find a girl who ain't ashamed to be seen walking with him Sundays. And I was grateful to your mother, and we got along first-rate. Only I couldn't say things to her-and she couldn't answer. Well-one day, a few months after we were married, Dolbrowski came to New York, and the whole place went wild about him. I'd never heard any good music, but I'd always had an inkling of what it must be like, though I couldn't tell you to this day how I knew. Well, your mother read about him in the papers too, and she thought it'd be the swagger thing to go to New York and hear him play-so we went. . . I'll never forget that evening. Your mother wasn't easily stirred up-she never seemed to need to let off steam. But that night she seemed to understand the way I felt. And when we got back to the hotel she said suddenly: 'I'd like to tell him how I feel. I'd like to sit right down and write to him.' "Would you?' I said. 'So would I.' "There was paper and pens there before us, and I pulled a sheet toward me, and began to write. 'Is this what you'd like to say to him?' I asked her when the letter was done. And she got pink and said: 'I don't understand it, but it's lovely.' And she copied it out and signed her name to it, and sent it."

after, before he went back to Europe, he sent your mother a last little note, and that picture hanging up there. . ."

Mr. Grew paused again, and both men lifted their eyes to the photograph. "Is that all?" Ronald slowly asked. "That's all every bit of it," said Mr. Grew.

"And my mother-my mother never even spoke to Dolbrowski?"

"Never. She never even saw him but that once in New York at his concert "

The blood crept again to Ronald's face. "Are you sure of that, sir?" he asked in a trembling voice.

"Sure as I am that I'm sitting here. Why, she was too lazy to look at his letters after the first novelty wore off. She copied the answers just to humor me-but she always said she couldn't understand what we wrote."

"But how could you go on with such a correspondence? It's incredible!" Mr. Grew looked at his son thoughtfully. "I suppose it is, to you. You've only had to put out your hand and get the things I was starving for-music, and good talk, and ideas. Those letters gave me all that. You've read them, and you know that Dolbrowski was not only a great musician but a great man. There was nothing

"That's how it began; and that's where I thought it would end. But it didn't, because Dolbrowski answered. His first letter was dated January 10, 1872. I guess you'll find I'm correct. Well, I went back to hear him again, and I wrote him after the performance, and he answered again. And after that we kept it up for six months. Your mother always copied the letters and signed them. She seemed to think it was a kinder joke, and she was proud of his answering my letters. But she never went back to New York to hear him, though I saved up enough to give her the treat again. She was too lazy, and she let me go without her. I heard him three times in New York; and in the spring he came to Wingfield and played once at the Academy. Your mother was sick and couldn't go; so I went alone. After the performance I meant to get one of the directors to take me in to see him; but when the time came, I just went back home and wrote to him instead. And the month

didn't feel. For six months I breathed his air, and I've lived on it ever since. Do you begin to understand a little now?" "Yes-a little. mother's name?

But why write in my Why make it a sentimental correspondence?"

Mr. Grew reddened to his bald temples. "Why, I tell you it began that way, as a kinder joke. And when I saw that the first letter pleased and interested him, I was afraid to tell him—I couldn't tell him. Do you suppose he'd gone on writing if he'd ever seen me, Ronny?"

Ronald suddenly looked at him with new eyes. "But he must have thought your letters very beautiful—to go on as he did," he broke out.

"Well-I did my best," said Mr. Grew modestly.

Ronald pursued his idea. "Where are all your letters, I wonder? Weren't they returned to you at his death?"

Mr. Grew laughed. "Lord, no. I guess he had trunks and trunks full of better ones.

"I should have liked to see your letters," the young man insisted.

"Well, they weren't bad," said Mr. Grew drily. "But I'll tell you one thing, Ronny," he added suddenly. Ronald raised his head with a quick glance, and Mr. Grew continued: "I'll tell you where the best of those letters is-it's in you. If it hadn't been for that one look at life I couldn't have made you what you are. Oh, I know you've done a good deal of your own making-but I've been there behind you all the time. And you'll never know the work I've spared you and the time I've saved you. Fortuné Dolbrowski helped me do that. I never saw things in little again after I'd looked at 'em with him. And I tried to give you the big

Mr. Grew paused, and for a long time Ronald sat motionless, his elbows on the table, his face dropped on his hands.

Suddenly Mr. Grew's touch fell on his shoulder.

"Look at here, Ronald Grew-do you want me to tell you how you're feeling at this minute? Just a mite let down, after all, at the idea that you ain't the romantic figure you'd got to think yourself... Well, that's natural enough, too; but I'll tell you what it proves. It proves you're my son right enough, if any more proof was needed. For it's just the kind of fool nonsense I used to feel at your age-and if there's anybody here to laugh at it's myself, and not you. And you can laugh at me just as much as you like. . ."

M

USTAPHA, the flute-maker, had a daughter. Now Mustapha was forty and four years old, and his shop was beside the eastern city gate, just where the laden camels pad into the city, and Bedouins and merchants enter and issue on their way to and from the cities of the South, by way of the Sahara. The shop of Mustapha was a hole in the thickness of the wall about seven feet high, six feet broad and eight feet long, and in it were hung a selection of flutes, finely scratched with intricate designs colored red with henna, well dried; and of every size, from the delicate reed scarcely more than the slimness of a woman's finger, to the hollowed bamboo as thick as half your wrist and without a mouthpiece at all. A young boy could blow the former, but a man's hand only is long enough to encompass the stops on the latter, and a man's breath necessary to coax the bamboo out of its dumbness. And the notes blown from these instruments

are rich and woody, with a sweet hoarseness and whispering like the rustle of leaves and hoof-sounds in dry grass.

Now the Araby name for a flute is a gasba, and because this name is fruitier and huskier than "flute," just as a gasba is fruitier and huskier than a Northern pipe, I will in future call Mustapha a maker of the gasba. Mustapha loved each gasba, from the moment when he scraped the knots from the green bamboo and hung it to yellow in the sun, where it ripened like the apricots in his garden, to the moment when he drew forth its virgin note and thrilled it with the divine breath of music. He felt, indeed, when he lifted a young gasba to his lips to impart this breath of life, something of the pleasure of Allah, who smiled when he heard the first cry issue from the lips of man, his creation-and a troublesome one at that, with none of the docility of Mustapha's gasba. Before that auspicious moment, however, the gasba had been hollowed out, cunningly pierced with holes, scraped and altered many times,

fitted with a mouthpiece and engraven with fair designs. Once tested through the gamut of its five or six notes, the gasba was plastered with wet henna, and polished by Mustapha's wife, until, complete and perfect, it waited on a string with others like itself for the purchaser.

Sometimes a gasba was unhooked from the row by the master and lifted again to his lips. Then it would thrill to a lovesong, or the Song of the Stranger, or a song that was no song at all, but just a trilling like the trilling of birds. So well did Mustapha play this song, that it was said that once, when travelling as a young man to Constantine with nothing but piety and a flute as means of subsistence, he sat down in the shade of a wild plum tree and began to play, and that the wild birds gathered around him and answered him, call by call, note by note.

All this while, even as Mustapha did, I am forgetting the daughter for the reed. Not that Mustapha did not love his daughter, for she was as dutiful as she was beautiful and pious. Her name was Zohara, which means Orange-Blossom, and she was as white and fragrant as her name. She was diligent too, and worked busily in the house, cooking and washing, spinning and weaving, crochetting bed-covers and what not besides for the house; and in her odd moments working wonderful designs on silk with her needle for rich merchants who bought such things for small sums from her mother and herself in order to sell them again at large prices to their customers.

For Mustapha himself was not rich: at current rates he sold a small pipe for twopence-halfpenny and a large one for threepence, and this does not spell a fortune. Nevertheless, with what he earned by his music in the evenings by going round from café to café, he had enough for comfort. In Mustapha's country one has always enough even with nothing at all.

Now Zohara had one accomplishment that was scarcely womanly; yet as she only used it to give her father pleasure it could hardly be said to be detrimental to her modesty. Most Arab girls can manipulate the darbouka, which is an earthenware drum made of sheepskin stretched over a vase, and most Arab girls can sing; but Zohara also played the gasba, though unsuitable for womankind' in spite of the little

breath that is needed and the slenderness of the instrument. She could play, and play well, and her father would often embrace her with tears in his eyes for pleasure after listening. The music drew his very soul out of him, why, he knew not, just as young men in spring when they hear the turtledoves in the palm gardens. Zohara knew melodies that were very ancient, she knew also those that were made yesterday in the cafés, the gay and the sad. She could play the song that Miloud the musician made for Mekki, keeper of the Hammam, when his only son died of a fever, and the song that Beda made for the light-hearted French lady who loved the cadi's son. She could play on her flute the airs sung in the dancing cafés although she had never set foot in one; she could pipe also the stirring Turkish music played by the Tirailleurs when they marched by the house. Her father had only to hum a tune once over to her, and she at once had it by heart, beautifying it by grace-notes, trills, and liquids till Mustapha could only cry, as he clapped his hands to his ears to shut out the enchantment, "Oh, Zohara, my daughter! If only thou hadst been a boy, our fortunes were assuredly made. Since thou art a girl, I have a mind to beat thee for excelling thy father and for melting his soul with thy fingers!"

Nevertheless he made the girl a very cunning and intricate gasba, over which he spent a full year's labor, both in making and decoration. At the end of that time the girl had reached her sixteenth year, and it was high time that she should have been married. Nor were suitors lacking, for the fame of her beauty had gone abroad, and mothers said, "If I can secure such a girl for my son, surely he will be satisfied with my choice, and all will be harmony in the household." When the matter was mentioned to Mustapha he grew blacker than Bou Cornin in a storm, and when his wife, Khedija, became importunate, he chastised her, and thereafter spoke to no one for a space of three days. For he could not bear the thought of losing his daughter's music.

"Daughters every man hath, or can beget," he exclaimed, "but what is the loss of a daughter compared to the loss of an instrument of sweet music, a precious breath, an enchantress of souls? No, I will not part with the girl."

Zohara pouted. She went to the mar

riages of her friends and saw their gifts and trousseaux and ate the marriage cakes. She, too, became languid for want of a lover and imagined that her husband when she beheld his face, would be surpassingly handsome and kind, and that to him she would play such melodies of love as would draw his heart to her before ever he had seen her face. Never would two beings love each other as she and her husband. Each time that there was talk of a suitor, she thought, "This then is the lover chosen for me by heaven," and set herself to imaginings of him.

There came a day when the rich cadi's son, the same for whom the gay French lady had caused a song to be made, asked her hand. He had heard so much of her rarity and beauty that he openly languished for love of her, and paid Miloud several gold pieces to write a song about her. In due time the song reached the imprisoned nightingale, and indeed, when she went out wrapped from head to foot in her woollen haik with her mother to the cemetery, or to the tomb of Lalla Menara, or to visit a neighbor, she heard it sung at the street corners.

But though the cadi's son was a match that every girl in El-Hathera might have envied, her father refused this also, spite of the fact that the cadi himself came to reason with him.

Zohara wept, for she liked the thought of the cadi's son in causing the song to be written for her, and she had it from a cousin of his that he was a well-favored youth, such as she could have loved. But again, she reflected on the gay French lady, and consoled herself with the thought that if he were not faithful to his loves, he might also be capricious with his wife, and variable in temper.

Several nights after, when Mustapha was abed and asleep, he was roused by his wife. "There is a great knocking without," said she anxiously. "What can it be?"

Mustapha, only half awake, listened. His house was placed in such neighborhood to the gate that noise was no new thing, but this was something out of the common. He hastily drew his burnous over his head, and, holding it about him, and thrusting his yellow shoes on his feet, ran out through the courtyard into the street. There was a terrific banging at the gate, and curses

without number. The guardians, soldiers, but stupid fellows, stood terrified, not daring to unbar it.

"If they had asked civilly and given the password," complained one, “we should have opened!"

The police, summoned by his whistle, were gathering as he spoke and a rabble of the curious and the good-for-nothing. Finally they opened the gate a little way, meaning to question further, but before the officials could bring out a word, a gigantic horseman on a strong horse had spurred through, had taken a flying leap over the crowd, and was clattering at full gallop down the street. It was so suddenly done that the soldiers and watchmen could only gape upon one another and wonder if a man or djinn rode the horse. By eight in the morning it was commonly reported in the bazaars that a djinn, eight feet in height, on a white horse from whose nostrils fire and smoke proceeded, had flown over the crowd and had alighted on the topmost minaret of the city. The soldiers and watchmen were discreet enough not to contradict the story and to keep the real history, which was not very creditable, to themselves.

But, as a matter of fact, the same horseman, accompanied by a second who was Si Achmed Safti, a well-known Turkish physician, renowned for his skill, had left the city again before daybreak, and had spurred away into the desert. It was evening before the hakim returned, and when he entered his café for his customary pipes and coffee-he was a great kif smoker-and his game of dominoes with Yussef the barber, he was more than ordinarily grave.

"

What is the matter?" asked his friend, when, after many pipes of kif, Achmed's face had lightened and his tongue loosened.

"I have been to Ourlal," the hakim said in a low voice, “to attend a woman at the request of Sidi Saed."

"A woman!" exclaimed the barber in tones of great surprise; "and in the house of Sidi Saed!"

"It is a mysterious story, my friend, and I should not care to tell it in the open streets, but to thee, my discreet Yussef, with whom secrets are safe, I can confide the thing."

The barber said nothing. He watched the hakim fill the small bowl of his kif-pipe with the golden-green herb, and waited.

"At an early hour," began the hakim,

"I was roused this morning by a commotion in the courtyard, and on going out to see what was wrong, I found a servant on his way to my apartment to tell me that an importunate fellow was without, who would speak with me. I went outside, and found a horseman on a white horse, who entreated me with civility to forgive him for disturbing me at so early an hour, but that a woman was attacked by a mortal sickness at Ourlal and that I must accompany him thither at once. I pointed out that Ourlal was many kilometres into the desert, but he would take no refusal. From his dress I guessed him to be wealthy, and seeing in his impatience some promise of reward adequate to the service he demanded of me, I had my mare saddled, and galloped with him down the streets, though my eyes were glued together by sleep. I shouted the password to the sentries at the gate, which my companion confessed he had forgotten in his agitation, and we began our journey down the Tizi road. As we passed the holy tomb of Sidi bel Hassan, whose white dome was gray as a dove's wing in the early light, I suddenly began to wonder whether this was not a pretext to lure me into the desert and to rob me of my excellent mare, which, as you know, was a present from the Bey of Tunis when I attended him last spring during the absence of the Court physician. My companion might be one of the band of rascals who played such a clever trick on our good Cadi the other day as he was on his way to the hot springs-thou rememberest? I kept my hand on my revolver, prepared to shoot at the first sign of treachery, but when my fellow-rider turned round, and I could see his face plainly in the level beams of the rising sun, I perceived that he was none other but Sidi Saed. Presently we were forced, on account of the depth and looseness of the sand to relax our pace somewhat, and I began to question him. But he answered me little or nothing. On arriving at Ourlal we rode straight to a house a little apart from the rest, and leaving our horses with a servant, we entered, Sidi Saed preceding me with a hasty step. I followed. In a room, and entirely unattended except for an old negress, lay a young woman of very dark complexion but of uncommon beauty. Sidi Saed, without the least attempt at further restraint, cast

himself over the girl's body and burst into sobs and bitter reproaches. I begged him to calm himself. "It is possible, Sidi," I said, "that she is in a swoon. Therefore let me see her." He raised himself, and I saw that she was, without doubt, dead, probably of a syncope, as there was no outward disease.

"As soon as I had finished my diagnosis, I turned to him and made known my opinion; namely that the young woman had been dead for many hours, and that as the result of some severe shock or exertion. He fell at once into a frenzy of grief, as unfitting his dignity and position as it was incomprehensible, for the girl was assuredly not of gentle birth, and though she was attired like a princess had the type of the Nail tribe. Sidi Saed's youth can no longer excuse him, for is he not thirty, and the son of the richest and gravest Sheik in the whole province?"

The barber smoked in silence, being a charitable man, and then said, "Thou, my friend, art a Turk, and the Turks do not understand love as we Arabs. If Sidi Saed loved the girl, excessive grief would not be misplaced. Truly, in scraping many chins, one learns a little of our frail nature."

"For a favorite wife or woman of his household, perhaps," the hakim rejoined. "But for a dancing-girl it is sheer folly. Are there not many more as beautiful and as complaisant?"

"They say that Sidi Saed lost his first wife and divorced his second two years ago. Since then he has refused every match proposed to him by our noblest families. This must be the dancing-girl Aziza of whom there had been so much talk!"

The hakim frowned. "There is too much public talk of women nowadays! This is the influence of the French whose own women are without shame."

"Well, well, one must walk with the times. This Aziza, it seems, was offered marriage by Sidi Saed."

"Allah defend us! The son of such a father!" the hakim exclaimed. "And this while virtuous maidens are still unwed!"

Soon the grief of Sidi Saed over the death of Aziza became public property. He returned to El-Hathera, it is true, but he ate little, wore a black burnous over a black gandourah; a black turban and black