think of the river Thomas did not know, but even his master's decision that they should all go down there, brought no joy to him.

By the cool side of the river they all found rest. All but Thomas. At first he felt within himself an even, slumbering curiosity toward the river,-a placid remoteness which permitted him to study the opposite shore and the moving stream with calm, unyielding eyes. A coolness was in his heart and a motionless calm through which the river moved without stirring him.

He walked along the bank. There, a little below and across was the cornfield where he had been taken for his father. Strange that the words of the farmer should swim into his mind at this time. "Hey, there, Tom Longthorpe, you back?" He had quite forgotten the words until this moment.

Calmly he walked on. But not so calmly as before. He did not like to come upon bends and turns, river cuts and scenes that threatened at any moment of revealing familiarity to tear down the remoteness about his heart. Yet he continued, the ground under his feet drawing him on.

He stopped suddenly and of himself. He dared not move forward. There, before him in a shallow was the flat, golden rock. With a pain that pulsated and stabbed through him he remembered the day, the very moment, when the river had offered of himself to be companion of his journey. Again he saw the magnificent slow circling of the fish, gleaming and full-bodied. He put his hand to his eyes to shut out the picture.

He turned about and started back to where the others rested. In his haste he could hear clearly the rapid humming and murmur of the river. There was torment in

the sound that seemed to embrace him, and now there was a flowing pain within him-circling and tingling in his heart, flooding his whole being.

He stretched out on a moist, cool plot of grass, but he could not rest. His eyes turned to the river. There was no calm in them, but only a yearning-a frightened longing. It seemed he could hear, close by, the soft thud of falling berries. He shifted from one side to the other. There were the constant, endless murmurs from the river -weaving confusion, weaving a sounding reproach which he could not silence.

That night Thomas was beside the river when the moon moved up into the sky. He saw how serenely she slipped out of reach of the straining branches by the side of the stream and looked down on the hills and valley.

Now his eyes were on the river and grasped the whole of its quivering, black-streaked surface. His ears were filled with its murmur as of silver striking silver. A great fatigue was upon him, a fatigue of tumult within, and made him limp.

The river would heal him of the hurt he felt. The river with his great calm, his old friendliness would take him. He did not see the branches held out to him by the neighboring trees. Only one thing he saw clearly. It was the moon-road on the water beckoning to him in a thousand broken dimples. He sought to shake free of his fatigue as he stepped into the water.

Next morning they missed him at the colonial house on the hill. But his body was found on the bank of the river.

T

OM MITCHEL sat in the door of a box-car, listening to the merry click of the wheels and feeling against his face the rush of wind. Over the grain fields a breeze spread, like the flow of a silver tide on hard sands. To sweep along, not too fast, and swing his legs above the world was a fine thing. He shut his eyes to give himself completely to the rush of wind on his face. When he opened them, stubble, on which squatted hay stacks, had replaced the fields. About one stack fussed jerking figures. This seemed a sordid business, to strip beauty from the breast of the earth. Profoundly he was satisfied in being free from it-up, somehow, with the blue of the skies and the gold of the sun. He took off his hat and followed the prairie that rolled into the violet haze of the unknown. Against the deepening purple a leaden bank of clouds was growing. Attracted as if by a magnet to the gray foundation, white puffs scudded faster and faster to pile up in a churning mass of gold-streaked silver. Through the edges of the silver and gold pile, seeped the pink of filtered sunlight; and behind it hung the deep blue curtain of the sky. In that blue, Tom felt a promise of the life to which he was going-the life of the South Seas, where beauty mixed with work; where green depths of waters swam down for a thousand fathoms; where white beaches gleamed like dead men's bones in the

steady beat of the sun. He sighed with the almost suffocating joy of it. If his father in the first place had only let him be free a while instead of sending him to law school"Ridin' on yer face, bo?"

Tom's eyes opened; from dream to reality he turned his head and grinned at the brakeman. "Sure, it's good, isn't it?"

He missed the rocks of the road-bed, and rolled and rolled over and over in the sand of an empty creek ten feet below. He was surprised; but before the car had slipped out of sight, he managed to stand up and wiggle his fingers at the brakeman in the door.

"The darn fool would've gotten his two bits if he'd only given me a chance," he laughed. He stopped sharp, as if someone had clapped a hand over his mouth. "Why, the idiot might've killed me just for a dirty two bits!"

Under his brown skin a muscle tautened, pulling his mouth into startling grimness. Then he smiled again at the utter ridiculousness of arguing to himself, out loud, in the burning sand of a dried-up creek, over the actions of a brakeman who, as far as he was concerned, no longer existed. But there he was, God alone knew how many miles from a town. And swinging on to such moving realities as trains is never so simple as falling off. He spread his coat over the burning surface of a boulder, then sat down to think. They were making hay. He wrinkled his face in disgust. But the money would be earned in a few days. Then the nearest town, another freight west"Hey, wait a minute! Hey you!" he shouted in sudden decision, and scrambled up the bank to the road.

A yellow-wheeled buckboard stopped, and let its enveloping dust drift slowly ahead. Tom walked up and laid his hand confidently on the arm of the seat, but dropped

it and moved back a pace when he saw the man sitting there. He never would have hailed him but for that cloud of dust. No, if he had seen that figure, squashed in the corner of the seat like a gunny sack loosely packed with straw, he never would have shouted. And if he had seen the eyes and face, eyes which flared suddenly, then filmed into the oily glow of detached contempt; eyes pushed deep into a face from which the flesh seemed to have dried, leaving flabby folds of skin burned red over the sharp angles of a skull, much too small- He had nothing to say. He waited, listening to a grotesquely weak whistle issuing from between thin lips folded into a million little wrinkles, each one the tiny root of a sneer. The whistle ceased, and a hand swollen enormously with the cramped strength of labor reached for the arm of the seat nearest Tom, and pulled forward the pudgy body,-as an accordion is pulled out. Tom stepped back another pace.

"Wal?"

Tom brushed his hand across his eyes; the tang of perspiration made them smart. He wanted to forget why

he had stopped the buckboard.

"Pretty warm."

It seemed ridiculous, inadequate, but it was all he could say after the rushing breeze of the train, the utter calm of the immense heat seemed to surround him with a vacuum of absolute silence.

The lips of the man in the buggy folded themselves slowly, a wrinkle at a time; a monstrously twisted "Nearer My God to Thee," like a challenging smack in the mouth, whipped Tom into resolution.

"Know anyone around here who needs a hand?" he asked.