On the crown of the hill stood a curious structure, actually small, but looming large in the grayness. The main body of the building was elevated upon posts, and was smaller at the bottom than where the spreading walls met the peaked roof. This roof spread out on both sides into broad verandas, and under these two wing-like shelters some three or four score of people were clustered in little groups. Lanterns and hand-lamps dimly lit up faces that showed strange in the unfamiliar illumination. There were women with shawls over their shoulders and women with shawls over their heads. Some of the men were in their shirt-sleeves, some wore shooting-coats, and a few had overcoats, though the night was warm. But no stranger arriving on the scene could have taken it for a promiscuous or accidental assemblage. There was a movement in unison, a sympathetic stir throughout the little crowd that created a common interest and a common purpose. The arrival of the two men was hailed with that curious sound with which such a gathering greets a desired and attended accession—not quite the sigh of relief, but the quick, nervous expulsion of the breath that tallies the coming of the expected. These were two of the men to be counted on, and they were there.

Every little community such as this knows its leaders, and now that their number was complete, the women drew together by themselves save for two or three who clearly took equal direction with the men; and a dozen in all, perhaps, gathered in a rough circle to discuss the organization of the search.

It was a brief discussion. A majority of the members of the group had formed decided opinions as to the course taken by the wandering child, and thus a division into sub-groups came about at once. This left various stretchings of territory uncovered, and these were assigned to those of the more decided minority who were best acquainted with the particular localities. When the division of labor was completed, the men had arranged to start out in such directions as would enable them to range and view the whole countryside for the extreme distance of radius to which it was supposed the boy could possibly have travelled. The assignment of Halford and Dirck to the river course was prompt, for it was known that they habitually hunted and fished along that line. The father of the boy, who stood by, was reminded of this fact, for a curious and doubtful look came into his face when he heard two of the most active and energetic men in the town set aside to search a region where he had no idea that his boy could have strayed. Some excuse was given also for the detailing of two other men of equal ability to take the range immediately above the river bank, and within hailing distance of those in the marshes by the shore. Had his mind not been in the daze of mortal grief and perplexity, he would have grasped the sinister significance of this precaution; but he accepted it in dull and hopeless confidence. When after they had set forth he told his wife of the arrangements made, and she heard the names of the four men who had been appointed to work near the riverside, she pulled the faded old Paisley shawl (that the child's nurse had wrapped about her) across her swollen eyes, and moaned, "The river, the river—oh, my boy, my boy!"

Perhaps the men heard her, for being all in place to take their several directions, they made a certain broken start and were off into the darkness at the base of the hill, before the two or three of their sex who were left in charge of the women had fairly given the word. The tramp of men's feet and horses' hoofs died down into the shadowy distance. The women went inside the spacious old corn-crib that had been turned into a gun-club shooting-box, and there the mother laid her face on the breast of her best friend, and clung to her without a sound, only shuddering once and again, and holding her with a convulsive grip. The other women moved around, and busied themselves with little offices, like the making of tea and the trimming of lamps, and talked among each other in a quiet way with the odd little upward inflections with which women simulate cheerfulness and hope, telling tales of children who had been lost and had been found again all safe and unscathed, and praising the sagacity and persistence of certain of the men engaged in the search. Mr. Latimer, they said, was almost like a detective, he had such an instinct for finding things and people. Mr. Brown knew every field and hollow on the Brookfield Road. Mr. MacDonald could see just as well in the darkness as in the daytime; and all the talk that reached the mother's ears was of this man's skill of woodcraft, of that man's knowledge of the country, or of another's unfailing cleverness or tirelessness.

Outside, the two or three men in charge stood by the father in their own way. It had been agreed that he should wait at the hilltop to learn if a trail had been found. He was a good fellow, but not helpful or capable; and it was their work to "jolly" him, as they called it; to keep his hope up with cheering suggestions, and with occasional judicious doses of whiskey from their flasks. For themselves, they did not drink; though their voices were low and steady they were more nervous than the poor sufferer they guarded, numbed and childish in his awful grief and apprehension. They were waiting for the sounds of the beginning of the search far below, and presently these sounds came, or rather one sound, a hollow noise, changeful, uneven, yet of a cruel monotony. It was a cry of "Willy! Willy! Willy!" rising out of that gray-black depth, a cry of many voices, a cry that came from far and near, a cry at which the women huddled closer together and pressed each other's hands, and looked speechless love and pity at the woman who lay upon her best friend's breast, clutching it tighter and tighter. Of the men outside, the father leaned forward and clutched the arm of his chair. The others saw the great drops of sweat roll from his brow, and they turned their faces away from him and swore inaudibly.

Then, as the deep below began to be alive with a faint dim light reflected from the half awakened heaven, the voices died away in the distance, and in their place the leaves of the great trees rustled and the birds twittered to the coming morn.

The day broke with the dull red that prophesies heat. As the hours wore on the prophecy was fulfilled. The moisture of the dew and the river mist rose toward the hot sky and vanished, but the dry haze remained and the low sun shone through it with a peculiar diffusion of coppery light. Even when it reached the zenith, the warm, faintly yellow dimness still rose high above the horizon, throwing its soft spell upon all objects far or near, and melting through the dim blue on the distant hilltop into the hot azure of the great dome above.

For an hour the watchers on the hill remained undisturbed, talking in undertones. For the most part, they speculated on the significance of the faint sounds that came up from below. Sometimes they could trace the crash of a horse through dry underbrush; sometimes a tumultuous clamor of commanding voices would tell them that a flat boat was being worked across a broad creek or a pond; sometimes a hardly audible whirr, and the metallic clinking of a bicycle bell would tell them that the wheelmen were speeding on the search. But for the best part of the time only nature's harmony of sounds came up through the ever-lightening gloom.

But with the first of daylight came the neighbors who had not been summoned, and they, of course, came running. It was also noticeable of this contingent that their attire was somewhat studied, and showed more or less elaborate preparation for starting on the already started hunt. Noticeable also it was, that after much sagacious questioning and profoundly wise discussion, the most of the new-comers either hung about peering out into the dawn and making startling discoveries at various points, or else went back to their houses to get bicycles, or horses, or forgotten suspenders. The little world of a suburban town sorts itself out pretty quickly and pretty surely. There are the men who do and the men who don't; and very few of the men who did, in that particular town, were in bed half an hour after the loss of that child was known.

But, after all, the late arrivals were useful in their way, and their wives, who came along later, were still more useful. The men were fertile in suggestions for tempting and practicable breakfasts; and the women actually brought the food along; and by the time that the world was well alight, the early risers were bustling about and serving coffee and tea, and biscuits and fruit, and keeping up that semblance of activity and employment that alone can carry poor humanity through long periods of suspense and anxiety. And the first on the field were the last to eat and the least critical of their fare.

It was eight o'clock when the first party of searchers returned to the hill. There were eight of them. They stopped a little below the crib and beckoned to Penrhyn to come down to them. He went, white-faced and a little unsteady on his feet; his guardians followed him and joined with the group in a busy serious talk that lasted perhaps five minutes—but vastly longer to the women who watched them from above. Then Penrhyn and two men went hastily down the hill, and the others came up to the crib and eagerly accepted the offer of a hasty breakfast.

They had little to tell, and that little only served to deepen the doubt and trouble of the hour. Of all the complication of unkind chance the searchers had to face the worst and the most puzzling. As in many towns of old settlement a road ran around the town, roughly circumscribing it, much as the boulevards of Paris anciently circumscribed the old fortifications of the city. It was little more than a haphazard connection of roads, lanes, and avenues, each one of which had come into existence to serve some particular end, and the connection had ended in forming a circuit that practically defined the town limits. It had been made certain that the boy had wandered this whole round, and that he had not left it by any one of the converging roads which he must have crossed. Nor could the direction of his wandering be ascertained. The hard, dry macadam road, washed clean by a recent rainfall, showed no trace of his light, infantile footprints. But sure it was that he had been on the road not one hour, but two or three at least, and that he had started out with an armful of his tiny belongings. Here they had found his small pocket-handkerchief, there a gray giraffe from his Noah's ark; in another place a noseless doll that had descended to him from his eldest sister; then a top had been found—a top that he could not have spun for years to come. Would the years ever come when that lost boy should spin tops?

There were other little signs which attested his passage around the circle—freshly broken stalks of milkweed, shreds of his brightly figured cotton dress on the thorns of the wayside blackberries, and even in one place the clear print of a muddy and bloody little hand on a white gate-post.

There is no search more difficult than a search for a lost child five or six years of age. We are apt to think of these wee ones as feeble creatures, and we forget that their physical strength is proportionally much greater than that of grown-up people. We forget also that the child has not learned to attribute sensations of physical discomfort to their proper sources. The child knows that it suffers, but it does not know why. It is conscious of a something wrong, but the little brain is often unable to tell whether that something be weariness or hunger. If the wandering spirit be upon it, it wanders to the last limit of physical power, and it is surprising indeed to find how long it is before that limit is reached. A healthy, muscular infant of this age has been known to walk nearly eight or ten miles before becoming utterly exhausted. And when exhaustion comes, and the tiny form falls in its tracks, how small an object it is to detect in the great world of outdoors! A little bundle of dusty garments in a ditch, in a wayside hollow, in tall grass, or among the tufts and hummocks of a marsh—how easy it is for so inconspicuous an object to escape the eye of the most zealous searcher! A young animal lost cries incessantly; the lost child cries out his pitiful little cry, finds itself lifted to no tender bosom, soothed by no gentle voice, and in the end wanders and suffers in helpless, hopeless silence.

As the morning wore on Dirck and Halford beat the swampy lands of the riverside with a thoroughness that showed their understanding of the difficulty of their work, and their conviction that the child had taken that direction. This conviction deepened with every hour, for the rest of the countryside was fairly open and well populated, and there the search should have been, for such a search, comparatively easy. Yet the sun climbed higher and higher in the sky, and no sound of guns fired in glad signal reached their ears. Hither and thither they went through the hot lowlands, meeting and parting again, with appointments to come together in spots known to them both, or separating without a word, each knowing well where their courses would bring them together. From time to time they caught glimpses of their companions on the hills above, who, from their height, could see the place of meeting on the still higher hill, and each time they signalled the news and got back the despairing sign that meant "None yet!"

News enough there was, but not the news. Mrs. Penrhyn still stayed, for her own house was so situated that the child could not possibly return to it, if he had taken the direction that now seemed certain, without passing through the crowd of searchers, and intelligence of his discovery must reach her soonest at that point. Perhaps there was another reason, too. Perhaps she could not bear to return to that silent house, where every room held some reminder of her loss. Certainly she remained at the Club, and perhaps she got some unreasoning comfort out of the rumors and reports that came to that spot from every side. It was but the idle talk that springs up and flies about on such occasions, but now and then it served as a straw for her drowning hope to clutch at. Word would come of a farmer who had seen a strange child in his neighbor's wagon. Then would come a story of an inn-keeper who had driven into town to ask if anybody had lost a boy. Then somebody would bring a report at third or fourth hand of a child rescued alive from the river. Of course story after story, report after report, came to nothing. The child seen in the wagon was a girl of fourteen. The inn-keeper had come to town to ask about the lost child, but it was only because he had heard the report and was curious. A child indeed had been rescued from the river, but the story was a week old. And so it went, and the hot sun rose to the zenith and declined, and the coppery haze grew dim, and the shadows lengthened, and the late afternoon was come with its awful threat of impending night.

Dirck and Halford, down in the riverside marsh, saw that dreaded change fall upon the landscape, and they paused in their search and looked at one another silently. They had been ceaselessly at work all day, and the work had left its marks on them. Their faces were burnt to a fiery red, they were torn and scratched in the brambles, their clothes were soaked in mud and water to the waist, and they had been bitten and stung by insects until they looked as though some strange fever had broken out on them.

They had just met after a long beat, each having described the half of a circle around a piece of open water, and had sunk down in utter weariness on a little patch of dry ground, and for a minute looked at each other in silence. Then the younger man spoke.

"Hal," he said, "he never came this far."

By way of answer the other drew from his pocket a child's shoe, worn and wet, and held it up.

"Where did you find it?" asked Dirck.

"Right over there," said Halford, "near that old wagon-trail."

Dirck looked at him with a question in his eyes, which found its answer in the grave inclination of the elder's head. Then Dirck shook his own head and whistled—one long, low, significant whistle.

"Well," he said, "I thought so. Any trail?"

"Not the least," replied Halford. "There's a strip of thick salt grass there, over two yards wide, and I found the shoe right in the middle of it. It was lying on its side when I found it, not caught in the grass."

"Then they were carrying him, sure," said Dirck, decisively. "Now then, the question is, which way."

The two men went over to the abandoned roadway, a mere trail of ruts, where, in years before, ox-teams had hauled salt hay. Up and down the long strip of narrow grass that bordered it, they went backward and forward, hunting for traces of men's feet, for they knew by this time, almost beyond doubt, that the child was in the hands of tramps. The "tramp-hole" is an institution in all suburban regions which are bordered by stretches of wild and unfrequented country. These tramp-holes or camps are the headquarters of bands of wanderers who come year after year to dwell sometimes for a week, sometimes for months. The same spot is always occupied, and there seems to be an understanding among all the bands that the original territory shall not be exceeded. The tramps who establish these "holes" are invariably professionals, and never casual vagabonds; and apparently they make it a point of honor to conduct themselves with a certain propriety while they are in camp. Curiously enough, too, they seem to come to the tramp-hole, mainly for the purpose of doing what it is supposed that a tramp never does, namely: washing themselves and their clothes. I have seen on a chill November day, in one of these places, half a dozen men, naked to the waist, scrubbing themselves, or drying their wet shirts before the fire. I have always found them perfectly peaceable, and I have never known them to accost lonely passers-by, or women or children. If a shooting or fishing party comes along, however, large enough to put any accusation of terrorism out of the question, it is not uncommon for the "hoboes" to make a polite suggestion that the poor man would be the better for his beer; and so well is the reputation of these queer camps established that the applicant generally receives such a collection of five-cent pieces as will enable him to get a few quarts for himself and his companions.

Still, in spite of the mysterious system of government that sways these banded wanderers on the face of the earth, it happens occasionally that the tramp of uncontrollable instincts finds his way into the tramp-hole, and there, if his companions are not numerous or strong enough to withstand him, commits some outrage that excites popular indignation and leads to the utter abolition of one of the few poor out-door homes that the tramp can call his own, by the grace and indulgence of the world of workers. That such a thing had happened now the two searchers for the lost child feared with an unspeakable fear.

Dirck straightened himself up after a careful inspection of the strip of salt grass turf, and looking up at the ridge, blew a loud, shrill whistle on his two fingers. There was no answer. They had gone a full mile beyond call of their followers.

"I'll tell you what, old man," said Dirck, with the light of battle coming into his young eyes, "we'll do this thing ourselves." His senior smiled, but even as he smiled he knit his brows.

"I'll go you, my boy," he said, "so far as to look them up at the canal-boats. If they are not there we've got to go back and start the rest off. It may be a question of horses, and it may be a question of telegraphing."

"Well, let's have one go at them, anyway," said Dirck. He was no less tender-hearted than his companion; he wanted to find the child, but also he wanted, being young and strong and full of fight, to hunt tramps.

There were three tramp-holes by the riverside, but two were sheltered hollows used only in the winter-time. The third was a collection of abandoned canal-boats on the muddy strand of the river. Most of them were hopeless wrecks; in three or four a few patches of deck remained, enough to afford lodgment and shelter to the reckless wayfarers who made nothing of sleeping close to the polluted waters that permeated the rotten hulks with foul stains and fouler smells.

From the largest of these long, clumsy carcasses of boats came a sound of muffled laughter. The two searchers crept softly up, climbed noiselessly to the deck and looked down the hatchway. The low, red sun poured in through a window below them, leaving them in shadow and making a picture in red light and black shades of the strange group below.

Surrounded by ten tramps; ten dirty, uncouth, unshaven men of the road, sat the little Penrhyn boy, his little night-shirt much travel-stained and torn, his fat legs scratched and bruised, his soiled cheeks showing the traces of tears, his lips dyed with the juices of the berries he had eaten on his way, but happy, happy, happy—happier perhaps than he had ever been in his life before; for in his hand he held a clay pipe which he made persistent efforts to smoke, while one of the men, a big black-bearded animal who wore three coats, one on top of the other, gently withdrew it from his lips each time that the smoke grew dangerously thick. And the whole ten of them, sitting around him in their rags and dirt, cheered him and petted him and praised him, even as no polite assemblage had ever worshipped him before. No food, no drink could have been so acceptable to that delicately nurtured child of the house of Penrhyn as the rough admiration of those ten tramps. Whatever terrors, sufferings, or privations he had been through were all forgotten, and he crowed and shrieked with hysterical laughter. And when his two rescuers dropped down into the hole, instead of welcoming them with joy, he grabbed one of the collars of the big brute with the three coats and wept in dire disappointment and affright.

"Fore God, boss!" said the spokesman of the gang, the sweat standing out on his brow, "we didn't mean him no harm, and we wouldn't have done him no harm neither. We found de little blokey over der in the ma'sh yonder, and we tuk him in and fed him de best we could. We was goin' to take him up to the man what keeps the gin-mill up the river there, for we hadn't no knowledge where he come from, and we didn't want to get none of you folks down on us. I know we oughter have took him up two hours ago, but he was foolin' that funny-like that we all got kinder stuck on it, see, and we kinder didn't want to shake him. That's all there was to it, boss. God in heaven be my judge, I ain't lyin', and that's the truth!"

The faces of the ten tramps could not turn white, but they did show an ashen fear under their eyes—a deadly fear of the two men for whom any one of them would have been more than a match, but who represented the world from which they were outcasts, the world of Home, of whose most precious sweetness they had stolen an hour's enjoyment—the world so strong and terrible to avenge a wrong to its best beloved.

Then the silence was broken by the voice of the child, wailing piteously:

"I don't want to be tooken away from the raggedty gentlemen!"

Dirck still looked suspicious as he took the weeping child, but Halford smiled grimly, thoughtfully and sadly, as he put his hand in his pocket and said: "I guess it's all right, boys, but I think you'd better get away for the present. Take this and get over the river and out of the county. The people have been searching for this baby all day, and I don't know whether they'll listen to my friend and me."

The level red light had left the valleys and low places, and lit alone the hilltop where the mother was watching, when a great shout came out of the darkness, spreading from voice to voice through the great expanse below, and echoed wildly from above, thrilling men's blood and making hearts stand still; and as it rose and swelled and grew toward her out of the darkness, the mother knew that her lost child was found.

A LETTER TO TOWN

There is no such thing as liking a country life—for I take it that you mean to remove to the real suburban countryside, and not to one of those abominable and abhorrent deserts of paved streets laid out at right angles, and all supplied with sewers and electric light wires and water-mains before the first lonely house escapes from the house-pattern books to tempt the city dweller out to that dreary, soulless waste which has all the modern improvements and not one tree. I take it, I say, that you are going to no such cheap back-extension of a great city, but that you are really going among the trees and the water-courses, severing all ties with the town, save the railway's glittering lines of steel—or, since I have thought of it, I might as well say the railway ties.

If that is what your intent is, and you carry it out firmly, you are going to a life which you can never like, but which you may learn to love.

How should it be possible that you should enjoy taking up a new life, with new surroundings, new anxieties, new responsibilities, new duties, new diversions, new social connections—new conditions of every kind—after living half a lifetime in New York? It is true that, being a born New Yorker, you know very little indeed of the great city you live in. You know the narrow path you tread, coming and going, from your house to your office, and from your office to your house. It follows, as closely as it may, the line of Broadway and Fifth Avenue. The elevated railroads bound it downtown; and uptown fashion has drawn a line a few hundred yards on either side, which you have only to cross, to east or to west, to find a strange exposition of nearsightedness come upon your friends. Here and there you do, perhaps, know some little by-path that leads to a club or a restaurant, or to a place of amusement. After a number of books have been written at you, you have ventured timorously and feebly into such unknown lands as Greenwich Village; or that poor, shabby, elbowing stretch of territory that used to be interesting, in a simple way, when it was called the French Quarter. It is now supposed to be the Bohemian Quarter, and rising young artists invite parties of society-ladies to go down to its table d'hôte restaurants, and see the desperate young men of the bachelor-apartments smoke cigarettes and drink California claret without a sign of trepidation.

As I say, that is pretty near all you know of the great, marvellous, multitudinous town you live in—a city full of strange people, of strange occupations, of strange habits of life, of strange contrasts of wealth and poverty; of a new life of an indescribable crudity, and of an old life that breeds to-day the very atmosphere of the historic past. Your feet have never strayed in the side paths where you might have learned something of the infinite and curious strangeness of this strange city.

But, after all, this is neither here nor there. You have accustomed yourself to the narrow dorsal strip that is all New York to you. Therein are contained the means of meeting your every need, and of gratifying your every taste. There are your shops, your clubs, your libraries, your schools, your theatres, your art-galleries, and the houses of all your friends, except a few who have ventured a block or so outside of that magic line that I spoke of a little while ago. And now you are not only going to cross that line yourself, but to pass the fatal river beyond it, to burn your boats behind you, and to settle in the very wilderness. And you ask me if you will like it!

No, Modestus, you will not. You have made up your mind, of course, to the tedium of the two railway journeys every weekday, and when you have made friends with your fellow-commuters, you will get to like it, for your morning trip in will take the place with you of your present afternoon call at your club. And you are pretty sure to enjoy the novelty of the first few months. You have moved out in the spring, and, dulled as your perceptions are by years of city life, you cannot fail to be astonished and thrilled, and perhaps a little bit awed, at the wonder of that green awakening. And when you see how the first faint, seemingly half-doubtful promise of perfect growth is fulfilled by the procession of the months, you yourself will be moved with the desire to work this miracle, and to make plants and flowers grow at your own will. You will begin to talk of what you are going to do next year—for you have taken a three years' lease, I trust—if only as an evidence of good faith. You will lay out a tract for your flower garden and your vegetable garden, and you will borrow your neighbor's seed-catalogue, and you will plan out such a garden as never blossomed since Eden.

And in your leisure days, of course, you will enjoy it more or less. You will sit on your broad veranda in the pleasant mornings and listen to the wind softly brushing the tree-tops to and fro, and look at the blue sky through the leaf-framed spaces in the cool, green canopy above you; and as you remember the cruel, hot, lifeless days of summer in your town house, when you dragged through the weeks of work that separated you from the wife and children at the sea-side or in the mountains—then, Modestus, you must look upon what is before you, and say: it is good.

It is true that you can't get quite used to the sensation of wearing your tennis flannels at your own domestic breakfast table, and you cannot help feeling as if somebody had stolen your clothes, and you were going around in your pajamas. But presently your friend—for of course you have followed the trail of a friend, in choosing your new abode—your friend drops in clad likewise, and you take the children and start off for a stroll. As the pajama-feeling wears off, you become quite enthusiastic. You tell your friend that this is the life that you always wanted to lead; that a man doesn't really live in the city, but only exists; that it is a luxury to breathe such air, and enjoy the peaceful calm and perfect silence. Away inside of you something says that this is humbug, for, the fact is, the perfect silence strikes you as somewhat lonesome, and it even scares you a little. Then your children keep running up to you with strange plants and flowers, and asking you what they are; and you find it trying on the nerves to keep up the pretence of parental omniscience, and yet avoid the too-ready corrections of your friend.

"Johnny-jumper!" he says, scornfully, when you have hazarded a guess out of your meagre botanical vocabulary: "Why, man, that's no Johnny-jumper, that's a wild geranium." Then he addresses himself to the other inquiring youngster: "No, my boy, that's not a chestnut; that's an acorn. You won't get chestnuts till the fall, and then you'll get them off the chestnut trees. That's an oak."

And so the walk is not altogether pleasant for you, and you find it safest to confine your remarks on country life to generalizations concerning the air and the silence.

No, Modestus, do not think for a moment that I am making game of you. Your friend would be no more at home at the uptown end of your little New York path than you are here in his little town; and he does not look on your ignorance of nature as sternly as you would look upon his unfamiliarity with your familiar landmarks. For his knowledge has grown upon him so naturally and unconsciously, that he hardly esteems it of any value.

But you can have no idea of the tragico-comical disadvantage at which you will find yourself placed during your first year in the country—that is, the suburban country. You know, of course, when you move into a new neighborhood in the city you must expect to find the local butcher and baker and candlestick-maker ready to fall upon you, and to tear the very raiment from your back, until they are assured that you are a solvent permanency—and you have learned how to meet and repel their attacks. When you find that the same thing is done in the country, only in a different way, which you don't in the least understand, you will begin to experience a certain feeling of discouragement. Then, the humorous papers have taught you to look upon the Suburban Furnace as part of the machinery or property of a merry jest; and you will be shocked to discover that to the new-comer it is a stern and cold reality. I use the latter adjective deliberately and advisedly. There will surely come an awful night when you will get home from New York with Mrs. Modestus in the midnight train, too tired for anything but a drowsy chat by the lingering embers of the library fire over the festivities of the evening. You will open your broad hospitable door, and enter an abode of chill and darkness. Your long-slumbering household has let fires and lights go out; the thermometer in the children's room stands at forty-five degrees, and there is nothing for you to do but to descend to the cellar, arrayed in your wedding garments, and try your unskilful best to coax into feeble circulation a small, faintly throbbing heart of fire that yet glows far down in the fire-pot's darksome internals. Then, when you have done what you can at the unwonted and unwelcome task, you will see, by the feeble candle-light, that your black dress-coat is gray with fine cinder dust, and that your hands are red and raw from the handling of heavy implements of toil. And then you will think of city home-comings after the theatre or the ball; of the quiet half-hour in front of the dying cannel; of the short cigar and the little nightcap, and of the gentle passage bedward, so easy in that warm and slumberous atmosphere that you hardly know how you have passed from weariness to peaceful dreams. And there will come to your spirit a sudden passion of humiliation and revolt that will make you say to yourself: This is the end!

But you know perfectly well that it is not the end, however ardently you may wish that it was. There still remain two years of your un-subletable lease; and you set yourself, courageously and firmly, to serving out the rest of your time. You resolve, as a good prisoner, to make the best of it. You set to work to apply a little plain common-sense to the problem of the furnace—and find it not so difficult of partial solution after all. You face your other local troubles with a determination to minimize them at least. You resolve to check your too open expressions of dissatisfaction with the life you are leading. You hardly know why you do this, but you have, half-unconsciously, read a gentle hint in the faces of your neighbors; and as you see those kindly faces gathering oftener and oftener about your fire as the winter nights go on, it may, perhaps, dawn upon your mind that the existence you were so quick to condemn has grown dear to some of them.

But, whether you know it or not, that second year in the suburban house is a crisis and turning-point in your life, for it will make of you either a city man or a suburban, and it will surely save you from being, for all the rest of your days, that hideous betwixt-and-between thing, that uncanny creation of modern days of rapid transit, who fluctuates helplessly between one town and another; between town and city, and between town and city again, seeking an impossible and unattainable perfection, and scattering remonstrant servant-maids and disputed bills for repairs along his cheerless track.

You have learned that the miseries of country life are not dealt out to you individually, but that they belong to the life, just as the troubles you fled from belong to the life of a great city. Of course, the realization of this fact only serves to make you see that you erred in making so radical a change in the current of your life. You perceive only the more clearly that as soon as your appointed time is up, you must reëstablish yourself in urban conditions. There is no question about it; whatever its merits may be—and you are willing to concede that they are many—it is obvious that country life does not suit you, or that you do not suit country life, one or the other. And yet—somehow incomprehensibly—the understanding that you have only shifted the burden you bore among your old neighbors has put a strangely new face on things, and has made you so readily tolerant that you are really a little surprised at yourself.

The winter goes by; the ever welcome glory of the spring comes back, and with it comes the natural human longing to make a garden, which is really, although we treat it lightly, a sort of humble first-cousin to the love of children. In your own breast you repress this weakness. Why taste of a pleasure which in another short year you mean to put permanently out of your reach? But there is no resisting the entreaties of your children, nor your wife's ready interest in their schemes, and you send for Pat Brannigan, and order a garden made. Of course, it is only for the children, but it is strange how readily a desire to please the little ones spreads into a broader benevolence. When you look over your wife's list of plants and seeds, you are surprised to find how many of them are perennials. "They will please the next tenants here," says your wife; "think how nice it would have been for us to find some flowers all already for us, when we came here!" This may possibly lead you to reflecting that there might have been something, after all, in your original idea of suppressing the gardening instinct.

But there, after a while, is the garden—for these stories of suburban gardens where nothing grows, are all nonsense. True, the clematis and the moonflower obstinately refuse to clothe your cot with beauty; the tigridia bulbs rot in the ground, and your beautiful collection of irises produces a pitiful pennyworth of bloom to an intolerable quantity of leaves. But the petunias and the sweet-williams, and the balsams, and all the other ill-bred and obtrusive flowers leap promptly into life and vigor, and fight each other for the ownership of the beds. And the ever-faithful and friendly nasturtium comes early and stays late, and the limp morning-glory may always be counted upon to slouch familiarly over everything in sight, window-blinds preferred. But, bless you dear urban soul, what do you know about the relative values of flowers? When Mrs. Overtheway brings your wife a bunch of her superbest gladioli, you complacently return the compliment with a half-bushel of magenta petunias, and you wonder that she does not show more enthusiasm over the gift.

In fact, during the course of the summer you have grown so friendly with your garden that, as you wander about its tangled paths in the late fall days, you cannot help feeling a twinge of yearning pain that makes you tremble to think what weakness you might have been guilty of had you not already burned your bridges behind you, and told the house agent that nothing would induce you to renew the lease next spring. You remember how fully and carefully you explained to him your position in the matter. With a glow of modest pride you recall the fact that you stated your case to him so convincingly, that he had to agree with you that a city life was the only life you and your family could possibly lead. He understood fully how much you liked the place and the people, and how, if this were only so, and that were only the other way, you would certainly stay. And you feel if the house agent agrees with you against his own interest, you must be right in your decision. Ah, dear Modestus! You know little enough about flowers; but oh, how little, little, little you know about suburban house agents!

Let us pass lightly over the third winter. It is a period of hesitation, perplexity, expectancy, and general awkwardness. You are, and you are not. You belong nowhere, and to no one. You have renounced your new allegiance, and you really do not know when, how, or at what point you are going to take up the old one again. And, in point of fact, you do not regard this particular prospect with feelings of complete satisfaction. You remember, with a troubled conscience, the long list of social connections which you have found it too troublesome to keep up at long range. I say you, for I am quite sure that Mrs. Modestus will certify me that it was You and not She, who first declared that it was practically impossible to keep on going to the Smith's dinners or the Brown's receptions. You don't know this, my dear Modestus, but I assure you that you may take it for granted. You remember also that your return must carry with it the suggestion of the ignominy of defeat, and you know exactly the tone of kindly contemptuous, mildly assumed superiority with which your friends will welcome you back. And the approaching severance of your newer ties troubles your mind in another way. Your new friends do not try to dissuade you from going (they are too wise in a suburban way for that), but they say, and show in a hundred ways, that they are sorry to think of losing you. And this forbearance, so different from what you have to expect at the other end of your moving, reproaches and pains while it touches your heart. These people were all strangers to you two years and a half ago; they are chance rather than chosen companions. And yet, in this brief space of time—filled with little neighborly offices, with faithful services and tender sympathies in hours of sickness, and perhaps of death, with simple, informal companionship—you have grown into a closer and heartier friendship with them than you have ever known before, save with the one or two old comrades with whose love your life is bound up. When you learned to leave your broad house-door open to the summer airs, you opened, unconsciously, another door; and these friends have entered in.

It is a sunny Saturday afternoon in early April, but not exactly an April afternoon, rather one of those precocious days of delicious warmth and full, summer-like sunshine, that come to remind us that May and June are close behind the spring showers. You and Mrs. Modestus sit on the top step of your front veranda, just as you sat there on such a day, nearly three years ago. As on that day, you are talking of the future; but you are in a very different frame of mind to-day. In a few short weeks you will be adrift upon a sea of domestic uncertainty. For weeks you have visited the noisy city, hunting the proud and lofty mansion and the tortuous and humiliating flat, and it has all come to this—a steam-heated "family-hotel," until such time when you can find summer quarters; and then, with the fall, a new beginning of the weary search. And then—and then——

Coming and going along the street, your friends and neighbors give you cheery greeting, to which you respond somewhat absent-mindedly. You can hear the voices of your children and their little neighbor-friends playing in the empty garden plot. Your talk flags. You do not know just what you are thinking about; still less do you know what your wife is thinking about—but you know that you wish the children would stop laughing, and that the people would stop going by and nodding pleasantly.

And now comes one who does not go by. He turns in at the gate and walks up the gravel path. He smiles and bows at you as if the whole world were sunshine—a trim little figure, dressed with such artistic care that there is cheerfulness in the crease of his trousers and suavity in his very shirt-front. He greets Mrs. Modestus with a world of courtesy, and then he sits confidentially down by your side and says: "My dear sir, I am come to talk a little business with you."

No, you will not talk business. Your mind is firmly made up. Nothing will induce you to renew the lease.

"But, my dear sir," he says, with an enthusiasm that would be as boisterous as an ocean wave, if it had not so much oil on its surface: "I don't want you to renew the lease. I have a much better plan than that! I want you to buy the house!"

And then he goes on to tell you all about it; how the estate must be closed up; how the house may be had for a song; and he names a figure so small that it gives you two separate mental shocks; first, to realize that it is within your means; second, to find that he is telling the truth.

He goes on talking softly, suggestively, telling you what a bargain it is, telling you all the things you have put out of your mind for many months; telling you—telling you nothing, and well he knows it. Three years of life under that roof have done his pleading for him.