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plants by the corn star, or the wheat, or the star of the melons, on the day when the cacique gives out the word that the stars say that planting should be done. Only the cacique and one other man knows the potent day of each star, and he, the reader of the stars, is kept secret from the tribe. One may not read their movements and tell the secrets in any but matters of great tribal importance.

Taos is, if anything, more conservative than the others, and is delightfully primitive, and the blood of its people exceptionally pure. Tribal laws stand firm against intermarriage with blood not their own, and the same tribal laws forbid all white man's garments. The youth can go to the village to our schools and learn the white man's ways and cunning in order to be better fitted to cope with encroaching neighbors, but when he returns to take up tribal life he must leave outside the village gates his dressy school uniform and wrap himself in a blanket of the tribe.

come down to meet the plains. A beautiful, and to them sacred, stream flows down through the forest's cool shadows and passes through the heart of this village. At its forested bank, above the village, the women get the water for home use, and on its banks below are gathered groups of matrons and maidens washing the clothing of the family, for these are a cleanly people. The forest above the village is, in a measure, like the stream, a sacred one, and is jealously guarded by the men of the tribe, and in its great depths are held many of the old-time rites, rites never seen by any except members of the order or tribe.

Spring, Summer, Autumn, or whiterobed Winter, this wonderful old forest is a master creation, and the like can be seen nowhere else. You, who say there is nothing old in our country, turn your eyes for one year from Europe and go to the land of an ancient yet primitive civilization. The trails are rarely travelled, and you will go

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From a photograph, copyright 1904, by E. S. Curtis.

When evening comes on.

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Twilight, a darkling wood.

The ancient trees, like hoary sentinels
All silent stand. Down the dim aisles

The distant, fading sky of dying gold

Is veiled in purple mist. Above, the heavens

Of darkest sapphire; one clear star

Already looking forth expectantly.

The winds are hushed, the very leaves are mute.

The purling brook singeth in undertones,

Her daylight song too loud, too unrestrained

To match the universal hush.

Lo! where she comes, threading the leafy ways, Cynthia, the Goddess, casting silvery rays!

M

By Alice Brown

ILLUSTRATIONS BY F. C. YOHN

ARSHALL BRUCE and his wife, Janie, lived in a flat in geniously contrived to be hot in summer and, by a defective system of heating, very cold in winter. They had perched there for three years during the weaving of their fortunes, sometimes hilariously intent on the uncouth advantages of the place, overlooking, as it did, a corner of life far removed from their own, except in anxious work and vagueness in regard to the next month's rent. That was like having an uncomfortable seat at a dreary realistic play. Or again when the fount of hope got choked and ceased temporarily to bubble, they recoiled from the tawdriness of it all, and wondered whether it would not have been better for Marshall to keep his professional post in the little academy, and for Janie to go on teaching literature under him, rather than to vault the cruel barbed wire into journalism, there to throw and be overthrown.

On this July evening, the flat was feeling the heat. Janie sat in the kitchen commanding the court where her neighbors had settled themselves for prolonged hours of unreserved revel, challenging their own jaded inner forces to counteract the atmospheric enemy without. They laughed loudly at intervals, in momentary uplift when some one of them, Janie knew through previous observation, made a foray upon a neighboring drug store, and returned with dishes of ice cream the mind shuddered to contemplate. She knew exactly how they looked, the men coatless, the women slatternly in lingerie waists profusely trellised with a "letting-in" of cheap lace, and the children, innocent of the dictum that boys and girls should be in retreat by the time it is dark under the table, alternating the wail of fretfulness with the shriek of an unlovely mirth. This was not one of the times when Janie could regard them all joyously as a picture of life, or warmly as a part of the great family wherein they seemed to be

VOL. XLV.-19

workers of a degree only less humble than her own. She was affronted by the city summer, tired of prolonged care, and she could but think of a circle in an ingeniously contrived inferno where lost spirits suffered not only the torture of their own habitat but that of the outcry from the one below. In a street not far away a talking machine started on its interminable jargon, chiming in terrifying commentary with her own mental lamentations. She would not have been surprised if the talking machine had broken suddenly into Brocken cries.

Proofs of a modest story long ago paid for and the proceeds eaten up, lay on the table before her, ready to be stamped and mailed, and she knew Marshall, in the front room, was poring over the last of his masterly series, a more exacting task, and therefore to be carried on in the fractionally less torrid portion of the house. Janie always insisted that she preferred the kitchen for her work because it seemed more secluded, and Marshall innocently agreed. He had not even known how she had held her breath and guarded him through the year when he was getting his material for this set of magazine articles on Elisha Porson, the bogy of all commercial circles, execrated by thousands who had served him and then gone under when they attempted to seek out the sources of the golden flood for which they dug the channel. There was to be no overflow, they found. The drops were all to run swiftly to one hoard. So the articles, now appearing, had proved. They were in effect an attack on Porson, his methods and his personal integrity, and through him, an onslaught upon modern business.

Marshall, when he had been asked to ride forth for the slaying of Porson, had felt a high commercial triumph of his own, and with that the righteous valor of the knight-errant. Janie had known he was the man commissioned to do a big deed. That first flame of eagerness had lighted her through three-quarters of the task. What Marshall felt about it now, what im

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mediate force was hurrying him, she did not know. Of one thing she was sure: he thought with her of the tangible reward if the articles ultimately "made good." For they were lifting an obscure magazine to an amazing circulation, and the publishers were just men. They would double and treble what he had been promised in advance, and that would mean a move from the flat overlooking the court, even a month in England benignly beckoning them, and, most of all, more work. But of these palliations to the task Janie was not thinking tonight as she leaned back in her chair, one arm lying along the table, her fingers holding the pen. She was thinking of life itself, the web embroidered by figures, Porson and these uncouth creatures in the court, though it looked less to her like a fabric than it sometimes did, a fabric stirred by a battling wind so that the figures themselves moved purposely. It was in some manner alive, though formless, a savage power bent on ruin.

Marshall, in the other room, pushed back his chair, and she came to herself with an instant call upon her every-day look of watchful sympathy. She was on guard, ready to do him service from filling his pen or pipe to speeding off on desperate foraging flights for the material he might suddenly lack. She heard his slippered feet along the corridor, and then saw him before her, strong, flushed, splendid to her gaze with the distinctions she loved in him: the kind gray eyes set wide apart, the warm hair tumbling over his forehead and his comprehensive look of youth and power. Tired as he was, he looked for the moment instinct with triumph.

"Well," said he, "it's done."

"Done!" The echo was not interrogative. It seemed rather a wondering comment on such a fact.

He began a tattoo on the oven of the gas stove, and she noted idly how fine his hand was, used to athletic tasks and fitted to hold the pen.

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'They'll set it up at once," she said languidly.

"Yes. I shall have the proof this week. Then we've done with Porson-done with him, done with him. Vale, Elisha Porson! Avaunt! Get out! You have served your turn. The tale of your iniquities is complete, and it now remains for you to get the

monopoly of sackcloth and ashes, and we will hie us from your crumbling ruins to other jobs." He was fantastically gesticulating over the sink where, in a moment, he proposed to let the water run through the filter preparatory to a cooling draught, when he turned to her for a responsive glance. He noted her pallor, the dark circles on her cheek, and sprang to her with dismay. "Why, old girl," said he, "you're done up."

Tears were squeezing themselves out under her dropped eyelids.

"Yes," she said, "I've known myself to be ruggeder. Don't hug me here, Marsh. The court'll see us. There! I told you. Hear them yell. Come off into the den, and we can talk."

His arm about her they did go, and in the den, littered still with his cast-off manuscript, he turned the light up to see if she really looked as alarmingly bad as he feared. She was on the sofa now, her head thrown back against her lifted arms. He took his own chair and watched her, a frown between his anxious eyes. In a minute she laughed.

"I'll tell you what it is, Marsh," she said. "It's Porson. This is his revenge."

"You've got too tired over him. You've let down, now the race is over. Take it as I do. Don't say, what a devil of a time we've had with him. Say, we've done with him."

"I feel as if we never should be done with him." She opened her eyes heavily for a moment, and closed them again because they had fallen on his completed work. Something had to remind her at every turn of Elisha Porson, the adversary of mankind as she had grown to think him, and so her adversary also. But with her husband's anxious eyes upon her she was bound to help him. "Don't you find yourself crushed by all this investigation, Marsh?" she asked. "Somehow sapped-depleted?"

He was frowning at the effort to understand.

"No," he said at once. "I feel as a lawyer does after he's won a nasty case. He hasn't enjoyed the evidence, but it's means to an end. It buys conviction. It serves justice. And for him it spells triumph."

"I can't think of the triumph just this minute. I'm certain we've learned things we wish we hadn't known.”

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