s tousled yellow hair rested
against her bosom. He put an arm around her neck and she flushed with
pleasure like a girl; but, although she held him close to her with a
sudden wistful tenderness, there was in her eyes a gloomy austerity which
forbade me to sentimentalize over the picture she made.

"But, Cousin Tryphena," I urged, "it _is_ a drop in the bucket, you know,
and that's something!"

She looked down at the child on her knee, she laid her cheek against his
bright hair, but she told me with harsh, self-accusing rigor, "Tain't
right for me to be here alive enjoying that dead man's little boy."

* * * * *

That was eighteen months ago. Mrs. Lindstrom is dead of consumption; but
the two children are rosy and hearty and not to be distinguished from the
other little Yankees of the village. They are devotedly attached to their
Aunt Tryphena and rule her despotically.

And so we live along, like a symbol of the great world, bewildered Cousin
Tryphena toiling lovingly for her adopted children, with the memory of her
descent into hell still darkening and confusing her kind eyes; Jomatiste
clothing his old body in rags and his soul in flaming indignation as he
batters hopefully at the ramparts of intrenched unrighteousness ... and
the rest of us doing nothing at all.

THE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND

Tongue of spice and salt and wine and honey,
Magic, mystic, sweet, intemperate tongue!
Flower of lavish love and lyric fury,
Mixed on lips forever rash and young,
Wildly droll and quaintly tender;--

Hark, the hidden melodies of Elfland
In the under, in the over tone;
Clear faint wailing of the far-heard banshee,
Out of lands where never the sun shone,
Calling doom on chieftains dying....

PIPER TIM

I

When Moira O'Donnell was born, Timothy Moran was thirty-three years old, a
faery number, as he often told himself afterward. When he was forty and
she was seven, another mystic number, he dedicated his life to her and she
gave him back his lost kingdom of enchantment. It was on the evening of
her seventh birthday that she led him to the Land of Heart's Desire he
thought he had left forever in green and desolate Donegal, and her
birthday fell on the seventh of October, and October is the month when the
little people are busiest. He never forgot what she did for him that
evening, although her part in it was so brief.

His own bi