te. If I had followed it up, I do believe
I'd have landed on that stern and rock-bound coast, but I went over
to the flesh pots instead. Now I have made a stern and rock-bound
compact with myself. I'm not coming back to New York, and you are not
to write me a line, until I've written a tale that brown-gowned
magazine will take. "Where there is no vision, the people perish,"
the Deacon thundered, at a meeting. I was very near to perishing,
when you scolded me awake, Michael Daragh, M.D., Miracle Do-er, God
save you kindly!

That vaudeville work--and I shall do more of it, some day--was like a
fast and furious game of tennis under a scorching sun; now I'm
delving in a dim, cool library.

I'm going to be as patient as a locust bridge-builder. I know that
flocks of long envelopes are coming back, bringing their tales behind
them, but one day I shall hear a jubilant note in the _klip-klup_
of Lizzie's hoofs and Uncle Robert will hand me an envelope of
bewitching smallness, with a tiny typed letter inside.... "It is
with very great pleasure...."

Until _that_ day break, and the shadows flee away----

J. V.

It was Michael Daragh's custom to read these letters three times,
carefully, and then to tear them in pieces which would be annoyingly and
impossibly small to the chambermaid, and to throw them into his
waste-paper basket, but this time, after his third perusal, instead of
destroying it he put it away in his worn leather wallet. "I'll be keeping
it, just, till the next one comes," he told himself, silently, "so I can
be comparing the way she's coming on--God love her."

But the next letter to come and several following held no mention of her
task. It was as if she had opened the heart of her mind further than she
meant to do, and was shyly standing in front of it, now, talking of
things remote and removed.

_Friday Morning._

I've found a way to make Dan'l happy, M.D. I was reading to him last
night, and suddenly he said in his shy, repressed way, "Was you ever
to a circus?" I started to say that they bored me to the bone, even
in infancy, but I happened to glance up and see his eyes. He's been
following his beloved vagabond about in his heart, you see. So I
tried to create a circus for him--the round rag rug was the sawdust
ring, the steaming kettle was the calliope, wheezing a strident song
about a wo