a sudden tide
of courage, which ebbed before he had finished
the sentence, "because they remind me of
yo— -somebody." He sniffed at them awk-
wardly.

Ruth's eyes drooped. The two, boy and
maid, walked on to her house and sat on
the lions, not afraid of them, but of each
other ; and Ruth looked happy, and Gee-Boy
silly; and a man who passed felt his sleeve
pulsating with laughter.

That night the youth of the budding love

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Amo, l.v.a.

remained out very late, intending to hear
the morning stars sing together. Opposite
Ruth^s house he leaned against a friendly
town pump for a space, and then invaded
the little park, where he reclined on a bench
hid in the shrubbery, and listened to a song
that came dancing across the way— a light
song of life and love that awakened anew
that delicious bubbling in his veins. Then
another, a tale of lost love, with an under-
melody bursting into occasional fits of pas-
sion in the pauses; and the concert was over,
and Ruth was first and the stars nowhere.
He looked up to them pityingly from his se-
clusion in the shadows. In the old days his
grandfather had been beaten in his third
race for the mayoralty because of his extrava-
gance in buying that park : Gee-Boy thought
it cheap at any price.

Then he circled the square in which the
Dulcinea of the moment lived, gazing with
a goose-look up at her window, through
whose closed shutters the light peeped in
faint slits, until at last, when the room was

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Gee-Boy

suddenly darkened, he leaped the fence, en-
sconced himself in the shadow of a lion, and
dreamed dreams all boys have dreamed
before.

The vernal habits of a schoolboy's fancy
are spoony and melodramatic; a description
would be too much like a confession to be
told in Gath or published in the streets of
Askelon; and would, besides, be too truthful
to be set down on pages not truth, but only
a summer's fancy ; so let them pass with an
epigram : To have so much blood that it
spills easily at the nose — ^this is to be young
and in love. Concerning which, one dis-
gruntled Schopenhauer hath spoken much
wisdom.

By and by, Gee-Boy's reveries were inter-
rupted by voices and footsteps in the streets;
and his blush made a glow like a lightning-
bug's on a June night. Two big red-tipped
cigars were coming along talking with each
other; one of them sent a big ring of smoke
up toward the very sentimental moon, and
said, with the sagest floiuish,—

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Amo, l.v.a.

"Don't do it, my boy; it's folly. An old
teacher of mine— I've spoken of him before;
a good fellow; we called him Uncle Tommy—
once said, 'To be in love is to be struck by
a shower of nonsense.' Don't ask her. Love
is as inevitable as measles, comes about the
same time, and is as soon cured. You're
too young to know your own mind. Wait a
while. Tarry at Jericho till your beard be
grown. No girls for me. If old Corbinson
is re-elected to Congress this fall, he will
appoint me to the military academy. I'll
wed my profession. A sword is the best
wife; it cuts the other fellow. Don't marry
until you are seventy; there'll be less time
left to repent. Why, man, love is like rheu-
matism—the first pangs have a funny streak
in them, and you hold your knee, or your
heart, and laugh; but you let them get
worse, and all the funny feeling is gone.
Take a fool's advice, and learn to don't.
There is a boy in my room at the West
Academy who is in love— struck by the
shower. Dreams in class. I ask him to

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Gcc-Boy

read Arma virumque^ and he is startled,
turns scarlet, and looks silly. The other
day I asked him the construction of a word—
an accusative of specification, it was — and
he stammered out, * Violets.' He wears *em
in his buttonhole. He is daffy, clean daffy.
There are two girls in the case, and he
doesn't know which dear charmer he wishes
away."

" This old teacher . of yours," said the
other cigar— "he really became your uncle,
didn't he? Married your aunt, I think you
told me once."

"Yes, but-uh"

The two big cigars were gone.

Gee-Boy sprang to his feet. The damp
night air chilled his flaming cheek, and seemed
to strike his spirit and sweep away all illu-
sion-making mists. He leaped the fence, and
went home ashamed, temporarily, but dog-
ged.

Thus with softness and sentimentality—
the mere thoughtless ebullition of a boy's
fickle blood— did the idyllic part of Gee-
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Digitized by CjOOQIC

Amo, l.v.a.

Boy's life approach a climax; after it, less
wholly was he to Hve in a world of his own
creation, and more in a world created for
him; less sport was to be his, and more
grief; less comedy, much tragedy; for so
runs the world away. Beware, Gee-Boy, the
rapids are below you. And one of those
fire-tipped Havanas that bobbed along the
street last night is unconsciously to lure
you into them. So,

"No,*' said the professor (every teacher
in the young West was professored), "let
us not call him pious; I have too much re-
spect for JEneas to call him pious."

"Well, he wasn't pious, anyway," inter-
rupted Fanfinx in her high piping voice— high
and shrill because, doubtless, her ancestresses
had had to shoo the chickens off the porch.
"He wouldn't have run away from Dido
if he had been." Fanfinx was sixteen, and
had ideas.

The eyes of the girl of the gray waist
grew sad (the gray waist had become a
habit with her— why, she never said) ; and she
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Gee-Boy

had to crush down an impetuous Kttle desire
to glance ever so hastily at Gee-Boy.

"Do you think so?" the professor replied;
a youngish professor he was, and rather
fond of loitering over the amatory passages;
fond, too, apparently, of a certain famili-
arity and incipient impudence from his pupils,
or, perhaps, unable to prevent it. He con-
tinued, "Other men who have passed for
pious have done the same thing; and some
have begun early. A man who can face
bullets without feeling his legs turn coward,
may be utterly craven in a love aflfair. Now
I heard a story once (the professor's eyes
twinkled, and he carefully avoided looking
at Gee-Boy) about a young man of nine
summers, or rather winters, for the snow
was on the ground, who was an ^neas in
a small way. Like the great hero, he

"—loved and ran away,

And lived to love another day."

"He didn't love her if he ran away," re-
torted Fanfinx.

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"Probably not; no more did iEneas."

Fanfinx, and all the room, looked expect-
ant, and a shade of sadness darkened the
gray waist.

"You want to know about it?" asked
the professor. "Well, you have heard that
love is blind. It^s a mistake. Love's eyes
are microscopes. A man in love can see
qualities in his Felix Dido that are not
visible to the naked eyes of other men. The
trouble with this young -^neas was that
there were two Felices Didones, and with
his magnifying eyes he saw much that was
too bluxy to cast away; and \hs,y—lnfelicesy
really— were sleepless because each feared he
thought more of the other than of her."

"Pooh! I don't believe it," Fanfinx
pouted.

"True, nevertheless. And it so happened
that the boy's mother gave one of the rival
girls a Maltese kitten, and when the other
girl heard of it, she was jealous."

"How silly!"

" Of course she was silly. All girls are, under
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the circumstances. And boys too. Yet she
said nothing, being modest. But the boy,
by an intuition that was almost feminine,
knew how she felt, and he told her that if
he had given the kitten away, he would have
given it to her. A bird of the air carried
the matter to little Miss Other Girl, the one
who had the kitten, and the next day she
met the boy. They were at the top of a
big hill, and the boy had his sled along, for
the coasting was good. She said to him,
' Did . you tell So-and-so that if you had
given the kitten you would have given it to
her?' Now what do you suppose the brave
boy did?"

Fanfinx's face had become very red. So
had the face of the girl of the gray waist.
Gee-Boy looked murder. But the professor
went on; he was not timid.

"Well, what could ho, do? There are times
(the professor settled himself in his chair
for a scholarly dissertation) when one must
yield to circumstances. For example, I have
been through the Latin grammar a dozen
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times, more or less, from Mensa to the Meters
of Horace, but have never discovered a royal
method of distinguishing purpose from result.
As a teacher, what am I to do? Why, in
a doubtful case, if one of you pupils says
'purpose,' I congratulate you on your dis-
cernment; and would, impartially, do the
same if you said 'result.' I take to my
heels, you understand. It is one of the tricks
of the trade. So the soldier, when he knows
he can't hold a position, runs away ; and the
lover, when he can't face a woman scorned,
runs away. Now our young hero couldn't
say No, for he had taken the hatchet story
very seriously. He couldn't say Yes, for
there were livid lightnings in the small
woman's eyes. So he tumbled onto his sled,
and sped, belly-buster, down the kn— hill,
I mean."

The pupils laughed loudly, except three.

"Don't you think it is a good story.
Turner ? " asked the professor, smiling blandly
at Gee-Boy.

"Very," returned Gee-Boy. "I'm fond of

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ancient history— particularly personal his-
tory."

"Pm glad," said the professor, "for I
have some more— modern history, too, this;
and personal, no doubt." He drew forth
a fresh newspaper from his desk. "Here
it is in our local abstract and brief chronicle
of the times— you know what Hamlet said
about the players. Now gather and surmise."
And the professor began to read, with many
vocal and facial flourishes, thus suiting the
action to the word,—

"'The other evening as our night reporter quietly
meandered through and about this thriving metropolis,
he meditated upon many things. Then did he come to
the conclusion that riches are vain, and awfully hard
to obtain ; that fame is, a bauble and that love is the
only thing worth having. But as he promenaded by
one of our massive piles dedicated to learning, his
heart was about to go forth in poetic strains, when,
lo ! not many steps distant, he descried a youthful
form, stilted in a tragic pose, and then he heard
ravings, the force of which was exhausted from much
repetition. Grasping note-book and pencil, he hastily
advanced, hoping for a chance to distinguish himself.
But no— it was only a student uttering some unintelli-

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gible sounds. "What is it?" asked our N.R. ''Nothing,
nothing to interest you or your thousands of readers,
noble searcher after truth; only a little note. If
I'd known that she corresponded with him, do you
suppose that I would go to sociables and donation
parties and everywhere with her? No! A thousand
times, No ! But I tire you with many words," said the
youth. "Read for yourself." He then handed to our
N. R. the following gentle effusion.

"*"It's too bad I lost it. I think it dropped into
the dough that I made up last night because my old
black mammy said I could n't. Aren't you sorry you
did n't let Fanfinx wear it instead of me? Now you
will have to get another, but you can afford it, making
five hundred a year out of the poor little piggie-
wiggies. Or maybe you are going to sue me for
damages. Oh, please don't; and some day if I ever
find the little piggie that cried wee wee all the way
home, I'll give it to you. Perhaps you would prefer
the one that could n't get over the barn door, but
I don't think he is very fat, because he did n't have
any thing to eat. She lives on Upper Sixth, near Market,

does n't she? Her name is Ella N . I can't spell it

because it's Dutch, but I'll tell you what it is some
other time. She goes to the East Academy, don't
she? And you have to go so far next Saturday night.
Nigger's night, too. Of course I'm rude to say this,
but then maybe I'm a little jealous. You might
suspect it from my yellow handkerchief. It's mammy's.
I got it by mistake. Well, I'm glad you think she's
cute and smart, a real Dolly Varden. But then ,

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Does she sajr wit for with? And does Fanfinx know
her? Poor Fanfinx! Yes, I nearly collapsed when I
read that. Who would have thought it ? And they're
engaged too. Of course I won't tell. You need n't
worry. I won't show Sid any of your notes— nor
anybody. Cross my heart. Hope to die. Oh, I don't
care if you talk to Polly, only it makes you an instru-
ment with four strings, as the professor would say.
She does n't wish me to write notes to you. Hush up ;
you make me vain. No, she spells it the good old-
fashioned way. She used to spell it S-m-y-t-h-e for fun.
Don't Fanfinx look pretty this aft? Isn't Virgil a
bore? Please let me see you spin your top at recess
or show me how to. Destroy this, please.

"*"P.S. What is the specific gravity of water?
Write it on a sheet of paper so I can see it. I never
could understand those things.

" ' " Second P.S. Maybe it will turn up in the bread." '

"And the reporter concludes with,

"*Not having the key, we simply present the above
great rhetorical effort in all its complicated obscurity.*"

"There," said the professor. "Now what
do you think of that?"

The girl of the gray waist, after a moment
of consternation and dumb terror, had set-
tled down into a supernormal calm, but there
was a white zone about her lips. Fanfinx
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blushed, laughed, and looked triumphant.
Gee-Boy looked and thought murder; and
the professor never knew how near he came
to a school-room fight. Polly, Sid, and Miss
S-m-y-t-h-e looked painfully conscious, while
the rest of the room, as they afterward
voted, had more fun than a bag of monkeys.

"Tell me. Turner, what do you think of
it?" repeated the professor. "Doesn't it
strike you as a masterly production?"

"I was wondering," Gee-Boy retorted,
"what it had to do with Virgil."

"That is just what I was wondering,"
replied the professor. "And I daily wonder
the same thing about many things that go
on in this room. One would think that
Virgil were a person of small importance."

"He was a horse-doctor; you have said
so yourself," Gee-Boy shot back.

"True, but he knew women as well as
horses. Now if Dido had written a note"

"Virgil could not have made it public."

"Why not?"

"Well, Caesar said that all gall is divided
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into three parts; and I don't suppose any-
one fellow had 'em all— not even Virgil."

The professor was evidently jogged. "'A
hit; a very palpable hit,'" said he. "But,
as I was going to say, if Dido had written
a note to ^Eneas, she would have praised her
rivals, if she had had any, as sweetly as the
author of this little epistle has praised hers,
and no doubt would have made her Latin
as bad as this English."

"Pardon me. Professor," Gee-Boy inter-
rupted with Satanic politeness, "Dido did
not speak Latin; neither did -^neas."

The professor blushed. "True," he said.
" Pray excuse the slip. And all the same she
would have felt like pulling her rival's hair."

The girl of the gray waist grew whiter
about the lips; and Fanfinx's color glowed
triumphantly.

" And then she would have disparaged her
own charms, expecting in return a com-
pKment from ^neas; for she would have
known how to manage a Lothario so gay
and popular among the ladies. Have we not
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an instance here? Woman is the same the
world over; Virgil knewher like— like a horse."

"You seem to be well informed yourself,
Professor," Gee-Boy observed.

" Yes, and I was young not long ago, and
went to the academy as you do, and"

"Wrote notes," interrupted Gee-Boy im-
pudently.

" I was about to remark further," the pro-
fessor continued, quelHng with a frown a
rising laugh, "that Dido would not always
have spoken of her rival so sweetly ; at the
proper time her eyes would have shot the
livid lightnings ; her tongue, too, was double-
edged, so that she was in as much danger
from it as other people were. So we see wom-
an, as Virgil understood her — ^the enigma,
with moods Hke the sky in April. Which
leads me to observe that a school-room is
a good place in which to study human na-
ture. However, this particular phase of
school-room work should be reserved for
the teacher; pupils should attend to very
different matters— Virgil, for instance."
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Gee-Boy

"If I have understood you correctly,"
Gee-Boy suggested, blandly, "the -^neid is
a good study of human natiu*e.'*

"A quibble, Turner, and not worthy of
you."

"But," persisted Gee-Boy, "shouldn't we
study life as well as books? I have heard
you say that that is a modern pedagogical
maxim."

" You are wise beyond your years. Turner.
Note-writing, however, is not in the curric-
ulum; and however interesting it may be
to those who write over the doors of their
schools, " Man, know thy Woman, you must
stop it at once or"

"You carry out my idea exactly, Profes-
sor."

"Yes, on a shutter."

The bell rang.

"I think we may safely saj," concluded
the professor, rising, "'Thus endeth the
morning lesson.' Let it be a life-lesson. The
next will begin in the middle of line 569,
— * Varium et mutabile semper Femina,^ "
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And now you axe in the rapids, Gee-Boy.
And there are two currents, one that might
cast you ashore on an island of happiness,
where in safety and peace you might con-
template the tumult about you, and one
that will certainly drag you over the cata-
ract; and you don't know which from t'other.
So,

The night was as black as the ninth plague
of Egypt; and the old mare, with the de-
jected colt by her side, moved cautiously
along the dusty road, meditating upon the
folly of what her driver and his little auburn-
haired maid called picnics. Nines miles out
and nine miles back ; and she with the rickety
old phaeton behind her, bringing up the
rear of a long procession of giddy young
people of the puppy-love age, who had taken
their fill of jaunting and junketing. Just
twenty hearts— twenty hearts that beat as
ten ! What was the good of so much travel?
Were not the knobs about the town as good
as those of Stoyman Township? And what
virtue in so much blackbird chatter? Only

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the mare and the colt were silent— nine miles
out and nine miles back. Fanfinx, by half-
hidden poutings and sly upturnings of the
right side of her pretty nose (in all of which
there was a trace of insincerity that Gee-
Boy was too much of a booby to detect),
had shown her regret that she had made
such a choice of escort, and had endeavoured
to give the impression that it was fortunate
for him that she had given her word before
the note appeared in the paper; but when
she had seen, gravely waiting at her front
door, the proud mother between the shafts
of the old phaeton, and the prouder son
hitched to her side (where, colt-like, he
thought he would draw the whole load),
there had been a flash of her eye and a
stamp of her foot in which the keenest and
coldest observer could have detected no dis-
simulation. Was she to travel through the
town and half the county in a fat-stock
show? She had hesitated a moment before
putting her foot on the step, and finally
had bounded in, feeling that the die had

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been cast for her; but she had rewarded her
bucolic escort by ignoring him the whole day,
by snubbing him openly in a game of " King
William was King James's son," by flirting
desperately with Sidney, and by torturing
poor Ruth into silence and pale despair.
It was not for nothing that the gods had
topped her with flaming locks. But when
the day was done and the return began,
she lost her spirit. And the night was as
black as the ninth plague of Egypt; and
the old mare plodded along in the thick
dust; and the dejected colt dragged at his
strap until the wheel bumped him.

An hour before, Gee-Boy had been full of
burning words — words all the hotter for
having smouldered long in his soul. How
often had he dreamed over what he would
say one day to one of the two ! Now the
time had come; events had turned his love
to Fanfinx; but, alas! the stream of it
seemed log-jammed, and flowed but tardily.
He parted his Hps to speak, but was voice-
less. What was the reason, he didn't know,

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but Fanfinx seemed too far away to hear
the soft tones his fancy had used in the
thousand times it had conjured up this Httle
scene. Curious!— for some luiaccountable
reason it occiured to him at this moment
that the moon had once looked Hke a pan-
cake. But the night had begun to yawn,
and minutes were golden ; he forced his mood,
and said,—

"Fanfinx, won't you speak to me?''

No answer.

" Fanfinx, you know I love you, and have
always loved you."

No answer, but a contemptuous little splut-
tering sniff!

"Do answer me, Fanfinx; I can't endure
your silence." And the simpleton didn't
know what a desirable virtue it was in her.

"I dare not speak," the young miss re-
turned, " for fear of annoying the colt."

Gee-Boy feared his blush would dispel the
darkness and reveal itself. He made no reply.

"I never knew any one so stupid," said
Fanfinx, hotly.

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Gee-Boy hung his head, and the reins,
drooped.

" Fanfinx, you were always cruel. I believe
if you had my heart in your hand, you would
throw it to the ground and trample on it."
This was a fine speech; he had practised it
often.

"I would. It thinks too much of gray
waists."

"How can you say it, Fanfinx?"

" And it beats faster when a . note comes
across the aisle."

" No, no, Fanfinx, I found her out to-day.
Sid told me all. The note dropped out of
my pocket; she picked it up, and after school
showed it to him and bragged that she was
leading me a pretty dance. She said it would
be a great joke to put it in his father's
paper. Would you believe that any girl
could think of such a thing — a note she
wrote herself, too? Well, she did; and Sidney
wrote the introduction. That's the whole
story. I never heard of a girl doing any
thing so contemptible. And vain." In the
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impetuous haste of his speech, Gee-Boy for-
got that in all the days he had known Ruth,
she had never been guilty of any deception
or any ungentle act ; forgot to form his judg-
ment on this rather than on a story bearing
all the marks of guile; forgot how often
and how much his own heart had warmed
into a quiet, restful contentment in her
presence; forgot her benevolent, self-denying
spirit ; forgot the magic effect of her glance,
and, above all, forgot her soft resonant
voice; forgot all this— wheedled, bewitched
by a little minx who never had an unselfish
thought in all her life; beneath whose every
act was spite, or trickery, or both ; who never
had a word responsive to any feeling higher
than the sordid things of earth. Had he only
known that his mistake foreboded a day when
a certain Philistine should be upon him I

Fanfinx bit her lip to keep down an up-
welling expression of triumph. "Pooh!*'
she blurted out presently. "It's taken you
a long time to find her out. I hate her—
hate her !"

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"Don^t mention her again. I renounce
her and all her works. It is you I love,
Fanfinx; and I never knew it till to-day.*'

"Oh— so? You said a moment ago that
you had loved me always."

" Don't pick me up in my words, Fanfinx,"
he replied, defensively bracing himself for
a fine speech, one that might exalt his emo-
tion. "You know what I mean. I never knew
how noble you are until I saw how ignoble
somebody else is. Don't you know that I
love you? I want to live my whole Hfe for
you."

"And the colt," suggested Httle miss.

"Fanfinx, you are joking with me; but
I hear your breath come quick, and I know
your heart beats fast." He put his arm
around her, and drew her close. A little
feathery wisp of her hair touched his cheek
and sent a million thrills skurrying through
him. And he said silly things that boys
say on such occasions; and took himself
seriously; and did not know that his pre-
meditated utterance was hollow, hollow.

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Gee-Boy

Fanfinx, cat-like, permitted herself to be
nestled closely, and was silent. Gee-Boy
bent his head and kissed her— once, twice,
thrice ; and the little wisps of hair engendered
that priceless ravishment.

"Now are you satisfied?" she asked, look-
ing up.

The night was silent save for the ragged
voices of crickets in the fence corners, the
distant chorus of frogs in a marsh, and the
far-away heart-quickening blast of a steam-
boat. The old mare and the colt plodded
on; the reins drooped; and love's young
dream dreamed on.

It must have been a quarter of an hour,
when the startUng clatter of the ill-matched
team's hoofs on the loose boards of a Uttle
bridge warned Gee-Boy that the end of the
fateful journey was at hand.

"Come, Fanfinx," he said softly, "you
must tell me now."

Fanfinx shook a little with what had
every appearance of a sob, and put her
hands to her face.

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" Tell me now," pleaded Gee-Boy.

"I— I— suppose so," said Fanfinx, faintly.

Gee-Boy suddenly took her in his arms
and pressed her close. "Fanfinx, I love
you— love you."

Fanfinx lay still a moment, and then
struggled to be fi-ee. "Don't, Gee-Boy, don't,"
she demanded, with a trace of impatience,
" you— you muss my collar."

The trail of the Serpent !

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/^EE-BOY hardly realised how it came
about that he couldn't keep his fingers
out of the ink-pot; yet the fact was present
that from time to time elegies and odes
smeared them, triolets stained his nails,
and once a fragment of an epic streaked
his shirt front in heroic lines. The cause
lay, doubtless, in a little seed of ambition
that was ready to sprout just in time to be
fertilised in a mind niuch harrowed by dis-
sensions at home. Fanfinx was an ill-tem-
pered thing, and, alas! his own. Things
that happened now reminded him of events
long gone by; the moon, forsooth, had once
looked like a pancake, and an unmussed
collar was more to be desired than many
kisses. Afterward, Fanfinx had failed to
be gratefully moved on being told that he
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would forego the last two years of his col-
lege life for her sweet sake; no sympathetic
response, neither, when told of the purchase
of "my little house in New Moon Street."
A cozy little nest, this, with an air of seclu-
sion; its garden was in constant danger of
sKpping down the slope into the river; and
here one could look over the house-tops
below and see the smoke-stacks of the steam-
boats; and, glancing westward over the
chimneys, the old home on the knobs and
the four green sentinels. But the hours of
ecstasy dreamed of here were hours of dis-
appointment; Fanfinx's soul and Gee-Boy's
were not in unison; she could never get up
to his mood, and he never down to hers;
he wished they might be content with plain
Kving and high thinking, she that their
eyes might stand out with fatness. His star
was far away, and fading. He was not a man
to discover easily that his love had been un-
wisely given ; and now, when it was ripe and
manly, he had no one to pour it out upon,
not even his httle daughter, who was always

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too well dressed to be "mussed"; so it was
dammed up in his heart, ready to burst its
bounds. Riding home day after day from
the farm, where he superintended the care of
the despised porkers, he hoped for a smile and
a caress from his wife and child; and day
after day he met peevish complaints and
unapproachable frocks. And it came to
be a constant thought with him that the
thing one has is never so good as the thing
one wants, and that the answer to the prob-
lem of living was ever as far away as the
edge of the world.

One fretful day in the fall when the scarlet
and yellow trees were dancing on the knobs,
Gee-Boy wandered up hill and down dale
in a fit of starved melancholy, until he came
into the lee of a low bluff or ledge on the
river's edge. A bit of colour on the water
side of a rock caught his eye— a little blue
flower with long hairy stamens, stretching
toward the south ; the most beautiful flower
he had ever seen. Its isolation, its life pro-
longed beyond the summer only to be caught
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Apples of Sodom

at last by the stormy autumn, stirred his
compassion, and almost without realizing it
he began a little jingle, to a harebelL

Little Harebell, wet with dew,
Blowing where thy forebears blew,

A little year before thee,
Dost thou know that life is brief?
Frost will blast thy bloom, thy leaf;

Such fate was theirs that bore thee.

Little Harebell, coloured blue.
Thine, methinks, is a sombre hue—

Ah, startle not, I pray thee;
For when I am sad and gloomy,
And all things are sombre to me,

Then I'm blue, I say thee.

So my colour's like to thine,

And thy life is like to mine-
Evil winds shall blow thee;

Evil winds shall blow me too.

To a land beyond the blue,
Where I hope to know thee.

True, Gee-Boy did not know this flower
to be a harebell, which, he seemed to remem-
ber, had five petals, while this had but three ;
and, if his botany served him, the harebell

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Gee-Boy

grew only in summer, now dead. So he
fortified himself with a most cogent syllogism
— ^he had never seen a harebell, nor this
flower either; whence their identity. Which
is logic enough for any poet. And if the
little blossom were not wet with dew, but
rather with a fine drizzle that had begun
to slant against the bluff, it was no more
a discrepancy between life and Uterature
than he had observed at divers times in the
past. He put the sheet of paper upon which
he had scribbled the Unes into his pocket,
and strode home, foolishly dreaming that
there under the clay bluff, with the slanting
drizzle against it, he had been making liter-
ary history.

He entered his home with more confidence
than usual, and threw the poem down on
the table with an air of one who has done
something worthy of remark.

Fanfinx read it critically.

" Um— awfully cute ! Did you write it your-
self?''

Gee-Boy nodded.

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Fanfinx read again. "Yes, cute; very!
What are you going to do with it?"

"Send it to a magazine."

"Do the editors pay for poetry?"

"Certainly."

"How much will you get for it?"

"Don't know."

"A dollar, do you think?"

"Don't know."

"Do you think it will bring as much as
a pig?"

Gee-Boy paled.

" Pigs and poetry ! I like the combination.
It's a pity, Turner (she spoke to him thus
formally more and more now), that you
are so unbusinesslike ; you are always doing
something that isn't worth while. And
upon my Hfe!— written on the butcher's
statement. I suppose you'll write the next
one on the baker's bill; the candlestick-maker,
thank Heaven ! is extinct. I can't remember
the time when you didn't do silly things.
You've always got some Dilemma* or other
to fight; some sea of Galilee to walk on.

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If you do any more of this stuff, I don't
want to see it, thafs all."

She threw the poem down upon the floor,
and left the room. For a moment Gee-Boy
tapped idly on the window, then put on his
rubber coat and went out into the rain.
His Spring and Summer were gone; an equi-
noctial storm was upon him ; and there was
need of meditation.

The night had fallen, and the sky held
the glint of fire from the blast furnaces.
He walked down to Front Street, and stood
for a while under an awning before a saloon
on the corner, listening to the loud talk
of rowdy deck-hands within; then tramped
along the levee to see a boat draw away
fi-om her wharf and slowly disappear down
the river, her rows of lights glistening and
her stacks belching flame, which, he felt,
was no hotter than the flames blazing within
him. After a time he found himself in the
little park, brought to a sudden halt by a
song that came sadly out into the night —
a song of lost love, with an under-mclody
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bursting into occasional fits of passion in
the pauses. His subsequent wanderings he
remembered but vaguely— to the river again,
up the levee, perhaps to its end, then aim-
lessly into the streets, by the two old market-
houses to the creek beyond the town, back to
— ^where not, conning new verses, which made
themselves, on The Lost Love. They sha-
dowed forth his grudge against the world
that the thing one has is never so good as
the thing one wants, that the land of heart's
desire is infinitely distant; and they shamed
the tenuity and the under-current of bitter
humour of the Hnes written on the butcher's
bill. But they were far too truthful an
imprint of his own soul to be thrust before
the vulgar, or even to be written down;
only in after years was that done.

As the months went by. The Lost Love
so brooded on Gee-Boy's mind that the poor
Uttle harebell jingle seemed as trivial as
tavern gossip, mere droppings from the fringe
of his mood; yet, try as he would, he could
not equal the better performance; his true
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heart had but one song to sing. There was,
however, one theme, or set of themes, that
warmed him, and these sadly and insuffi-
ciently—the old problems of himself and the
world; the beauty and wonder of the universe
which he could not accept without question
and comment; the brilliancy of the day;
the mysterious benediction of the night;
the myriad voices of nature; the thrill of
life, and the throb of love within him. All
these, if anything could, compensated for the
burden of his melancholy ; and it sometimes
expressed itself in rime— rime by no means
faultless, but touched with the bitterness
of the feeUng that he was the sport of things,
and ringing true overtones of desolation;
for, savage-like, he set his songs to a minor
key.

When a year had passed, Gee-Boy had a
profusion of Hterary scraps stuffed into an
old drawer in his mother's garret, and he
began to think of printing. In stolen inter-
vals he re-wrought the verses, copied them
neatly and sent them to a publisher— a singu-
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Apples of Sodom

larly businesslike person, he thought, who
wrote something about the merit of the
poems— a rather vague enigmatical something
—and agreed to put his imprint on the book
if the poet would pay the printer. Two
hundred and thirty dollars ! And the price
of pork was falling. The situation was
pathetic. Gee-Boy scrimped for months,
knowing how well he should enjoy the pointed
finger, like Horace; and he put away from
time to time the silver for which he betrayed
the innocent swine into the hands of their
slayers, all hugger-mugger, of course, for
Fanfinx was handy with her two's and two's,
and would have raised no end of pow-wow.
At last it appeared, neatly hound— Moods,
Being Poems by Turner Dexter Brown; and
a hundred copies were sent to the reviewers.
Gee-Boy had not suspected the venom of
the breed. Being now a parent and an
author, he knew on how slender a thread
hangs the peace of one who sends into the
world child or book. He had once over-
heard someone say that little Grace Brown
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Gee-Boy

was as silly as her father and as ill-tempered
as her mother ; now he read equally disturb-
ing things of Moods, " The author should
open his old Green's grammar at the back
and learn the elements of prosody," said
one. Said another, "One expects Emms,
Quods & Co. to publish books that are, to
say the least, above the mediocre, and not
such melancholy twaddle as this." A third
asked, "Why will ordinary people set them-
selves up for extraordinary?" Anoth^, a
Texas editor, remarked, "The poet's blood
is out of order. We understand that he
hails from Indiana; he should go to the
woods and get a little sassafras; it's good
for what ails him." " Common, distressingly
common and amateurish," was another com-
ment; and "An hour spent in reading it
will be wasted," was the judgment of yet
another. "Not bad for an uplondish mon,"
— ^from a critic across the river. Such worm-
wood was given to Gee-Boy, who itched for
the bliss of being quoted, who expected
"encomiums" and "tributes." There were,
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Apples of Sodom

besides^ a few uncritical and sickening lau-
dations from the country papers, particularly
those of his own town. "We herald Mr.
Brown as the coming poet of the age, and
we pride oiu-selves on having him in our
midst." And lo ! this wormwood was bitterer
than the rest.

Out of the mass of notices sent the de-
jected poet by his publisher, was one from
an eastern critical journal, that was neither
castigation nor blandishment. "This little
book," it ran, " is doubtless the work of a
young man who has taken too seriously
some of the world's griefs; he has set his
heart on thp fruit that turns to dust when
touched, and has allowed himself to become
pessimistic. We fear this is a disease in a
certain type of mind— the type that is ideal-
istic enough to defy everything and every-
body that seems beautiful, and sensitive
enough to mourn over the inevitable dis-
appointment. Yet we are pleased to ob-
serve that Mr. Brown hears a little of the
sphere-music, and that he sees the right light

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Gee-Boy

penetrating the gloom— the hght of love and
wonder for the great things that make up
life and the world; and we trust that his
future attempts will have a more hopeful
note as well as a maturer touch. The fol-
lowing poem, which we print entire, gives
the title to the volume, —

"* MOODS
"'Depression
"'Life! A vision brief;

A little joy ; a world of grief;

A prayer against the day of doom;

A little journey toward the tomb.

" ' Ecstasy
" ' Sun !

That burns within the blue;

Stars !

That blossom in the night;

Worlds !

That make the moon a lustrous retinue;

And Eyes!

Ah, Eyes have I to see their light.

"'Violets!

That burst from out the sod;
Grasses !

That cloak the earth in green;
Rivers !

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Oceans!

Forests !

Mountains !

Garments all of a beauty-loving God;

And Mind !

Ah, Mind have I to guess a little what they mean.

"*Life!
That flutters in the robin's song;
Life!
Love!

That throb plaintively in the plover's call;
Love!
Life!

That pulse through the summer, firm and strong;
And Heart!
Ah, Heart have I to cherish all.

"'Rest!
That comes at last;
Rest!

That overtakes the soul dutiful;
Death!

An endless truce to the painful t>ast;
Death! —
Rebirth, I trust, to a life more beautiful.'"

Balm, balm! And Gee-Boy learned the
friendly words by heart.

By all the canons of good judgment, the
young poet's dream of fame should have

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Gee-Boy

been withered and wrinkled, like an apple
that has clung to its tree till mid-winter.
He had done his best, unless he publish
The Lost Love; and rather than this he
would have poured out his heart's blood.
In truth, it was his heart's blood. And he
should have known that it is only this that
the world will give its fig for. The masters
all know it; and the greatest, by his own
testimony, sold cheap what was most dear;
the tyro never knows it, unless, perhaps,
when the last drop of ink has dried on his
pen. Gee-Boy scarcely sought to reveal
his soul; but sought, rather. Fame, a capri-
cious maid, who comes only to those who
ignore her. He wanted to acquire genius,
not knowing that it is something to be
retained rather than acquired— a simple,
sincere, childlike relation to the world, an
illusioned passion and credulity that contact
with our wretchedly modem life has no
power to destroy. And if he had known—
what? Shades of the prison-house had long
been gathering about him. Witness all his
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Apples of Sodom

enforced disillusions, as (surely not an in-
significant fact) his former feeling toward
any word on the printed page, at which he
used to stare until it seemed an impossible
thing; now quite possible, and natural.

And Gee-Boy should have known, too, that
in some way or other, a drop or two of
gall embitters every cup of wine. He had
read this long ago in the experience of many
men ; but we don't know a thing that others
tell us; we must at last find it out for our-
selves, and bitterly. He knew how Keats
was hounded by his critics; Johnson by
starvation, and rebuffs from Chesterfield;
Shakespeare by an unattainable love. He
knew what Marco Polo said of Kubla Khan
—that he went to the hunt in a golden-Uned
chamber supported by four elephants; that
he rode with a thousand hunters, and— the
gout. And Socrates ! whose words men set
down in books, even to his trivial dying
remark that he owed a cock to -^sculapius;
yet— sorest thought of all ! —the great philoso-
pher was not more renowned for his wisdom
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Gee-Boy

than for his Xanthippe. Henceforth it should
have been contentment to Gee-Boy to brood
and dream for the sake of brooding and
dreaming; or, better still, to accept the
wisdom of disillusion. Like a modern artist
who contents himself with small things, he
should have crowned a skull with laurel,
and under it have written, "What's the
Use?"

Pigs and Poetry ! Swine and Sonnets !

Ah me ! "Why should the spirit of mortal
be proud?"

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THE PAINS OF DEATH AND OF
LIFE

'T'HE one sad thing about mothers is
that you never know how good they
were till they are gone. The time came
when the doors of the old house on the knob
no longer stood hospitably open; no smoke
wavered up from the great chimney; the
shutters of aged green, closed, made the
walls a solid blank, and the joyousness of
long ago became mute. Yet sweetest memo-
ries of Monna remained, and, most precious
of her possessions, the little old-fashioned
ambrotype in its case of rubber. Raven
hair parted in the middle and combed
smoothly down over the ears; round neck
and shoulders; dress of jettest silk; hands
white and graceful — all just as Monna was
when she was young; and when Gee-Boy

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Gee-Boy

studied the likeness in its details and re-
flected upon the mortality of flesh, there
recurred to him a very early impression —
the heartless cruelty of Nature; the little
relentless Never loomed up before him like
an iron-barred fortress in his path. Yet he
was progressing in the business of living.
He had been a child and had seen the dreams
of childhood fade; a son, and had lost a
^ father; a man, and had become a husband
and a father himself; and now he had com-
pleted the experience begun in the death of
Auchophet-Man—the lives that gave his were
gone; and only he and his were left, frail
links between ancestry and posterity. Now
he knew better what Life is, and Death, and
Time; he could see deeper into the hearts
of men, and into the graves of their cher-
ished hopes; and he was destined to see
further.

For a time the old house on the knob

was deserted, but at length Gee-Boy and his

family left the home in the town and climbed

the knob to live. But the old boyish days

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Pains of Death and of Life

did not return; there were no illusions there;
nor was there warmth; the old house was
a box of sandal-wood emptied of its jewels
and its odours, and filled with sharp-edged
stones picked up from the margin of a half-
frozen stream. Yet he did not despair. He
still lived in hope, but in a faltering hope.

Little Grace fell sick one day. Her grand-
father, the doctor, looked concerned, refused
to name the disease, and sat silent by the
bedside, watching. When Gee-Boy came home
in the evening and heard the ill news, he
chanced to lay an opened letter by his hat
on the table before he tiptoed into the child's
room. This letter was freighted with evil.

The two hundred copies of Moods that
the publisher had not sent to the reviewers,
were, in the course of a year, reduced by
twenty or thirty; and the author received
a paltry sum, together with the reminder
that if in another year the sales did not
justify publication and advertising, the
edition, according to agreement, would be
sold as waste paper. Fanfinx, passing

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Gee-Boy

through the hall, saw the letter, and pried
into it. There would have been no unpleasant
consequences but a twitting, but for mention
made of the price paid for the printing.
When she read this, her Fury seized her.

"You paid for printing all that twaddle !"
she exclaimed, when Gee-Boy came out of
Grace's room.

He looked at her reproachfully. "I don't
know why I love you when you talk Hke
that."

"You needn't love me if you don't want
to. I'm sorry you ever did — sorry ! Do you
hear?"

It was clear enough that he heard. "I've
suspected it long," he said.

" Then why will you — oh, why will you —
why havetCt you better sense?"

" Fanfinx, I have lost your love; you never
allowed me my daughter's ; I had to find"

"Nonsense! A man— a man to talk so!
I should think you would have known —
have known better." She stamped her foot
in dumb rage.

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Pains of Death and of Life

Gee-Boy looked sadly out of the door.
"It's no disgrace to be a p)oet," he said.

"No, but it is to be a dawdler. There's
a distinction. If you had succeeded I
would n't have said a word. But you did n't.
Has a poet money? Not one in ten thou-
sand. You have no more right to squander
money this way than I have to buy dia-
monds. Two hundred and thirty dollars!
If you were rich, it would have made no
difference; but you are poor. Pigs and
poetry ! Disgusting ! They say Sidney Cook
is coming back from South America with a
fortune in his pocket— all made in seven
years. If you were like him "

"You chose between us."

" And what a choice ! If it were all to do
ov"— she bit her lip.

Gee-Boy turned pale. "There are some
things, Fanfinx, that should not be said,
because they cannot be unsaid."

"I don't care. If it were not for our
child!"

Gee-Boy was stunned. Fanfinx saw his
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Gee-Boy

look, and for an instant was frightened;
but went on, whit^ yet determined. "If
people are disappointed when they marry,
they should— should-— now, you need n't look
so; you've thought of it yourself."

" No," Gee-Boy replied, with a slow death-
drag in his words, "I never dreamed of
it."

"If I had not seen it in you before, I
should not have dreamed of it. At any rate,
I have endured enough."

" I never dreamed of such a thing." Gee-
Boy uttered the words with the look of one
ivho blunders along in the dark. "I have
been disappointed in you sometimes, but I
never"

" If it were not for Grace !" Fanfinx wrung
her hands.

Gee-Boy paused, and looked at her straight.
" It's diphtheria," he said.

She sank down upon the stairs, and he
would have helped her, but was motioned
away.

Things happened quickly now. Parents
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Pains of Death and of Life

and grandparents, with two consulting phy-
sicians, watched the Httle Ufe go out in a
vain struggle for breath ; and another event
was added to Gee-Boy's sum of human expe-
riences. He would have been stronger
through it all if he could have comforted
his wife; but she would have no consoler but
her mother, and he must be dumb. When
the child had been buried, Fanfinx would
not come home, but lay sick next door, re-
fusing even to see the man who was doubly
bereft.

The days passed indistinctly. At times,
out of nowhere, a voice cried to the lonely
man— a voice suggestive of vague omissions.
It was a soft resonant voice, full of con-
fused melodies that warmed his heart, but
blunted his sight. At length, by some
accidental return and connection of impres-
sions, vague even at first, he associated it
with the contralto who sang at Grace's
funeral; now, first, he knew it was an old
voice to him. The discovery stopped him
still in the street, until his abstraction was
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vGooQle

Gee-Boy

suddenly broken by a man who approached
and stopped.

It was Sidney Cook, with much of the
wealth of South America displayed upon his
expanded person. They greeted each other
with formality, and parted soon without
regret, perhaps even with incipient hostiHty.
After they had walked a block, each turned
and looked back at the other.

Not a week later Sidney Cook came riding
up the knob on a sleek bay gelding, and
reined in before Gee-Boy, who leaned on the
gate, his unlighted pipe in his mouth.

"Fanfinx at home?"

"No."

"Be back soon?"

"Don't know."

"Where'"

"At her mother's." Gee-Boy jerked his
head slightly to the left.

"I guess ril— is she receiving callers— now?"

"You might go see."

The man at the gate made no reply to
^ mumbled answer, and the South American,
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Pains of Death and of Life

somewhat consciously urged his horse the
few rods farther, and alighted at the doctor's
horse-block. He came away in a quarter of
an hour, and stopped reluctantly before
the forbidding figure at the gate, to say, —

"Not receiving. Pfetty much cut up over
the death of the little girl. Strange that
Fanfinx should be a mother; she was such
a slip of a girl when I went away. Her
mother seems aged."

A subtle light gleamed in Gee-Boy's eye,
the glow of fire within; but he smothered
it. "Time changes all things," he replied.
And after a moment of oppressive silence,
"Not married, yourself?"

"No. I suppose there is a wife for me
somewhere; but the world is so big and she
is so little that I cannot find her."

Gee-Boy's gaze was too steady and too
searching for the South American, and he
cantered away.

Yet he went to church Sunday after Sun-
day, sat two seats back of the doctor's pew,
and finally was rewarded; twice afterward
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Gcc-Boy

that Gee-Boy knew of, he cHmbed the knob
after nightfall. In the silent house the lone
man ground his teeth impotently; he medi-
tated fiercely day by day, and could act
when the horn- came. But his star had
gone out.

Months went on, and Sidney's home visit
of a year was nearing an end. At this
time Gee-Boy felt himself the object of stolen
glances and hidden whispers. There were
fiends in him that raved and gnashed their
teeth; but, after all, what reason had he?
At last, one night when he came in late
from the farm, he saw two figures sitting
on a bench behind a lilac bush in the doc-
tor's yard, and heard the low burr of voices.
It was enough, it seemed. He went into the
sitting-room, to a desk where the war reUcs
of Auchophet-Man were kept, and handled
something there. His blood surged through
him in tides; and he was not afraid. But
he paused to think; and the tides broke
into trembling waves of brine, seething but
uncertain. His head drooped. At length he
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Pains of Death and of Life

closed the drawer, and went again to look.
The bench was empty. That night he
wandered among the knobs till the intrusion
of dawn.

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THE LAST WORD OF THE PINES

pERHAPS it all came remotely from the
little game that Gee-Boy once played
beneath the Blugg-Blugg Tree. In lonely
times like that the human soul is beset by
a stark staring sanity — a power of vision
through merely adventitious surroundings
and the hallucinations of substance into
what, in truth, is. Then the spiritual and
the physical assume their true relations,
forgetful of estrangement; the two worlds
merge.

The coming of such a deep-seeing sanity
is no midsummer dream. Before, the brain
is coarse, earthly, needing resetting unto
finer harmonies; so a thousand little elf
things tug cruelly at its outer fibres, com-
pressing it as in a net ; creasing it in minute,
vibrating, burning meshes— expelling, refin-

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The Last Word of the Pines

ing, attuning; and all with a racking pain
that fixes the eyes in a distant stare. The
experience leaves an impression such as a die
leaves on a coin— eternal ; and symbolic,
too, in that deep view through the adven-
titious, of the Eternal. Good reason, per-
haps, that tragedy, on the stage or in Ufe,
moves the soul more than comedy; for out
of the heaviest trials of Hfe this experience
is bom.

It was not yet five of the morning; and
thin wisps of mist curled up from the water,
like steam from a caldron. There was a
group of fishermen and wharfmen standing
by; and a boat, full of ropes, poles, and
grappling-hooks, was drawn up upon the
muddy shore. Not far away, just at the
mouth of the creek, was another boat, up-
turned, and caught in the branches of a
half-sunken and' water-logged tree. The
stream swirled about it, making it rise and
fall.

" We found her clinging to a branch eight

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Gee-Boy

feet deep," Gee-Boy heard some one say in
a low tone.

"And him?'* queried another.

"The Lord knows," the first replied.
"There are tracks running along the shore
as far as the bend, where they take to the
woods. His, probably. Saved himself, but
not her. And they say there was a carriage
waiting all night on the Kentucky shore,
there where the road veers to the west to
run down the river."

A man came along the bank from the west.
In his hand he held a wet and muddy hand-
kerchief, which he gave to Gee-Boy. In the
corner, stitched in red silk, were the letters
S. C. .

And this was all anybody knew. Fanfinx
had not been for Gee-Boy, and their mating
was an error whose punishment was pre-
destined.

The days that followed were very dumb
days, and the man lay alone in the silent
house. He had a feeling that the Julep-Devil
came into the room occasionally, adminis-

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The Last Word of the Pines

tered to his wants, and went away. Upon
his memory were dim traces of conversations
that were fragmentary, and more or less
incoherent— just such conversations as would
befit the frivolous hostler. Once he saw the
man tap his forehead strangely as he stood
by the parting of the curtains, and mutter
something; but this was in character, and
not worthy of serious reflection. Besides,
Gee-Boy had other matters to ponder. He
had lain there on the bed three days now,
and his torpor seemed to lapse by fits, and
let him see things as they were. A veil
seemed to be lifted, the veil that obscures
mortal vision, just as in that soundless,
bloodless battle which was a distant echo
of that which had taken the life of Auchoph-
et-Man. He heard, too, strange things;
secret voices spoke to him from shadows,
and bade him watch and listen. Once he saw
Potchy sitting there by the fire in the dim
room, taking off his boots and warming his
toes, as was his custom, before the glowing
coals. Gee-Boy raised up on his elbow and
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Gee-Boy

watched the figure a long, long time; then
the veil fell, blinding his sight. Again he
fought over the battle beneath the Blugg-
Blugg Tree; only it didn't end the same;
the soldiers were unruly, behaved impishly,
and finally faded away in the thin wreaths
of smoke that rose in spirals from the
ashes in the fireplace. Gee-Boy turned over
and went to sleep.

When he awoke, a strange lightness was
upon him; and the shutters were faintly
shaken by the hurrying wind. An old im-
pression came back to him; he thought of
the leagues and leagues of wind that had
blown through the pines, of the curving
twisting current that went from them
throughout the world, bearing their spicy
odour.

Now he sat up in bed and listened. He
could hear the old familiar voices, but with
a new note of strange unrest. He stood
feebly, and felt his way to the hall door,
thence to the stair, and up to his old room.
He put pillows and a blanket or two on the^
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The Last Word of the Pines

window-seat, and tried to curl up as when
a boy. The shutters were closed, but a slat
was broken; and through it he could see
the four dark shadowy sentinels, and between
them the shrouded moonHght on the lawn,
whitening the dried stalks of sunflowers and
hollyhocks in the fence corners.

The wind was very capricious that night,
flourishing about the corners of the house
and cutting capers like a long restrained colt
unloosed. It rattled a hanging waterspout
under the eaves; it made a clatter with a
disengaged sheet-iron cap on the south
chimney; it scraped a limb of one of the pines
against the roof. All this bang and flurry
had a soothing effect on the man who lis-
tened, and he lay back at his ease. For a
feeHng began to come to him that the restful
feeling was due not so much to the commo-
tion, as to a presence just outside the window;
and while he pondered upon it, he heard his
name whispered,—

"Gee-Boy." Just as plain as that.

It startled him at first, but soon seemed

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Gee-Boy

a natural thing. He listened to the voice
again, and heard it in spite of the clatter
of waterspout and chimney-cap. It was
strangely confused with the rushing of the
wind through the pines, and the tone was
quiet and restful. In broken, interrupted
phrases, each touched delicately with a lisp,
the message came, giving word of a world
where eyes see more clearly and hearts feel
more truly.

He Hstened long, but the voice was gone.
Softly, very softly, he opened the shutter
and leaned out; but there was only the
ragged lawn and the dried sunflowers show-
ing between the pines, and the light of the
moon filtered through thin autumnal clouds
shining coldly over all. j

And the soft woman's voice had said that
eyes were clearer and hearts truer there.
All the love Gee-Boy had ever felt for woman
gathered into a flood in whose bursting
there would be peril. The grave had sent
its dead to soothe his wounded spirit; and he
forgot all the pain of the past.
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The Last Word of the Pines

The long limb that rubbed the roof had
grown in the years since he had climbed from
it to the ground to fight the fight under the
Blugg-Blugg Tree, and now it invited him
to descend, this time to visit the new grave
on the hill back of the orchard. When he
reached it, the scrub oaks that straggled
along the road leading from the creek were
shuddering in the chill wind; and the low
arbor-vitae and firs among the rows of
mounds bowed incessantly.

In his night vigil among the graves of
those he had held dear, Gee-Boy heard the
splash of a horse's hoofs from the ford below.
Going to the rough stone wall, he leaped
upon it and watched until horse and rider
came into view around the hill. The animal
snorted and stopped stock still, looking
steadily ahead at the motionless figure, then
turned and fled, splashing noisily through
the ford again, and into the woods beyond.

Gee-Boy wondered but little about the night
rider as he retraced his steps; he wondered
only whether he should hear again the voice
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Gee-Boy

in the pines before the gray of morning
began to suffuse the sky. Reaching the tree,
he put a porch chair against it, and cUmbed
painfully up. Once in his room again, he
closed the shutters and listened; but there
was no whisper but that of the pines.

A day went by, and a night; the watcher
heard the voice again as he crouched in the
window and peered through the broken
shutter.

"If you were free, as I am free"— it said;
and the broken phrases, touched delicately
with a lisp, were lost in the clatter of the
loosened chimney-cap, the hanging water-
spout, and the bough rubbing on the shingles.
He listened anxiously. For days he had be-
lieved that Fanfinx had been more tricked
than persuaded; and now he hoped to hear
her word for it come slipping through the
shutters, in some pause of the various clatters
the wind made. And it came, softly, but
unmistakably; and died away in a faint
tinkle of happy laughter.

Rousing himself, the watcher threw open
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the shutter, only to see the accustomed
scene. A spring of hate was welling up in
the mountain of his love.

Some obscure impulse drove him out upon
the roof again, along the eaves to the bough,
down to the ground, through the orchard,
down the hill and up the opposite one to the
Httle burying-ground. He paused under the
half-naked scrub oaks, leaped the rough stone
wall, and was by the new mound of yellow
clay. What then? Why had he come? He
did not know; only, he did not want that
other to come and mourn over her grave.

The destined event came on the instant,
like the footfalls of Fate; there was a splash-
ing of a horse's hoofs in the ford below.

Under impulse of maniacal instinct, Gee-
Boy stooped and ran along a row of firs
to the stone wall, behind which he crouched,
listening to the horse ascending the hill.
He could hear the rider urging on the re-
luctant animal with voice, heel, and whip;
and when they reached the turn where they
had stopped the night before, again there was
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Gee-Boy

a terrified snort and the noise of hoofs
planted with final decision. Again the sound
of voice, heel, and whip, until the horse,
nerving himself for a dash past the place,
came pounding up the road. At once Gee-
Boy leaped upon the wall, waved his arms,
and shrieked with laughter.

Things happened quickly then. The horse
turned, and dashed back over its path, its
rider swerving fi-om side to side; in an in-
stant they were past the turn, a sharp one
at the bottom of the hill, just where the road
took to the water, and on the edge of it
was a great bowlder, which horse and rider
could hardly escape. There was only time to
think when a fall came— a sound as if the
horse had tumbled over the stone; and
another as of a human life crushed out. Gee-
Boy listened a moment. There was a struggle
and all was still. With pale face and trem-
bling limbs he ran down the hill, up again on
the other side, climbed to his roon^, and
closed the shutters behind him.

The wind was hissii^g now in the pines,
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The Last Word of the Pines

and the clatter of the chimney-cap and the
loosened gutter became furious. Peering
through the broken shutter, Gee-Boy felt the
approax;h of an intangible presence. A white
wraith interposed its filmy substance be-
tween him and the nearest pine.

" Gee-Boy, I am afraid," faltered the voice.

The wraith fled away ; Gee-Boy pushed the
shutter ajar, just far enough for a little
wider view without. Now the voice came
again from deep in the pines— the tremulous
voice of a woman wringing her hands. " Gee-
Boy," it wept, " I am afraid— so, so afraid."
Again a silence, palpitating with dread,
and the voice broke out in passion, " He's
crushed against a stone; he will carry me
over the dark river. I am afraid— afraid—
so"

There was a final cry of terror, a cold
mocking laugh; and a sense of the flight
of two spirits in the leagues on leagues of
wind that blew through the pines.

Gee-Boy clutched the casement; his whole
being seemed to slip out and away from

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Gee-Boy

him. He made one last effort to rouse him-
self, and even violently pushed open the
shutter; but the wind slammed it to with
bang and clatter, and he fell helpless and
senseless to the floor.

When the world dawned upon him again,
he had the feeling that there had been an
incredible lapse of time, and that all worth
doing and living for was gone; a supreme
indifference to himself and the world pos-
sessed him. He was lying in the big bed in
the sitting-room; there was a low blaze of
logs in the fireplace; the porch door was
open, and he saw the Julep-Devil sitting in
the big hickory chair.

" Daft, clean daft !" this person was saying,
between puffs of his short pipe. " Laid there,
he did, on the bed fer days after his wife
was drowned, and stared at the wall. Had
to mourn 'cause she was his wife, I reckon;
but she wasn't much to mourn fer. There
was always sompin' that wasn't there about
that woman, an' I think he knowed it. Any-

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way, he went to his old room upstairs one
night; he was took bad, as anybody could
see. The second mornin' I found him layin'
on the floor there, 'thout no more life in
'im than a dornick— same mornin' Sid Cook
was found by the big bowlder with his horse
layin' on top o' him. Daft, clean daft !
An' I'm a-tellin' yuh"~ here the speaker
lowered his voice — ^' 'at it runs in the fambly.
Don't I 'member, years ago, lemme see —
twenty-seven years ago come next January,
'at his granmammy went round with 'er
hands t'er head, sayin', ^Lost, lost!' She's
dead, long dead. She was a good woman,
God rest her soul ! but daft, clean daft !
An' this boy is Uke her to a /. Why,
onct"

Gee-Boy covered his head, turned his face
to the wall, and shut out the monotone.

An indifference to himself and the world!
That was his mood; for emotions were
burned out, and brain and body were weary.
But while brain and body, pressure removed
and rest complete, gained fibre in the slow

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Gee-Boy

drag of bed-ridden days, his heart recovered
no jot of power to feel. In this state, Gee-
Boy's whole past became to him merely an
objective series of events, events which he
regarded coldly, and as if far away, not
parts of himself: his very Hfe, too, came to
be viewed in the same remote objectivity—
a thing .to be pondered upon. As one who
comes upon the low lying beach of the sea
or a great lake sometimes sees, by some
trick of vision, the watery expanse lying
much lower, as if sunk hundreds of feet be-
neath its accustomed level, and sees ships
not distant as if far away, and standing
still with idle sails, in a thin mist, so he saw
his own being and his own being's history.
The world had been too much with him
after the memory of his first childish spec-
ulation has grown dim; and now the prob-
lem of his own existence as a living soul
and the existence of the big universe about
him came again for solution, demanding the
dispassionate thought of his mature years.
Philosophy, no doubt, would have its con-
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solations; and therefore, in his manhood,
he would return to the perplexities of his
childhood.

In time he left his bed, and was, physi-
cally, something like himself again. One day
he drew what money he had in bank, wrote
a long letter to his lawyer, piled all the
household goods in the dark unused parlour,
and filled a valise with a few articles of cloth-
ing, which he set aside until night should
fall. Sitting on the porch steps, he ate a
bowl of bread and milk, watched for a long
time the lights appear in the widespread
picture before him, and with his burden
swung over his back with a cane, left the
yard and took the road that wound down
to the west among the knobs— those knobs
that he had loved so well, and that were to
know his tread no more for twenty years.

IS 225

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XII

THE LITTLE ROOM

TF you turn to the left out of the Boulevard
St. Michel at a certain place, you come
into a short street with a gray mountain at
its end, or what was a gray mountain,
doubtless; but the temple in it from the
beginning has been cut out and the refuse
carted away. You behold the Pantheon.
Here, nowadays, you may trample on the
dust of Victor Hugo, if you like. But if
you prefer to observe the writhing of the
quick, rather than to trample upon the help-
less dead, take the street a Uttle to the right
of the Sorbonne, which is just across the
way, and pass into the narrow Rue Valette.
If it be day, the big gateway at No. 21
stands open; if night, you have an open
sesame in a certain knock; the portal opens
wide, and closes behind you with a bang.
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The Little Room

Within is a place where nothing much ever
happens. A court, long and narrow; on the
farther side, a high old house, once aristo-
cratic perhaps, now venerable. Beyond this,
a garden, an ideal place in which to sip
your coffee and smoke a cigarette. The
narrow stair within the house leads you up
to the top, and you grope along to a door
opening into a double apartment overlooking
the court. Here is a table strewn with papers
and books; in a recess, a bed. A grate is
opposite the window— a dying fire within.
Between it and the bed is a door opening
into a Httle kitchen. You hear the shuffle of
papers, the scratch of a pen, the movement
of a book; perhaps a sigh. And this is all
that ever happens in that melancholy
chamber. At least it was so years ago.

The court, as you see it from the room,
is bounded on three sides by plastered walls
topped by roofs of various slants, and cut
by balconied windows of irregular shapes.
On one side the building projects, the pro-
jection having a farther projection, narrow
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Gee-Boy

like a column, perhaps containing a winding
stair — ^the whole nearly closing that end of
the court. On the top of this column, or
stair-well, is a little room whose overhanging
walls are supported by brackets. There are
two windows, a chimney, and a roof like
an inverted ash-hopper. Here, long ago,
nothing ever happened— nothing but the
shuffle of papers, the scratching of a pen, the
movement of books. But, I fancy, never a
sigh. This made the difference between a
man who knew everything and a man who
tried to know everything; between one who
was in the confidences of the Creator, and
one who was not.

Here in the house of Etienne de la Forge,
Hell was first paved with the bones of infants
who, born with an infusion of the plague of
Adam, went to damnation for their own
fault, not from his. This is one of the eternal
verities. Did not Calvin say it? And in
this Httle room ! And with what grim iron-
featured humour must he have warned the
dogmatic of the coming of his heresies!
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The Little Room

Thick-headed Nicholas Cop, newly made a
regent of the Sorbonne and confronted with
the horror of pronouncing an oration, in-
duced the Genevan (an easy task, doubtless)
to prepare the document for him. And it
was a defence of the Reformation ! Fancy
the Sorbonists, the author being known,
rushing through the big gate of Etienne de
la Forge, up the sky-aspiring stair to the
Httle room under the inverted ash-hopper,
searching under the table and under the
bed for the cursed heretic and his heretical
papers. But an ever-wise Providence had not
omitted prudence from the qualities of Calvin,
and on this occasion he contrived to be else-
where with the documents containing the
tenets now enjoying so peaceful a repose
in the cemetery for dead dogmas. And Cal-
vin is dead, too ! His soul is with the saints,
we trust.

All was otherwise with the inhabitant of

the double apartment overlooking the court.

The Sorbonists cared not a red for him.

On his table lay two thin volumes, one a

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Gee-Boy

thesis for his doctor's degree at Heidelberg—
Die Entstehungsgeschichte des Agnostictsmus;
the otheri a labour of conviction, Platos
Einwirkung auf dem neucren Idealismus^ both
having his name upon the title-pages; and
under his folded hands lay a thick pile of
sheets, his magnum opus^ an epoch-making
volume, if the world had only known it —
one that was to demolish the temples of
faith and build a new age-defying conception
of God and his designs. And no one de-
murred.

But the work did not come on well. The
brain impulses, trained from the early
activity displayed in the enunciation of the
dictum, " I am me," down through the unsys-
tematic groping in poetic labyrinths and the
conscious threading of metaphysical paths
in the university, were losing their power
to shoot up, out, down, and about, descrying
relations, detecting identities, separating
actualities from illusions. They stopped
short of discovery. Doubtless they had not
pierced all the thinker's brain; there were
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The Little Room

menta^ regions there yet unexplored by the
darting spirals and zigzag molecular activi-
ties; there was room in the unpierced portion
of the hemispheres for these impulses to meet
and make all relations complete; and for
time unreckoned the lonely scholar sat,
head propped in hands, trying to advance
the weary energies into new paths. But day
unto day uttered no speech, and night unto
night showed no knowledge. Out of the win-
dow there was the little room of* Calvin;
and beyond it the dome of the Pantheon,
showing airily against the sky in the early
gray of morning. The scholar^s face was
old, his hair threaded with white, his eyes
sunken. He had reached the end.

The end merely; not completion. Two
years before he had come from Germany
to this nook in the Latin Quarter of Paris,
searching for the vigour he fancied would be
inspired by new surroundings in the old city
of passionate history. Here some part of
every battle of human life had been fought
out; was it not meet that the problem of
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Gee-Boy

post-human life should be solved here too?
And that was the lone scholar's task— to
find out and set down whatsoever things
were true about the here and the hereafter.
His rubs and knocks against the unyielding
world had conspired to drive away all belief
in caprice as an attribute of deity, all con-
fidence in a Providence wise or unwise, all
hope of a tempering of the wind of eternal
destiny to the shorn lamb. Yet God could
not be cruel. The cruelty of nature could
not be his wilful doing, but rather the work-
ing out of a law inherent in himself, a part
of himself, a law that he could no more
arrest than human creatures can arrest the
diseases that gnaw upon them. An impossi-
bility is as impossible to God as to man—
an old thought come back with the strength
of new conviction; the cry of a young soul
lost in the quicksand ! What had life been
since but a continuation of that cry, accom-
panied by raillery at divine impotence, until
the coming of the saving thought that God
is slowly struggling upward for the sake
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The Little Room

of the universe within him, evolving the soul
of man to participation in the God-head for
the perfect, though infinitely distant, Hfe
hereafter— a life whose fulness is to be ob-
tained, not by divine fiat, but by slow pro-
cess of law? Hence, neither punishment nor
reward in the beyond; only the struggle, as
here, with the goal of a perfect life some-
where, sometime.

This, the task; simple, and forever impos-
sible ! The proofs, the mathematically accu-
rate demonstration, refused to come; the
long-strained nerve impulses failed to push
themselves farther into unexplored mental
regions, and back the thinker fell into the
pit of agnosticism, with not the faintest glow
of the ideal above him. He was young,
but his face was old, his hair threaded with
white, his eyes sunken. He had reached the
end. He turned feebly, grasped the mass
of manuscript and tossed it upon the low
fire in the grate. He watched the scattered
sheets ignite. A tirade against agnosticism
was the first to curl its white straight edges

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Gee-Boy

into a black crumpled fringe; then an attack
upon Calvin and his damnation of babes;
then Jonathan Edwards had his turn; and so
to the end— a black mass of stuff that sent
stray flakes flying up the chimney. The
watcher stared fixedly into the grate; a big
bell began to beat— one stroke, two, the suc-
cession to twelve. Staggering up fi-om his
last defeat, the man looked out the window.
There was the dome of the Pantheon, and
the room of the man who knew, or thought
he knew, famed forever, and for the crudest
of errors. The bed in the comer swayed
about; but wavering toward it, the defeated
one caught it as it swam near him, and cast
himself upon it. And that was all that ever
happened in the little room.

Toward the decline of the following day
the man awoke, recollected himself, not with-
out difficulty, made his toilet with unusual
care, and with no look into the grate, went
into the street. The air was fresh and keen.
A faint joy in physical existence began to
bubble in him— the body ! He was siu-e of that

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The Little Room

and of the present world; there was nothing
after it, perhaps; but he did not know, nor
care. After eating a trifle and drinking a few
drops of wine, he wandered forth, free, whither
his capricious feet might lead him. By and
by he came to a place where three soldiers
and a countryman were eagerly talking be-
fore a great placard displaying inducements
for recruiting. He paused. His father had
been a soldier. He spoke to one of the men
in uniform, and was inspected by all,
narrowly.

"And what age is monsieur?"

The reply was received with polite incredu-
lity, a lifted eyebrow or so.

"It would do no harm to try," said the
soldier. "Enter, if you please, monsieur;
the officer is about to close the bureau/'

The door stood open. A lieutenant in
fatigue dress was filing papers in a desk.
As he raised his hand to pull down the Hd,
a shadow fell along the floor.

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XIII

BEFORE THE CHARGE

npHE jungle was impenetrably thick; and
the moist suffocating heat rose from
the fetid pools and rank vegetation, spread-
ing itself about in layers that the wind,
which blew gently above the trees, could
not drive away. All about were closely
crowded cocoa-palms, mangoes and limes;
between grew a thousand tropical grasses
and shrubs, created to catch the foot in inces-
sant tangles. The birds had fled— all but
a few parrots that screamed in the tree
tops, and the vultures that wheeled far
above; while beneath, in the brush, thou-
sands of land-crabs scuttled noisily.

Winding through the thick sweltering
forest was a deep-sunken road, clogged with
thousands of marching soldiers, waggon-
trains, and detachments of artillery, ail
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vGooQle

Before the Charge

in inextricable confusion. The cracking of
whips, the curses of angry drivers urging on
their jaded, thirsty horses through the sticky
clay, the impatient shouts of mounted aids
pressing ahead of the throng, and the whirl
and pop of Mauser bullets— by these sounds
one could know how the jungle teemed with
life and death.

By and by the sunken road came out into
a more open place on the slope of a little
hill, below which, obscured by a high bank
and tall, thick trees, lay a stream; beyond
this, a valley; and beyond this again,
another hill, topped with a blue blockhouse
surrounded by a line of yellow earthworks.
In spite of the rustle of bullets, which struck
many down, some of the troops deployed to
right and left, making a thin line along the
bank, and crossed to the shelter of the one
opposite. They were fainting from weariness,
begrimed with dirt and sweat; their tongues
were parched and black, their throats dry,
their voices raucous; they drank the fever-
laden water of the stream with rabid ardour,

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Gee-Boy

and lay down in the tall grass or crouched
in the bush to obey one order, the only one
they were to receive that day— not to shoot,
just to wait, under fire, until human endur-
ance could endure no longer.

It was here that The One and The Other
met.

The One, being a mere soldier, and in
Cuban uniform at that, was of no conse-
quence; he came to a salute when The Other
looked steadily and disapprovingly at him,
and stood so in spite of the incessant bullets
that cut the grass about him.

The Other, having a sword in his hand,
returned the salute gravely. "You don^t
belong to us," he said. "What are you do-
ing here?"

"I don*t know, sir; I must have got lost
in the shuffle. Besides, I want to be with
my own people."

"Go to your regiment."

The One's hand dropped, and he glanced
about hesitatingly. Again he came to a
salute. "Where is it, sir?" he asked.

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Before the Charge

The Other looked stem a moment; then
laughed. " Lie down," he commanded.

Into the tall burning grass, which kept
the breeze away, dropped The One, and The
Other too, very strangely and mysteriously.
"IVe got it," he exclaimed, hoarsely. "In
the leg. Tie it up, will you?"

Half a dozen of his own men came
crawUng up, but he accepted the ministra-
tions of The One, who cut away what of his
trousers the jungle's thorns had left, and
bound up the wounded leg. " Can you move
it?" he asked.

"Yes; but it's rather numb."

"I'll rub it. Captain. You'll need it when
orders come. And then we won't do a thing
to 'em."

" Meanwhile— God I Look at that !"

Two red-cross men were carrying a
wounded man on a stretcher to the shel-
tered bank beyond the stream, where a Une
of dead and dying were lying in an orderly
row, when a bullet struck the foremost man
in the back.

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Gee-Boy

** Sharpshooters ! They Ve in the trees all
around us. Smokeless powder! Hell!"

The Other thrust away The One and tried
to rise, but his leg was yet useless. "It is
Hell," he said. "And no orders. Why
doesn't old Cloud Compeller let us move?"

The bullets went rustUng by, cutting the
grass, plunking into the trees, and plunging
into the jungle and the tangled brigades
within them. Across the stream the line
of dead and wounded was steadily growing.
Men went fearlessly to and fro carrying heavy
stretchers; and aids galloped up and down
on useless missions. A bullet from the blue
blockhouse came spitting by The One's ear.
He ducked. "It's a bluxy world," he said.

"What's that?" asked The Other, lookmg
at him sharply.

"A strange world, I said."

"A rare thing— to dodge Mauser bullets
and to moralize at the same time."

"No time .fitter. Besides, I've done the
like all my life. What's all this rumpus
about, anyway? What are we here for?
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Before the Charge

Was life given us to throw away ? And those
we take— did God give them for us to de-
stroy? Are we the sheep of his pasture, or
they? Which side is doing God's will? And
what is His will? — if anybody knows. Who
told us to beat our ploughshares into swords ?*'

"You're all wrong," said The Other, rub-
bing and beating his leg, and drawing it
painfully up and down. "There is a theory
of life"

"Only one? Why, man, the palms of this
jungle are not more numerous. It isn't a
theory I want. I want to know for certain
what's what."

"Listen now. I'm older than you— ten
years, maybe. I've more than half a cen-
tury behind me; and I've gone up and
down the world a bit. There is a philosophy
of life"

"I know it; and it is as good as any other,
and any other is as good as it. Philosophy
is the apotheosis of guess-work. A plague
upon it all I"

"Listen, sir. I am your superior officer,
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Gee-Boy

and I command you. (He set his teeth to
hide a grim dirty grin.) You do not respect
authority. When God spoke from the burning
bush, suppose Moses had^'

"Not a parallel case, Captain; you don't
intend to compare me to Moses, do you?"

The Other laughed, and dodged at once.
He rubbed his leg thoughtfully and stretched
it out. Then he looked up at the soaring
vultures. A land-crab went scuttling through
the grass toward a dead soldier who lay a
few feet away. "Poor fellow!" The Other
mused. "He needs no theory of Ufe. And
the worst of it is that, to be like him, we
must become food for the vultures and the
land-crabs."

"That will come soon enough. Look at
the stream there and the file of men in the
shelter of the bank ; perfect alignment, isn't
it? I've been in many a hot scrimmage,
but this is the worst yet; lying still in battle
is no cinch. Must we lie here and be shot
like wild beasts in a trap?"

^' Many a hot scrimmage?"
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Before the Charge

"Yes, Fve fought with the Tommies in
India. I've had my shot at Fuzzy- Wuz;
and I carry three scars from his spear. I've
been with the French in Senegambia. I've
led a company in Venezuela and a regiment
in Honduras. I've sailed all seas; I've
travelled all lands — ^and with puzzles for com-
panions. I've been a mighty hunter before
the Lord — ^hunting a way to live in two
worlds at once; this one, and the next."

"Fool! Fool! Fool!"

" I've known all faiths. I've lived all lives.
I've found them all hollow. I've formulated
a faith of my own, and burned it up, so
other fools couldn't read it. Two worlds!
We get them mixed up when we theorise,
for sometimes we can't tell the one from
the other; one seems to encroach upon the
other, to give us vague glimpses, as we see
a ship in the mist, with a high cKfF-shore
beyond; we make out spars, and shout,
and ask what she is and where bound; we
get a few blurred words for answer, but don't
know what they are, nor whether they are

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Gcc-Boy

replies from the ship or echoes from the cliflf."
The Other deigned no reply ; The One ram-
bled on with little coherence.

"A vague illustration, no doubt. I'm not
quite sure what I mean. How could I? And
if I could, how could I say it with my throat
parched and the bullets screaming death
songs? Anyway, in this somnambulistic
journey called life the two worlds get mixed
up. We live in one, and try to Kve in the
other, yet shunning the only way. My earli-
est recollections are of these things. I had
my notion of how things ought to be, and
I found them otherwise. Why do we fight
against disillusion? I found my spirit revolt-
ing against the indomitable Something that
thwarted my will. I kicked against the Infi-
nite; and the Infinite, unbecomingly, kicked
against me. I couldn't know and do what
I desired; power was denied to such a worm
as I. And there you are! In boyhood I
had my little problems, and tried to solve
them; and the whole eternal fixity of things
stood by and jeered at me. We have so
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Before the Charge

many brute laws in the universe, and they
teach themselves to us by paying out their
penalties. We bruise ourselves against Fate.
We make our best endeavour to know the
law of Heaven, and we Kve by it; but Fate
opposes us, and Heaven looks on and will
not take oiu* part. We aspire to nobleness
and honour and perfection; and the great
Something whose baubles we are seems to
encourage venaUty and dishonour and pec-
cancy. Those of us who try to do and to be,
are held up to the scorn of those who idle.
Those of us who dream, are called fools by
those who lie wallowing in the muck. They
see oiu" gaze in the clouds, and they tap their
heads. Then we love; we deify one person—
the wrong person, for she is more sordid
than all the rest ; is enamoured of gew-gaws
and fine trappings, and so wallows in her
own peculiar muck, with other wallowers.
This disillusion is killing. The mind is
strained beyond the tension of life here below;
it feels wounds too deep for Time to heal;
it knows a world-grief, and hears voices

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from the Beyond. Again, people tap their
foreheads and look wise. The blatant fools
don't know that dullness is its own reward.
But the strain passes; the flesh is heavy,
and drags the mind down to its level. Then
we go out to wander, and try to mould our
souls to the Heavenly Image, and the same
old world keeps us down to its own. Even
in our desire we are alone. We are unique
because we aspire. It is surprising how much
contentment reigns here below. It is not
currently believed, but man is a contented
sort of beast. If the pot boils, he rests.
The few discontents— they are our hope.
You see them all along the world's march-
mountain peaks! Socrates! Christ! And
there are some little hillocks, unhappy Uttle
hillocks, that nobody sees. They strive,
but they can't add a cubit to their stature.
They are not tall enough to plant a beacon
on ; they are nothing but hillocks. A torrent
sweeps down, or an avalanche, and they are
no more. They pass away wishing they
were peaks. And the peaks themselves have
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their trials— the lightning rends them; they
reach their heads to Heaven for help, and
Heaven strikes them in the face. And they
are more alone than the hillocks; the world-
procession passes on, and refuses to look;
it sees them only when the backward dis-
tance gives them perspective. Then strange
and untruthful visions are had of them, and
the multitude bows down and worships and
tells fables about them; and religion, worn
out, becomes mythology; cant begins, the
incredulous scoff, the world becomes weary;
and beUeving nothing, pines for something
to believe— vain desire, when there is no-
thing to believe ! So we write over the doors
of our unbuilt temples, * I don't know,' and
over our neighbour's we write, * Neither do
you'; and here ends our philosophy."

"Well, * God's in His heaven; all's
right'"

"Maybe. We may awake from our sleep;
but I don't know— I don't know. We've
been told on good authority that they
didn't * know ever)rthing down in Judee.*"
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"Your case is sad; yet I do not believe
in your doctrine of discontent— not for myself
anyway."

"A contented man is either a lout or one
resigned to failure."

"Let me be one or the other, then. My
way is to do my daily duty— to live, to
work, to fight, to love my wife and children,
and to watch the big procession go by; this
satisfies me. What is the use of striving
after the unattainable? It is enough to look
upon the wonders about us. Life is worth
while for that alone. If all our questions
are to be answered hereafter, will not the
revelations give us more pleasure than if
we knew them here? If we knew them now,
there would be no Unknowable, and the
mystery of life would be dispelled. Be satis-
fied with one world. Don't aspire to di-
vinity."

" But perhaps they are not to be answered
hereafter."

"Then what's the use of worrying? Make
your wonder at the world a pleasure, not a
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pain. Let it be an inspiration, not a dis-
couragement. Do you see the vultures up
there? Do you hear the land-crabs at that
soldier? Do you hear the bullets singing?
These are a part of the world procession.
I like to see these things. Do you remember
the mist here in the jungle last night? And
the thousand unaccustomed noises? These
too. And the transports off the coast, and
the horses swimming to shore? And the
black smoke of the warships? And the
ocean and the sky ? These too. And there's
the blue blockhouse on the hill. It must be
taken in spite of all the powers of Hell.
And if orders don't come soon, we'll take it
without orders. That will be life too— a good
life to Hve, and a good death to die. I've
done my work thus far ; if I can do no more,
then that will be enough."

The whirl of flying bullets suddenly shifted
to one side, and rose to an impetuous
crescendo.

"What's broke loose now?" said The
Other, rising and looking about.
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A big blundering balloon hung low over
the tree-tops, drawing the full fire of the
enemy.

**We can't stand this long," he went on
to say. "There will be a break somewhere,
and it will be forward." Giving sharp orders
to his men, some of whose fiery faces and
staring eyes were peering above the grass,
to lie down and stay down, he again dropped
beside The One, to wait. The air grew hotter,
and black tongues stuck out from parched
mouths. The two crawled through the heat
to* the stream, and lapped up their fill of the
sickly water, and crawled back.

"Now Usten," said The Other. "This
can't continue long. Something is going to
happen, and I have a bit to say. I knew
a man like you once, or rather, a boy. He
was a pupil of mine before I went to West
Point. A strange child! Made names for
people and things. Tried to do impossible
things. When he was growing up, the inevi-
table girl question arose, and out of it, more
than he knew, grew a discontent like yours.
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Th^e were two girls in this case. One was
modest and true^ a glory to womanhood.
The other was deviUsh. Could look unutter-
able things, but her heart was cold. Could
feign any emotion to gain her end. And her
end was this boy. She gained him by a He
— ^ lie plain and brazen. Everybody knew
of it, and knew it was a lie— all but him.
He had always courted illusions, and this
was the greatest of them all. There was a
note found, a silly school-girl note, written
by her rival to him. She, the false one, this
she-devil, gave it to a suitor of hers and per-
suaded him to print it in his father's paper,
and say her rival had induced him so that
she might flaunt her conquest. She told no
he herself; she got a soft-hearted and soft-
brained male creature to do it— clever! A
trifle, a mere pebble, but it turned a stream.
They married, these two, the she-devil and
the boy who loved illusions. They say
she led him a race. The other suitor, he of
the soft heart and the soft brain, came back
after a time from the ends of the world,

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idiither he had fled in despair. Then her life
went out in a tragedy, and the lover's;
and the husband's reason, they say, though
I don't know. Maybe. He wasn't well-bal-
anced. To be in perfect balance is to have a
certain amount of selfishness and stupidity;
he had neither. But he went away— nobody
knew where, but me. Do you imderstand?"

The One had simk face down on the ground
and lay there in silence. The bullets were
around them as thickly as before. One of
The Other's men suddenly leaped up and
fell back, breathing out his life with a sigh
of infinite relief and content. A dozen more
of the company lay still or writhing.

" What can't be endured must be cured,"
said The Other, rising. "Let's make our
own orders."

At that moment a horseman appeared in
the jungle, and said to somebody, "If you
don't want to advance, then let my men
and me." He wore a sombrero with a
spotted blue handkerchief tied about it. His
men pushed through with a rush.
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Before the Charge

" Get up," The Other said to the recumbent
figure, giving it a nudge with his foot. Then
he shouted an order to his men that brought
them to their feet.

The One got up. He hardly knew what
was happening, so the fury of life and of
battle was working in him. Soon they were
in the stream, The Other limping on and
cheering his men. They crossed, pushed
through bushes and trees, and were at the
bottom of the basin beyond which rose the
hill, whose surface was tangled with long
grass and whose top upbore the deadly
blockhouse with its line of yellow earth-
works. They were few, these men in the van ;
but there were teeming thousands behind
them and the horseman with the sombrero
in front. They toiled on slowly in the
intolerable heat and the matted grass, the
bullets tearing up the earth in front, and
dropping them one by one.

Suddenly The Other plunged forward and
fell; and the company passed over. He
gasped, and spit a little blood. "Go on,

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Gcc-Boy

Gee-Boy, go on, and— good-bye." There was
an instant of struggle, then a sigh, and
quiet.

The One laid him straight, placed his
sword by his side, and saying in a voice
hoarse with grief and thirst, ** Good-bye,
Professor," struggled on alone.

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XIV

THE WORLD GOES BY

]^rOT the least labor of Time is to round
up all things, to prove the value of
trifles once cast away, to bring success, or
resignation with ripened wisdom, after many
failures. A familiar truth, this, with which
to conclude the whole matter.

Gee-Boy toiled painfully through the dusk
and under the stars, up the long winding
road that climbed the knob with the old
sentinelled house a-top. Through the years
of his absence there had been a succession
of tenants; who was there now, he knew not,
being content with the small quarterly remit-
tance from his lawyer. On his return he
visited the old place first, because it was
the scene of his earliest and dearest recol-
lections, the scene of his childhood's illusions;
and some of his disillusions. And above it,
his star still beckoned.

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At the summit he paused and leaned heavily
on the gate, breathing hard, and reflecting
that a half-healed bullet wound in the lungs
aids one but little in climbing a hill. There
were the old pines, older now, but not per-
ceptibly larger, still with a carpet of cones
and leaves beneath them; and the old house,
placid and dignified in its age, just beyond.
Above, the same sky ; below, the same town
and the same broad river; beyond, the same
thriving city, with a starry sparkle here and
there.

"Yes, I am me," Gee-Boy panted; "more's
the pity. It would have been better if I had
been somebody else, even if I had never
found it out. It's dangerous business—
this hitching a fellow's waggon to a star; he
is certain to knock off the tops of a few hills
and get a bad bumping. And here I am at
the old place again. The difficulty is"

He paused for breath, and did not resume

aloud. It was the necessity of turning out

the tenants that troubled him, now that an

irresistible yearning to live in the old home

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and to end his days there, had seized him.
Good tenants, too, who paid their rent
promptly, although from something his
lawyer had written him while he was in the
hospital, he supposed them to be people in
reduced circumstances. They, too, might be
attached to the place, with its wealth of
orchard and pasture, its wide and varied
prospect of field, town, river, city, sky. His
claim, however, was a prior one, and his
purpose in life much more serious and philo-
sophical, being the result, as it was, of many
years of grafting and pruning his little tree
of knowledge—no less a purpose, in fact,
than to watch the world-procession go by,
and to consider this a sufficient cause for
being. We reach a little wisdom at last,
when in ripeness of life we sit down to wait
with wonder and contentment the inevitable
summons. Other purposes were corollaries.
To give up the impossible (he admitted the
influence of the captain-professor), to submit
to the inevitable necessity, to be content with
living in one world at a time, to regard the

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blasting of an illusion as a thing of no con-
sequence, to forget his grief at being made
the sport of things, to assert nothing fixedly
about this enigmatical world, nor to admit
others' belief to be true, yet to hope for every
thing good— these ! And these too,— to work,
to fight, if necessary, as he had already
done, like his father before him, and to lo —
no, not to love; there was no one to love.

Though the articles of this creed gave him
that feeling of rest and security that comes
to one who has been suddenly made certain,
after long striving, of his basic principles,
yet, as he discovered on reflection, there was
not one but had had its roots deep in the
past. The force, the strength of his view,
it was, that was new; each distinct conviction
was old, a thing once cast away, happily
found again, and valued as it deserved; a
thought once banished, now returned "with
renewed majesty.'' Had not life been a strug-
gle between the two parts of the poem
Moods'^ Each depression had brought its
feeling of the worthlessness of life; con-

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The World Goes By

trariwise, each ecstasy at the marvel of his
own existence, at that of all the whirling
worlds, reacting upon itself, had so magni-
fied his wonder at it all, that life seemed
worth living for this privilege alone— to watch
the world go by. How often thought of it
in times long gone! how often forgotten!
how gladly received in his mind now for a
finality, and enthroned there! And the
corollary, to give up the impossible— old too !

Had not

From the house there came the low deep
tones of a piano's bass notes, then a sombre
chord or two in the middle register, and a
voice joined in — sl rich voice, not powerful,
but with all the melancholy of a woman
who has Hved and loved, with all the sweet-
ness of one who has suffered and has not
been embittered. It was a voice that made
the watcher at the gate start with surprise,
then bow his head upon his arms as they
rested on the gate. He listened to the old
song, the song of lost love, with the un-
dermelody bursting into occasional fits of
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Gee-Boy

passion in the pauses. For more than twenty
years his heart had sung it. He remained
still until the music had long died away
and a step sounded on the stone flagging
leading down from the house. He looked up.
She stood before him there in the starlight.

** You have a stranger without your gates,"
he said.

She came near and looked into his face.
He felt his youth surging up within him.

" Gee-Boy/' she said, and undid the latch.

He entered, walked with her to the little
Greek porch, sat down on its edge, felt again
the old worn stone steps beneath his feet,
smelled again the odour of the pines, saw the
dim night-prospect under the branches.

"All these years, Ruth— what have you
done?*'

"Waited— just waited; that is the woman's
part."

"It's the man's part, too, if he only knew

it. What do we get for all our striving? —

just resignation to wait until what we want

be given to us, or refused. If we could only

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wait calmly, restfully, with perfect com-
panionship, enjoying what we are and what
we behold in the big universe, content at
last, if these be all ! "

Ruth looked up to where the black bulk
of the pines' foliage was edged with bunches
of the spiky leaves— just a fringe of Japanese
decoration silhouetted against the night
sky; and drew in her fill of the balsam.
"It's a good place to wait— this hill," she
said.

"IVe come many a long day's journey to
wait here," he returned. ^'Here my life began,
and here I had my first notion of what life
is — an enchantment, a dream, in which caprice
rules. Then it became an incongruity, a
puzzle; then a prison with an invisible jailer;
then a despair— even a death. Years followed
in which Hfe was a patched beggar wandering
drunkenly in a labyrinth. Now it is a man
sitting on a hill, resigned to his own igno-
rance and impotence, but filled with a pagan-
like reverence for the big world-procession
and the power behind it— if there be a power
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Gee-Boy

behind it; a man, and a woman> too, who
have learned more of themselves than they
knew when they were young. There they wait,
these two, and if there be more hereafter —
well!"

There was a clicking at the gate-latch.
An old bent form came hobbling through.

" An old friend of yours," Ruth explained.

" I don't recognize him there in the dark."

"Tom Hook."

"The Julep-Devil!"

"He works for mother and me— a little;
as much as he is able. Cares for our horses,
drives down into town or out to the farm,
feeds the chickens, all feebly and poorly;
but we can't turn him away. He has had no
home but this and— one other; his path has
not been strewn with flowers. See here, Tom."

The old man approached timorously.

"Do you know who this is?" asked Ruth.

He raised his hand from force of habit,

as if to screen his eyes, looked long and

earnestly, then recovered himself. "Don't

know as I do," he answered, apologetically.

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"I cain't see as good as I used to could.'^

" Then you don't know me," said Gee-Boy.

At the sound of the voice the old man
began to tremble and to sink down upon
the stone steps, where he began to cry and
to chatter a feeble tremolo. "Back again
after all these years. I never b'lieved you'd
come; no sir-ee. An' after so long, so many
years. How do yuh come on ? Onlymiddlin',
eh ? Well, well ! a heap o' things has hap-
pened—particular to me. I reckon Miss
Ruth told yuh?" The old man wiped the
tears from his eyes.

"N-no," doubtfully.

"Tell him," said Ruth.

Tom shifted his position uneasily. "It
• don't seem right t' tell yuh miseries as soon
as yuh come back; but then I'd a heap
ruther tell yuh'n have some other feller tell
yuh. Understand, don't yuh? 'Druther tell
yuh myself."

The old man leaned back against the pillar,
and looked up at Ruth and Gee-Boy. There
was a patch of moonlight on his face, and
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Gee Boy

a strange expression, too, a mixture of shame-
faced defiance and of apology. He had had
his own Hfe to hve, in his own way; let us
conclude his story here.

"Well, sir, I been in the pen," he said.

"What?"

"Yessir, in state prison." He twirled his
hat nervously.

"Yessir, at Jeff. Six months."

"What— you, Tom Hook? Why, what did
you do?"

The look of mingled defiance and apology
flashed away, and the old man wept bitterly
a moment, then dried his tears. "Yessir,
me, me. I never would a-thought it, but
it's so. What 'u'd my ole mother think if
she was alive? Yuh see, I didn't lay on no
featherbed after you went away. I'd kinder
got used to yore easy way o' doin' (you
wasn't no harder on yer hands 'n whut yer
father was), an' it 'peared like I couldn't git
no stiddy job, being old, and not as stout as
I used to was; seventy-eight, now, come
next October. I worked in one o' the steam-
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The World Goes By

boat yards a spell, an' got the sack; an*
then on a farm in the spring o' the year,
an' then here an' there in town an' out,
an' onct across the river, but nothin' stiddy.
When winter come on I couldn't git no job
nowhere fer long, an' I tuck t' the woods.
I built a cabin o' driftwood an' an ole yawl
between the knob an' the river, an' fixed up
a contrapshun t' cook my vittles on. I
staid there when I had any grub, an' when
I hadn't none, I went out t' forage. At the
mill they give me some meal for nursin' a
sick horse ; I got some coffee an' sugar from
a grocery fer pilin' cord-wood in the cellar;
an' I went on a-doin' that-a-way. By an'
by I couldn't git nothin' t' do, an' I was
hungry. I come around the corner of the
lower market-house one day; an' it was win-
ter, an' the stalls all empty but a butcher's
an' a farmer's who had chickens an' eggs.
Goin' in, I says to the butcher, * Gimme a
job,' I says. ' I ain't got no work,' says 'ee.
Then I says t' the farmer in the next stall,
says I, 'Gimme some work; I'm hungry.
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Gimme a dozen eggs, an' I'll do a day's
chores fer yuh.' 'I ain't got no work,' he
says. So I slipped behind the stove t' warm.

"Well, sir, they was a bunch o' chickens
huddled on the floor at the eend o' the
counter, with their legs tied; an' one of 'em,
a dominecker, comes flop, flop, flop, over
my way, tryin' t' hide, I reckon; fer it put
its head down between my feet, shut its
eyes an' laid still. It looked like a special
invite t' a hungry man, a special dispensa-
tion o' Providence. The farmer was n't lookin'.
*The Lord will pervide,' I says, an' picked
the chicken up an' hid it under my coat.
It cuddled close, an' was still. Onct I come
mighty nigh puttin' it down again, but I
thought o' my little shanty an' the box I
kep' fer a cupboard, an' how empty it was,
an'— an'— well, I mosied out, soft-like.

"Yessir, I mosied out, just like a thief-—
me, Tom Hook, who had my faults, but was
always honest. Well, well! I reckon it had
t' be.

"They ain't much more fer t' tell. They
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ketched me. I reckon I was awkward, not
bein* used to the Lord's way o* pervidin'.
Jedge an' jury set on me, an' 'lowed I'd have
t' go t' Jeff fer a right smart spell. The
jedge 'lowed he was sorry, but, says 'ee,
'Life ain't all beer an' skillets,' says 'ee, er
words t' that effect. They toted me over on
the dinky (they got a dinky line t' Jeff now,
an' over the river, on the new bridge). The
boys come down t' the depot t' give me a
good send-off, but I didn't feel Uke no hero;
I wanted t' hide my face from the eyes o' my
feller man.

**Well, sir, we hadn't gone more'n two
blocks when ole Hi Nickleson got on the
train, goin' t' Jeff, er over the river, I dis-
remember which. You mind him? The little
whiffet !. County treasurer as fer back as the
oldest inhabitant kin remember, until that
spring they found out the county didn't have
as much money as she'd ort by twenty thou-
sand dollars. Still, when he goes t' Jeff he
don't have no deputy-sheriff along t' keep him
from gittin' lonesome. He come a-struttin'
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Gee Boy

down the aisle, an' he up an' says, says 'ee,
lookin' down at my bracelets, * Whut fer did
you hook that chicken?' An' I says t' him,
says I, "Cause I didn't have no chanct at
the county funds,' says I. An' he didn't stay
no longer.

"Well, that made me feel some peerter fer
a spell, but when we got out o' town, the
dinky train begun t' sing a song t' me, 'cause
o' the things a-runnin' in my mind an' the
wheels goin' dumpy-de-dump-dump on the
rails. First thing was, * Hook— Hook— Hook,'
jest like that; regular, callin' out my name,
Hke soldiers marchin' an' sayin', 'Left, left.'
Then it was, ' Hook-a-chicky, hook-a-chicky,
hook-a-chicky. Hook — Hook — Hook.' The
words made me raise outen my seat, mighty
nigh; but the wheels went right on, *Dom-
inecker, dom-inecker, dom^necker, Hook-
Hook— Hook, hook-a-chicky, hook-a-chicky,
dom-inecker, hook-a-chicky. Hook— Hook—
oh Lord! them words will go trampin'
through my mind till I die."

The Julep-Devil's head sank low on his
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breast, and his hearers suffered his silence
to remain unbroken. After a time he raised
his head, and went on, " Of course, I— I ain't
bKnd t' the humorous character o' this here
episode, an* I don't calculate you think I am.
But sometimes I 'low things git less an' less
funny the nearer you git to 'em; an' that's
whut's the matter with me.

"Well, that's all-that's all. My life is
mighty nigh spent; an' things I looked for-
ward to, so fer away I thought they'd never
come, have come an' gone, long gone. An'
some have come that I didn't look forward
to— no, not at all. I reckon I've been mighty
wicked, but the Lord ain't goin' to be too
hard on an ole feller like me. I reckon he'll
say whut the jedge said, *Life ain't all beer
an' skillets.'"

The old man paused and looked up at the
sky a moment, then rose painfully, and
moped silently away.

The fringe of spiky leaves edged the black
bulk of the sentinels silhouetted against the
sky— the deep, star-set sky; the unfathom-
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able blue silence above; and below, a man
and a woman— two specks and the Im-
mensity !

"Is He mindful of us, do you think?"
Ruth asked, as she contemplated the heavens.

"It's one of the things I've given up. I
suppose my life is the history of a failure.
Now I know that I aspired to divinity;
but divinity is silent— keeps its own counsel.
There may be a hidden purpose in what we
have to endure; but it looks to me like
chance— the chance of events working one
upon the other and upon helpless man. Fate I
Life seems to be the tossing of a coin ; and
a coin has two sides. We ought to be happy
enough if we can toss a second time when
we lose the first. You remember the pro-
fessor, Ruth? I was with him in the charge;
a captain of regulars. I saw him struck,
and laid him straight when he was dead.
He told me some things I did not know
before— about long ago ; our lives might have
been different if I had known. So runs the
life of man. We yet have a long waitings
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you and I. Shall we wait— here on the
knob?'^

Her face, cast upward to the sky, received
its soft light, and her heart its benediction;
her voice was low and melodious. "It is
what I have waited for."

He took a thin leathern book from his
pocket, extracted some folded sheets of
paper, and put them into Ruth's lap. She
unfolded them. A flat and withered violet
dropped out. In the faint light of the sky
she made out the title of some verses.

And Gee-Boy, looking up at his star, felt
the Infinity that brooded upon it, and her.

The End

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vGooQle

To the Reader

If you have enjoyed'

GEE -BOY

and wish to read other
books of child-life, in-
spect the titles on the
following pages

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TWO BOOKS VERY LIKE

GEE-BOY

AKB

KENNETH GRAHAME'S

THE GOLDEN AGE

AN»

DREAM DAYS

MR. RICHARD LbGALLIENNE :

''I can think of no truer praise of Mr. Kenneth Grahame*t
* GoMen Age* than that it is worthy of being called *A Child's
Garden — of Prose.* **

MR. ISRAEL ZANGWILL :

** No more enjoyable interpretation of the child's mind has
beea accorded us since Stevenson's * Child's Garden of Verses.' '*

MR. SWINBURNE:

"The art of writing adequately and acceptably about children
is among the rarest and most precious of arts. . . . *The Golden
Age' is one of the few books which arc well-nigh too praiseworthy
for praise. . . . The fit reader — and the * fit ' readers should be
far from *few' — finds himself a child again while readmg it.
Immortality should be the reward. . . . Praise would be as super-
fluous as analysis would be impertinent."

THE NEW YORK TIMES SATURDAY REVIEW :

** In this prorince, the reconstruction of child life, Kenneth
Grahame is masterly. In fact we know of no one his equal.'*

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TOMMY WIDEAWAKE

By H. H. Bashford

The Reader^ in an appreciative review, says : '' Not a boy^s story,
but a charming story of a boy ; a charming, sympathetic, whole-souled
bit of writing just long enough to while away a Summer* s afternoon.
Tommy is delightful : a good, healthy English lad, neither too full of
pranks nor too cherubic to be natural ; he is fond of cricket and play-
ing truant and swimming, and, indeed, all that the ideal out-door boy
is fond of. ... ,

** The setting is perfect. Four men of mature years and consequent
experience of life have pledged themselves to look after the motherless
son of an old comrade

"These men are all of different vocation, staid country batchelors
who possess in greater degree the conscience and desire to do the right
thing for Tommy than the knowledge how to set forth properly about
it. The result is, of course, that Tommy teaches them, and makes
them young again

" He is a brightness in their midst, a voice, a movement of all that
is sweetest and wholesomest in life, and they give him in return their
harvests of affection. The story is never maudlin : it is told, indeed,
with indescribable humour and genuineness, and we advise all those
who — ^no, we advise everybody to buy it.**

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THE CHILD MIND

By R. H. Brethciten

Tht New York Tims Saturday Revimo,^^**The book b chann-
ing; each page leads one temptingly on to the next.**

TAi Syracust Herald. — ** If we were omnipotent. The Child Mind,
by Ralph Harold Bretherton, should be placed in the hands of all
parents and ^miliarity with its contents enforced. We marvel that
maturity could produce a book which for sympathetic comprehension
of a most important phase of child life we have never seen excelled.**

Tke Boston Transcript. — '< It is not merely interesting, it is fasci-
natmg. It is a genuine addition to the literature of the subject.**

TAe San Francisco Argonaut. — **The author b in no respect obscure
or profound, and the book, much of it cast in narrative form, should
be pleasant reading u well as instructive."

The St, Louis Mirror.-^^** It is of considerable psycholopcal and
pedago^cal value.**

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A ROMANCE OF THE NURSERY

By L. Allen Harker

TAt Nno York Mail and Exfnss, — « It is inmitiTe, it hu insight
and understanding sympathy ; it is a book to delight those to whom
the romance of childhood has not lost its charm in the course of
years."

The H^ashinvton Post, — " As the adult reader turns the pages his
mind sinks back, back into a hazy past from which he emerges younger
and lighter-hearted.**

The Louisville Evening Post. — ** It is a real book of childhood^-of
a happy, healthy childhood, spent in an old-time, old-fashioned, quiet
environment. It has an irresistible humor and charm ; it is gay, deb-
onair, enchanting. Above all, it is delicately imaginative, going to the
very hearts of these children, and suggesting, with exquisite sympathy,
their natures and ideals. We recommend the book to all lovers of
•The Golden Age.***

The Detroit Free Press, — <* The book is a delightful study of child
personality, and it is more^t is good literature.**

The Cleveland Daily fForld, — *< It is one of the finest-grained books
for little folks that has been issued. It is more than a child's book in
its make-up, its treatment, and even in its appearance. Not the least
of the attractiveness of this book are the illustrations by Katharine M.
Roberts*

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TH E CH I LD WHO WI LL NEVER
GROW OLD

By K. Douglas King

The Ne%u Tork Commercial- Advertiser. — ** A rare and sympathetic
understanding of child nature gives to this little group of stories a charm
not often found in books which deal almost exclusively with childhood.
This book has in general the merits of strength and vividness, as well
as a sympathy which is keenly alive to the highest possibilities of the
subject, whether it be a pampered child or a begrimed beggar.**

The London Daily Telegraph. — ** Wc can cordially recommend this
little volume to all those who feel the charm of childhood and delight
in the sympathetic interpretation of it in fiction. The charm is inde-
finable ; it lies partly in the unconsciousness and freshness of the child,
in its perfect confidence and frankness of heart, and partly in its quaint-
ness of diction and the curious processes of thought that pass through
its mind. To inteVpret all this with complete success is given to very
few, but the authoress of this book, Miss K. Douglas King, is among
the number. The whole volume is full of good things.*'

The London Daily Chronicle. — "They are pretty and pathetic stories,
fiill of fine perception of children's ways, and showing a penetrative
and sympathetic study. In the impressive and beautiful story of
* Flicklet* wc find the dignity and purification of tragedy.**

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(i) A HUNDRED FABLES OF JESO?

(2) A HUNDRED FABLES OF LA FONTAINE

(3) A HUNDRED ANECDOTES OF

ANIMALS

Each Tolume with over one hundred full-page illustradont
By Percjr J. Billinghurst

4to. Dccoratite Covers. Separate Volumes, I1.50 each
The three volumes in Decorative Box, ^$3.50

(1) WYMPS

(2) ALL THE WAY TO FAIRYLAND

(3) THE OTHER SIDE OF THE SUN

Fairy Sfries

B7 Evelyn Sharp

Each volume with coloured illustrations by Mrs. Dearmer

Sq. ixmo. Decorative Covers. Separate Volumes, ^$1.50 each

The three volumes in Decorative Box, ^3.50

The St. yamcis Gazette says : ** To be able to write a good fairy
tale is given to few, though alas ! a good many incompetent people
imagine they are able to do so. Far and away the best fairy tales are
the old traditional stories of Cinderella, Jack and the Beanstalk, and
others. To these we add the stories of Hans Andersen and Grimm j
and now room must be made in that select company for the tales of
Evelyn Sharp. In both her books children will find unmixed delight.
The tales are genuine fairy tales ; they abound in quaint conceits, happy
devices, fun, wit, and real wisdom, and every one of the tales is in such
simple language that a child of eight (as we have proved) can under-
stand and enjoy them.**

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