ward the audience. Next, Duval had taken her hand and was placing her against the background, elevating her arms, stepping off a yard to look at her posture critically, returning to move a stiffened arm half an inch, all the while with tiny glints dancing on the dark curves of his eyes.

He had drawn off and was holding up for the inspection of the audience one of the heavy gleaming knives. He faced her and the board, the knife slanted and flashed in his hand. She closed her eyes. Thud! Through a snaky veil of fire indefinitely before her shone pale blue lights. Only effort could open her eyes; and she saw knife following knife, given off from a dark blot against the wings, a black sun from which flashed silver lightnings. She must run, but she could not move. She lived in a rhythm of clearing and dwindling masses, alternating between a white chaos and the stage of the Strand. She caught Duval's face, drawn, intent, and blackening. He was to throw another. Thud! Another.... Alone in a white heaven, englobed in light, knives beating on her from every side, constantly, pitilessly. She must not move, not her head. She could not.

Then the great blaze in which she swung and paled and shook, and suddenly broke to objects. She was on the floor, gazing at the rolled drops and rigging, and somewhere between her and the ceiling floated Duval's enlarged face, blanched and smooth. He was trying to speak through a din of screaming, trying ineffectually, not attempting to make her hear, just talking. The face and ceiling dissolved, and far overhead was only a tumult of lights, then crashing wheels of darkness.

Duval, down on his knees, lifted slow eyes from the work of the knife to watch the curtain as it hitched toward the floor.

T

A RURAL COMMUNITY

BY RUTH SUCKOW

HE station agent at Walnut, and Mrs. Jake Dietz who was expecting her brother's wife from

Pomeroy, could not place the man who got off the "Clipper" at 10:10. He did not look just like a traveling man. He was stocky, moved very briskly, had a slight mustache, wore a gray suit and a traveling cap, and carried a bag pasted over with labels which Mrs. Dietz could not make out. She did not hear him ask the station agent where Luke Hockaday lived, or it would have come to her who he must be that Ralph Chapin whom Luke Hockaday had “raised" and who was now a writer of some kind. But she was busy greeting her brother's wife and saying "Well, you got here."

Ralph Chapin looked alertly about him, at the yellowand-brown depot with the row of willow trees and the pastures beyond, at the one small business street and the dingy brick Opera House and Masonic Hall. He thought, "That was here that wasn't." The sharp white steeple of the little old Congregational church where he had suffered every Sunday through one of Mr. Soper's half-hour prayers, no longer rose from the maple trees beyond the Opera House. It had burned, he remembered, and now there was a modern building of pressed brick with a square English tower. He noticed that the little street "across the tracks," where the old

hotel and livery barn stood, was falling into decay. One old man sat out in a windsor chair in front of the empty livery stable. Two or three automobiles passed. They were putting up two new "pebble dash" bungalows on what used to be a vacant lot filled with red clover. Changes-even here! You couldn't escape them.

The station agent had told him that Luke Hockaday's was just at the edge of town- "Well, you know where the old Wood place is? Well, d'you know where Art Penhollow's pasture is where the dump is? Well, d'you know where the cemetery is? Well, right across from that where the road turns." He thought that he could find it. This was the first time that he had been in Walnut since Luke Hockaday had moved into town; it must be fifteen years or more.

He went along a street that had a sidewalk only part of the way. It was "across the tracks" in the old part of town. The first thing that he had noticed when the train pulled out was the stillness everywhere-only twitterings of birds and an occasional trill of song from a fence or tree. His mind, still filled with the rumblings and shriekings of cities, could hardly take it in. Was everyone asleep? As he looked down the street, it pleased him to fancy that the whole town had fallen asleep, like the Sleeping Beauty's castle, and was waiting for him to come back to waken it. Because this street had scarcely changed at all. It was almost the same!

He had been prepared for change. Flying about all over the civilized world as he did, change was the only thing he saw. His mind was full of a world rocking and falling and transforming itself into something undreamed of before of new inventions, changing empires, a tottering social order, revolution. He had ex

pected hardly to recognize the little old town. When he had come through Edinburgh, the county seat, where he and the Hockaday boys used to drive with their girls on County Fair day and the Fourth of July, he had seen it transformed from a country town into a miniature modern city. His eye had noticed at once the fine brick bank, the asphalt, the new cement bridge over the river. What he had not been prepared for was to find anything the same. He had not permitted himself to expect it. But of course Walnut was slow. It was a country community, made up almost wholly of retired farmers, and they either of English birth or English descent. It had always had something quaint and rustic about it. Besides, all hill and timber countries were behind the times; and Walnut was just at the edge of that patch of rocky wooded country in the northeastern corner of Iowa.

He looked from side to side-eager to recognize old landmarks, half amused when he discovered them, yet feeling all the time a tinge of sadness that was like the haunting of melancholy in this exquisite autumn day. This was the very street along which they used to drive when they came into town with a load or on Saturday nights. A wagon came along now-rattling slowly, an old man with a thick white beard hunched over on the seat, a bushel basket of apples and some gunny sacks full of nuts jolting about in the back. That-everything he saw-teased him with elusive memories. This old house had always stood here-a one-story house of dingy brick, plain, with square small-paned windows, an old-timer. That big oak tree at the corner! Here were vague reminders of the old days-plain white houses with almost a New England air, fallen leaves half-raked upon the lawns, some late petunias bordering white house walls, a

rockery, a bed of pansies and withered "sweet alyssum" edged with white clam shells from the Mississippi. Rope swings hanging from the boughs of elm trees, a boy with bare feet who stared after him, pumps with tin cups dangling, even one of those queer old hammocks made of slats! It was like going back into his past, in a kind of dream. There were memories that he could almost touch -but not quite—

He looked beyond the houses, at the line of low hills on the south. He stood still-almost caught his breath at the sudden stab of emotion. With a strange impulse he took off his cap, held it crushed in his hand. There they were still the old eternal hills! How well he knew them, better than anything in the world. The lay of the land-something in that to stir the deepest feeling in a man. Low rolling hills, fold after fold, smooth brown and autumnal, some plowed to soft earth-color, some set with corn stalks of pale tarnished gold. Along the farther ones, the woods lay like a colored cloud, brown, russet, red and purple-tinged. As he walked on the houses grew fewer, everything dwindled into pasture land. The feeling of autumn grew more poignant. There was a scent of dust in the stubble. The trees grew in scattered russet groups. One slender young cottonwood, yellow as a goldfinch and as lyric in its quality, stood in a meadow, alone. Not even spring beauty was so aching and so transient-like music fading away. Yet under everything something abiding and eternal.

He came to the very edge of town, almost to the woods through which Honey Creek ran. A house stood at the turn of the road. Of all things he had seen it was the most autumnal. It stood plain and white against the depths of blue sky. Its trees were turning to pale yellow,