ting on the table, bent forward, not to watch her out of sight, but to make sure whether she really would stop at the north pasture.

"No, she's goin' by," she said aloud, with evident relief. "No, she ain't either. I'll be whipped if she ain't lettin' down the bars! 'Twould smell kind o' good, I declare!"

She was still peering forward, one slender hand on the window-sill, when Mary, a pretty young woman with two nervous lines between her eyes, came hurrying in.

"Mother," she began, in that unnatural voice which is supposed to allay excitement in another, "I dunno what I'm goin' to do. Stella's sick."

"You don't say!" said Old Lady Lamson, turning away from the window. "What do they think 't is ?"

"Fever, John says. An' she's so fullblooded, it'll be likely to go hard with her.

They want me to go right down, an' David's got to carry me. John would, but he's gone to be referee in that land case, an' he won't be back for a day or two. It's a mercy David's just home from town, so he won't have to change his clo'es right through. Now, mother, if you should have little 'Liza Tolman come an' stay with you, do you think anything would happen s'posin' we left you alone just one night?

Fever's a quicker complaint than old age. It allers was, an' allers will be."

"Oh, I know it! I know it!" cried Mary, starting towards the door. "There ain't a thing for you to do. There's new bread and preserves on the dairy wheel, an' you have 'Liza Tolman pick you up some chips, an' build the fire for your tea; an' don't you wash the dishes, mother. Just leave 'em in the sink. And for mercy sake take a candle, an' not meddle with kerosene "

"Come, come, ain't you ready?" came David's voice from the door. "I can't keep the horse stan'in' here till he's all eat up with flies."

Mary fled to her bedroom, unbuttoning her dress as she ran, and David came in, bringing an air of outdoor freshness into the little sitting-room, with his regal height, his broad shoulders, and tanned, fresh face.

"Well, mother," he said, putting a hand of clumsy kindliness on her shoulder, "if anything happens to you while we're gone, I shall wish we'd let the whole caboodle of 'em die in their tracks. Don't s'pose anything will, do ye?"

"Law, no, David!" exclaimed the old lady, looking at him with beaming pride. "You come here an' let me pick that mite o' lint off your arm. I shall be tickled to death to get rid o' ye."

"Now, mother," counseled Mary, when she came out of the bedroom, hastily tying her bonnet strings, "you watch the schoolchildren, an' ask 'Liza Tolman to stay with you, an' if she can't, to get one of the Daltons; an' tell her we'll give her some Bartlett pears when they 're ripe."

"Yes, yes, I hear," answered the old lady, rising, and setting back her chair in its accustomed corner. "Now, do go along, or ye won't be down to Grapevine Run afore five o'clock."

She watched them while they drove out of the yard, shading her eyes with one nervous hand.

stan' there in that wind, with nothin' on your head!"

The old lady turned back into the house, and her face was alive with glee. "Wind!" she ejaculated scornfully, and yet with the tolerance of one too happy for complaint. "Wind! I guess there would n't be so much, if some folks would save their breath to cool their porridge!"

She did not go back to the sittingroom and her peaceful knitting. She walked into the pantry, where she gave the shelves a critical survey, and then, returning to the kitchen, looked about her once more.

"If it's one day sence I've been down sullar," she said aloud, "it's two year." She was lighting a candle as she spoke. In a moment more she was taking sprightly steps down the stairs into the darkness below.

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Now, mother, don't you fall!" she chuckled, midway in the descent, and it was undeniable that the voice sounded much like Mary's in her anxious moods. "Now, ain't I a mean creatur' to stan' here laughin' at 'em!" she went on. "Well, if she don't keep things nice! "Taters all sprouted, an' the preserve cupboard never looked better in my day. Mary's been well brought up, I'll say that for her."

Old Lady Lamson must have spent at least half an hour in the cellar, for when she ascended it was after four o'clock, and the schoolchildren had passed the house on their way home. She heard their voices under the elms at the turn of the road.

"I ain't to blame if I can't ketch 'em," she remarked calmly, as she blew out her light. "I don't see 's anybody could say I was to blame. An' I could n't walk up to the Tolmans' to ask 'Liza. I might fall!"

She set about her preparations for sup per. It was a favorite maxim in the household that supper should be eaten early, "to get it out of the way," and

to-night this unaccustomed handmaid had additional reasons for haste. But the new bread and preserves were ignored. She built a rousing fire in the little kitchen stove; she brought out the moulding-board, and with trembling eagerness proceeded to mix cream-of-tartar biscuits. Not Cellini himself nor Jeannie Carlyle had awaited the results of passionate labor with a more strenuous eagerness; and when she drew out the panful of delicately browned biscuits, she set it down on the table, and looked at it in sheer delight.

"I'll be whipped if they ain't as good as if I'd made 'em every night for the last two year!" she cried. "I ain't got to get my hand in, an' that's truth an' fact !

She brought out some "cold b'iled dish," made her strong green tea, and sat down to a meal such as they taste who have reached the Delectable Mountains. It held within it all the savor of a happy past; it satisfied her hungry soul.

After she had washed the supper dishes and scrupulously swept the hearth, she rested, for a moment's thought, in the old rocking-chair, and then took her way, candle in hand, to the attic. There was no further self-confidence on the stairs; she was too serious now. Her hours were going fast. The attic, in spite of the open windows, lay hot under summer's touch upon the shingles outside, and odorous of the dried herbs hanging in bunches here and there.

"Wormwood-thoroughwort-spearmint," she mused, as she touched them, one after another, and inhaled their fragrance. "Tain't so long ago I was out pickin' herbs an' dryin' 'em. Well, well, well!"

She made her way under the eaves, and pulled out a hair trunk studded with brass nails. A rush-bottomed chair stood near by, and, setting her candle in it, she knelt before the trunk and began lifting out its contents: a brocaded satin

waistcoat of a long-past day, a woolen comforter knit in stripes, a man's black broadcloth coat. She smoothed them as she laid them by, and there was a wondering note in her lowered voice.

"My Lord!" she whispered reverently, as if speaking to One who would hear and understand, "it's over fifty year!" A pile of yellowed linen lay in the bottom of the trunk, redolent of camphor from contact with its perishable neighbors. She lifted one shirt after another, looking at them in silence. Then she laid back the other clothes, took up her candle and the shirts, and went down stairs again. In hot haste she rebuilt the kitchen fire, and set two large kettles of water on the stove. She dragged the washing-bench into the back kitchen from its corner in the shed, and on it placed her tubs; and when the water was heated, she put the garments into a tub, and rubbed with the vigor and ease of a woman well accustomed to such work. All the sounds of the night were loud about her, and the song of the whippoorwill came in at the open door. He was very

near.

His presence should have been a sign of approaching trouble, but Old Lady Lamson did not hear him. Her mind was reading the lettered scroll of a vanished year. Perhaps the touch of the warm water on her hands recalled her to the present.

"Seems good to feel the suds," she said happily, holding up one withered hand and letting the foam drip from its fingers. "I wish 't I could dry outdoors. But when mornin' come, they'd be all of a sop."

She washed and rinsed the garments, and, opening a clothes-horse, spread them out to dry. Then she drew a long breath, put out her candle, and wandered to the door. The garden lay before her, unreal in the beauty of moonlight. Every bush seemed an enchanted wood. The old lady went forth, lingering at first, as one too rich for choosing, then with a firmer step. She closed the little gate,

and walked out into the country road. She hurried along to the old signboard, and turned aside unerringly into a hollow there, where she stooped and filled her hands with tansy, pulling it up in great bunches, and pressing it eagerly to her face.

"Seventy-four year ago!" she told the unseen listener of the night with the same wonder in her voice. "Sir laid dead, an' they sent me down here to pick tansy to put round him. Seventy-four year ago!"

Still holding it, she rose and went through the bars into the dewy lane. Down the wandering path, trodden daily by the cows, she walked, and came out in the broad pasture, irregular with its little hillocks, where, as she had been told from her babyhood, the Indians used to plant their corn. She entered the woods by a cart-path hidden from the moon, and went on with a light step, gathering a bit of green here and there, - now hemlock, now a needle from the sticky pine, and inhaling its balsam on her hands. A sharp descent, and she had reached the spot where the brook ran fast, and where lay "Peggy's b'ilin' spring," named for a great-aunt she had never seen, but whose gold beads she had inherited, and who had consequently seemed to her a person of opulence and ease.

titudinous, dumb soundless races incalculably older than man. Of their visible history we know much; names we have given them, and classification. The reason of the forms of their leaves, of the qualities of their fruits, of the colors of their flowers, we also know; for we have learned not a little about the course of the eternal laws that give shape to all terrestrial things. But why they are, that we do not know. What is the ghostliness that seeks expression in this universal green, the mystery of that which multiplies forever issuing out of that which multiplies not? Or is the seeming lifeless itself life, only a life more silent still, more hidden?

But a stranger and quicker life moves upon

the face of the earth, peoples wind and flood. This has the ghostlier power of separating itself from earth, yet is always at last recalled thereto, and condemned to feed that which it once fed upon. It feels; it knows; it crawls, swims, runs, flies, thinks. Countless the shapes of it. The green slower life seeks being only. But this forever struggles against non-being. We know the mechanism of its motion, the laws of its growth: the innermost mazes of its structure have been explored; the territories of its sensation have been mapped and named. But the meaning of it, who will tell us? Out of what ultimate came it? Or, more simply, what is it? Why should it know pain? Why is it evolved by pain? And this life of pain is our own. Relatively, it sees, it knows. Absolutely, it is blind, and gropes, like the slow cold green life which supports it. But does it not also support a higher existence, nourish some invisible life infinitely more active and more complex? Is there ghostliness orbed in ghostliness, life-within-life without end? Are there universes interpenetrating universes?

For our era, at least, the boundaries of human knowledge have been irrevocably fixed; and far beyond those limits

only exist the solutions of such questions. Yet what constitutes those limits of the possible? Nothing more than human nature itself. Must that nature remain equally limited in those who shall come after us? Will they never develop higher senses, vaster faculties, subtler perceptions? What is the teaching of science?

Perhaps it has been suggested in the profound saying of Clifford, that we were never made, but have made ourselves. This is, indeed, the deepest of all teachings of science. And wherefore has man made himself? To escape suffering and death. Under the pressure of pain alone was our being shaped; and even so long as pain lives, so long must continue the ceaseless toil of selfchange. Once in the ancient past, the necessities of life were physical; they are not less moral than physical now. And of all future necessities, none seems likely to prove so merciless, so mighty, so tremendous, as that of trying to read the Universal Riddle.