of the surface, the waiting pike and all the
shadows and lights of the bottom grow once more still and distinct.
There floats the greatest cannibal of the fishes, paying his devotion
to the flame, and above him stands the greatest cannibal of all created
beings, pointing his deadly spear.

There is no moon. The stars cannot penetrate the thickening clouds. The
bay is still and its shores invisible, the distant light of a farmhouse
only serving to intensify the lonely silence. The savage joy of that
moment repays the boy for all his laborious preparations. He brought two
boards down the river from the mill, and toiled at them with all the
tools in the woodshed till the ends and edges were made smooth. He
collected lumber from all available sources for the ends and bottom,
fastening them on with a miscellaneous collection of nails and springs.
Then he patiently picked an old piece of tarred rope into oakum, and
caulked it into the seams with a sharpened gate-hinge. He notched a pine
tree, gathered the gum and boiled it into pitch to make the joints
tight. That extraordinary pair of oars he sawed, chopped, and whittled
from an old plank. The spear is a family relic which he dug up and
fitted with a white-ash pole, and the anchor is a long stone, tied by
the slack of a clothes-line. The jack is a basket made of old
pail-hoops, and fastened to an upright stick to hold the burning pine
knot. Yet we wonder why it is always the country boy who succeeds in the
city!

Will he too, be lured by the seductive glimmer? Will he turn away from
the conquest of nature and embark in the conquest of his fellow-mortals?
Will he go to a resort for his fishing and a preserve for his shooting?
Will that bunch of hair protruding from under his hat be worn thin and
gray in scrambling after the delights of the vain and the covetous? Will
he devote his superb strength of body and mind to outstripping and
circumventing his fellows in the pursuit of that transient glimmer, that
all-alluring _ignis fatuus_ which the Babylon world calls success?

S. T. Wood

DAFFODILS

I wandered lonely as a cloud
That floats on high o'er vales and hills,
When all at once I saw a crowd,
A host of golden daffodils;
Beside the lake, beneath the trees,
Fluttering and dancing in the breeze.

Continuous as the stars that shine
And twinkle on the milky way,
They stretched in never-ending line
Along the margin of th