ng heart, had told him, doubtful of the future, that she knew the
invention would win out--the Thunder Bird go where nothing earthly had
ever gone before.

And he had whispered something--something surpassing--about a Wise Woman
who saved a city.

It made sacred every thought now, and humbled it, too, in the breast of
this little sixteen-year-old girl, with the mingled yarn in her
nature--the mingling spice in her name.

Others had these fair stoles, too, the history of their girlish lives
woven in pearls of typical purity, crossed by vivid representations of
events. Drooping to their knees, in symbolic beauty, finishing with the
soft leather fringes on which a breeze sweeping down the wide chimney
played, they flashed here and there in the high colors of adventure--the
quaintly symbolized adventure tale.

But none could match the theme of the two little primitive figures upon
the mounttain-top, the inventor looking through a tube, the comet-like
streak of fire above them: the opening of a highroad through Space,--the
first step towards a federation of the heavenly bodies.

The record to go down to posterity!

Yet old Earth had still her individual romance of seedtime and harvest,
sun and storm, peril and deliverance.

Emblematically depicted these were in the pearl strip of a girl, with a
winsome reflection of Andrew's thistle-burr in her speech. Born "far
awa' in bonnie Scotland", the thistle and America's goldenrod blent
their purple and gold upon her young shoulders; there was an idealized
plow, representing the peaceful agricultural calling of her father,--and
a jump from peace to peril in the primitively symbolized scene of a
shipwreck through which she had been with him when crossing the Atlantic
in a sailing vessel.

"We had all to take to the boats, you see," said Jennie McIvor, "for the
ship was leaking so badly that she couldn't keep afloat but a wee bit
longer; and we had a verra rough time until we were picked up."

A rough time, indeed, typified by the wildly driven little canoes--the
most primitive form of the boat--tossed upon stiff water-hills, brooding
above them the quaint, corkscrew figure, with the eye in its head, of
Ta-te, the tempest.

Somehow, this eye--the spying wind's eye--haunted Pemrose that night,
curled up in a previous suggestion of the Guardian's which, momentarily,
had twisted itself, snake-like, around her heart.

Suppose Ta-te should prove cruel to her, as to Jennie whom