o the library."

Mrs. Foster hesitated, laughing at the old man's manner.

"It seems foolish, but I don't know why _not_!" she said. "Jennie, you run
on over home and bring a broom for Elzaphan. The book must be in an
_awful_ state!"

When Jennie came back, a knot of women stood before the door, talking to
her mother and looking back at the smoldering ruins. The girl followed the
direction of their eyes and of their thoughts. "I don't believe but what
we can plant woodbine and things around it so that in a month's time you
won't know there's been anything there!" she said hopefully.

SALEM HILLS TO ELLIS ISLAND

A single sleighbell, tinkling down
The virgin road that skirts the wood,
Makes poignant to the lonely town
Its silence and its solitude.

A single taper's feeble flare
Makes darker by its lonely light
The cold and empty farmsteads square
That blackly loom to left and tight;

And she who sews, by that dim flame,
The patient quilt spread on her knees,
Hears from her heirloom quilting-frame
The frolic of forgotten bees.

Yea, all the dying village thrills
With echoes of its cheerful past,
The golden days of Salem Hills;
Its only golden days? Its last?

II

From Salem Hills a voiceless cry
Along the darkened valley rolls.
Hear it, great ship, and forward ply
With thy rich freight of venturous souls.

Hear it, O thronging lower deck,
Brave homestead-seekers come from far;
And crowd the rail, and crane the neck;
In Salem Hills your homesteads are!

Where flourish now the brier and thorn,
The barley and the wheat shall spring,
And valleys standing thick with corn
(Praise God, my heart!), shall laugh and sing.

AVUNCULUS

I

The library of Middletown College had been founded, like the college
itself, in 1818, and it was a firm article of undergraduate belief that
the librarian, Mr. J.M. Atterworthy, had sat behind his battered desk
from that date on to the present time. As a matter of fact, he was but
just gliding down-hill from middle age, having behind him the same number
of years as the active and high-spirited president of the college. And yet
there was ground for the undergraduate conviction that "Old J.M." as he
was always called, was an institution whose beginnings dated back into the
mists of antiquity, for of his sixty years he ha