recognition of your services toward cementing the
entente, will appoint you the next ambassador to France."

"Well, anyway," said Steve, still violently red about the face and
ears--"well, anyway, I don't care. Even if it weren't a first-class
corpse, it was a first-class funeral."

FOOTFALLS

BY WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

From _The Pictorial Review_

This is not an easy story; not a road for tender or for casual feet.
Better the meadows. Let me warn you, it is as hard as that old man's
soul and as sunless as his eyes. It has its inception in catastrophe,
and its end in an act of almost incredible violence; between them it
tells barely how one long blind can become also deaf and dumb.

He lived in one of those old Puritan sea towns where the strain has
come down austere and moribund, so that his act would not be quite
unbelievable. Except that the town is no longer Puritan and Yankee.
It has been betrayed; it has become an outpost of the Portuguese
islands.

This man, this blind cobbler himself, was a Portuguese from St.
Michael, in the Western Islands, and his name was Boaz Negro.

He was happy. An unquenchable exuberance lived in him. When he arose
in the morning he made vast, as it were uncontrollable, gestures
with his stout arms. He came into his shop singing. His voice,
strong and deep as the chest from which it emanated, rolled out
through the doorway and along the street, and the fishermen, done
with their morning work and lounging and smoking along the wharfs,
said, "Boaz is to work already." Then they came up to sit in the shop.

In that town a cobbler's shop is a club. One sees the interior
always dimly thronged. They sit on the benches watching the artizan
at his work for hours, and they talk about everything in the world.
A cobbler is known by the company he keeps.

Boaz Negro kept young company. He would have nothing to do with the
old. On his own head the gray hairs set thickly.

He had a grown son. But the benches in his shop were for the lusty
and valiant young, men who could spend the night drinking, and then
at three o'clock in the morning turn out in the rain and dark to
pull at the weirs, sing songs, buffet one another among the slippery
fish in the boat's bottom, and make loud jokes about the fundamental
things, love and birth and death. Harkening to their boasts and
strong prophecies his breast heaved and his heart beat faster. He
was a large, full-blooded fellow, fashioned for e