subdivided it, spread it,
redistributed it. Ever and anon my eye would be caught by some sentence
or fragment of a sentence in the midst of a charred page before the
flames crept over it. Always loathed you, but, I remember; and think
Tolstoi was right. Who had always loathed whom? And what, what, had
Tolstoi been right about? I had an absurd but genuine desire to know.
Too late! Confound the woman!--she was scoring again. I furiously drove
her pages into the yawning crimson jaws of the coals. Those jaws had
lately been golden. Soon, to my horror, they seemed to be growing grey.
They seemed to be closing--on nothing. Flakes of black paper, full-sized
layers of paper brown and white, began to hide them from me altogether.
I sprinkled a boxful of wax matches. I resumed the bellows. I lunged
with the poker. I held a newspaper over the whole grate. I did all that
inspiration could suggest, or skill accomplish. Vainly. The fire went
out--darkly, dismally, gradually, quite out.

How she had scored again! But she did not know it. I felt no bitterness
against her as I lay back in my chair, inert, listening to the storm
that was still raging. I blamed only myself. I had done wrong. The small
room became very cold. Whose fault was that but my own? I had done wrong
hastily, but had done it and been glad of it. I had not remembered the
words a wise king wrote long ago, that the lamp of the wicked shall be
put out, and that the way of trangressors is hard.

IN HOMES UNBLEST 1919.

Nothing is more pleasant than to see suddenly endowed with motion a
thing stagnant by nature. The hat that on the head of the man in the
street is nothing to us, how much it is if it be animated by a gust of
wind! There is no churl that does not rejoice with it in its strength,
and in the swiftness and cunning that baffle its pursuer, who, he too,
when the chase is over, bears it no ill will at all for its escapade. I
know families that have sat for hours, for hours after bedtime, mute, in
a dim light, pressing a table with their finger-tips, and ever bringing
to bear the full force of their minds on it, in the unconquerable hope
that it would move. Conversely, nothing is more dismal than to see set
in permanent rigidness a thing whose aspect is linked for us with
the idea of great mobility. Even the blithest of us and least easily
depressed would make a long detour to avoid a stuffed squirrel or a case
of pinned butterflies. And you can well imagi