y-tale
strangely found on his hearth by some shepherd as he returns from the
fields at evening--a little fairy girl swaddled in fine linen, and
dowered with a mysterious bag of gold.

Soon she developed delicate spiritual needs to which her simple parents
were strangers. From long truancies in the woods she would come home
laden with mysterious flowers, and soon she came to ask for books and
pictures and music, of which the poor souls that had given her birth had
never heard. Finally she had her way, and went to study at a certain
fashionable college; and there the brief romance of her life began.
There she met a romantic young Frenchman who had read Ronsard to her and
written her those picturesque letters I had found in the old mahogany
work-box. And after a while the young Frenchman had gone back to France,
and the letters had ceased. Month by month went by, and at length one
day, as she sat wistful at the window, looking out at the foolish sunlit
road, a message came. He was dead. That headstone in the village
churchyard tells the rest. She was very young to die--scarcely nineteen
years; and the dead who have died young, with all their hopes and dreams
still like unfolded buds within their hearts, do not rest so quietly in
the grave as those who have gone through the long day from morning until
evening and are only too glad to sleep.

* * * * *

Next day I took the little box to a quiet corner of the orchard, and
made a little pyre of fragrant boughs--for so I interpreted the wish of
that young, unquiet spirit--and the beautiful words are now safe, taken
up again into the aerial spaces from which they came.

But since then the birds sing no more little French songs in my old
orchard.

The Bowmen

BY ARTHUR MACHEN

From _The Bowmen_, by Arthur Machen. Published in England by
Simpkin, Marshall, Hamilton, Kent & Co., Ltd., and in America by
G.P. Putnam's Sons. By permission of the publishers and Arthur
Machen.

It was during the Retreat of the Eighty Thousand, and the authority of
the Censorship is sufficient excuse for not being more explicit. But it
was on the most awful day of that awful time, on the day when ruin and
disaster came so near that their shadow fell over London far away; and,
without any certain news, the hearts of men failed within them and grew
faint; as if the agony of the army in the battlefield had entered into
their souls.

On