and talks half a dozen languages like English. I suppose he's got money enough to live without lifting a hand, any more than his father does; son of Bromfield Corey, you know. But the thing was in him. He's a natural born business man; and I've had many a fellow with me that had come up out of the street, and worked hard all his life, without ever losing his original opposition to the thing. But Corey likes it. I believe the fellow would like to stick at that desk of his night and day. I don't know where he got it. I guess it must be his grandfather, old Phillips Corey; it often skips a generation, you know. But what I say is, a thing has got to be born in a man; and if it ain't born in him, all the privations in the world won't put it there, and if it is, all the college training won't take it out."

Sometimes Lapham advanced these ideas at his own table, to a guest whom he brought to Nantasket for the night. Then he suffered exposure and ridicule at the hands of his wife, when opportunity offered. She would not let him bring Corey down to Nantasket at all.

"No, indeed!" she said. "I am not going to have them think we're running after him. If he wants to see Irene, he can find out ways of doing it for himself."

"Who wants him to see Irene?" retorted the Colonel angrily.

"I do," said Mrs. Lapham. "And I want him to see her without any of your connivance, Silas. I'm not going to have it said that I put my girls at anybody. Why don't you invite some of your other clerks?"

"He ain't just like other clerks. He's going to take charge of a part of the business. It's quite another thing."

"Oh, indeed!" said Mrs. Lapham vexatiously. "Then you are going to take a partner."

"I shall ask him down if I choose!" retorted the Colonel. disdaining her insinuation.

His wife laughed with the fearlessness of a woman who knows her husband.

"But you won't choose when you've thought it over, Si." Then she applied an emollient to his chafed surface. "Don't you suppose I feel as you do about it? I know just how proud you are, and I'm not going to have you do anything

that will make you feel meeching afterward. You just let things take their course. If he wants Irene, he's going to find out some way of seeing her; and if he don't, all the plotting and planning in the world isn't going to make him."

"Who's plotting?" again retorted the Colonel, shuddering at the utterance of hopes and ambitions which a man hides with shame, but a woman talks over as freely and coolly as if they were items of a milliner's bill.

"Oh, not you!" exulted his wife. "I understand what you want. You want to get this fellow, who is neither partner nor clerk, down here to talk business with him. Well, now, you just talk business with him at the office."

The only social attention which Lapham succeeded in offering Corey was to take him in his buggy, now and then, for a spin out over the Milldam. He kept the mare in town, and on a pleasant afternoon he liked to knock off early, as he phrased it, and let the mare out a little. Corey understood something about horses, though in a passionless way, and he would have preferred to talk business when obliged to talk horse. But he deferred to his business superior with the sense of discipline which is innate in the apparently insubordinate American nature. If Corey could hardly help feeling the social difference between Lapham and himself, in his presence he silenced his traditions, and showed him all the respect that he could have exacted from any of his clerks. He talked horse with him, and when the Colonel wished he talked house. Besides himself and his paint Lapham had not many other topics, and if he had a choice between the mare and the edifice on the water side of Beacon street, it was just now the latter. Sometimes, in driving in or out, he stopped at the house, and made Corey his guest there, if he might not at Nantasket; and one day it happened that the young man met Irene there again. She had come up with her mother alone, and they were in the house, interviewing the carpenter as before, when the Colonel jumped out of his buggy and cast anchor at the pavement. More exactly, Mrs. Lapham was interviewing the carpenter, and Irene was sitting in the bowwindow on a trestle, and looking out at the driving. She saw him come up with her father, and bowed and blushed. Her father went on upstairs to find her mother, and Corey

THE RAIN.

The rain sounds like a laugh to me—
A low laugh poured out limpidly.

My very soul smiles as I listen to

The low, mysterious laughter of the rain,
Poured musically over heart and brain

Till sodden care, soaked with it through and through,
Sinks; and, with wings wet with it as with dew,
My spirit flutters up, with every stain

Rinsed from its plumage, and as white again
As when the old laugh of the rain was new.

Then laugh on, happy Rain! laugh louder yet!—
Laugh out in torrent-bursts of watery mirth;
Unlock thy lips of purple cloud, and let
Thy liquid merriment baptize the earth,
And wash the sad face of the world, and set
The universe to music dripping-wet!

THE FISHING PARTY.

WUNST We went a-fishin'-Me
An' my Pa an' Ma, all three,
When they wuz a picnic, 'way
Out to Hanch's Woods, one day.

An' they wuz a crick out there,
Where the fishes is, an' where
Little boys 't ain't big an' strong
Better have their folks along!

My Pa he ist fished an' fished!
An' my Ma she said she wished
Me an' her was home; an' Pa
Said he wished so worse'n Ma

Pa said ef you talk, er say
Anything, er sneeze, er play,
Hain't no fish, alive er dead,
Ever go' to bite! he said.

Purt' nigh dark in town when we
Got back home; an' Ma, says she,
Now she'll have a fish fer shore!
An' she buyed one at the store.

THEY met and they talked where the cross-roads meet,

Four men from the four winds come,

And they talked of the horse, for they loved the theme,

And never a man was dumb.

And the man from the North loved the strength of the horse, And the man from the East his pace,

And the man from the South loved the speed of the horse, The man from the West his grace.

So these four men from the four winds come,

Each paused a space in his course

And smiled in the face of his fellow-man

And lovingly talked of the horse.

Then each man parted and went his way

As their different courses ran;

And each man journeyed with peace in his heart
And loving his fellow-man.

II.

They met the next year where the cross-roads meet,
Four men from the four winds come;

And it chanced as they met that they talked of God,

And never a man was dumb.

One imaged God in the shape of a man,

A spirit did one insist;

One said that Nature itself was God,

One said that He didn't exist.

But they lashed each other with tongues that stung,

That smote as with a rod:

Each glared in the face of his fellow-man,

And wrathfully talked of God.

Then each man parted and went his way,

As their different courses ran:

And each man journeyed with war in his heart,
And hating his fellow-man.

MIRACLES.

SINCE I have listened to the song

The melted snow-bank sings,

I've roamed the earth a credulous man,

Believing many things.

The snow which made the mountains white

Made green the babbling lea;

And since that day have miracles

Been commonplace to me.

Sprung from the slime of sluggish streams,

Inert, and dark, and chilly,

Have I not seen the miracle

And glory of the lily?

Have I not seen, when June's glad smile
Upon the earth reposes,

The cosmic impulse in the clod

Reveal itself in roses?

Have I not seen the frozen hill,
Where snowy chaos tosses,
Smile back upon the smiling sun
With violets and mosses?

Have I not seen the dead old world
Rise to a newer birth,

When fragrance from the lilac blooms
Rejuvenates the earth?

Have I not seen the rolling earth,
A clod of frozen death,

Burst from its grave-clothes of the snow
Touched by an April breath?

Have I not seen the bareboughed tree,
That from the winter shrinks,
Imparadised in apple blooms
And loud with bobolinks?

Now who can riddle me this thing?

Or tell me how or where

The tulip stains its crimson cup

From the transparent air?

So from the wonder-bearing day

I take the gifts it brings,

And roam the earth a credulous man,

Believing many things.

-S. W. Foss.