!" to the sun. "Oh, mother, do you see me? I am flying!" And
being but a baby, it soon was gasping, but still it trilled the same
ecstasy, and when it fell panting to earth it still trilled, and the
distracted mother called to it to take breath or it would die, but it
could not stop. "Thank you, thank you, thank you!" it sang to the sun
till its little heart burst.

With filmy eyes Tommy searched himself for the little pocket-book in
which he took notes of such sad thoughts as these, and in place of the
book he found a glove wrapped in silk paper. He sat there with it in
his hand, nodding his head over it so broken-heartedly you could not
have believed that he had forgotten it for several days.

Death was still his subject; but it was no longer a bird he saw: it
was a very noble young man, and his white, dead face stared at the sky
from the bottom of a deep pool. I don't know how he got there, but a
woman who would not admire him had something to do with it. No sun
after rain had come into that tragic life. To the water that had ended
it his white face seemed to be saying, "Thank you, thank you, thank
you." It was the old story of a faithless woman. He had given her his
heart, and she had played with it. For her sake he had striven to be
famous; for her alone had he toiled through dreary years in London,
the goal her lap, in which he should one day place his book--a poor,
trivial little work, he knew (yet much admired by the best critics).
Never had his thoughts wandered for one instant of that time to
another woman; he had been as faithful in life as in death; and now
she came to the edge of the pool and peered down at his staring eyes
and laughed.

He had got thus far when a shout from Corp brought him, dazed, to his
feet. It had been preceded by another cry, as the boy and the sapling
he was twisted round toppled into the river together, uprooted stones
and clods pounding after them and discolouring the pool into which the
torrent rushes between rocks, to swirl frantically before it dives
down a narrow channel and leaps into another caldron.

There was no climbing down those precipitous rocks. Corp was shouting,
gesticulating, impotent. "How can you stand so still?" he roared.

For Tommy was standing quite still, like one not yet thoroughly
awake. The boy's head was visible now and again as he was carried
round in the seething water; when he came to the outer ring down that
channel he must infallibly go, and eve