ow upon a barren heath between two
shores, and shortens with each passing minute the shadows of countless
headstones that bear no names, only numbers. The breakers that beat
against the bluff wake not those who sleep there. In the deep trenches
they lie, shoulder to shoulder, an army of brothers, homeless in life,
but here at rest and at peace. A great cross stands upon the lonely
shore. The moon sheds its rays upon it in silent benediction and floods
the garden of the unknown, unmourned dead with its soft light. Out on
the Sound the fishermen see it flashing white against the starlit sky,
and bare their heads reverently as their boats speed by, borne upon the
wings of the west wind.

SKIPPY OF SCRABBLE ALLEY

Skippy was at home in Scrabble Alley. So far as he had ever known home
of any kind it was there in the dark and mouldy basement of the rear
house, farthest back in the gap that was all the builder of those big
tenements had been able to afford of light and of air for the poor
people whose hard-earned wages, brought home every Saturday, left them
as poor as if they had never earned a dollar, to pile themselves up in
his strong-box. The good man had long since been gathered to his
fathers--gone to his better home. It was in the newspapers, and in the
alley it was said that it was the biggest funeral--more than a hundred
carriages, and four black horses to pull the hearse. So it must be true,
of course.

Skippy wondered vaguely, sometimes, when he thought of it, what kind of
a home it might be where people went in a hundred carriages. He had
never sat in one. The nearest he had come to it was when Jimmy Murphy's
cab had nearly run him down once, and his "fare," a big man with
whiskers, had put his head out and angrily called him a brat, and told
him to get out of the way, or he would have him arrested. And Jimmy had
shaken his whip at him and told him to skip home. Everybody told him to
skip. From the policeman on the block to the hard-fisted man he knew as
his father, and who always had a job for him with the growler when he
came home, they were having Skippy on the run. Probably that was how he
got his name. No one cared enough about it, or about the boy, to find
out.

Was there anybody anywhere who cared about boys, anyhow? Were there any
boys in that other home where the carriages and the big hearse had gone?
And if there were, did they have to live in an alley, and did they ever
h