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HERE is no further use of your coming round here, I tell you!" declared an angry and insistent voice, "You are the greatest nuisance that ever came rolling into Arrowhead, anyway, and the sooner you leave for good, all the better it will be for all concerned."

The speaker ended his caustic remarks by fixing his glaring eyes upon the object of his bitter denunciation and treating him to a gesture that could only be interpreted to mean great disgust, as he shrugged his huge shoulders so that his head appeared to be, as it were, between two big mountains of red, perspiring skin, and, then drooped the same shoulders until his neck looked very long indeed; this operation was repeated at least four times, and, at the end of it, the hands attached to the huge shoulders, which were large as would have been expected, were spread out to their widest limit and thrown up in the air with a significant shaking of the largeknuckled fingers, as if he with that gesture, wiped his hands of the whole matter.

He continued to glare at the offending person before him even after the rumbling of his heavy voice had ceased to disturb the harmony of the surrounding forest. The speaker stood at the door of the only log house for many miles around; this building was rather pretentious considering the location of it, and it had been prepared to receive as guests fully fifty people, at least, so that the landlord in that wild country needed to be big and husky and quick to decide some such question as had just been under discussion.

"I do not wish to make any plea for myself," tremulously answered the cul

prit, for so he had just been declared to be, "but I would like to have you think, for a moment, what all this will mean to my poor little wife, who, certainly, has never lifted one of her dainty fingers in any but a good cause, unless you include her in this affair of mine, which is not in any sense hers; indeed, she has always opposed me in this that you decry as being improper, as much as she has ever opposed me in anything."

The accuser weakened a little at this remark, but, still the expression on his face had not changed a great deal when the door of the bar-room was timidly opened by a little woman, leading by the hand a tiny girl who seemed to be just like her evident mother except in the small matter of age.

The new-comer entered hesitatingly and as if she was unaccustomed to the surroundings in which she suddenly found herself; she advanced toward the big man, standing in the center of the floor, slowly and as if while she felt that the duty had to be performed, yet she felt its weight; but she kept right on with no deviation from the straight course upon which she had entered, until she had reached the side of the landlord of the tenement which she, with her husband and baby, had been inhabiting for some months.

When she was so near to the big man that she was almost under his awkward hand which he had raised and shook in the direction of the man who had been suffering from the lash of his unyielding tongue, she came to a stop and began to weep violently, and yet despairingly, as if she knew that tears were unavailing and yet had to be shed in the cause which was, at the time, very near to her heart. After she had exhausted her first

wild sorrow, she began to address the man in a low, pleading voice:

"Why do you turn us out in the streets to starve to death? Does not this poor baby, here, deserve a bite to eat and a place to lay her little curly head? Don't my poor husband, there, need to rest after a hard day's labor at the works? Don't even I deserve some little sustenance, so that I may do the work I must do to help my poor little baby and my unfortunate husband? What have we ever done that you will insist on our leaving on this bitter, cold day without any idea at all as to where we can even find shelter from the blizzard to say nothing of some little thing to keep soul and body together? What if this were your own little girl instead of mine, and your wife instead of me, and you instead of my poor husband, who stands there shivering and hungry, while you are, as any. one can see, very well fed and very well kept? What do you suppose you would do," she wailed afresh, "What do you suppose that you would do if our positions were reversed? Suppose it would be my husband who ordered you out of house and home just because he owned the little place where you were living, and suppose that somebody objected to your business which is surely no more respectable than anything that my poor man may do at night after he has quit his daily labor at the works. I have never heard that saloon-keepers were the proper persons to decide vexed social questions!"

She ended with quite a grand flourish for a woman of her size, and immediately began to follow up the rather cowed look that she thought she saw in her landlord's inflamed eyes by pressing an immediate adjustment of the difficult question in hand.

"I guess you wouldn't like to go dragging through the snowy streets with the wind blowing every which way leading by the hand your only child with almost nothing to keep her from freezing to death ... I guess you would cry, too, or, anyway, your wife would cry and so would your poor little baby."

She stood before him with the tears

rolling down her thin cheeks and with her small fists clenched so that the nails of her fingers left their marks upon her palms; as he looked at her he saw that she was indeed in a very pitiful condition, and, in spite of himself, he felt that his first stern resolution was weakening toward the man whom he had so bitterly condemned.

He had taken his place beside his wife, now, as if he felt that, weak as she was, she might protect him, to some extent at least, from the wrath of the man who had his destinies in his big, cruel hands, for he was well aware that, in case he was ejected from the tenement-house, he would, almost inevitably, lose his place at the works, and, in that case, he had no idea as to where he could get any kind of labor so that he might continue to provide even the poor fare upon which the little family had been subsisting for some months.

Turning his large, hungry eyes upon his self-appointed judge, he added what weight he could to the continued silent entreaties of his dependents, for the little girl, had also added her small pleading to those of her parents, by clinging to her mother, and, while she hid behind her scanty skirts, peering up at the big man with a gaze in which fear and entreaty were mingled.

This silent group finally became too much for the endurance of the sufferer from it, and, as his anger rose, his pity grew less, as if anger and pity were the two ends of a balancing pole which rose and fell bringing to the surface both emotions at succeeding intervals.

At length anger quite overbalanced pity and gained the ascendancy over the landlord in whose hands the little family felt that their future destiny reposed, and with a vile epithet applied to the man, he ordered him to get out of his sight and take his spawn along with him:

"Go!" he commanded, "Get out of my sight and out of my house as well. . . . what have I to do with your food and lodging unless it pays me to look after them? What claim have you on me? Get out and never let me put my eyes

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on you again or it may be the worse for the whole caboodle of you!"

His voice rose to a sullen roar at the end of this sentence and the frightened trio departed clinging to each other. . . . the woman and child crying and the man white with fury and yet afraid to vent it on the object of it.

After they had reached the snowy waste of the wind-swept street, they made a forlorn group indeed, and it was while they yet lingered in front of the saloon where the controversy just recounted had taken place, that a large automobile came purring up and stopped directly in front of the building before which they stood.

Jumping hastily out of the car a young girl wrapped in warm furs ran across the sidewalk and up to the door of the saloon, calling excitedly:

... .

"Dad! Dad! Can you come home with me right away? Little Bernice has had an accident and mama says for you to come right back with me and we are to get a doctor and take him with us oh! Dad!" she continued as he appeared at the door, "Oh! Dad, do please hurry for she looked so white and was so limp when I came away that I am afraid she may not be there at all when we get back if we don't go just as fast as we can."

There was a look of deep anxiety on the fat face of the landlord who had just turned the little family out of doors, and he hurried into his great-coat which hung handily near and jammed a large felt hat over his head as he followed the girl out to the car which he entered at once and ordered the chauffeur to drive to a certain street and number which meant the office of the family doctor-then he turned to his elder daughter to find out what he could about the accident to which she had referred and found that his little girl, just about the age of the child they had left still shivering on the sidewalk in front of his saloon, had gone out with her sled to slide down hill and had gotten in the way of a machine that was being driven along at a high rate of speed and had been seriously injured in some way un

known to her frightened sister who had been sent to bring him home.

When they reached the house the anxious father at once ran up the wide staircase that led into the upper portion of the spacious residence and found the little girl lying on her own white bed very pale and with her little face drawn with suffering that called forth almost constant stifled groans of agony from her wee mouth, while her almost distracted mother knelt beside the bed and smoothed the golden hair that lay in disordered beauty over the soft pillow and held the tiny, groping hands that looked very small and pitiful as they picked and pulled at the splendid bed-covering that lay beneath them.

The man realized the seriousness of the accident when he saw those groping fingers, for he had had some experience with wounds and had, more than once, looked upon sudden and violent death.

Now, he stooped over the little sufferer and said to her in a voice that had lost all its sternness as well as its cruelty:

"My darling little Bernice, tell your own Papa what is causing you this suffering. Where are you hurt? Can't Papa make it all well?"

She fixed her wandering, rolling eyes upon his face and whispered softly:

"It is my leg, Papa-I think they crushed it all to pieces when they ran over it-oh!" her sweet voice rose to a scream of agony, "Oh! Papa-they hurt me so they hurt me so-"

The man's unusual tears fell on her small face as he tried to help her bear the dreadful pain which now increased instead of diminishing as the injured limb began to waken to renewed life after the shock to the delicate nerves had worn off to some degree-he held the little hands in his own warm ones and he called her many loving names, but her only answers were the dreadful screams of agony that seemed about to tear his heart in two.

The doctor bent above the bed and, as he uncovered the poor little leg the seriousness of the injury was apparent. He ordered the patient removed to the

nearest hospital where he could have proper facilities for performing a surgical operation which he declared held the only possible chance for the recovery of little Bernice.

It was with anguish that seemed almost unbearable that the stricken parents prepared to go with the little girl and be near her during what she would have to undergo in the hospital.

They left the elder sister in the desolate home where the baby had been both light and sunshine, to look after the servants and to answer the telephone during their absence.

It was a sorrowful little procession that then proceeded through the icy streets to the hospital-the big car of the family following the ambulance where the little girl lay under an anaesthetic which the doctor had administered to her.

Then came the operating room with all its attendant horrors and, when the poor little sufferer was returned to the best of the rooms that money could buy in that large hospital, it was but a small bundle of misery that the parents saw lying there before them; at first they would not even ask what had been done for the sight of the little face almost as white as death and drawn with pain and streaked with half-dried tears was almost enough of itself to break their hearts, but, when they knew that the small injured leg had been removed at the hip and that, even in case she survived, their little daughter would never again run and play as normal children did, both the man and the woman bowed their heads under the weight of this terrible calamity.

Only a few short hours before, little Bernice had been a happy, healthy child with everything around her to continue her health and happiness, and, now, there she lay, almost an inert mass of quivering helpless flesh and blood.

It seemed to them that their cup of misery was as full as it could ever be, but, yet, they hoped that their little daughter would live even if she had to be a pitiful cripple during all the balance of her life on earth.

As soon as little Bernice recognized her, the mother was ordered to return to the home, but the father stayed beside the bed while the pitiful appeals for water assailed his ears-while he held the sponge which had been only moistened, to the lips of his poor little daughter.

As he sat there, suddenly, it seemed to him he could almost see the great eyes of that other small girl whom he had met that morning, peering out at him from behind her mother's skirtsit seemed to him that he could almost hear the pleading tones of that other mother's voice and the father's sorrow was now reflected in his own heart.

He faced these apparitions brought before him by his memory for some moments and listened to the labored breathing of his own child lying there on that little bed-then he called the nurse who was at hand concealed behind a screen, and left the room while he hunted for a telephone. When he had found the object of his search he called up the office of the rental agency that looked after the tenement that had been occupied by the man who had plead with him for time that day and asked whether the summons of ejection which he had signed had yet been delivered.

The agent, worried for fear he might be blamed for holding off about this matter, answered him that it had already been done and that the family had gone away to parts unknown; thinking to please his client, he added succinctly:

"And good riddance to bad rubbage!" Little dreaming of the effect that this remark would have on the man to whom he had made it, the agent patted himself on the back, as it were, congratulating himself on having thought quickly enough to tell the lie he had told, for he had not served the notice and did not intend to if he could help it, as he meant to arrange to pay the rental for a time himself, naming a new tenant to the owner of the place whom he did not wish to offend yet whose methods in this case he could not approve of.

The father went back to his suffering child regretting his inability to set the

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matter of the morning right, but it seemed to him that the family did not haunt him quite so constantly after he had tried to undo his harshness of the morning, and, while he deeply regretted his hasty judgment, yet he felt that he had only done what any business man, similarly placed, would have done

It was with great misgiving that the little man went, with his small family, to the tenement-house where he had left his personal belongings, for he was not at all sure that even the few things of which he was possessed might not be considered worthy of appropriation by the man who had ordered him and his out into the bleak and bitterly cold streets of Arrowhead, which was situated some few miles from the log-house where we first met the little party of suppliants.

They approached the place that they had called home with great caution for they feared they knew not what, but, as they found nothing disturbed, they entered and acted as if nothing had happened to disturb the safety of their former refuge.

The little girl had been crying from weariness and from exposure to the cold, and her mother was bending over her, chafing her small red fingers and trying to comfort her, and the father was hastily building a fire in the small stove that served both for heating and cooking purposes in the rude dwelling, when the outer door was thrust open without ceremony.

Startled and fearful, the little family gasped in terror and cast fear-laden glances in the direction of the street, but, as nothing formidable appeared in the doorway, the man was about to close the door in order to shut out the cold wind, when something was thrown, violently, past the threshold and landed beside the woman and child.

With a wild cry of terror the mother clasped her child in her arms, and the father hurried toward the object that had caused the alarm; he touched it gingerly at first, not knowing what it might contain, for it was a large package and carefully tied with strong string; he fi

nally carried it outside to untie the cord and undo the wrappings.

The mother crouched beside the little girl encircling her in her embrace, while she waited the result of the father's actions, and was much relieved to hear an exclamation of pleasure from him; soon he appeared in the doorway bearing a huge chunk of fresh meat and a big loaf of bread and various other eatables which had been contained in the package. They were almost ravenous with hunger and fatigue and it did not take them long to prepare a repast such as they had not enjoyed for many long days.

They did not cease to wonder whence this bounty had come, but they were too exhausted to do anything else but enjoy it as well as the fire which was now roaring up the small chimney, adding much to the comfort of the little home.

Suddenly, as if she had heard an approaching footstep, the little girl ran to a window and peered into the street outside, after she had thawed a place to look through on the frost-veiled windowpane; turning to her startled parents she said:

"I heard something coming; I think it is a big elephant by the way it shakes the ground-can't you hear it?"

But neither of the older ones had noticed any unusual noise.

"There it is again!" the child exclaimed, repeating her former perfor mance of breathing on the window-pane to thaw a peep-hole, "It must be that you can hear it, now-it is almost up to the door-there-it is about to open it,

guess-no, it is going right past our house-now it is out in the streetcan't you hear the steps? One right after the other as regular as can be. I don't like it—” she ended, shuddering, "it makes me afraid."

She doubled up her little fist and shook it toward the street, crying out in as loud a voice as she could command:

"You mean old elephant or whatever you are I wish that you would never come here any more-I don't like youyou mean old thing!"