aped the loose earth back and heaped
it over that which had been called Sister Anita; I heard Father Josef's
voice of music repeating the "Ashes to ashes, and dust to dust." And
then we turned away and left the spot, as men turn every day to the
common affairs of life.

Four days later Little Blue Flower came to me as I, still numb and cold
and blankly unthinking, sat beside Fort Marcy and looked out with
unseeing eyes at the glory of a New-Mexican sunset.

"I come from Eloise." The sadness of her face and voice even the
Indian's self-control could not conceal.

"She is sad, but brave, and her mother loves her and calls her 'Little
One.' She will never grow up to her mother. But"--Little Blue Flower's
voice faltered and she gazed out at the far Sandia peaks wrapped in the
rich purple folds of twilight, with the scarlet of the afterglow beyond
them--"Eloise loves Beverly. She will always love him. Heaven meant him
for her." There were some other broken sentences, but I did not grasp
them clearly then.

The world was full of gray shadows. The finishing touches had been put
on life for me. I looked out at the dying glow in the west, and wondered
vaguely if the sun would ever cross the Gloriettas again, or ever the
Sangre-de-Christo grow radiant with the scarlet stain of that ineffable
beauty that uplifts and purifies the soul of him who looks on it.

XVII

SWEET AND BITTER WATERS

Trust me, it is something to be cast
Face to face with one's self at last,
To be taken out of the fuss and strife,
The endless clatter of plate and knife,
The bore of books, and the bores of the street,
And to be set down on one's own two feet
So nigh to the great warm heart of God,
You almost seem to feel it beat
Down from the sunshine, and up from the sod.

JAMES RUSSELL LOWELL.

My hair is very white now, and my fingers hold a pen more easily than
they could hold the ox-goad or the rifle, and mine to-day is all the
backward look. Which look is evermore a satisfying thing because it
takes in all of life behind in its true proportion, where the forward
look of youth sees only what comes next and nothing more. And looking
back to-day it seems that, of the many times I walked the long miles of
that old Santa Fe Trail, no journey over it stands out quite so
clear-cut in my memory as the home trip after I had watched the going
away of Eloise, and witnessed the f