rr so grievously.

It is hoped the stories presented will serve to exercise both the boy's
mind and conscience; that seeing and feeling life and nature as Jack
London saw and felt it--the best and the worst in human nature, with the
Infinite always near and from whom there is no escape--seeing and
feeling such things boys will develop the emotional muscles of the
spirit, have opened up new windows to their imaginations, and withal add
some line or color to their life's ideals.

FRANKLIN K. MATHIEWS, Chief Scout Librarian, Boy Scouts of America.

[Illustration]

BROWN WOLF

She had delayed, because of the dew-wet grass, in order to put on her
overshoes, and when she emerged from the house found her waiting husband
absorbed in the wonder of a bursting almond-bud. She sent a questing
glance across the tall grass and in and out among the orchard trees.

"Where's Wolf?" she asked.

"He was here a moment ago." Walt Irvine drew himself away with a jerk
from the metaphysics and poetry of the organic miracle of blossom, and
surveyed the landscape. "He was running a rabbit the last I saw of him."

"Wolf! Wolf! Here, Wolf!" she called, as they left the clearing and took
the trail that led down through the waxen-belled manzanita jungle to
the county road.

Irvine thrust between his lips the little finger of each hand and lent
to her efforts a shrill whistling.

She covered her ears hastily and made a wry grimace.

"My! for a poet, delicately attuned and all the rest of it, you can make
unlovely noises. My eardrums are pierced. You outwhistle----"

"Orpheus."

"I was about to say a street-arab," 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."

"Oh, 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 i