into it. "Don't they look beautiful?" she asked. She had to lift her voice a little because both of the McKelvey girls were talking at once.

"They certainly do!" came the response in a wholly unexpected voice, and Flora turned and beheld the animated face of Mrs. Harrod framed in the doorway.

"Mrs. Shepard asked me to come on up," said Mrs. Harrod. She looked about her as if the room was empty. "Flora," she demanded, "where's that child?" She had laid eager hands upon Flora's shoulders and kissed her flushed cheek with genuine affection. She had also taken a second to glance at the McKelvey girls and say: "How-do, young ladies?" "Child?" echoed Miss Baron.

"That perfect little creature who was here the last time I was. I did hope she'd let me in again. Such angelic manners. You don't mean to say you've let her go?"

"Oh, Bonnie May! No, she hasn't gone. She's quite one of us now. Where is she, Victor?"

Baron fidgeted. "She went up into the attic, I believe."

Mrs. Harrod made for the hall immediately. "I'm sure you don't mind," she said without turning around. They heard her climbing the second flight of stairs. "You young people won't miss me," she called back.

The younger Miss McKelvey suddenly sat up very straight. "What's the matter with you, Flora Baron?" she demanded. "The matter?"

"The way you're looking at Victoryes, and the way he's looking at you. What's the mystery?"

Flora listened. Úp-stairs a door opened and shut, and then there was silence. "I was wondering if Mrs. Harrod would find things just to her liking up there," she explained.

"Oh! Well, if she doesn't, it will be her own fault. People who take possession of a house can't be too particular." "I suppose not," admitted Flora thoughtfully. She was listening intently again. There was a movement downstairs. Mrs. Shepard was serenely complaining to herself of many interruptions. The street-door opened and shut and

Flora heard resonant, familiar tones. Baron heard them, too.

"I'll see," Mrs. Shepard was heard to say; and then there was the sound of her heavy tread on the stairs.

Again Flora and Victor looked at each other dubiously.

"What is the matter with you?" demanded Miss McKelvey-the other Miss McKelvey this time.

Flora leaned back against the mantel almost limply and laughed-not the laugh of Bonnie May's lessons but the old contralto gurgle. "Nothing," she said. Her cheeks flamed, her eyes were filled with a soft light.

"Mr. Addis has called to see Miss Baron," announced Mrs. Shepard truculently in the doorway.

"I'll go right down," said Flora. "Oh!" exclaimed the older Miss McKelvey.

"Oh!" echoed her sister.

They arose as by common impulse and stole out into the hall. "We don't care if we do," they flung back in a whisper as they tiptoed to the stair-railing. They came hurrying back with ecstatic twitterings. "You know you never entertain company in that dark room downstairs, Flora Baron! You've got to bring him up!"

Flora gazed at them in rebellious mis

ery.

"Well, then!" exclaimed the younger Miss McKelvey, seizing her sister's hand, "we'll go up into the attic!"

And they were gone.

"Oh!" cried Flora helplessly, "it shows what one criminal act will lead to!"

"There was no criminal act," retorted Baron. "Nothing is really wrong. Have him up!" His tone seemed to say: "Assert your right! I'll back you up!”

He went to the head of the stairway. "Come right up, Addis," he called. He tried to throw a great deal of cordiality into his voice.

Flora's hands went to her temples in a gesture of despair. "You invited him here in mother's absence you know you did!" she cried.

"I didn't. But I wouldn't care if I had. I'd have done it if I'd had the wit to think of it. Why shouldn't he come?"

WR

Grace before Books

E live in an age that does not ask the blessing. To some of us, wistful for an older fashion, the world may seem to have had comelier manners in days when little children did say grace in every Christian kind of place. There is a spiritual gaucherie in our present sheepishness before the Unseen, an æsthetic loss in the fact that heads no longer bow and knees no longer kneel in instinctive reverence. It is to no grace-less age that literature owes the ten.der homeliness of the blessings that Herrick asked or the exquisite gratitude implied. in Lamb's protest against Grace before Meat." These were two men who always sat down with a relish to the meal of life, although the fare that was served them may look to us harsh enough. It was because he found so many things holier to enjoy that Lamb deprecated a ritual of thanks confined to "the solitary ceremony of manducation." We to whom life may sometimes seem a bitter banquet, squalidly set forth, may sometimes, reading, envy Lamb, seeing that neither the stale boredom of the countinghouse nor the acrid sting of the madhouse

ever spoiled the gusto of his palate. It is with the high-heart gayety that is the finest essence of thanksgiving that he demands:

"A form for setting out upon a pleasant walk, for a moonlight ramble, for a friendly meeting, or a solved problem. Why have we none for books, those spiritual repasts— a grace before Milton, a grace before Shakespeare, a devotional exercise proper to be said before reading 'The Faerie Queene'?" A poet of to-day has echoed Lamb's desire:

"Myriad-leaved as an elm;

Starred with shining word and phrase;
Wondrous words that overwhelm,
Phrases vivid, swift, divine;
Gracious turn of verse and line-

O God, all praise

For a book: its tears, its wit,

Its faults, and the perfect joy of it."

In a time when tongue and pen alike are stiff and straitened in the utterance both of prayer and praise, it were, perhaps, an exercise enfranchising for the spirit to formulate certain graces for those books that, devoured, have become our bone and sinew and red corpuscle, but that we have received and relished with "never a civil word to

God." The dishes named in Lamb's bookfeast have been also the chief dishes of our own sustenance. We might offer this tardy grace for Milton:

"Jehovah, who dost speak by prophets, we thank thee for thy prophet-poet, for music martial with the battle-cries of hell and heaven, and melodious with the peaceful praise of earth, for manhood austere and lonely, for faith fearless in defeat and darkness; through him may we believe that genius is greatest through speaking the glory of God, that the scholar is wisest through the study of holiness; that the soldier is bravest who, unbroken unto death, serves no king but God."

To image a world without Shakespeare is as hard as to image an earth without the sun; but which one of us has ever thanked God for him? In saying grace for the king of words all others' words must stammer:

"God in man, we thank thee that to one man thou didst lend thine own creatorship to make a world; we bless thee that each one of us may enter there and, in the only poetspeech that ever made word and passion one, may hear souls speak fear, hate, love, and know each soul only our own made myriad by a poet's magic; and, looking within our own heart to find there Hamlet and Caliban, Romeo and Puck, may see, with God and Shakespeare, the universal heart, which to perceive is to pity, which to understand is to love, which to reverence is to aspire."

It should not be in the humdrum language of every day but in the woven melody of the Spenserian stanza that we ask a blessing upon our reading of the poet of the poets:

"God of beauty, we thank thee for those woods and waters of enchantment where knights and ladies ride to the adventure of a wizard's brain, where shines forever a light that never shone, where lies forever a world that never was. We thank God for one who out of the bleak stones of rectitude could build a palace of radiant righteousness, bright with beings moving forth from faerie to the harmonies of a music timed to earth's hidden heart-beats and to the pulsing of the stars. We whose lives are prose thank God that the poet's poet chose to sing in imperishable story the grace of goodness and the loveliness of love."

But would one who was himself past master in appreciation and its expression have approved these our blessings before books?

One wishes that Lamb himself had set to words his gratitude for his poets. We can utter no grace he could not have bettered, except perhaps one, a grace for Elia himself:

"Father, who in love didst ordain sunshine to cheer our eyes and laughter to cheer our souls, we thank thee for that great and simple man, because his mirth was as that of the flowers, which every morning praise thee. We thank thee for wit and wisdom and whimsey, and all the sun-bright weapons thou didst give him against a darkling fate. We thank thee for one who, loving the men of the past as he loved the men of the present, is by us loved even as he loved. We thank thee for one who loved a book as he loved a man, and we thank thee for his book because it is himself."

The Pertinacity of Things

No time has been wasted on idle adornment. Its little frame is painted black, the seat is of fine woven cane, the rockers stop short in the back with a slant outline that is almost nautical in its rakishness, and its arms are uncompromisingly red, of a red unknown to our latter-day cabinet workers, for no natural wood, paint, or stain in our present markets could boast such a tint.

Any one with an appreciation of personality in furniture would realize at a glance that this little "rocker" was not one to be lightly set aside even in a household where there are no longer any little children. Fortunately, so generous are its proportions that its first mistress, though past the halfway house of life, can still use it when winter afternoons make tea-drinking a fireside affair, and the electric stove is discarded for a kettle that "hums on the hob."

However, useful or not, the little chair has travelled wherever we have travelled, for we are a family possessed by things. Occasionally, as individuals, we rebel, emphasize the capital "T" in things, and declare we will have no more of their tyranny, but as a family we cling to everything that has once "belonged" and cultivate a fatal propensity for increasing the belongings. We have been told by scornful in-laws that what we needed was not so much an abandoned farm

Unfortunately, all the warehouses we ever encountered were in good working order, and charged storage. Now, storage is an empty and unsatisfying way in which to spend money. I doubt if any woman has ever stored her belongings without starting out, almost immediately, to search for the flat that "would cost so very little more than the storage, that she could afford to have her things about her, and yet be able to shut them up, whenever she wanted to run away for a holiday,” etc.

That is a well-recognized phase of the storage game. It is really an S O S call from the beloved things that still possess one, even though they may have lost their hold for the moment. For storage hurts the feelings of self-respecting furniture. There is no more forlorn group than that of one's huddled things, hemmed in by boxes that disguise books, pictures, and hangings, as they wait in the wide hall of some terribly safe and sanitary warehouse, to be checked off as per list before they are stored away out of sight. There is no more dreary, heart-breaking reading than that same list, that miscalls things, and records scratches, dents, and scars where owners would not willingly acknowledge a blemish.

Still, if your particular little rockingchairs, tables, and footstools become too insistent, and you crave freedom for a time, store them by all means, but in the end you must be prepared to pay much more than the mere quarterly bills. Ah, those bills that seemed so small in the beginning and so soon became a vexation to the spirit and the bank account! They are so empty, those bills, of everything but figures that mount up; their total is such a price to pay for the privilege of not having one's things about

one.

Temporary freedom is an empty joy if one is to suffer tyranny by absent treatment. In the end the things come out of storage, and here is the extra bill to pay. It is a moral one this time, for although you recognize the scratches, stains, and scars you were so eager to deny before; they are rarely in creased in the hands of a good storage company. Your furniture has been safe enough, but it has been chilled to the marrow. It stands aloof. It positively sulks. You must be prepared to pay the price of your holiday by weeks of patient coaxing before the pos

After all, why should such circles be broken through any foolish ambition that looks toward a freedom that does not really exist? Isn't it simpler and easier to accept the little rocking-chairs of this world and settle down by the fire with them? They are very lenient, even friendly, when their owners are obedient and faithful. This little one, that sits, so placid and four-square, by my fire of pine knots in New England has shown itself just as cosey beside the sudden jets of flame from a soft-coal fire in London, and wholly unperturbed by the basket grate full of walnut-shaped briquettes that warmed my Paris sitting-room.

Nothing could have been more incongruous than this bit of New England handicraft in the midst of genuine Empire furniture, but nothing could disturb its equanimity. In its way it, too, was wholly genuine. Besides, it "belonged," and the stately couches and desks of Napoleon's day were merely temporary, as far as I was concerned, as it very well knew.

The little rocking-chair and I understand each other perfectly.

"A

The Singing Phrase

ND dying, remembered Sweet Argos." There was once upon a time a little lame boy (so ran the tale I read in a magazine some years ago) whose imagination was strangely fired by that phrase. Now, why did those words mean so much to him? There is no deep significance in them that they should have been so vital. One might, of course, claim that the writer of the tale has pictured a false situation. But I know they are words of record for this reason: I have forgotten all but the barest outlines of that story; my most painstaking efforts fail to recall the magazine in which it appeared or give back to me the source from which the phrase came. one thing that still clings is the phrase itself, "And dying, remembered Sweet Argos."

The

Those words sing themselves over and over in my mind. And that, I think, is the secret. It was not the meaning but the music singing through the phrase that soothed and rested the little lame lad and helped drive away his pain.

How many such phrases and sentences there are in literature that lay hold on our affections and memories more because of

their musical quality than because of their sense. They echo in our minds like the fragment of an old tune, some chance word calls them to the surface, and we say them over and listen entranced to the music they make without thinking much about their meaning. "We shall start up-river when the tide turns," said the skipper one day last summer. And straightway my mind echoed "even at turning of the tide," and I found myself softly repeating it. "Even just between twelve and one, e'en at turning o' the tide."

There is no thought in that line, there is no poetry of color or emotion, but to me at least there is a strange, sweet music in the sound of those words, nay, even in the unspoken thought of them.

Sometimes the phrase that affects one thus is a line of verse, but just as often it is not in verse form. And, in either case, it is not the music of metre, the cadence of long and short syllables, that makes it haunt the mind. For on both sides stand lines of metre just as perfect, and yet we do not remember them. The ear of our mind is listening for a rhythm more subtle than that of accent or measured feet.

The Bible is full of this music. Take, for instance: "As the shadow of a great rock in a weary land." There is a depth of significance in that which no one who has ever toiled along the sun-baked stretches of road in a tropic country and crept exhausted into the shadow of the town wall or of some building can fail to feel. But beyond and above that meaning is a music "as the shadow of a great rock in a weary land"how it echoes, how it sings and soothes!

"Thy love to me was wonderful, passing the love of women"-surely the great king and greater poet who said that must have loved that phrase when he heard himself utter it. No wonder he caused it to be written down if it was as beautiful in the original Hebrew.

"O Jerusalem, Jerusalem, thou that killest the prophets and stonest them which are sent unto thee, how often would I have gathered thy children together, even as a hen gathereth her chickens under her wings, and ye would not!" I am not quite sure whether it is the poignancy of that appeal of a broodingly tender love or the music of the phrase that most endears that verse to me. But I am sure that it is pure music that lifts me up and makes me feel as if my soul (or some

thing big and restless inside me) had the wings it has always been longing for in this: "They that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run and not be weary; and they shall walk and not faint."

When I was fifteen a teacher who believed in having her pupils learn lengthy passages of poetry selected by herself forced several hundred lines of "Paradise Lost" upon me. I cannot repeat one of those to day. Yet there are two lines of "Paradise Lost" which no one asked me to learn, and which, in fact, I do not think I ever made any conscious effort to retain, that I have never forgotten. Though I live far beyond the allotted threescore years and ten (isn't there an echo of this subtle music in this accustomed phrase?) I know that the linking of the words "summer" and "day" (for instance, "a fine summer day") will start echoing in my mind the words:

"From morn till noon he fell,

From noon till dewy eve,-a summer's day."

There is no doubt that these lines taught themselves to me by sheer force of their haunting music. I could not forget them if I tried. Though, indeed, I suppose there is nothing that emphasizes their hold in that fact, since to try to forget a thing is the least effective way of ridding oneself of it. I think I would better say I could not forget them even if I had been forced to learn them.

Perhaps no other modern writer has so many of these haunting phrases as Oscar Wilde. Page after page is jewelled with such unforgettable cadences as: "One who trod with tired feet the purple, whitestarred fields of Asphodel."

"I never can remember poetry," a phlegmatic friend told me once, anent Oscar Wilde, "but "-he finished with unwonted fire-"I can't forget that line."

There are those who will say that some rhythmical arrangement of syllables, that alliteration or onomatopoia or some other rhetorical device accounts for the haunting quality of all these phrases and sentences that I have quoted.

It may be so, but I prefer to think that it is something less tangible, perhaps some strain of the hymeneal music of the perfect marriage between the language and the thought, some faint, far-off echo of the fabled music of the spheres, the essence and spirit of all earthly music.