schance, of the door of the White City of Rest!...

How old, how sore a man climbed up the steep bank! There were
white fields. In the distance a dog barked. Away across the
fields a bright and cheery light shone out from a window, and
as the moon rose higher, it showed the house which held the
light. It was not a large house, but it seemed to be a home.
Home!--what is that? I wondered; and I remember that I pulled at
the frozen legging, and moved, with pain, the limbs grown tired
and sore. And, as one looked at that twinkling, comfortable
light, how plainly the rest of the old song came back:

"When all the world is old, lad,
And all the trees are brown,
And all the sports are stale, lad,
And all the wheels run down,

"Creep home and take your place there,
The sick and maimed among.
God grant you find one face there,
You loved when you were young."

The light in the little house went out. I think it was a happy
home. May yours be so, always.

[Illustration]

[Illustration: The Little River]

[Illustration]

THE LITTLE RIVER

The Singing Mouse came out and sat upon my knee. It fixed its
small red eye upon me, and lifted its tiny paws, so thin the
fire shone through them. And it sang.... Like the voice of some
night-wandering bird of melody, hid high in the upper realms of
darkness, came faint sweet notes falling softly down. It was as
if from the deep air above, and from the wide air around, there
were dropping and drifting small links of silken steel, gentle
but strong, so that one were helpless even had one wished to
move. To listen was also to see.

There were low rolling hills, covered and crowned with a thick
growth of hazel thickets and short oaks. Between these hills
ran long strips of green, strung on tiny bands of silver.
And as these bands moved and thickened and braided themselves
together, I seemed to see a procession of the trees. The
cottonwoods halted in their march. The box-elders, and maples, and
water-elms, and walnuts and such big trees swept grandly in with
waving banners, and wound on and on in long procession, even
down to two blue distant hills set at the edge of the world,
unpassed guardians of a land of dreams. Ah, well-a-day! I look
back at those two hills now, and the land of dreams lies still
beyond them, it is true; but it is now upon the side whence I
first gazed. It is back there, where one can not go again; back
there, along that crysta