The City and the World and Other Stories

The City and the World
and Other Stories
FRANCIS CLEMENT KELLEY
Author of The Last Battle of the Gods, Letters to Jack. The Book of Red and Yellow. Etc., Etc.
SECOND EDITION EXTENSION PRESS 223 W. Jackson Boulevard CHICAGO 1913

These stories were not written at one time, nor were they intended for publication in book form. For the most part they were contributions to Extension Magazine , of which the author is Editor, and which is, above all, a missionary publication. Most of them, therefore, were intended primarily to be appeals, as well as stories. In fact, there was not even a remote idea in the author's mind when he wrote them that some day they might be introduced to other readers than those reached by the magazine itself. In fact, he might almost say that the real object of most of the stories was to present a Catholic missionary appeal in a new way. Apparently the stories succeeded in doing that, and a few of them were made up separately in booklets and used for the propaganda work of The Catholic Church Extension Society. Then came a demand for the collection, so the writer consented to allow the stories to appear in book form; hoping that, thus gathered together, his little appeals for what he considers the greatest cause in the world may win a few new friends to the ideas which gave them life and name.
FRANCIS CLEMENT KELLEY.
Chicago, Illinois, July 30, 1913.
Father Ramoni suddenly felt his joy congealing into a cold fear.

FATHER DENFILI, old and blind, telling his beads in the corner of the cloister garden, sighed. Father Tomasso, who had brought him from his confessional in the great church to the bench where day after day he kept his sightless vigil over the pond of the goldfish, turned back at the sound, then, seeing the peace of Father Denfili's face, thought he must have fancied the sigh. For sadness came alien to the little garden of the Community of San Ambrogio on Via Paoli, a lustrous gem of a little garden under its square of Roman sky. The dripping of the tiny fountain, tinkling like a bit of familiar music, and the swelling tones of the organ, drifting over the flowers that clustered beneath the statue of Our Lady of Lourdes, so merged their murmurings into the peacefulness of San Ambrogio, that Father Tomasso, just from the novitiate, felt intensely that he knew he must have dreamed Father Denfili's sigh. For what could trouble the old man here in San Ambrogio on this, the greatest day of the Community?