* * * *

Oh, shining web of hair, burst loose your bonds and bid me move! Oh,
time, cease not your calculations, but speed me on to deliverance! Oh,
silence, vast, immense, infuse into your soul some sound other than the
heavy throbbing of this fast disintegrating heart! Oh, pitiless stone
arches, let fall your crushing weight upon this Stygian monster!

I pray to time, to eternity, to the frozen aeons of the past. Useless. I
am seized, forced to open my cold lips; there is agony,--supreme, mortal
agony of nerve tension, and wrenching of vitality. I struggle, scream,
and clutching the monster with superhuman strength, fling him aside, and
rise, bleeding, screaming--but triumphant, and keenly mortal in every
vein, alive and throbbing with consciousness and pain.

* * * * *

No, it was not opium, nor night-mare, but chloroform, a dentist, three
obstinate molars, a pair of forceps, and a lively set of nerves.

TITEE.

It was cold that day; the great sharp north wind swept out Elysian
Fields Street in blasts that made men shiver, and bent everything in its
track. The skies hung lowering and gloomy; the usually quiet street was
more than deserted, it was dismal.

Titee leaned against one of the brown freight cars for protection
against the shrill norther, and warmed his little chapped hands at a
blaze of chips and dry grass. "May be it'll snow," he muttered, casting
a glance at the sky that would have done credit to a practised seaman.
"Then _won't_ I have fun! Ugh, but the wind blows!"

It was Saturday, or Titee would have been in school--the big yellow
school on Marigny Street, where he went every day when its bell boomed
nine o'clock. Went with a run and a joyous whoop,--presumably to
imbibe knowledge, ostensibly to make his teacher's life a burden.

Idle, lazy, dirty, troublesome boy, she called him, to herself, as day
by day wore on, and Titee improved not, but let his whole class pass him
on its way to a higher grade. A practical joke he relished infinitely
more than a practical problem, and a good game at pinsticking was far
more entertaining than a language lesson. Moreover, he was always
hungry, and _would_ eat in school before the half-past ten intermission,
thereby losing much good play-time for his voracious appetite.

But there was nothing in natural history that Titee didn't know. He
could dissect a butterfly or a mosquito-hawk and describe thei