b," she concluded severely.

"Poesy does not prevent one from being practical--at least it doesn't
prevent _me_. Mine is no futility of genius that can't sell gems to the
magazines."

He assumed a mock extravagance, and went on:

"I am no attic singer, no ballroom warbler. And why? Because I am
practical. Mine is no squalor of song that cannot transmute itself, with
proper exchange value, into a flower-crowned cottage, a sweet mountain-
meadow, a grove of redwoods, an orchard of thirty-seven trees, one long
row of blackberries and two short rows of strawberries, to say nothing of
a quarter of a mile of gurgling brook. I am a beauty-merchant, a trader
in song, and I pursue utility, dear Madge. I sing a song, and thanks to
the magazine editors I transmute my song into a waft of the west wind
sighing through our redwoods, into a murmur of waters over mossy stones
that sings back to me another song than the one I sang and yet the same
song wonderfully--er--transmuted."

"O that all your song-transmutations were as successful!" she laughed.

"Name one that wasn't."

"Those two beautiful sonnets that you transmuted into the cow that was
accounted the worst milker in the township."

"She was beautiful--" he began,

"But she didn't give milk," Madge interrupted.

"But she _was_ beautiful, now, wasn't she?" he insisted.

"And here's where beauty and utility fall out," was her reply. "And
there's the Wolf!"

From the thicket-covered hillside came a crashing of underbrush, and
then, forty feet above them, on the edge of the sheer wall of rock,
appeared a wolf's head and shoulders. His braced fore paws dislodged a
pebble, and with sharp-pricked ears and peering eyes he watched the fall
of the pebble till it struck at their feet. Then he transferred his gaze
and with open mouth laughed down at them.

"You Wolf, you!" and "You blessed Wolf!" the man and woman called out to
him.

The ears flattened back and down at the sound, and the head seemed to
snuggle under the caress of an invisible hand.

They watched him scramble backward into the thicket, then proceeded on
their way. Several minutes later, rounding a turn in the trail where the
descent was less precipitous, he joined them in the midst of a miniature
avalanche of pebbles and loose soil. He was not demonstrative. A pat
and a rub around the ears from the man, and a more prolonged caressing
from the woman, and he was away down the trail in front of th