? We had 'em, and we suffered for 'em, and now we give
'em up; that's what it means to raise a family."

"Salcha," he said, his fingers stroking hers gently, "we're getting
old--ain't it, old lady?"

"Yes," she said, rocking rhythmically; "twenty-eight years now! We've
had good times, and we've had bad times."

"Good--and--bad--times," he repeated.

They watched the flames.

After a while Mr. Katzenstein's head fell forward on his chest and he
dozed lightly.

The clock ticked somberly and with increasing loudness; twice it
traveled its circle, and twice it tonged the hour. The gas-logs burned
steadily and kept the shadows dancing. Off somewhere a dog bayed; a
creak, which is one of the noises that belong solely to after midnight,
came from the direction of one of the windows.

Mr. Katzenstein woke with a start and jerked his head up.

"Mamma!" he cried, dazed with sleep. "Mamma! Birdie! Mamma!"

"Yes, papa," she replied, smiling at him and with her hand still beneath
his; "I'm here."

BREAKERS AHEAD

In the ink-blue shrieking trail of the twenty-two-hour Imperial flyer,
Slateville lay stark alongside the singing tracks as if hurtled there
like a spark off a speed-hot emery wheel.

The Imperial flyer swooped through the dun-colored village like the
glance of a lovely coquette shoots through her victim's heart and leaves
it bare.

At eight-one the far-off Imperial voice hallooed through the darkness
like a conquering hero whose vanguard is a waving sword which flashes in
the sunlight before he and his steed come up out of the horizon.

At eight-four a steam yodel shook the panes and lamp-chimneys of
Slateville, a semaphore studded with a ruby stiffened out against the
sky, and a white eye--the size of a bicycle-wheel--flashed down the
tracks.

Then the howl of a fiend, and a mile-long checkerboard of lighted
car-windows, and cinders rattling against them like hail.

A fire-boweled engine with a grimy-faced demon leaning out of his
red-hot cab, and, on every alternate night, a green eye with a black
pupil which winked a signal from that same heat-roaring cab and from a
dirt-colored frame shanty in a dirt-brown yard, where a naked tree
stretched its thin arms against the sky, an answering eye which gleamed
through a bandana-bound lantern and outlined the Hebe-like silhouette of
a woman in the window.

Then the flash of a mahogany-lined dining-car with nodding _vis-a-vis_,
pink-shaded candles a