would take her in his arms where she could cuddle and
be loved. So the passing year had to take a fine brush and paint upon
the small, wistful face a fleeting shadow, the mere ghost of a sadness
that came and went as she watched and waited for the father love.

And Judge Thomas Van Dorn, the punctilious, gay, resistless, young Tom
Van Dorn was deaf to the deeper voices that called to him and beckoned
him to rest his soul. And soon upon the winds that roam the world and
carry earth dreams back to ghosts, and bring ghosts of what we would be
back to our dreams--the roaming winds bore away the passing year, but
they could not take the shadows that it left upon the child's tender
heart.

Now, when the old year with all its work lay down in the innumerable
company of its predecessors, and the bells rang and the whistles blew in
South Harvey to welcome in the new year, the midnight sky was blazoned
with the great torches from the smelter chimneys, and the pumps in the
oil wells kept up their dolorous whining and complaining, like great
insects battening upon an abandoned world. In South Harvey the lights of
the saloons and the side of the dragon's spawn glowed and beckoned men
to death. Money tinkled over the bars, and whispered as it was crumpled
in the claws of the dragon. For money the scurrying human ants hurried
along the dark, half-lighted streets from the ant hills over the mines.
For money the cranes of the pumps creaked their monody. For money the
half-naked men toiled to their death in the fumes of the smelter. So the
New Year's bells rang a pean of welcome to the money that the New Year
would bring with its toll of death.

"Money," clanged the church bells in the town on the hill. "Money makes
wealth and since we have banished our kings and stoned our priests,
money is the only thing in our material world that will bring power and
power brings pleasure and pleasure brings death."

"And death? and death? and death?" tolled the church bells that glad New
Year, and then ceased in circling waves of sound that enveloped the
world, still inquiring--"and death? and death?" fainter and fainter
until dawn.

The little boy who heard the bells may have heard their plaintive
question; for in the morning twilight, sitting in his nightgown on his
high chair looking into the cheerful mouth of the glowing kitchen stove,
while the elders prepared breakfast, the child who had been silent for a
long time raised his face and aske