followed one upon another, marshalled, orderly. He picked a dry leaf from the oak near by and looked at it intently. The tracery of veins, the shadings fine as a moth's wing, were clear to his sight as though etched in steel. He walked a few rods; his steps rang clear and steady upon the frozen ground. Then a great, quiet wonder came upon him. He stopped and looked down at his bare outstretched hands. And they were calm. He turned to the low kindling East. A light wind sighed and drifted; softly the pines intoned their high rejoicing chant. He looked deep into the crystal of the miracle: his lost life, given back to him entire and perfect, its every noble power his to use once more. The craft of cunning hand; the majesty of sight; the supreme might of trained unshaken brain, strong, confident, unfailing. It was all his, this prince's inheritance. Ah, gift of gifts, the strength to toil once more! And over the ramparts of the hills, hushed in the peace of victory, lifted the white oriflamme of the Day. SUNDAY IN TOWN By Caroline Duer I THE sun is misty yellow and the sky is hazy blue, Near and deeply, fair and faintly, Each one following its fellow in an echo clear and true. Many feet make haste toward pleasure, And the sound is as the rustling of the leaves in paths we knew. II Oh, the fragrance of the hollows that the little brooks ran through! Like a torch at every turning, On the way my spirit follows in a dream forever new, Where from quiet, distant meadows, Dim beneath the mountain shadows, Came the clank of swinging cow-bells down the softest wind that blew. III We have had our fill of roving where spring blossoms bound the view. Danced the nymph-and-shepherd dances; Now the Summer of our loving glows and throbs about us too. In our eye the light yet vernal, In our hearts the fire eternal, And when time has touched the branches and our rose-leaf days are few, Oh, it's then I'd still be walking in life's Autumn woods with you. I THE LEVITATION OF MISS WEEKS By Josephine Daskam Bacon ILLUSTRATIONS BY FLORENCE SCOVEL SHINN DON'T suppose you have the least idea what levitation means; unless you've ever done it, that is, and then you called it something else, most probably. Anyway, whatever you call it, it's a very strange thing, and stranger if you knew Weeksey. Ben says that if she lives to be an old woman of thirty or forty she shall never forget the sight of poor Weeksey's face as she sailed up in the air. Ben is writing an account of it herself in blank verse, which will probably be very famous, but I am to do it in prose, because poetry is seldom appreciated till after you're dead. Still, I don't see how anyone could help but appreciate Ben's poetry. Some lines are very fine. Here is a bit about the discovery of the Society just as Miss Weeks was sent up, by that sneak of a Creepy-cat (her name is Katrina Kripsen, and she is supposed to teach the Swedish System): Oh, then indeed did Weeksey's eyes begin To roll, and still she held her breath in tight As she was bidden by the valiant band. Still up she went and up to-ward the blue. Of course it was not blue, as it was the eiling of the cloak-room, which is natu rally whitewashed. But as Ben says, if you will look at any poem, you will see that there are a number of things like that in it, even the greatest. When softly opes the door a little bit, And more and more, alas for Weeksey poor! For who is this? Great God, the Creepy-cat! If anyone thinks that Ben talks that way, they are much mistaken. Of course she wouldn't be allowed to. Why, in translations, you can't say what mon Dieu really is. You say "Indeed!" or "What, then!" or "Alas!" according to the sense. Although it seems very strange that if that is what they mean they don't say so, and not something else entirely. I wanted Ben to say, "Alas, the Creepycat!" myself, but she got so awfully mad and talked so much about it that I saw it was no use. Ever since they sat on her composition where the boys came out of school and said "Bully for you," she has been very sensitive about those sort of things. Of course in one way she is perfectly all right-boys do say "Bully for you!" we all know that. But still it looks very queer for a girl to write to hand in to a teacher. So we all begged her to take it out, knowing what the Pie (in other words, Miss Appleby) would think. But, of course, if you know Ben you know how much good we did. That is, none at all. use. She said she was writing as an author, not as a girl. So she left it in, because the Pie was a teacher of Literature and must know that an author doesn't necessarily do all the things the characters in his works do. For look at Shakespeare in that case, or Ouida. But of course it was pounced on, and the Pie wrote in red ink on the side, "Change this expression." Then Ben fought it out with her, and asked her what expression the boys would be likely to use, and she said that was not her concern, but she knew what expressions her pupils must not Which hadn't anything to do with it, of course; but what could you expect of the Pie? Ben argued it with her all the afternoon, trying to make her see that she wasn't responsible for the way boys talked, but the Pie said at last that she needn't select such subjects, and then Ben had her on the hip, as Shylock says, because the subject was given to us-The First Day of the New Term! Then the Pie got mad and said she had no more time to waste, and Ben got mad, too, and asked her for a list of expressions not allowed to be used by the Elmbank School, and she got a reprimand and had to practise all Wednesday afternoon, more or less. But to our muttons, as they say in novels. I don't suppose we should have had any Society at all if it hadn't been for Ben. Whoever does anything by themselves, she finds it out, and if it's worth anything she makes a society right away-she is usually president. We've had a good many, but they don't last especially long, because we begin to scrap very soon and then it splits up, and some of the girls keep splitting away from the first split, if you see what I mean. Eleanor Northrop says that Ben's societies are like the Protestant Reformation in that way—she is sixteen. She was in one with us once, which is why she knew about them, for of course those older girls won't have anything to do with us usually. But she has an aunt who believes that King Charles is the rightful King of England to-day, and not Queen Victoria. If you believe that, you wear a white pink in the lapel of your coat, or pin it to your guimpe if you are a girl, unless you have tailor-suits like Pinky West, who can wear a flower like a man. I have given her one every Saturday for weeks. Well, when Ben heard about this, she thought it would be a grand idea for a society, so she got one right up. There was all our crowd, and then Eleanor, of course, on account of her aunt. She thought she ought to be president, and I will say that if it hadn't been that Ben and I always go together, I might have agreed with her, both on account of her age and her aunt; but of course Ben wouldn't be in any society she couldn't be president of, as we explained to Eleanor. Eleanor thought she knew most about the thing, but when we came to talk it up, she found to her surprise that Ben knew a lot more! It was no surprise to me, because Ben always does know more, somehow. When the girls all tried to get her to tell how she found it out so soon, she just looked big and coughed that way she does and it does make you awfully mad-and said everybody knew all about that, of course. Just the same she didn't till she looked it up, because I caught her in the upstairs library sitting under the piano, scowling and mussing her hair the way she does, with a big book. I gave our private call, but she pretended not to hear; and if you keep on she gets mad and won't speak, and she persists afterward that she didn't hear a word! Ben is easy to get along with if you will pretend to believe what she wants at the time, but I see what the girls mean when they stop speaking with her about twice a week. Polly-Cracker (in other words, Miss Luella McCracken Parrott) says that Ben has a tremendous temperament, but that is not so-plenty of the girls have a million times worse temper than Ben. It is queer that Polly should say that, too, for next to dear Miss Naldreth she is the kindest to her of all the teachers, and not because Ben does well for her either, for she teaches Mathematics, which Ben loathes and despises and can't do. That society never amounted to much, because really when you got down to it there wasn't much to do but wear white things and listen to Ben read long ballads about Prince Charley. She reads too fast, anyway-we all like her own poetry better. fork! But it did one thing: if it hadn't been for he had not been taught how to hold his that we probably shouldn't have known anything about Gray Fairchild's voodoo, and that was the beginning of the most important society we ever had or shall have in Elmbank School. It was probably the most important society ever had in any school, for that matter. I don't believe you can show me many societies that have had professors from Harvard come to see Her family did not approve of the Revolutionary War, and they went to live in England during it, nor the Civil War either. Her grandmother is called Madam Fairchild, and once Gray was saucy to her and was not allowed to speak to her or come into the room where she was for a month. She had never been in a society before She is supposed to teach the Swedish System.-Page 195. them, and articles in German written about them! Gray Fairchild is from Virginia. She joined the society, though not in our crowd, because her family is a very old one and was originally in favor of Prince Charley and not of Queen Victoria. She had an ancestress in ancient times who refused to marry George Washington, according to an old legend he was not of high enough birth for her, though that seems very strange, as we always thought Washington was the highest possible person. But Gray says that not to be able to tell a lie has nothing to do with family greatness, though it may be very good in other ways. She also says that being a President of the United States isn't considered so dreadfully much in Virginia. There was an aunt or some relative of her mother's that got up from the table once when one of the Presidents was at dinner, because she said and she was terribly proud of being elected a member of this one and of being treasurer, on account of her ancestors feeling just as the Society did about Queen Victoria. There was really little or nothing for a treasurer to do, but Ben always makes us have all the offices in her societies. Which is all right, of course, and pleases the girls when they are elected. Well, one day we met in the laundry, and for once we didn't have to pretend, because it was really dangerous meeting there, as they have a fit if they know about it, and everyone had to wear black crape on their arms because it was the anniversary of something or other about the Pretender. There were two pretenders, and one is in "Kidnapped," but I get them all mixed up-I never really knew which one it was we believed was the rightful heir. Eleanor's aunt and Ben know, I suppose, but I doubt if even Eleanor does. Still, we did not promise not to describe the history of it for future generations, which is quite different from telling the other girls. If all the secret vows were secret like that, Ben said that there ought to be some But Gray's nurse told them, and she told special ceremony to mark this day forever us, the fate of those that break the oath in our minds, and that we ought never to that we all of us took, and I never took a see a clothes-wringer again or those little worse, though Ben has given us some terballs of bluing without a sob rising in our rible ones. Some from books and some throat-she got part of that out of some she composed herself and some mixed. book. We hadn't had a very good initiation for this society because we'd used all the good ones we knew, and Ben felt that the girls weren't interested in keeping it secret, which is the main good of a society, of course. So she was specially anxious for some really big thing to do. And then it was that Gray Fairchild told us the great secret that afterward made us so famous, though only, alas! for a short while. "Let's raise 'em high!" said she. Of course nobody knew what that meant, and when Gray explained it to us, we didn't believe it. But Ben was de lighted with the idea from the first; she always knows when there's anything in a thing, besides inventing the most interesting and remarkable things herself, as everybody admitseven the girls that can't bear her. Florence Scoral Shinn An old darky nurse I have given her one every Saturday for weeks.-Page 196. that Gray and her sisters had, told them about it, and the secret charms for it and the best times to do it and all. We have all given our solemn words of honor never to do it again, and not to tell it to the others, who certainly would, and would probably hurt themselves badly, not knowing the secret spells that we never can tell-not even to Miss Naldreth or the Professor or Dr. Welles, though they begged of us to do so; but we were firm and would have been so under any kind of torture, which was not done, I am happy to say. I can't see how they could ever have got into the histories, where the most private things, even that people thought, seem to be known. I suppose all secrets were told somebody for that purpose, so they could be preserved. Constantia says that God keeps them to reveal at his leisure, but her Sundayschool teacher told her that, and everybody knows it any way. From whom no secrets are hid, it says in the Prayer-book, which is where her teacher got it, probably. Ben says that perhaps God doesn't know the oath we took, on account of its being a voodoo oath, and his not caring to know about it, though of course he probably could if he chose. I think this is very reasonable myself, but Constantia got mad and left the Society, though Ben explained very clearly to her that she didn't mean anything disrespectful to God, but really rather flattered him by supposing that he would scorn to take any interest in voodoo. Moreover and particularly, as Dr. Belcher says, Ben proved it to Constantia from the Bible itself and from Tennyson; but Constantia is a little foo! and wouldn't come back to the Society, and wrote to her uncle about it, and it was that letter that started the teachers following us up. |