with Hades?"

"If I come home with a wife at my age my father is just as liable as
not to cut me off with a hot coal, as they say down there."

Jasmine spoke up.

"I love washing," she said quietly. "I have always washed my own
handkerchiefs. I'll take in laundry and support you both."

"Do they have washwomen in Hades?" asked Kismine innocently.

"Of course," answered John. "It's just like anywhere else."

"I thought--perhaps it was too hot to wear any clothes."

John laughed.

"Just try it!" he suggested. "They'll run you out before you're half
started."

"Will father be there?" she asked.

John turned to her in astonishment.

"Your father is dead," he replied sombrely. "Why should he go to
Hades? You have it confused with another place that was abolished long
ago."

After supper they folded up the table-cloth and spread their blankets
for the night.

"What a dream it was," Kismine sighed, gazing up at the stars. "How
strange it seems to be here with one dress and a penniless fiancee!

"Under the stars," she repeated. "I never noticed the stars before. I
always thought of them as great big diamonds that belonged to some
one. Now they frighten me. They make me feel that it was all a dream,
all my youth."

"It _was_ a dream," said John quietly. "Everybody's youth is a
dream, a form of chemical madness."

"How pleasant then to be insane!"

"So I'm told," said John gloomily. "I don't know any longer. At any
rate, let us love for a while, for a year or so, you and me. That's a
form of divine drunkenness that we can all try. There are only
diamonds in the whole world, diamonds and perhaps the shabby gift of
disillusion. Well, I have that last and I will make the usual nothing
of it." He shivered. "Turn up your coat collar, little girl, the
night's full of chill and you'll get pneumonia. His was a great sin
who first invented consciousness. Let us lose it for a few hours."

So wrapping himself in his blanket he fell off to sleep.

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON

I

As long ago as 1860 it was the proper thing to be born at home. At
present, so I am told, the high gods of medicine have decreed that the
first cries of the young shall be uttered upon the anaesthetic air of
a hospital, preferably a fashionable one. So young Mr. and Mrs. Roger
Button were fifty years ahead of style when they decided, one day in
the summer of 1860, that their first baby should be born in a
hospital. Whether