him externally clean, proceeded to dose him
internally from a little red bottle. Isidro took everything--the
terrific scrubbing, the exaggerated dosing, the ruinous treatment of his
pantaloons--with wonder-eyed serenity.

When all this was finished the Maestro took the urchin into the
dining-room and, seating him on his best bamboo chair, he courteously
offered him a fine, dark perfecto.

The next instant he was suffused with the light of a new revelation.
For, stretching out his hard little claw to receive the gift, the little
man had shot at him a glance so mild, so wistful, so brown-eyed, filled
with such mixed admiration, trust, and appeal, that a queer softness had
risen in the Maestro from somewhere down in the regions of his heel, up
and up, quietly, like the mercury in the thermometer, till it had flowed
through his whole body and stood still, its high-water mark a little
lump in his throat.

"Why, Lord bless us-ones, Isidro," said the Maestro quietly. "We're only
a child after all; mere baby, my man. And don't we like to go to
school?"

"Senor Pablo," asked the boy, looking up softly into the Maestro's still
perspiring visage, "Senor Pablo, is it true that there will be no school
because of the great sickness?"

"Yes, it is true," answered the Maestro. "No school for a long, long
time."

Then Isidro's mouth began to twitch queerly, and suddenly throwing
himself full-length upon the floor, he hurled out from somewhere within
him a long, tremulous wail.

JAMES MERLE HOPPER

James Merle Hopper was born in Paris, France. His father was American,
his mother French; their son James was born July 23, 1876. In 1887 his
parents came to America, and settled in California. James Hopper
attended the University of California, graduating in 1898. He is still
remembered there as one of the grittiest football players who ever
played on the 'Varsity team. Then came a course in the law school of
that university, and admission to the California bar in 1900. All this
reads like the biography of a lawyer: so did the early life of James
Russell Lowell, and of Oliver Wendell Holmes: they were all admitted to
the bar, but they did not become lawyers. James Hopper had done some
newspaper work for San Francisco papers while he was in law school, and
the love of writing had taken hold of him. In the meantime he had
married Miss Mattie E. Leonard, and as literature did not yet provide a
means of support, he became an in