"It need not make any difference between us, dear friend. I so wanted that it should not. You take it so nobly. It is an example to me."

He received her pressure a little dryly. "I am glad that you have told me, Mrs. Winton," he said, rising; "it will help me shape my course in the future.”

"I hoped it might, - I was quite willing to sacrifice myself."

"But there is n't need, you see; and it would be out of the question if there were. But why should you worry? It is not a crime that a man should be thought to be in love with a woman. Whether he is or not is a matter it seems to me, quite between themselves."

"Quite," she admitted. "You cheer me wonderfully. I was so afraid it might reach you through some other source, and that you would shrink from seeing me. Then I did want to warn you to be careful

-you will be careful, won't you? not to give color for such gossip in other quarters. I so want you to keep your ideals fresh and pure. Your blue girdle was quite a symbol for me.'

"It will not be any longer," he said. “I am out of the society; did n't you know it ?"

"Did n't I know it? How should I know it? You don't tell me your secrets. Ah, then there is all the more need to be strong, to be careful, is n't there?”

"Quite so. What you have told me tonight will be a help.”

"I so hoped it might be," she repeated, as she put her hand in his. She met his frank look with eyes full of unshed tears, which glistened with an odd effect in the moonlight.

As Carr turned out of High Street the evening was still young; the moon was sailing serenely in mid heaven, amidst some long slim clouds; there was a tender little breeze abroad which whispered in the elm-trees, and made the pines to murmur pleasantly in the old churchyard. A few moments' rapid walking brought him to a house that set well back from the road that led out of Kingsbridge

on quite the other side of the town. As he strolled up the little inclined avenue toward the old-fashioned house with its broad veranda and big pillars, he saw some one in a white dress sitting on the steps. Fortunately enough a closer inspection revealed that it was Wilhelmina Paine, and that she was sitting there alone. He thought there was a glimmer of pleasure in her eyes, as she greeted him, and explained that her family were gone to bed.

"It was so pleasant out here that I have been sitting on alone. I am glad to see you. If you sit there on the steps you can get a bit of the view through the trees. I like that tower in silhouette."

"A symbol, eh?" asked Carr.

"Oh, I don't go in for the symbolic. It is just good and Gothic and pleasing to the eye, and the perspective is fine; there seem to be vast reaches beyond, and the vista makes it a kind of picture. A symbol of good taste, if you will. All Kingsbridge is not good taste, more's the pity."

"That is true enough," he admitted. "It seems odd that when they had that admirable little bit of Gothic to set the pace, they did n't keep it up."

"Oh, we mortals don't follow a pace, even when it is a good one. I should think you clergymen would have cause to bemoan that rather frequently."

"We bemoan it enough," he responded; "but rather more the fact that the one we set is not often quite what it purports to be. I have just been told that the parish is raking me over the coals at a tremendous rate."

"What for?" asked Wilhelmina.

"Don't you know?" he questioned. Her frank look was quite disingenuous, as she answered, with a little smile, "I think your blue girdle has worried some good people, they think it is dreadfully Roman and dangerous."

--

"Well, it won't worry them any more. I have given it up."

"And your vows with it?" She looked incredulous.

"Well, in more ways than one. "Knowing her, one would say she was capable of that."

"She is capable of a great deal," asserted Carr. "Mrs. Winton is a genius, in her way."

"Mrs. Winton is a fool," said Miss Paine, with a conviction that startled Carr into laughter.

"It depends on how you take her," he conditioned.

"Oh, there are ways and ways of doing that. I think I have ceased taking her altogether."

"That is what she complains of you, as I tried to tell you before. She gave me a long talking-to to-night. She says the town is talking about her."

"It is," assented Wilhelmina.
"And about me," he added.

"Oh, it has always done that," she said with a laugh.

"And I put two and two together."
"Did she not help a bit?"
"Well

a little perhaps. I seem to have been a kind of ass.'

"Oh, don't say that," protested Wilhelmina. "You are young; and youth, you know, is so sweet and pathetic and foolish and sad and glad and vain!"

Carr began to laugh. "Why, you do go in for the symbolic.'

"The symbolic? Does that seem symbolic? I think it is very obvious. There is not a great deal of nuance in a string of adjectives. Oh, no, dear friend, I don't go in for nuance; I don't go in for anything. What is the use? It all means so

little.

There is nothing in the world, nothing whatever. Except to be disillusioned, that's there, oh,

that's yes, quite, quite there. It is with us every day, every hour, every minute. We can't escape it, we can't get away from it, we can't get beyond it. It sticks to us closer than a brother, closer than our clothes. It is in the air we breathe, in the water we drink, in the food we eat. There is nothing to do but to strive to be resigned. To bear our trials bravely, to live ah, how we should as the stars live." "Oh, don't, don't!" he protested. "I can't stand it; I ought not to stand it. I feel like a traitor. How on earth it's she, it's she! but you have kept yourself mightily hidden

oh,

"Oh, no," went on Wilhelmina, "what would be the use? It is not even worth while to keep one's self hidden, it is not worth while to try to reveal one's self. It is just what one is what the day shows one to be — in one's little place. Oh, it is sweet to have a friend who understands."

"By Jove," he cried, and a queer dizzy feeling of hilarity and joy crept over him, "I understand one thing, and that is that I have been head over ears in love with you for the last six months."

The girl looked at him in sudden alarm; the gayety for a moment went out of her eyes; a momentary joy shone there; then the old shyness crept back; then the mockery; and she looked up at him. frankly.

"Is this the way the little scenes in High Street come to an end?" she asked.

"Oh, bother High Street! I am sick and tired of being made a fool of by a parcel of women, of passing for a kind of sanctified bachelor. I have been in love with you since we began that music together at St. Luke's. That was the real reason I threw up the society, and put away the girdle. I honestly thought I wanted to be a celibate. But I could not keep away from you, you saw that. And when I heard that the parish thought I was in love, I realized that the parish was right. I saw a good many things in that

quarter of an hour by the light of Mrs. Winton's illuminating conversation. One thing as plain as day, and I rushed off here to tell you of it. I am to have the parish, if I want it; the rector is going to resign; but if I stay you have got to share it with me. I won't stay in this town unprotected another month. Otherwise, I am off for China. It is for you to say, Wilhelmina. Which shall it be?"

He took her hands and looked into her eyes, where he saw a good many different expressions in the space of half a minute.

"Oh, the poor heathen!" she said, withdrawing her hands, "you ought to go."

"It is the Chinese you are thinking of, eh?"

A fortnight later Mrs. Winton went for her annual outing to her little cottage on the coast. From "Resthaven" she wrote Carr a sweet little note, in a slender hand, on soft gray note paper, to which there was attached the suspicion of a violet scent. It was penned "in the murmur of the sea, under the light of the stars." She told him it would be a long time before she would be back at Kingsbridge; he would be rector then and there would be a Mrs. Carr.

"It is sweet to me to feel that when I do go back, when I gather strength to take up my work again, there will be in the dear old rectory two good, good friends who understand me, who know a little of my sufferings, and how little there is left in life for me. I have so few joys that perhaps you can hardly understand what a pleasure it is to me to see joy in the hearts of my friends. You will never know the comfort it is to me to feel that now you are in a position where horrid calumny can never fix upon you as its victim again, nor the voice of slander wound you as once it did. It was fine of you to understand me so beautifully, to see so clearly my subtle meaning under my poor, agitated, stumbling words. But we must never speak of these things more. My prayer for you both is that you may never know disillusion, that sweet, gracious Maya may ever be yours."

Then she added in a postscript: "There is just one little favor I should like to ask of you. Will you not send me the blue girdle you used to wear? No one shall ever know of it. I will put it away among my poor little treasures, among the mementos of my far-away bright past. It is a symbol to me, and it will be a help to have it."

Wilhelmina wrapped up the girdle, and Carr sent it on to "Resthaven." A few days later came back another little gray note, on which was inscribed, very simply, in Mrs. Winton's fine, clear hand, the single word, "Thanks."

"MIDDLE age does not look on life like youth; we cannot make it. And why mix the years and the thoughts? Let the young carry their own burdens and banner; and we ours. For me those young years are gone. I cannot go back to that tide. I hear the rush of it in quiet hours like the murmur of lost music." Such was Mr. Mitchell's answer forty years ago when he was asked to revise, for a new edition, those Reveries which had early won for him the fellowship of thousands of readers. Twenty years later came the same request from the publishers, met by a similar protest. He added a word of grateful surprise at the steady demand for the little book which, "in spite of its youngness and fervent rhetoric," appealed yearly to so many new readers and old friends. Thirty years ago these essays of reverie and dream-life were familiar to college students throughout our country; they were read, not as "college requirements in English," but because they appealed to the emotions and ambitions of young manhood. In those days the literary rather than the athletic spirit pervaded our universities. The books were also household favorites in that same past, before the reign of Women's Clubs and classes, and before the surplus of light periodicals had intruded upon cultural reading by the fireside.

In these later days, younger students may not be sure of "Ik Marvel's" work in letters, but they have found in the rural and literary studies of Donald G. Mitchell the same happy fancy and form which charmed the older generation. To name the essential quality of his writings we must turn to the primal meaning of sentimental, without any taint of excess or artifice. His theme may be idyllic or

realistic, but it is always treated with wholesome, frank sentiment. To-day, as in the past, his fancies and musings, his gleanings in rural and literary fields, give mental pleasure and more gracious temper. Past fourscore, in touch with the highest life in ideal and actuality, Mr. Mitchell deserves the tribute which he once gave to Irving, "Fashions of books may change — do change; a studious realism may put in disorder the quaint dressing of his thought. . . . But the fashion of his heart and of his abiding good-will towards men will last-will last while the hills last."

In his books are common traits of other favorites, - the geniality of Lamb and Irving, the domestic tenderness of Longfellow and Curtis, the subtle wit of Lowell and Holmes, the outdoor delight of Walton, Thoreau, and Miss Mitford, the romantic fancy of such modern reveries as My Lady Nicotine and Dream Days. There is also a strong individuality which emphasizes, if it does not explain, the charm of both his earlier and later books. The reader knows his author's personality, a man of rare kindliness, well-trained mind, wise ideals, and a winsome modesty shown by the greeting, given with a hearty hand-clasp of welcome, to a recent "interviewer" who called at Edgewood, "Well, I am sorry to say I dread your call as much as I would that of a kindly disposed dentist."

The roots of this personality may be traced in two sturdy, college-bred New England families, the Mitchells and the Woodbridges. The masterful Scotch ancestor, Donald Grant, has had his name twice honored. Alfred Mitchell, father of our author, was a fine scholar, with plenty of courage in matters of duty, but "diffident to a fault." On the hillside

burial-ground in Norwich, Connecticut, overlooking the church where he preached for seventeen years, is the record of his character, "sound in doctrine, plain and faithful in his preaching, conscientious and upright, amiable and affectionate in every relation of life." At the Otis Library of the same city may be read three or four of his printed sermons, undoubtedly "sound in doctrine," but no less kindly in their appeal to his "dear, perishing hearers." His rural tastes heralded the joys of his son at Edgewood. Up a little path behind the parsonage, at the entrance to dense woods still standing, he constructed a "retreat." Mrs. Sigourney, neighbor and friend of the family, said that within this arbor one would always find a single book, the Bible.

Though Norwich was not long the home of Donald Mitchell after his boyhood and his father's death, yet he never lost his vivid impressions of his birthplace. For Miss Perkins's book, Old Houses of ye Antient Town of Norwich, he made a map from his memories of the town about 1830, when he was eight years old. It is most interesting, this colored drawing, "A Boyish Remembrance." Incidentally, he marked the Court House, the Brick Tavern, and an occasional church, school, or residence; but with conspicuous skill he located the Skating-Pond, the Peat-Pond, the RopeWalk, the Watering-Trough, the Red Barn, the cranberry meadow, the clump of mulberry trees, and the long avenue of white sycamores.

Behind the New Haven homestead of Donald Mitchell rise the Woodbridge hills, commemorating the name of his maternal family. On his last public appearance four years ago at the Yale bicentennial, he gave the address of dedication for Woodbridge Hall. Recalling the family traits, he expressed, in one of his unique metaphors, the true meaning of the occasion: "And so this great belt of Woodbridge influences which I have sketched in bald outline, cropping out in churches, in teeming villages, in mills

that fire the October nights,- this whole Woodbridge belt, I say, is to-day buckled by this jewel of a building about the loins of this stalwart University of Yale!"

In Ellington, in old Winsor, at Dr. John Hall's famous school for boys, Donald Mitchell passed a brief season and later used some impressions of this strict, nature-loving master and other village types in his story of Dr. Johns. Some pages of Dream Life are autobiographical in feeling, if not in fact, especially the chapter on "Cloister Life." Far more than to the average student of his day or of ours, his college years gave mental equipment and focus towards the future. Here he began literary work on the college journal; as class orator, he made a personal plea for "The Dignity of Learning" as a vital part of life's purpose. With the first steps towards literature, there was mingled that love for country life which gave impetus to much of his writing. He came in direct contact with the soil by hard work, during vacations and after college, at the ancestral farm in Salem, near Norwich. The grapes and the nuts, the clover, the pastures, and the barn-rafters were photographed upon his heart. In the book of mature life, Rural Studies, he devoted a chapter to this large farm, "wild, unkempt, slatternly," with elements of drudgery and ugliness, but with many compensations for senses and soul. "Nothing to see? Lo, the play of light and shade over the distant hills, or the wind, making tossed and streaming wavelets on the rye. Nothing to hear? Wait a moment and you shall listen to the bursting, melodious roundelay of the merriest singer upon earth, the black and white-coated Bobo-Lincoln, as he rises on easy wing, floats in sunshine, and overflows with song, then sinks, as if exhausted by his brilliant solo, to some swaying twig of the alder bushes. Nothing to hope? The maize leaves through all their close, serried ranks are rustling with the promise of golden corn. Nothing to conquer? Nothing to conquer? There are the brambles, the roughnesses, the inequali