then he noticed his father saying, "So you think you'll not be able to help us any more, Syd?"

“Well, not just for the present," replied Syd pleasantly, as though correcting Mr. Brinder in an important inexactitude of statement. "Maybe sometime after a while."... So Syd was going; going too. They were both going, his conscious mind repeated, though something that had been fierce and silently stridulous began to shrink within him, and he began to wonder how much he meant that.

He rose and left the house. He went down the lane, and along the road which led toward the corner where, on the main highway, their mail-box stood.

There was nothing but yesterday's paper, and a postcard from his sister. The latter contained only the most banal message, documenting the fact that its sender was alive and, it added, in good spirits; and that the boss said her vacation would come in the next month.

1

The relationship of the brother and sister was not known to any especial tenderness, and yet, as he thought of the sense of her presence in the first few days after her return, of the feeling while at work of somebody new waiting for him at mealtimes, he couldn't but look forward to it, and he realized and now admitted to himself that his struggle had found an issue. A dull quietude came upon his mind. He tramped back home, his heavy feet upon the hard rounded road.

He found that the men had gone to the barn when he reached the kitchen. Syd would be hitching his horses and going away.

His mother-she would be beginning her holiday among the impossible wonders of the city. He thought of

the endless confidential chats she would have with her sister, his aunt Charlotte, as they would rock together in the first afternoons, and the family would be out at work or at play. Already he began to miss her. Nearly two days were gone. But he should have, though only until realization, for expectance the last one of her absence.

Then he was struck by the triviality of what he allowed to pass as excuses for abandoning the determination he had so highly taken.

Once, clearing the table, he looked at the clock, but he did not let the reminder stay with him. As he wiped the dishes slowly, he looked at it again, and said aloud and consciously:

"What's the use? What's the weary use?"

Then, at the coming of an impulse as he was going out, his brow knitted, and he stopped a moment and went back up the stairs to his room. When he returned it was with a laden suitcase in his hand. He set it plainly on the floor before the table, and then thought, "No, that's too plain. He'll see it anyway-" and put it to one side.

With a beating heart he went out of the house, whistling.

D

KNOWING DAD

BY IVAL MCPEAK

AD and I have often been taken for brothers.

I

think it's because we have always had more of a

man-to-man understanding than father and son usually do. We began to know each other in my earliest boyhood; and later, when we "bached it" together in a very empty, weatherbeaten farmhouse, there was perfected between us a comradeship that came out of sharing a great loneliness.

Many things helped me to know Dad, chief among them the incident by the window,-an episode which for the space of a few years was only a mystery insubstantially woven of detached words, silences, and apprehensive feelings. Hence, in the telling of those things that set forth the greater mystery of Dad himself, there comes insistently the feeling of a hot summer afternoon, and the sensation of lying on a red plush couch in front of the window and being shielded from the sun by the green curtain pulled down. The images of faces and gestures are clear, but the talk is fragmentary, just as it was the first time, before I was prepared to hear it all.

In the beginning, however, I believe it was the incident of the dark wood that made me see, after a childish fashion, into the mind of Dad, at least to sense a more than surface difference between him and Mother. member looking down a narrow road that branched off from the highway at the corner of our dooryard and

noticing a thick wood that seemed to stretch away into mysterious distances. And straightway I became afraid of that wood as something that should not be passed by at night. It was a dark mass of trees, unlike the friendly Corot shades of the grove in our yard. A neighbor boy shortly afterwards told me that the devil came up out of that wood to catch and devour boys, whether they were good or bad. I ran into the house to ask Mother if the devil lived down there. She was painting trees with a brush on a piece of canvas. But she laid down her brush, took me in her lap, and talked a good while in words which I didn't understand, but from which I gathered that being good would insure me against harm from Satan, no matter how near he was. Then I got down and watched her paint. A few minutes later Dad came in. As I remember it now, he seemed to look on with an uncomprehending approval until, taking notice of me, he found words for praise. He lifted me up, pointed at the canvas, and said something in which I caught the words, "Mamma-pretty picture." That night, when the fear of the devil and the wood possessed me again, I asked Dad about it out by the barn. I think he was a bit puzzled for a moment at my question; then with a touch of gruffness he said, "No, there ain't any devil in those woods." Presently, in a matter-of-fact voice, he added, "That piece of timber belongs to Mr. Brundage." That was the first time I had heard the name, but it stayed by me always. Mr. Brundage, unluckily identified with the devil, was a person to be feared.

Then, there are other memories that stand out curiously clear in vague settings: Mother sewing and painting incessantly before Christmas; Dad glancing up at the ill-fitting stovepipe of the many elbows and remarking

that "Santa Claus would have a hard time coming down that"; Grandma Stillwell visiting us, always with something for me, and afterwards Mother and Dad trying to explain why she never came any more. Mother told me she had gone to heaven, and went on to describe what sort of place that was; but Dad, uninstructed, said that she was dead. Then, I suppose, they got together on their stories, for I was comforted by Dad's promise that "we would all see Grandma Stillwell some day."

One spring morning I was made to realize that I was six years old, nearly seven, and must go to school. At the breakfast table Mother commanded me to go straight to school, to come straight home, to keep my face and hands clean, and to get my lessons. To all of which Dad added the sweeping admonition, "And mind what the teacher says!" "Teacher" turned out to be a big-framed man with a sonorous voice, who waved his blackboard pointer furiously when we sang Columbia, the Gem of the Ocean. And in me there was a feeling of resentment at having to obey this alien person thrust upon me. I began to look upon Dad with a new sort of affection that set him out sharply from among men. He was the one to whom I was glad to get back at the end of the day's work, the one whom it was becoming a privilege to obey.

In another sense, I imagine that I was more intimate with Mother during these times. It is hard to tell about that; her personality has become dim through the years. But without doubt I took more pride in associating with Dad and doing the things that met with his approval, some of the same pride I had in holding my own with the boys in playing "ball" or making good use of my fists in turbulent walks home from school. On the occasion of