Count Anteoni, which has passed into other
hands, a little boy may often be seen playing.

Sometimes, when twilight is falling over the Sahara, his mother calls
him to her, to the white wall from which she looks out over the desert.

"Listen, Boris," she whispers.

The little boy leans his face against her breast, and obeys.

An Arab is passing below on the desert track, singing to himself, as he
goes towards his home in the oasis, "No one but God and I knows what is
in my heart."

The mother whispers the words to herself. The cool wind of the night
blows over the vast spaces of the Sahara and touches her cheek,
reminding her of her glorious days of liberty, of the passion that came
to her soul like fire in the desert.

But she does not rebel, for always, when night falls, she sees the form
of a man praying, one who once fled from prayer in the desert; she sees
a wanderer who at last has reached his home.

* * * * *

OLIVER WENDELL HOLMES

Elsie Venner

Oliver Wendell Holmes, essayist, poet, scientist, and one of
the most lovable men who have adorned the literature of the
English tongue, was born at Cambridge, Massachusetts, Aug. 29,
1809, of a New England family with a record in which he took
great pride. After studying medicine at Harvard, he went to
Europe on a prolonged tour, and, returning, took his M.D., and
became a popular professor of anatomy. He had some repute as a
graceful poet in his student days. "Elsie Venner," at first
called "The Professor's Story," was published in 1861, and was
the first sustained work of fiction that came from the pen of
Oliver Wendell Holmes. Illumined by admirable pictures of life
and character in a typical New England town, the book itself
is a remarkable study of heredity--a study only relieved by
the author's kindly humour. The unfortunate child, doomed
before her birth to suffer from the fatal bite of a
rattlesnake--an incident unduly extravagant in some critics'
opinions--and only throwing off the evil influence on her
death-bed, is one of the most pathetic figures in all American
literature. It was not until seven years later that "Elsie
Venner" was followed by another novel, "The Guardian Angel," a
story which is worked out on the same lines of thought as the
former. Holmes died on October 7, 1894.

_I.--The