and, with all eternity to
get over it and forgive me in, I have a right to be hopeful that he
will."

Hyssop Drake died in that fixed resolve; and I'm sure I trust that, when
'tis my turn to join my parents again, I shall find no shadow between
'em. But there's a lot of doubt about it--knowing father.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Skuat, windfall.

THE HAUNTED PHOTOGRAPH

BY RUTH McENERY STUART

From _Harper's Bazar_, June, 1909. By permission of _Harper's Bazar_.

The Haunted Photograph

BY RUTH McENERY STUART

To the ordinary observer it was just a common photograph of a cheap
summer hotel. It hung sumptuously framed in plush, over the Widow
Morris's mantel, the one resplendent note in an otherwise modest home,
in a characteristic Queen Anne village.

One had only to see the rapt face of its owner as she sat in her weeds
before the picture, which she tearfully pronounced "a strikin'
likeness," to sympathize with the townsfolk who looked askance at the
bereaved woman, even while they bore with her delusion, feeling sure
that her sudden sorrow had set her mind agog.

When she had received the picture through the mail, some months before
the fire which consumed the hotel--a fire through which she had not
passed, but out of which she had come a widow--she proudly passed it
around among the friends waiting with her at the post-office, replying
to their questions as they admired it:

"Oh, yes! That's where he works--if you can call it work. He's the head
steward in it. All that row o' winders where you see the awnin's down,
they're his--an' them that ain't down, they're his, too--that is to say,
it's his jurisdiction.

"You see, he's got the whip hand over the cook an' the sto'eroom, an'
that key don't go out o' his belt unless he knows who's gettin'
what--an' he's firm. Morris always was. He's like the iron law of the
Ephesians."

"What key?"

It was an old lady who held the picture at arm's length, the more
closely to scan it, who asked the question. She asked it partly to know,
as neither man nor key appeared in the photograph, and partly to parry
the "historic allusion"--a disturbing sort of fire for which Mrs. Morris
was rather noted and which made some of her most loyal townsfolk a bit
shy of her.

"Oh, I ain't referrin' to the picture," she hastened to explain. "I mean
the keys thet he always carries in his belt. The reg'lar joke there is
to call him 'St. Peter,' an' he takes it in good par