l sleep, too," she thought.

_BUTTERFLIES_

BY ROSE SIDNEY

From _The Pictorial Review_

The wind rose in a sharp gust, rattling the insecure windows and
sighing forlornly about the corners of the house. The door unlatched
itself, swung inward hesitatingly, and hung wavering for a moment on
its sagging hinges. A formless cloud of gray fog blew into the warm,
steamy room. But whatever ghostly visitant had paused upon the
threshold, he had evidently decided not to enter, for the catch
snapped shut with a quick, passionate vigour. The echo of the
slamming door rang eerily through the house.

Mart Brenner's wife laid down the ladle with which she had been
stirring the contents of a pot that was simmering on the big, black
stove, and, dragging her crippled foot behind her, she hobbled
heavily to the door.

As she opened it a new horde of fog-wraiths blew in. The world was a
gray, wet blanket. Not a light from the village below pierced the
mist, and the lonely army of tall cedars on the black hill back of
the house was hidden completely.

"Who's there?" Mrs. Brenner hailed. But her voice fell flat and
muffled. Far off on the beach she could dimly hear the long wail of
a fog-horn.

The faint throb of hope stilled in her breast. She had not really
expected to find any one at the door unless perhaps it should be a
stranger who had missed his way at the cross-roads. There had been
one earlier in the afternoon when the fog first came. But her
husband had been at home then and his surly manner quickly cut short
the stranger's attempts at friendliness. This ugly way of Mart's had
isolated them from all village intercourse early in their life on
Cedar Hill.

Like a buzzard's nest their home hung over the village on the
unfriendly sides of the bleak slope. Visitors were few and always
reluctant, even strangers, for the village told weird tales of Mart
Brenner and his kin. The village said that he--and all those who
belonged to him as well--were marked for evil and disaster. Disaster
had truly written itself through-out their history. His mother was
mad, a tragic madness of bloody prophecies and dim fears; his only
son a witless creature of eighteen, who, for all his height and bulk,
spent his days catching butterflies in the woods on the hill, and his
nights in laboriously pinning them, wings outspread, upon the bare
walls of the house.

The room where the Brenner family lived its queer, taciturn life was
tapes