uld want a star. Misery! Misery!"

He leaned upon a low stonewall and looked down on the town, over the
pastures blurred with rain.

"And those wretches down there," he pronounced slowly, "who jeer at me
when I pass and insult me with impunity, whose heads should be struck
off, and I cannot strike them off! I loathe that town. How ugly it is!
It offends my eyes."

He turned and looked us full in the face and our hearts became as water.

"Burn it," he said.

Then he turned away again and bowed his head in his arms on the wall.

I don't remember anything clearly till a long time afterward, when I
found myself walking with Mr. G.M. in the wet night on a deserted road
on the outskirts of the town. We were carrying some inflammable things,
flax, tar, matches, etc., which we must have purchased.

Mr. G.M. stopped and looked at me. It was exactly like coming out of a
fainting fit.

"What are we doing with this gear?" he said in a low voice.

"I don't know."

"Better chuck it over a hedge.--"

We made our way to the station in silence. I was thinking of that
desolate figure up there on the hill, leaning over the wall in the dark
and the rain.

We caught the last train to London. In the carriage Mr. G.M. began to
shiver as though he were cold.

"Brrr! that fellow got on my nerves," he said; and we made no further
allusion to the matter.

But as the train, moving slowly, passed a gap which brought us again in
sight of the town, we saw a tongue of flame stream into the sky.

THE SHAME DANCE[18]

By WILBUR DANIEL STEELE

(From _Harper's Magazine_)

"Stories of New York life preferable."

Well, then, here is a story of New York. A tale of the night heart of
the city, where the vein of Forty-Second touches the artery of Broadway;
where, amid the constellations of chewing-gum ads and tooth paste and
memory methods, rise the incandescent facades of "dancing academies"
with their "sixty instructresses," their beat of brass and strings,
their whisper of feet, their clink of dimes.--Let a man not work away
his strength and his youth. Let him breathe a new melody, let him draw
out of imagination a novel step, a more fantastic tilt of the pelvis, a
wilder gesticulation of the deltoid. Let him put out his hand to the
Touch of Gold.--

It is a tale of this New York. That it didn't chance to happen in New
York is beside the point. Where? It wouldn't help you much if I told
you. Taai. That island. Take an imag