From the painting by F. Brangwyn

"THEIR LANTERN JUST BROUGHT OUT THE GHOSTLINESS OF GRAVESTONES LEANING BETWEEN THE COLUMNS OF THE CYPRESSES"

See "The Valley of Mills," page [659]

McCLURE'S MAGAZINE

VOL. XXXI OCTOBER, 1908 No. 6

Table of Contents

FAMILIAR
LETTERS OF
AUGUSTUS
SAINT-GAUDENS

EDITED BY
ROSE STANDISH NICHOLS

ILLUSTRATED WITH PHOTOGRAPHS

Copyright, 1908, by The S. S. McClure Co. All rights reserved

These familiar letters from Augustus Saint-Gaudens show the artist as his intimate friends knew him. They were written at odd moments, often in haste, and never with a shadow of self-consciousness. They are interesting, not as literary productions, but as the simple record of a critical period in his career.

"Le Cœur au Métier," the motto which he wished to place in his studio, will be seen to express the spirit of his life. Other keen interests he had, but they were never allowed to interfere with his work, and he seldom felt the need of any recreation apart from it. One of his friends used to complain that in the midst of their merrymaking an abstracted look would come into his eyes and his mind would hark back to sculpture. Although he was extremely modest and was given to underrating his powers in other directions, from his childhood he confidently expected to be a great artist. As a little school-boy, sent from his father's shop to do errands, he would sit in the omnibus and look about at his well-dressed fellow-passengers, and wonder what they would think if they realized what he was going to be some day. But even as a child he never dreamed of achieving his ambition without years of ceaseless struggle.

When the boy left school, at the age of thirteen, this struggle began. In 1848 his father, a Frenchman, had brought his Irish wife and his baby, Augustus, to New York, where he worked as a shoemaker. He was poor, and was anxious that his eldest son should become self-supporting as soon as possible; so at thirteen the boy was apprenticed to a cameo-cutter, whose trade he mastered with surprising readiness, at the same time studying drawing at the Cooper Institute in the evenings. In a little while he was not only earning his own living by cameo-cutting, but excelled all his fellow-pupils at the night-school in talent and perseverance.

AUGUSTUS SAINT-GAUDENS
FROM A PHOTOGRAPH IN THE COLLECTION OF MRS. ROSE NICHOLS

Saint-Gaudens' artistic education was completed in Europe, where he went at the age of eighteen and stayed almost continuously for nearly fourteen years. His father sent him first to Paris. There his progress in the art schools was marked, although he continued to support himself by his trade, and could give only half his time to sculpture. At the outbreak of the Franco-Prussian War he reluctantly refrained from enlisting in the French army and left for Italy. It was in Rome that he first found sculpture remunerative, and finally was able to drop cameo-cutting. The years from 1866 to 1880, which he spent in Rome and Paris, with only occasional visits to America, were singularly happy ones, characterized by a capacity for continuous work at a high pitch of excellence.

The letters from Saint-Gaudens printed here were written eighteen years later, when the sculptor had come into full possession of his genius. They cover a most critical period in his career, and record his greatest artistic triumph—his recognition in France as one of the foremost of modern sculptors. After he returned to the United States in 1880 he lived and worked in New York, and by 1897 had built up a national reputation. His work was progressing under the most favorable conditions, with the encouragement of an ever-increasing circle of friends and admirers. On the other hand, in France, his father's country, where he himself had been educated, his work was practically unknown. A few of his former comrades at the Beaux-Arts, judging his sculpture from photographs, did not hesitate to tell Saint-Gaudens that it had been over-praised in America and would obtain no such appreciation in France. The sculptor felt that, in order to learn his own deficiencies and to find out where he really stood among his contemporaries, he must return to Paris, exhibit at the Salon, and run the gauntlet of the best critics. All his friends on both sides of the water discouraged him from taking this step, and he himself dreaded it; but he believed that, in justice to himself and to his work, he must make this venture.

After his decision was made, however, his departure had to be postponed until various duties were fulfilled. The Shaw and Logan monuments had first to be completed and unveiled, and a number of smaller commissions had to be executed. From the beginning of his work upon the Shaw memorial there had been bitter opposition upon the part of his friends to the symbolical figure hovering above Colonel Shaw and his men, but the sculptor clung to his original conception with great tenacity. Saint-Gaudens' best friend, Bion, a Parisian sculptor and critic, whose opinion he valued highly, had never liked the idea of this figure. Just before Bion's death he received a photograph of the monument as finished in the clay, and he wrote a long letter to Saint-Gaudens, complaining that the angel was as superfluous as a figure of Simplicity would be, floating in the air above the bent figures in Millet's "Gleaners," and concluding: "I had no need of your 'nom de Dieu' allegory on the ceiling. Your negroes marching in step and your Colonel leading them told me enough. Your priestess merely bores me as she tries to impress upon me the beauty of their action."

CARYATID FOR THE VANDERBILT HOUSE

Concerning this letter of Bion's, Saint-Gaudens wrote:

"The Players, New York,
Jan. 26th, 1897

"Dear ——

"I meant to write you at length tonight but I started with a letter to Bion which has kept me busy till now, 11 P.M. It is in reply to the one from him that I enclose, in which at the end he says a word of you.

"I am not disturbed by his dislike of my figure. It is because it does not look well in the photograph. If the figure in itself looked well, he would have liked it, I know, and notwithstanding his admirable comparison with the Millet I still think that a figure, if well done in that relation to the rest of the scheme, is a fine thing to do. The Greeks and Romans did it finely in their sculpture. After all it's the way the thing's done that makes it right or wrong, that's about the only creed I have in art. However his letter is interesting, although very sad, dear old boy.

"All of the Shaw is out of the studio. They cast the Logan on Monday and I am working like the devil on the Sherman. I've found precisely the model I wished, just his size, the same pose of the head and the same thinness; a Milanese peasant who poses like a rock. Next week I commence the nude of the Victory from a South Carolinian girl with a figure like a goddess.

"Affectionately yours
A. St.-G."

DETAIL FROM THE SHAW MEMORIAL, SHOWING THE ALLEGORICAL FIGURE FULL FACE, AS IN THE FIRST DESIGN

Copley print, copyrighted by Curtis and Cameron

DETAIL FROM THE SHAW MEMORIAL, SHOWING THE ALLEGORICAL FIGURE WITH THE HEAD TURNED MORE IN PROFILE, AS IN THE FINAL EXECUTION

Bion died shortly after writing his objections to the allegorical figure, and if anything could have changed Saint-Gaudens' decision regarding his composition of the Shaw monument, his friend's letter would certainly have done so. Although Saint-Gaudens and Bion had studied sculpture together at the Beaux-Arts in their youth, it was not until years afterward that, through a constant interchange of letters, their relation became a close one. Bion gave up sculpture as a profession, and devoted himself to friendship and philosophy. He dropped into the studios of a few intimates every day, frequented art exhibitions, and attended lectures upon philosophy and psychology at the Sorbonne or the Collège de France; but the long letters which he used to write Saint-Gaudens every week became more and more the chief business of his life. He kept his friend informed as to what was going on in Paris; of the doings of their little circle of acquaintances; and wrote him detailed descriptions of all important events in the world of art, besides giving him a great deal of disinterested advice upon every conceivable subject, including his work and the conduct of his life. Saint-Gaudens used to reply at great length, but his letters were destroyed, according to directions left in his friend's will. When the news of Bion's death reached Saint-Gaudens, he wrote:

"148 W. 36th St., Feb. 17th, 1897

"Of course the one thing on my mind, the terrible spectre that looms up, is poor Bion's death; night and day, at all moments, it comes over me like a wave that overwhelms me, and it takes away all heart that I may have in anything. Today, however, I have had a kind of sad feeling of companionship with him, that seems to bring him to me, in working over the head of the flying figure of the Shaw. The bronze founders are not ready for it yet. I have had a stamp made of the figure and have helped it a great deal, I am sure you will think. You know that Thayer told me he thought an idea I once had of turning the head more profile, was a better one than that I had evolved, and I've always wished to do it. It is done, and it's the feeling of death and mystery and love in the making of it that brought my friend back to me so much today.... But the young, thank Heaven, do not feel these blows so profoundly as do older people. In one of my blue fits the other day I felt the end of all things, and reasoning from one thing to the other and about the hopelessness of trying to fathom what it all means, I reached this: that we know nothing, (of course) but a deep conviction came over me like a flash that at the bottom of it all, whatever it is, the mystery must be beneficent. It does not seem as if the bottom of all were something malevolent; and the thought was a great comfort.

"I shall be all the week at the figure. I've made an olive branch instead of the palm,—it looks less 'Christian martyr'-like,—and I have lightened and simplified the drapery a great deal. I had not seen it for two or three months and I had a fresh impression.

"At 27th Street I've finished the nude of the Sherman and next week I begin to put his clothes on him. I had another day with the model for the Victory last Sunday, and that, too, is progressing rapidly. Zorn, the Swedish artist, was with me all day Sunday making an etching of me while the model rested; it is an admirable thing and I will send you a copy of it.

"The studio is once more in a fearful condition with the casting of the Logan, and the getting of the Puritan ready to photograph and cast for the Boston Museum and to send abroad to have the reductions made....

"This letter is no good, but it must go; the clatter of seven moulders and sculptors does not help to the expression or the development of thought, confusion only——

"Affectionately
A. St.-G."

Copley print, copyrighted by Curtis and Cameron

MONUMENT TO COLONEL ROBERT GOULD SHAW, ERECTED AT BOSTON

"May 15th or 16th,
1897

"The Shaw goes to Boston on Thursday or Friday. I've done little else lately but run around about it until I am frantic. On the other hand, while waiting for some workmen yesterday, I had a great walk in the Babylonian East Side here. It was a beautiful day and one of great impressions.

"I have not commenced the Howells medallion yet, as I expected to be absent. I believe I told you I had a nice note from him.

A. St.-G."

MURAL PLAQUE ERECTED IN MEMORY OF DR. JAMES McCOSH

The Shaw memorial was unveiled in Boston, in the latter part of May, 1897. The erection of the monument had been so long delayed that Saint-Gaudens feared that the public had lost interest in the work, or would expect too much and be disappointed. On the contrary, its success was immediate, and made him very happy. Its appeal was to men of every condition, laymen as well as artists, and nothing ever pleased the sculptor more than the way it arrested the attention of almost every passer-by. In June, scarcely a month after the unveiling of the Shaw, another soldier's monument, the equestrian statue of General Logan, was unveiled at Chicago, and Saint-Gaudens went there to be present at the ceremony.

STATUE OF PETER COOPER, NEW YORK

"1142 The Rookery, Chicago, June 23, 1897

"I am again at the top of this big building here, and I will give you some description of the last 24 hours. At one o'clock yesterday Mrs. Deering, Mrs. French, Mr. French (brother and sister-in-law of Dan French) and I were placed in one carriage, Mr. Deering, Mrs. St.-G. and the editor of the 'Chicago Tribune' in another, and in the wake of a lot of other carriages and followed by a procession of them, we drove to the big stand. A great day; with a high wind and glorious sun. I was put in one of the seats in the Holy of Holies alongside of Mrs. Logan, if you please, and the president of the ceremonies. A lot of speeches, one of which was very good, and at the right moment the complicated arrangement of flags dropped, the cannon fired, the band played, Mrs. Logan wept, and I posed for a thousand snap photographs, 'a gleam of triumph passed over my face,' think of that! (vide 'Chicago Tribune').

"However, the monument looks impressive as I see it this morning for the first time with much of the disfiguring scaffolding gone. I stay here until Sunday, when I take the 5.30 P.M. train and shall get to New York Monday at 6 or 7. Last night we went to a great golf place where high merriment prevailed. This afternoon to Fort Sheridan. Tonight a reception at the Art Institute; tomorrow a lawn party at Burnham's and Sunday a visit to the great dredging canal; on Monday the cars and rest."

THE LOGAN MONUMENT, ERECTED AT CHICAGO

After the sculptor's return from Chicago, he continued his preparations for departure in New York.

"The Players, August 7, 1897

"Brander Matthews has just come and interrupted this with a long and interesting talk on the conventional in art and an article he has written and sent to Scribner's on it. You have often wondered what I think about things—I wonder myself; I think anything and everything. This seeing a subject so that I can side with either side with equal sympathy and equal convictions I sometimes think a weakness. Then again I'm thinking it a strength.

"Last night I dined with X—— and Y—— and passed a delightful evening with them. X—— cracked his constructed jokes and manufactured his silversmith puns, and cackled over them. We talked literature, English, French, and Taine's great work on English literature. We afterward went to the open air concert at the Madison Square Garden, and when we were not talking of anything else we talked on that subject of eternal interest and mystery 'les femmes.'"

Finally, in the autumn of 1897, after both the Shaw and Logan monuments had been unveiled, and various minor obstacles to his departure had been removed, Saint-Gaudens was ready to leave America. Opposition to his plan still came from every side. Many of his friends in New York seemed to feel that he was casting a certain reproach upon his country by his desire to profit by foreign criticism and to measure his work by European standards. They prophesied that his work would deteriorate under French influence. His few friends in Paris were equally discouraging. They did not hesitate to warn him that if he persisted in coming there he must be prepared to face indifference and failure. Even Bion, when Saint-Gaudens had asked him to get the opinions of a few French artists upon photographs of the Shaw memorial, had refused to do so, saying: "I shan't show your photographs to anyone. Shiff, MacMonnies, and Proctor have seen them, my poor old friend, and the others do not know you. They are quite indifferent about what goes on outside their own little show."

Saint-Gaudens himself feared that he might be making a serious mistake. The ocean voyage in itself was an ordeal to him, and before leaving he wrote: "I continue fencing and am preparing for the voyage as one prepares for a fight. I go to the theatre and that tides over the blue hours which lie between dinner and bed-time." But he felt that he must make the venture, whatever lay before him, and that he could never be satisfied until he had stood the test of a comparison with his chief contemporaries and until his work had been passed upon by the most sophisticated and penetrating critics of art. At the end of September, 1897, accompanied by his wife and his son, Homer, he sailed for England. After crossing to France, he thus described his first impressions:

"Hotel Normandy, Paris, Nov. 7th, 1897

"The beauty of the scenery and of the English homes and villages on the railroad from Southampton to London recalled the delightful impression of the last trip, when I was so light-hearted. The sense of order and thrift appealed to me strongly in comparison with the shiftlessness of America. Then London with its extraordinary impression of power and also of order. Homer and I went to see Hamlet. Read it, R——. As I grow older, the greatness of Shakspeare looms higher and higher; every line, every word is so deep, so true, 'never offending the modesty of nature withal,' as Hamlet himself advises the players.

"From London we came on the following day to Paris. The country between Calais and Dover seemed very grand; great rolling lands with immense fields being ploughed in the waning day. The peace, simplicity, and calm of it all was profoundly impressive. Just a ploughman and a boy, alone in the country on a hillside, following the horses and the plough along the deep, straight furrows; no fences, a clear sky with the half moon, and only a small clump or two of trees—all so orderly and grand."

For the first few weeks in Paris Saint-Gaudens was miserable. His studio, on the Rue de Bagneux, in the Latin Quarter, was large and cheerful, with comfortable quarters adjoining for his assistants, and he was extremely interested in his work upon the equestrian statue of General Sherman. But he missed his old friends and haunts in New York, the weather was gloomy and depressing, and he felt enervated and homesick. Almost none of the friends of his student days were there to welcome him back to Paris, and he was not in the mood to make new ones. Dr. Shiff, a retired physician with a philosophic turn of mind, and many years the sculptor's senior, was the only man he could count upon for regular companionship, though occasionally an old friend like Henry Adams, John Alexander, or Garnier would drop into the studio. John Sargent was another warm friend who helped to keep up his spirits and whom he admired intensely both as a man and as an artist. With Helleu, the etcher, they enjoyed spending a day or two at Chartres and Rheims. In the following letter he describes his first meeting with Whistler:

"Paris, Nov. 16th, 1897

"Mac and I made a short call on Whistler, whom I found much more human than I imagined him to be, and today I went to the Court of Appeals where a trial of his was to come off—it didn't,—but I had a delightful chat with him. He is a very attractive man with very queer clothes, a kind of 1830 coat with an enormous collar greater even than those of that period; a monocle, a strong jaw, very frizzly hair with a white mesh in it, and an extraordinary hat."

The brightest spot in Saint-Gaudens' winter was his visit to the south of France and to Italy, in the company of his friend Garnier, who, like Bion, had been a fellow-student of his at the École des Beaux-Arts years before. They left Paris in December, and went almost directly to Aspet and Salies du Salat, Gascon villages where Saint-Gaudens' father was born and where he worked at his trade as a young man. This was the first time that Augustus Saint-Gaudens had visited that country on the Spanish frontier where his paternal ancestors had lived for centuries and where many of their name still survived.

"Aspet, December, 1897

"I write this in the village where my father was born and today has been one of the most delightful days of my life. I have invited my old friend Garnier (a dear friend and the most delightful of companions) to travel with me. We left Paris yesterday morning and slept at Toulouse last night. We left there this morning before dawn and saw the sun rise over the Pyrenees on our way to Salies du Salat, a most picturesque and dirty village at the foot of the beautiful mountains. I inquired at the station if any Saint-Gaudens lived there. 'Yes, opposite the mairie.' We walked up a narrow Spanish-looking street and there was a little shoe-store and on it the sign 'Saint-Gaudens.' I woke my cousin up. His is the very house where father passed his childhood. We three walked over the town up to the cradle of the 'Comminges' just back of father's house, and we went around on the sward and on the old moat where the children now play and where his father and my father played when children. I cannot describe to you how I was moved by it all.

"After a characteristic déjeuner with the cousin, a typical French peasant, and his typical wife, we hired a wagon with two horses and drove three hours into the mountains through a wonderfully beautiful country, very Spanish in character, to this delightful village. Here father was born, and baptized in the little church right at hand from where I write. There are delightful fountains at every corner and an air of thrift, order, and cleanliness that you cannot imagine. We are in a nice hotel, a homelike place, and tomorrow, after seeing Market Day, we walk to Saint-Gaudens, about 12 miles from here. It is a most romantic spot; all the country and the people here have a good deal of the Spanish dignity. We are 30 miles from the frontier of Spain. I must stop now because my third cousin (his grandfather and mine were brothers) is coming. He is the postman of the village and the surrounding country, a handsome young fellow who carries the mail around on horseback, and who between times makes shoes."

Leaving this out-of-the-way corner of Gascony, under the shadow of the Pyrenees, Saint-Gaudens and Garnier traveled by Toulouse to Marseilles. From this port the sculptor had sailed twenty-seven or eight years before, when he first went to study in Rome. Now, with his old friend, he again climbed up to where the church of Notre-Dame de la Garde overlooks the Mediterranean, and was amused to remember the three days he had spent upon that hill-top, with little to eat but figs and chocolate, while awaiting the departure of his ship for Italy.

The two artists went by train from Marseilles to Nice and Ventimiglia, and then walked along the superb Cornice road to San Remo, conscious that every step brought them nearer to their beloved Italy. The hills, covered with palms and orange-trees, the sacred-looking groves of gray-green olives detached against the deep blue of the sea, recalled to Saint-Gaudens a story by Anatole France describing some early Christians in an olive grove overlooking the Mediterranean.

In Italy they stopped first at Pisa, and did not reach Rome much before midnight. Regardless of fatigue, Saint-Gaudens insisted upon starting out that night to revisit the favorite haunts of his student days, taking the reluctant Garnier with him. At a late hour they ended their excursion at the Café Greco, where the sculptor talked with a waiter who had served him with coffee in 1871. The next morning they spent in the gardens and the Bosco of the Villa Medici. Nothing seemed to them much changed, and their happiness was as great as if they had found their youth again in the land where they had left it. Saint-Gaudens afterward said that on the night of that arrival in Rome he felt as if he were slaking a great thirst. Before their return they also visited the Bay of Naples. Vivid memories of Italy were present with the sculptor until the end of his life, and during his last illness he said that one thing he wished to live for was to take again the drive from Salerno to Amalfi: the vineyards clinging to the hillsides, the cliffs with the blue waves breaking at their base, haunted him as a vision of exquisite beauty.

Late in the winter Saint-Gaudens returned to Paris, and when spring and the pleasant weather came on he was working again with great enthusiasm, preparing for the Salon. His exhibit at the Champs de Mars attracted much attention and elicited unexpected praise from the severest French critics.

"3, rue de Bagneux, Paris, May 16th, 1898

... "I must be brief today for Dr. Shiff is coming in to talk, and help me with his consoling philosophy as Bion did; and I must work, for the model leaves shortly, and I must use him every hour I can; so I will tell you briefly of what has happened.

"This Paris experience, as far as my art goes, has been a great thing for me. I never felt sure of myself before, I groped ahead. All blindness seems to have been washed away. I see my place clearly now, I know, or think I know, just where I stand. A great self-confidence has come over me and a tremendous desire and will to achieve high things, with a confidence that I shall, has taken possession of me. I exhibited at the Champs de Mars and the papers have spoken well and it seems as if I were having what they call a 'success' here. I send you some of the extracts from several of the principal artistic papers here, the 'Gazette des Beaux-Arts,' 'Art et Décoration,' and from the 'Dictionaire Encyclopédique Larousse'; four of these have asked permission to reproduce my work. The Director of the Luxembourg tells me he wishes something of mine, and other friends have asked that I be given the Legion of Honour. Of this latter you must say nothing, and I only speak of it to give you a true idea of what impressions I am undergoing.

"For four months it rained incessantly, but the great interest of preparing for the Salon has interested me. The sunshine has been a blessing, and Paris, with her smiles and green dress and the blue skies overhead captivates like a beautiful woman.

"There is something in the air here which pushes one to do beautiful things; it seems something actually atmospheric, something soft and gentle in the air.... Later Sargent came in very good spirits. We dined and went to the theatre together last night. He wished me to tell him when I go to London, as the fellows there wish to give me a great 'blow off.' And so it all goes; the sun is now pouring into the studio, and it all seems like a great dream."

The article in Art et Décoration to which Saint-Gaudens refers was written by Paul Leprieur. After attacking with great severity Rodin's "Balzac," the critic said:

"The more completely to forget this sinister vision, one may well linger before the work of a great sculptor, almost unknown among us, who reveals himself to us, so to speak, for the first time, with an altogether remarkable collection of monumental sculpture and photographs of monuments previously executed. We refer to M. Saint-Gaudens, an Irishman by birth, who has worked mainly for America, and who was, if I mistake not, the teacher of Mr. MacMonnies—a teacher far superior to his pupil. His exhibit is one of the surprises and delights of the Champs de Mars.

"Had we only the photographs which he shows us—whether of his Peter Cooper, his President Lincoln, the noble and serious allegorical figure for a tomb, called the Peace of God, or the charming caryatid for the Vanderbilt house—we could already perceive the grasp of composition, the decision of the contours, the depth of the sentiment expressed without any splurge or noise. This sculpture, in its acceptance, or ingenious re-shaping, of traditions from ancient sources, as well as in its modern inventiveness, imparts a savor of intimate charm, of dignity without parade, which are rare indeed in our day.

"The actual work exhibited simply confirms the impression of the photographs. To say nothing of the placques and medallions, models of a fine funeral bas-relief, and the highly entertaining and picturesque statue of a Puritan, the large high-relief dedicated to the memory of Colonel Robert Gould Shaw may well be esteemed as a model of intelligent decoration.

"The idea of representing, not the death scene itself, but the moment preceding it, and of showing the army of blacks, led by the white officer, filing by as if in a march to death, grave of mien, solemn, and heroic, is as novel as it is boldly treated. While presenting prodigies of skill (absolutely without triviality or pettiness in matters of detail), and modeled with a great freedom and understanding of how to arrange the various groups of lines in perspective,—which all men of his profession will admire,—everything is kept subordinate to the ensemble and to the predetermined unity of motion. Upon each of the faces one feels more or less the reflection of the motto of self-sacrifice and enthusiastic faith inscribed on a flat surface in the background (Omnia relinquit servare rem publicam), and the superb figure of a woman with flying drapery, symbolical of glory or of death, comparable to the loveliest creations in this style by Watts or Gustave Moreau, succeeds in giving to this very sculpturesque composition a distinguished moral significance."

Two months later the critic Léonce Benedite, in his article on the salons of 1898, wrote, in the Gazette des Beaux-Arts:

"It is a foreign sculptor, an American artist whose name alone had previously reached us, M. Augustus Saint-Gaudens, who affords us an example of a commemorative monument composed of modern elements and broadly executed in the simplest and purest sculptural spirit. Half French, not only by descent, but by his whole education, trained in our school,—which he honors today,—the illustrious chief of the future American school of sculpture has produced numerous beautiful works in his own country. Photographic reproductions of these accompany his exhibited works and demonstrate their rare dignity and grandeur of style. His beautiful mortuary statues, one of which is on exhibition at the Salon, together with the caryatid of the Vanderbilt house—long and slender, with beautiful, severe draperies—are figures of distinguished elegance, of austere grace.

"But above all, the statues of President Lincoln and Peter Cooper, the mural tablets of Dr. McCosh and Dr. Bellows, show us with how exalted an appreciation of his art the American master has succeeded in making the most of the complete modernity of his subjects. To be sure, he has not misrepresented the characteristic local physiognomy of his models, or the unique effect of the accessories of costume and furniture; far from it. But with what elegance and vigor he makes them all speak to one, from the skirt of the coat to the slightest fold of the trousers!

"We find ourselves face to face with a powerful and self-restrained master, who is able to comprehend and to express emotion, who speaks a simple but expressive language, and who has the power to convince and to fascinate. The monument to Colonel Robert Gould Shaw, erected at Boston, and exhibited in plaster at the Salon, affords us a striking proof of this. It is a large high-relief, set in a graceful and exceedingly simple architectural frame. In the center a young officer, mounted, sword in hand, is leading a company of black soldiers who are marching by his side, musket on shoulder, with a drummer at their head. In the upper field floats a grave and melancholy figure, flying horizontally; it is Duty, and with a sweeping and eloquently mournful gesture she points out to them the road leading to glory and to death. The measured march of the men, the expression of resigned and submissive gravity on the faces of those colored troops, contrasting with the proud, absorbed energy of the young white man who leads them, his beautiful young steed nervous and quivering, emphasizes yet more the restrained enthusiasm and patient determination of the commander. All this, and even the sculptural comprehension of all this paraphernalia of war, impresses one simply yet powerfully, and holds one enthralled by its genuine epic grandeur."

"June 14th, Paris

"I am going to stay alone in Paris and on Sundays go and see Brush and Garnier and the Proctors and go to St. Moritz for a week or ten days; further than that I have no plans.... I see Shiff every other night and dine with him then; occasionally I see F——, whom I rather like. I'm working hard but slowly. I want a little rest, so in two days I go to London to see the exhibit there; besides, Sargent gives me a dinner on the 20th. Paris is really a wonderfully attractive city and the 'cut' atmosphere, to use a very unpleasant phrase, is clearly a great thing. There can never be more than a few big men that one respects, but there are so many people deeply interested in art, literature and music, so many that are working hard, that you feel a great deal of intelligence around you in the direction in which you are working, beside the unusual amount of general intelligence which surrounds one."

Toward the end of June Saint-Gaudens and his family went to England. In London, Sargent, always hospitable, gave a dinner to introduce Saint-Gaudens to many distinguished sculptors and painters. Burne-Jones, unfortunately, had died a few days before. Saint-Gaudens had always admired his work greatly, and treasured photographs of his pictures.

After two days at Broadway with Edwin Abbey, the family separated. Saint-Gaudens and his son Homer then returned to Paris for the summer, while Mrs. Saint-Gaudens went to take a cure at Vichy and St. Moritz. During that summer in Paris Saint-Gaudens saw as much as possible of George De Forest Brush and his family, who were then living near Fontainebleau. His intimacy with the Brushes dated back to his student days in Paris, and had been kept up in America. The two families had often been neighbors at Cornish, New Hampshire. Indeed, the Brushes had spent their first summer there encamped in an Indian "tepee," which was pitched on the edge of a field in front of the Saint-Gaudens' house. Their life always impressed every one as singularly beautiful and happy, and their presence so near Paris helped Saint-Gaudens to get through the long, dull weeks of the summer.

"Paris, July 10th or 11th

"Lately I have had a great time with X——, driving and lunching with him and sometimes with the ladies, going to Versailles and the museums. Next Sunday we go to Chantilly, another day to Dampierre where Rude's great statue of Louis (XIII, I think) is. We go to the Cluny, to the Louvre, and sit sipping in front of cafés, X—— telling me how much the woman question from one point of view troubles him and I doing the same from another, and the big world turns round, and we all suffer, and men fight, and women mourn. Courage and love is what we all need, isn't it?

"Yesterday I went with Homer to Fontainebleau to see Brush and Proctor who live near there at 'Marlotte Montigny.' The day was fine, and I enjoyed it greatly, particularly the walk with Brush and his two lovely eldest children. How remarkable Brush is! All the children are so beautiful and nice-mannered. He has commenced another picture of his wife, this time with all the children and himself, and it is already a stimulating thing, the composition is so fine and what there is of it that is drawn, is so splendidly drawn."

"Paris, July 14th

"It is the third or fourth really fine day that we have had since coming to France eight months ago. The whole city is alive with sunshine, a sky with white floating clouds, and every place brilliant with flags, and there is an unusual feeling of peace in this big studio as I sit alone in it and write to you.

"I have your letter with the enclosure from the Transcript. 'That's the way things is,' as Bryant said to me. I send you some more Hosannahs in my honour by this mail, and there is going to be more still in the 'Gazette des Beaux-Arts,' as I judge from the way Ary Renan talked to me the other night. He is son of the great Renan and is one of the editors of the 'Gazette des Beaux-Arts' and wished to meet me so much that Pallier, another critic, asked us to dine with him night before last. Pallier is the one who wrote the long article in the Liberté about me.

"You speak of Browning—I shall read the 'Ring and the Book,' but unless a man's style is clear I am too lazy and I have too little time to devote to digging gold out of the rocks, fine as it may be. On the other hand I got the Schopenhauer that Shiff spoke about with the intention of sending it to you, but it is so deadly in its pessimism, judging from the ten or eleven lines that I read, that I flung it away. It was so terribly true from his point of view, but what's the use of taking that point of view? We can't remedy matters by weeping and gnashing our teeth over the misery of things. 'That's the way things is' again, and although I have been told all my life it's best to put on a brave face and bear all cheerfully, it's only lately that it is really coming into my philosophy.

"It seems as if we are all in one open boat on the ocean, abandoned and drifting no one knows where, and while doing all we can to get somewhere, it is better to be cheerful than to be melancholy; the latter does not help the situation, and the former cheers up one's comrades.

"Michel, a friend of mine, had a beautiful nude marble bought for the Luxembourg, a pure noble chaste figure. There was a remarkable statuette by Gerôme, two or three other good things in sculpture and the same among the objets d'art, and one swell thing in painting, the Puvis de Chavannes. That appealed to me, but of course there were a lot of other very fine things, by Aman Jean, Henri Martin, Besnard and others. I send you some publications with the good things marked. I think if the Champs-Elysées were sifted there would be more good work found in it or as much as at the Champs de Mars. It is remarkable how much good work is done in Paris, but the first impression is bad, as the good is concealed in such a mountain of trash; but it's like gold in a mountain."

"Paris, July 24th

"Last night I dined with an old 'camarade d'atelier' at his home in the Cité Boileau at Passy and it was a great pleasure to be with him, one of the nicest kind of Frenchmen, a sculptor who is doing admirable work, a man of calm manners and large views, intensely interested in his work. His wife and three children are by the seaside, and on their return, if Homer does not go to America and I remain too, I'm looking forward to Homer's meeting his children. His boy, who is seventeen, is going to work in his atelier with him. It was delightful, as he took one through the rooms of his three children, to see the photographs of admirable works of art they had selected to hang on the walls. He has a house with a garden and we dined outside. (His name is) Lenoir and he is the son of a distinguished architect and grandson of a Lenoir whose bust is erected in the Cour des Beaux-Arts, a man of great distinction here on account of his love of art and his efforts to prevent the Revolutionists in 1795 from destroying the public monuments."

Early in August, while his wife was still away, Saint-Gaudens took his son Homer to Holland, where they had a delightful trip, extending to the quaint dead cities of the north. Ten days or so after their return to Paris they made another successful expedition together to join some friends at the sea-shore.

"3 rue de Bagneux, Paris, Aug. 26.

"It was intensely hot in Paris. I discovered that the Brushes were at Boulogne as well as the Proctors, so off we packed and we have had a great time, what with bathing and lolling all day on the cliffs, which I adore doing. The two Mears sisters followed us down there, and we, the Brushes, Proctors, Mears, babies, and all started off in the mornings, and, with the luncheon mixed up with the babies in the carriage, passed most delightful days, either on the cliffs or by the shore."

Saint-Gaudens, however, could never be happy long away from his work, and he was soon writing from his studio again.

"Paris, Sept. 2d

"A Russian professor at one of the Universities here has sent me his translation of Tolstoi's last work 'What is Art?' and has asked me (with highly eulogistic terms about what I have done, in an inscription on the fly leaf) to give him my opinion, which he wishes to publish with those of other men of note. So I am in for reading it. You read it too, please, and tell me what you think of it, then I'll sign it and send it as my opinion! For I have no opinion, or so many that trying to put them into shape would result in driving me into the mad-house sooner than I am naturally destined to be there. Yes, 5000 different points of view that are possible. After all, we are like lots of microscopical microbes on this infinitesimal ball in space, and all these discussions seem humourous at times. I suppose that every earnest effort toward great sincerity or honesty or beauty in one's production is a drop added to the ocean of evolution, to the Something higher that I suppose we are rising slowly (d——d slowly) to, and all the other discussions upon the subject seem simply one way of helping the seriousness of it all.

"Shiff's letter that I enclose is in reply to one asking whether the professor's request was all right and whether I should bother about it. In answer he wrote that the Russian was a very serious man who had done admirable work. I once told Shiff that at times I thought that 'beauty must mean at least some goodness'—that explains part of his letter to me."

TO BE CONCLUDED IN NOVEMBER

THURNLEY ABBEY

BY
PERCEVAL LANDON

Three years ago I was on my way out to the East, and as an extra day in London was of some importance, I took the Friday evening mail train to Brindisi instead of the usual Thursday morning Marseilles express. Many people shrink from the long forty-eight-hour train journey through Europe, and the subsequent rush across the Mediterranean on the nineteen-knot Isis or the Osiris; but there is really very little discomfort on either the train or the mail-boat, and unless there is actually nothing for me to do, I always like to save the extra day and a half in London before I say good-bye to her for one of my longer tramps. This time—it was early, I remember, in the shipping season, probably about the beginning of September—there were few passengers, and I had a compartment in the P. and O. Indian express to myself all the way from Calais. All Sunday I watched the blue waves dimpling the Adriatic, and the pale rosemary along the cuttings; the plain white towns, with their flat roofs and their bold "duomos," and the gray-green gnarled olive orchards of Apulia. The journey was just like any other. We ate in the dining-car as often and as long as we decently could. We slept after luncheon; we dawdled the afternoon away with yellow-backed novels; sometimes we exchanged platitudes in the smoking-room, and it was there that I met Alistair Colvin.

Colvin was a man of middle height, with a resolute, well-cut jaw; his hair was turning gray; his mustache was sun-whitened, otherwise he was clean-shaven—obviously a gentleman, and obviously also a preoccupied man. He had no great wit. When spoken to, he made the usual remarks in the right way, and I dare say he refrained from banalities only because he spoke less than the rest of us; most of the time he buried himself in the Wagonlit Company's Time-table, but seemed unable to concentrate his attention on any one page of it. He found that I had been over the Siberian railway, and for a quarter of an hour he discussed it with me. Then he lost interest in it, and rose to go to his compartment. But he came back again very soon, and seemed glad to pick up the conversation again.

Of course this did not seem to me to be of any importance. Most travelers by train become a trifle infirm of purpose after thirty-six hours' rattling. But Colvin's restless way I noticed in somewhat marked contrast with the man's personal importance and dignity; especially ill suited was it to his finely made large hand with strong, broad, regular nails and its few lines. As I looked at his hand I noticed a long, deep, and recent scar of ragged shape. However, it is absurd to pretend that I thought anything was unusual. I went off at five o'clock on Sunday afternoon to sleep away the hour or two that had still to be got through before we arrived at Brindisi.

Once there, we few passengers transhipped our hand baggage, verified our berths—there were only a score of us in all—and then, after an aimless ramble of half an hour in Brindisi, we returned to dinner at the Hôtel International, not wholly surprised that the town had been the death of Virgil. If I remember rightly, there is a gaily painted hall at the International—I do not wish to advertise anything, but there is no other place in Brindisi at which to await the coming of the mails—and after dinner I was looking with awe at a trellis overgrown with blue vines, when Colvin moved across the room to my table. He picked up Il Secolo, but almost immediately gave up the pretense of reading it. He turned squarely to me and said:

"Would you do me a favor?"

One doesn't do favors to stray acquaintances on Continental expresses without knowing something more of them than I knew of Colvin. But I smiled in a noncommittal way, and asked him what he wanted. I wasn't wrong in part of my estimate of him; he said bluntly:

"Will you let me sleep in your cabin on the Osiris?" And he colored a little as he said it.

Now, there is nothing more tiresome than having to put up with a stable-companion at sea, and I asked him rather pointedly:

"Surely there is room for all of us?" I thought that perhaps he had been partnered off with some mangy Levantine, and wanted to escape from him at all hazards.

Colvin, still somewhat confused, said: "Yes; I am in a cabin by myself. But you would do me the greatest favor if you would allow me to share yours."

This was all very well, but, besides the fact that I always sleep better when alone, there had been some recent thefts on board these boats, and I hesitated, frank and honest and self-conscious as Colvin was. Just then the mail-train came in with a clatter and a rush of escaping steam, and I asked him to see me again about it on the boat when we started. He answered me curtly—I suppose he saw the mistrust in my manner—"I am a member of White's and the Beefsteak." I smiled to myself as he said it, but I remembered in a moment that the man—if he were really what he claimed to be, and I make no doubt that he was—must have been sorely put to it before he urged the fact as a guarantee of his respectability to a total stranger at a Brindisi hotel.

That evening, as we cleared the red and green harbor-lights of Brindisi, Colvin explained. This is his story in his own words:

"When I was traveling in India some years ago, I made the acquaintance of a youngish man in the Woods and Forests. We camped out together for a week, and I found him a pleasant companion. John Broughton was a light-hearted soul when off duty, but a steady and capable man in any of the small emergencies that continually arise in that department. He was liked and trusted by the natives, and his future was well assured in Government service, when a fair-sized estate was unexpectedly left to him, and he joyfully shook the dust of the Indian plains from his feet and returned to England. For five years he drifted about London. I saw him now and then. We dined together about every eighteen months, and I could trace pretty exactly the gradual sickening of Broughton with a merely idle life. He then set out on a couple of long voyages, returned as restless as before, and at last told me that he had decided to marry and settle down at his place, Thurnley Abbey, which had long been empty. He spoke about looking after the property and standing for his constituency in the usual way. He was quite happy and full of information about his future.

"Among other things, I asked him about Thurnley Abbey. He confessed that he hardly knew the place. The last tenant, a man called Clarke, had lived in one wing for fifteen years and seen no one. He had been a miser and a hermit. It was the rarest thing for a light to be seen at the Abbey after dark. Only the barest necessities of life were ordered, and the tenant himself received them at the side-door. His one half-caste man-servant, after a month's stay in the house, had abruptly left without warning, and had returned to the Southern States. One thing Broughton complained bitterly about: Clarke had wilfully spread the rumor among the villagers that the Abbey was haunted, and had even condescended to play childish tricks with spirit-lamps and salt in order to scare trespassers away at night. He had been detected in the act of this tomfoolery, but the story spread, and no one, said Broughton, would venture near the house except in broad daylight. The hauntedness of Thurnley Abbey was now, he said with a grin, part of the gospel of the countryside, but he and his young wife were going to change all that. Would I propose myself any time I liked? I, of course, said I would, and equally, of course, intended to do nothing of the sort without a definite invitation.

"The house was put in thorough repair, though not a stick of the old furniture and tapestry were removed. Floors and ceilings were relaid; the roof was made watertight again, and the dust of half a century was scoured out. He showed me some photographs of the place. It was called an Abbey, though as a matter of fact it had been only the infirmary of the long-vanished Abbey of Closter some five miles away. The larger part of this building remained as it had been in pre-Reformation days, but a wing had been added in Jacobean times, and that part of the house had been kept in something like repair by Mr. Clarke. He had in both the ground and the first floors set a heavy timber door, strongly barred with iron, in the passage between the earlier and the Jacobean parts of the house, and had entirely neglected the former. So there had been a good deal of work to be done.

"Broughton, whom I saw in London two or three times about this time, made a deal of fun over the positive refusal of the workmen to remain after sundown. Even after the electric light had been put into every room, nothing would induce them to remain, though, as Broughton observed, electric light was death on ghosts. The legend of the Abbey's ghosts had gone far and wide, and the men would take no risks. On the whole, though nothing of any sort or kind had been conjured up even by their heated imaginations during their five months' work upon the Abbey, the belief in the ghosts was rather strengthened than otherwise in Thurnley because of the men's confessed nervousness, and local tradition declared itself in favor of the ghost of an immured nun.

"'Good old nun!' said Broughton.

"I asked him whether in general he believed in the possibility of ghosts, and, rather to my surprise, he said that he couldn't say he entirely disbelieved in them. A man in India had told him one morning in camp that he believed that his mother was dead in England, as her vision had come to his tent the night before. He had not been alarmed, but had said nothing, and the figure vanished again. As a matter of fact, the next possible dak-walla brought on a telegram announcing the mother's death. 'There the thing was,' said Broughton.

"'My own idea,' said he, 'is that if a ghost ever does come in one's way, one ought to speak to it.'

"I agreed. Little as I knew of the ghost world and its conventions, I had already remembered that a spook was in honor bound to wait to be spoken to. It didn't seem much to do, and I felt that the sound of one's own voice would at any rate reassure oneself as to one's wakefulness. But there are few ghosts outside Europe—few, that is, that a white man can see—and I had never been troubled with any. However, as I have said, I told Broughton that I agreed.

"So the wedding took place and I went to it in a tall hat which I bought for the occasion, and the new Mrs. Broughton smiled very nicely at me afterwards. As it had to happen, I took the Orient Express that evening and was not in England again for nearly six months. Just before I came back I got a letter from Broughton. He asked if I could see him in London or come to Thurnley, as he thought I should be better able to help him than any one else he knew. His wife sent a nice message to me at the end, so I was reassured about at least one thing. I wrote from Budapest that I would come and see him at Thurnley two days after my arrival in London, and as I sauntered out of the Pannonia into the Kerepesi Ut to post my letters, I wondered of what earthly service I could be to Broughton. I had been out with him after tiger on foot, and I could imagine few men better able at a pinch to manage their own business. However, I had nothing to do, so after dealing with some small accumulations of business during my absence, I packed a kit-bag and departed to Euston.

"I was met by a trap at Thurnley Road station, and after a drive of nearly seven miles we echoed through the sleepy streets of Thurnley village, into which the main gates of the park thrust themselves, splendid with pillars and spread-eagles and tom-cats rampant atop of them. From the gates a quadruple avenue of beech-trees led inwards for a quarter of a mile. Beneath them a neat strip of fine turf edged the road and ran back until the poison of the dead beech-leaves had killed it under the trees. There were many wheel-tracks on the road, and a comfortable little pony trap jogged past me laden with a country parson and his wife and daughter. Evidently there was some garden party going on at the Abbey. The road dropped away to the right at the end of the avenue, and I could see the Abbey across a wide pasturage and a broad lawn thickly dotted with guests.

"The end of the building was plain. It must have been almost mercilessly austere when it was first built, but time had crumbled the edges and toned the stone down to an orange-lichened gray wherever it showed behind its curtain of magnolia, jasmine, and ivy. Farther on was the three-storied Jacobean house, plain and handsome. There had not been the slightest attempt to adapt the one to the other, but the kindly ivy had glossed over the touching-point. There was a tall flèche in the middle of the building, surmounting a small bell tower. Behind the house there rose the mountainous verdure of Spanish chestnuts all the way up the hill.

"Broughton had seen me coming from afar, and walked across from his other guests to welcome me before turning me over to the butler's care. This man was sandy-haired and rather inclined to be talkative. He could, however, answer hardly any questions about the house: he had, he said, only been there three weeks. Mindful of what Broughton had told me, I made no inquiries about ghosts, though the room into which I was shown might have justified anything. It was a very large low room with oak beams projecting from the white ceiling. Every inch of the walls, including the doors, was covered with tapestry, and a remarkably fine Italian fourpost bedstead, heavily draped, added to the darkness and dignity of the place. All the furniture was old, well made, and dark. Underfoot there was a plain green pile carpet, the only new thing about the room except the electric light fittings and the jugs and basins. Even the looking-glass on the dressing-table was an old pyramidal Venetian glass set in heavy repoussé frame of tarnished silver.

"After a few minutes cleaning up, I went downstairs and out upon the lawn, where I greeted my hostess. The people gathered there were of the usual country type, all anxious to be pleased and roundly curious as to the new master of the Abbey. Rather to my surprise, and quite to my pleasure, I rediscovered Glenham, whom I had known well in old days in Barotseland: he lived quite close, as, he remarked with a grin, I ought to have known. 'But,' he added, 'I don't live in a place like this.' He swept his hand to the long, low lines of the Abbey in obvious admiration, and then, to my intense interest, muttered beneath his breath, 'Thank God!' He saw that I had overheard him, and turning to me said decidedly, 'Yes, thank God I said, and I meant I wouldn't live at the Abbey for all Broughton's money.'

"'But surely,' I demurred, 'you know that old Clarke was discovered in the very act of setting light to his bug-a-boos?'

"Glenham shrugged his shoulders. 'Yes, I know about that. But there is something wrong with the place still. All I can say is that Broughton is a different man since he has lived here. I don't believe that he will remain much longer. But—you're staying here?—Well, you'll hear all about it to-night. There's a big dinner, I understand.' The conversation turned off to old reminiscences, and Glenham soon after had to go.

"Before I went to dress that evening I had twenty minutes' talk with Broughton in his library. There was no doubt that the man was altered, gravely altered. He was nervous and fidgety, and I found him looking at me only when my eye was off him. I naturally asked him what he wanted of me. I told him I would do anything I could, but that I couldn't conceive what he lacked that I could provide. He said with a lustreless smile that there was, however, something, and that he would tell me the following morning. It struck me that he was somehow ashamed of himself, and perhaps ashamed of the part he was asking me to play. However, I dismissed the subject from my mind and went up to dress in my palatial room. As I shut the door a draught blew out the Queen of Sheba from the wall, and I noticed that the tapestries were not fastened to the wall at the bottom. I have always held very practical views about spooks, and it has often seemed to me that the slow waving in firelight of loose tapestry upon a wall would account for ninety-nine per cent of the stories one hears, and certainly the dignified undulation of this lady with her attendants and huntsmen—one of whom was untidily cutting the throat of a fallow deer upon the very steps on which King Solomon, a gray-faced Flemish nobleman with the order of the Golden Fleece, awaited his fair visitor—gave color to my hypothesis.

"Nothing much happened at dinner. The people were very much like those of the garden party. After the ladies had gone, I found myself talking to the rural dean. He was a thin, earnest man, who at once turned the conversation to old Clarke's buffooneries. But, he said, Mr. Broughton had introduced such a new and cheerful spirit, not only into the Abbey, but, he might say, into the whole neighborhood, that he had great hopes that the ignorant superstitions of the past were from henceforth destined to oblivion. Thereupon his other neighbor, a portly gentleman of independent means and position, audibly remarked 'Amen,' which damped the rural dean, and we talked of partridges past, partridges present, and pheasants to come. At the other end of the table Broughton sat with a couple of his friends, red-faced hunting men. Once I noticed that they were discussing me, but I paid no attention to it at the time. I remembered it a few hours later.

"By eleven all the guests were gone, and Broughton, his wife, and I were alone together under the fine plaster ceiling of the Jacobean drawing-room. Mrs. Broughton talked about one or two of the neighbors, and then, with a smile, said that she knew I would excuse her, shook hands with me, and went off to bed. I am not very good at analyzing things, but I felt that she talked a little uncomfortably and with a suspicion of effort, smiled rather conventionally, and was obviously glad to go. These things seem trifling enough to repeat, but I had throughout the faint feeling that everything was not square. Under the circumstances, this was enough to set me wondering what on earth the service could be that I was to render—wondering also whether the whole business were not some ill-advised jest in order to make me come down from London for a mere shooting party.

"Broughton said little after she had gone. But he was evidently laboring to bring the conversation round to the so-called haunting of the Abbey. As soon as I saw this, of course I asked him directly about it. He then seemed at once to lose interest in the matter. There was no doubt about it: Broughton was somehow a changed man, and to my mind he had changed in no way for the better. Mrs. Broughton seemed no sufficient cause. He was clearly very fond of her, and she of him. I reminded him that he was going to tell me what I could do for him in the morning, pleaded my journey, lighted a candle, and went upstairs with him. At the end of the passage leading into the old house he grinned weakly and said, 'Mind, if you see a ghost, do talk to it; you said you would,' He stood irresolutely a moment and then turned away. At the door of his dressing-room he paused a moment: 'I'm here,' he called out, 'if you should want anything. Good-night,' and he shut his door.

"I went along the passage to my room, undressed, switched on a lamp beside my bed, read a few pages of the Jungle Book, and then, more than ready for sleep, switched the light off and went fast asleep.

"Three hours later I woke up. There was not a breath of wind outside. It was so silent that my ears found employment in listening for the throbbing of the blood within them. There was not even a flicker of light from the fireplace. As I lay there, an ash tinkled slightly as it cooled, but there was hardly a gleam of the dullest red in the grate. An owl cried among the silent Spanish chestnuts on the slope outside. I idly reviewed the events of the day, hoping that I should fall off to sleep again before I reached dinner. But at the end I seemed as wakeful as ever. There was no help for it. I must read my Jungle Book again till I felt ready to go off, so I fumbled for the pear at the end of the cord that hung down inside the bed, and I switched on the bedside lamp. The sudden glory dazzled me for a moment. I felt under my pillow for my book with half-shut eyes. Then, growing used to the light, I happened to look down to the foot of my bed.

"I can never tell you really what happened then. Nothing I could ever confess in the most abject words could even faintly picture to you what I felt. I know that my heart stopped dead, and my throat shut automatically. In one instinctive movement I crouched back up against the head-boards of the bed, staring at the horror. The movement set my heart going again, and the sweat dripped from every pore. I am not a particularly religious man, but I had always believed that God would never allow any supernatural appearance to present itself to man in such a guise and in such circumstances that harm, either bodily or mental, could result to him. I can only tell you that at that moment both my life and my reason rocked unsteadily on their seats."

The other Osiris passengers had gone to bed. Only he and I remained leaning over the starboard railing, which rattled uneasily now and then under the fierce vibration of the over-engined mail-boat. Far over, there were the lights of a few fishing-smacks riding out the night, and a great rush of white combing and seething water fell out and away from us overside.

At last Colvin went on:

"Leaning over the foot of my bed, looking at me, was a figure swathed in a rotten and tattered veiling. This shroud passed over the head, but left both eyes and the right side of the face bare. It then followed the line of the arm down to where the hand grasped the bed-end. The face was not that entirely of a skull, though the eyes and the flesh of the face were totally gone, There was a thin, dry skin drawn tightly over the features, and there was some skin left on the hand. One wisp of hair crossed the forehead. It was perfectly still. I looked at it, and it looked at me, and my brains turned dry and hot in my head. I had still got the pear of the electric lamp in my hand, and I played idly with it; only I dared not turn the light out again. I shut my eyes, only to open them in a hideous terror the same second. The thing had not moved. My heart was thumping, and the sweat cooled me as it evaporated. Another cinder tinkled in the grate, and a panel creaked in the wall.

"My reason failed me. For twenty minutes, or twenty seconds, I was able to think of nothing else but this awful figure, till there came, hurtling through the empty channels of my senses, the remembrance that Broughton and his friends had discussed me furtively at dinner. The dim possibility of it being a hoax stole gratefully into my unhappy mind, and once there, one's pluck came creeping back along a thousand tiny veins. My first sensation was one of blind unreasoning thankfulness that my brain was going to stand the trial. I am not a timid man, but the best of us needs some human handle to steady him in time of extremity, and in this faint but growing hope that after all it might be only a brutal hoax, I found the fulcrum that I needed. At last I moved.

"How I managed to do it, I cannot tell you, but with one spring towards the foot of the bed I got within arm's length and struck out one fearful blow with my fist at the thing. It crumbled under it, and my hand was cut to the bone. With the sickening revulsion after my terror, I dropped half-fainting across the end of the bed. So it was merely a foul trick after all. No doubt the trick had been played many a time before: no doubt Broughton and his friends had had some bet among themselves as to what I should do when I discovered the gruesome thing. From my state of abject terror I found myself transported into an insensate anger. I shouted curses upon Broughton. I dived rather than climbed over the bed-end on to the sofa. I tore at the robed skeleton—how well the whole thing had been carried out, I thought—I broke the skull against the floor, and stamped upon its dry bones. I flung the head away under the bed, and rent the brittle bones of the trunk in pieces. I snapped the thin thigh-bones across my knee, and flung them in different directions. The shin-bones I set up against a stool and broke with my heel. I raged like a Berserker against the loathly thing, and stripped the ribs from the backbone and slung the breastbone against the cupboard. My fury increased as the work of destruction went on. I tore the frail rotten veil into twenty pieces, and the dust went up over everything, over the clean blotting-paper and the silver inkstand. At last my work was done. There was but a raffle of broken bones and strips of parchment and crumbling wool. Then, picking up a piece of the skull—it was the cheek and temple bone of the right side, I remember—I opened the door and went down the passage to Broughton's dressing-room. I remember still how my sweat-dripping pajamas clung to me as I walked. At the door I kicked and entered.

"Broughton was in bed. He had already turned the light on and seemed shrunken and horrified. For a moment he could hardly pull himself together. Then I spoke. I don't know what I said. Only I know that from a heart full and over-full with hatred and contempt, spurred on by shame of my own recent cowardice, I let my tongue run on. He answered nothing. I was amazed at my own fluency. My hair still clung lankily to my wet temples, my hand was bleeding profusely, and I must have looked a strange sight. Broughton huddled himself up at the head of the bed just as I had. Still he made no answer, no defence. He seemed preoccupied with something besides my reproaches, and once or twice moistened his lips with his tongue. But he could say nothing, though he moved his hands now and then, just as a baby who cannot speak moves his hands.

"At last the door into Mrs. Broughton's room opened and she came in, white and terrified. 'What is it? What is it? Oh, in God's name! what is it?' she cried again and again, and then she went up to her husband and sat on the bed; and the two faced me in speechless terror. I told her what the matter was. I spared her husband not a word for her presence there. Yet he seemed hardly to understand. I told the pair that I had spoiled their cowardly joke for them. Broughton looked up.

"'I have smashed the foul thing into a hundred pieces,' I said. Broughton licked his lips again and his mouth worked. 'By God!' I shouted, 'it would serve you right if I thrashed you within an inch of your life. I will take care that not a decent man or woman of my acquaintance ever speaks to you again. And there,' I added, throwing the broken piece of the skull upon the floor beside his bed, 'there is a souvenir for you, of your damned work to-night!'

"Broughton saw the bone, and in a moment it was his turn to frighten me. He squealed like a hare caught in a trap. He screamed and screamed till Mrs. Broughton, almost as terrified as I, held on to him and coaxed him like a child to be quiet. But Broughton—and as he moved I thought that ten minutes ago I perhaps looked as terribly ill as he did—thrust her from him, and scrambled out of the bed on to the floor, and still screaming put out his hand to the bone. It had blood on it from my hand. He paid no attention to me whatever. In truth I said nothing. This was a new turn indeed to the horrors of the evening. He rose from the floor with the bone in his hand, and stood silent. He seemed to be listening. 'Time, time, perhaps,' he muttered, and almost at the same moment fell at full length on the carpet, cutting his head against the fender. The bone flew from his hand and came to rest near the door. I picked Broughton up, haggard and broken, with blood over his face. He whispered hoarsely and quickly, 'Listen, listen!' We listened.

"After ten seconds' utter quiet, I seemed to hear something. I could not be sure, but at last there was no doubt. There was a quiet sound as of one moving along the passage. Little regular steps came towards us over the hard oak flooring. Broughton moved to where his wife sat, white and speechless, on the bed, and pressed her face into his shoulder.

"Then the last thing that I could see as he turned the light out, he fell forward with his own head pressed into the pillow of the bed. Something in their company, something in their cowardice, helped me, and I faced the open doorway of the room, which was outlined fairly clearly against the dimly lighted passage. I put out one hand and touched Mrs. Broughton's shoulder in the darkness. But at the last moment I too failed. I sank on my knees and put my face in the bed. Only, we all heard. The footsteps came to the door, and there they stopped. The piece of bone was lying a yard inside the door. There was a rustle of moving stuff, and the thing was in the room. Mrs. Broughton was silent: I could hear Broughton's voice praying, muffled in the pillow: I was cursing my own cowardice. Then the steps moved out again on the oak boards of the passage, and I heard the sounds dying away. In a flash of remorse I went to the door and looked out. There at the end of the corridor was a small bowed figure in a gray veil—I knew it only too well. But this time there was a pathos in the drooped head that left me standing with my forehead bowed in shame against the jamb of the door.

"'You can turn the light on,' I said, and there was an answering flare. There was no bone at my feet. Mrs. Broughton had fainted. Broughton was almost useless, and it took me ten minutes to bring her to. Broughton only said one thing worth remembering. For the most part he went on muttering prayers. But I was glad afterwards to recollect that he had said that thing. He said in a colorless voice, half as a question, half as a reproach, 'You didn't speak to her.'

"We spent the remainder of the night together. Mrs. Broughton actually fell off into a kind of sleep before dawn, but she suffered so horribly in her dreams that I shook her into consciousness again. Never was dawn so long in coming. Three or four times Broughton spoke to himself. Mrs. Broughton would then just tighten her hold on his arm, but she could say nothing. As for me, I can honestly say that I grew worse as the hours passed and the light strengthened. The two violent reactions had battered down my steadiness of view, and I felt that the foundations of my life had been built upon the sand. I said nothing, and after binding up my hand with a towel, I did not move. It was better so. They helped me and I helped them, and we all three knew that our reason had gone very near to ruin that night. At last, when the light came in pretty strongly, and the birds outside were chattering and singing, we felt that we must do something. Yet we never moved. You might have thought that we should particularly dislike being found as we were by the servants: yet nothing of the kind mattered a straw, and an overpowering listlessness bound us as we sat, until Chapman, Broughton's man, actually knocked and opened the door. None of us moved. Broughton, speaking hardly and stiffly, said: 'Chapman, you can come back in five minutes.' Chapman was a discreet man, but it would have made no difference if he had carried his news to the 'room' at once.

"We looked at each other and I said I must go back. I meant to wait outside till Chapman returned. I simply dared not re-enter my bedroom alone. Broughton roused himself and said that he would come with me. Mrs. Broughton agreed to remain in her own room for five minutes if the blinds were drawn up and all the doors left open.

"So Broughton and I, leaning stiffly one against the other, went down to my room. By the morning light that filtered past the blinds we could see our way, and I released the blinds. There was nothing wrong in the room from end to end, except smears of my own blood on the bed, on the sofa, and on the carpet where I had torn the thing to pieces."

Colvin had finished his story. There was nothing to say. Seven bells stuttered out from the fo'c'sle, and the answering cry wailed through the darkness. I took him downstairs.

"Of course I am much better now, but it is a kindness of you to let me sleep in your cabin."

THE TERROR

BY

A. E. THOMAS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY HERMAN C. WALL

It was a gray and bitter morning in January when Tim first saw The Vale. For weeks winter had lain heavy upon the sunny South. A cold rain had swept the countryside; then came zero weather for days, till the ice lay inch-thick on all the broad pikes of Lexington County, and only the firs were green.

Tim and his mother had left the little cabin they called home at the first crack of dawn and together had tramped the five miles that spelled the road to The Vale. All the way they spoke scarce a word, for they knew that parting was near and that it had to be. Colonel Darnton was to take the boy and make a jockey of him, if he could, and the stables of The Vale were to be his home thereafter.

The negroes were feeding the stallions when the boy and his mother trudged up to the big barn. They sat on a feed-box until the Colonel had finished his breakfast and come out from the big house under the trees.

"Morning to you, Mrs. Doolin," said the Colonel. "And so you've brought the boy, eh?"

"I have that," responded Mrs. Doolin, in her odd mixture of brogue and Southern drawl. "An' I beg ye t' be good tew him. Since Pete died, he's all I hov, an' it's the good lad he's been to me, an' phwat it is I'll be doin' widout him whin he's gawn, I dinnaw. Will ye be afther lettin' him come down t' see me wanst a fortnight, sor?"

"Of course I will," smiled the Colonel, and then he turned to Tim, standing there, so pale and little.

"And you, boy," he said, taking the lad's chin in his big hand and turning the blue eyes up to his gaze, "how about you—strong for the hosses, eh?"

Tim's lip quivered. He was only twelve. But he looked the Colonel bravely in the face.

"I reck'n," he said.

"Well, well, we'll see," said the Colonel, mercifully releasing the boy's chin. "'Twould be odd if you weren't. Your father was mighty handy with 'em all—mighty handy."

"Savin' yer prisince, Colonel, I'd hov jist wan wurrud wid th' boy," said the woman, and she drew Tim aside.

"Lookee yew here, yew Tim Doolin," she said, when she had him by himself, "don't yew niver fergit thet yew're up here tew The Vale tew larn hosses. Raymimber thet." The boy drew one ragged sleeve across his blue eyes.

"All right, maw," he quavered.

"An' raymimber this, too," she went on. "There niver yit was wan Doolin thet wasn't on the square. Hoss racin' ain't prayin', an' all them as races hosses ain't like the Colonel. But there niver was wan Doolin yit thet wasn't on the level. Mind yew ain't the fust crook in the clan, er else yew needn't niver come home t' the Blue Grass ter look yewr maw in the face."

Thin and gaunt and gray-haired, she stood in the biting wind that fought to tear her shawl from her bony shoulders. For a moment she stared, stern and dry-eyed, at the boy. Somehow he had never seemed so tiny before.

"Will yew raymimber thet?" she demanded at last. Tim dropped his eyes in boyish embarrassment.

"I reck'n," he said.

His mother drew her shawl tightly about her shoulders and departed without more ado.

The life of a stable-boy on a great breeding-farm is not all beer and skittles, whatever that may be. His principal business is to look sharp and do as he is told and never forget. It's always early to rise, before dawn in the winter time, and often late to bed, if some of the priceless thoroughbreds are ailing. Moreover, the tongues of stable foremen are sharp, and their hands are heavy.

Tim made his mistakes. Once, after they came to trust him at The Vale, on a sharp morning when he was giving King Faraway, the head of the stud, his morning gallop on the pike, he fell to dreaming. A little brook ran under a wooden bridge built for carriage use. But to one side there was a ford through which people drove in summer to give their horses drink. The brook was solid ice that morning, but Tim, not thinking, turned King Faraway into the ford. The great horse slipped and fell.

Tim sprang up from the far side of the brook with the blood gushing from a nasty cut on his forehead. But he didn't think of that. Was King Faraway hurt?

He walked the three miles back to The Vale, the stallion limping behind him, and at the stable he told the truth and got a thrashing.

King Faraway was on three legs for a month. But he recovered. Every night of that month the boy slept on a heap of straw in the stallion's box stall, waking up half a dozen times a night to rub the injured stifle; and in the end the great horse was as good as new.

Again, one chilly November night Tim left one of his yearlings out in the South Paddock. Late that night a cold, driving storm came up. In the morning they found the yearling shivering by the paddock gate. The Colonel himself worked his fingers off over that yearling colt, for he was bred in the purple. The youngster had pneumonia, but they saved him, and the Colonel said that Tim's nursing was what pulled him through.

On an April morning something over two years after the day Tim came to The Vale, he started with the season's two-year-olds for the big tracks at New York. He had helped break the youngsters to the saddle and to the track on the half-mile race-course on the farm, and he knew every one of the lot as if he had been its mother. So when they rounded them up to take them to the special box-cars that were waiting in the freight yards, the Colonel took the lad aside.

"Really want to be a jockey, Tim?" he asked.

"Sure," said Tim.

"Want to leave us, then, eh?" The boy looked away, and the Colonel spared him.

"All right," he said with a laugh. "To the races you go. You can come back if you don't like it."

All the broad acres of The Vale and the costly stallions and the brood mares belonged to David Holland, a captain of finance. He was too busy manipulating the ticker to pay much attention to the stock-farm itself. He knew nothing whatever about the breeding of horses and was clever enough to admit it. He paid the bills and got his fun out of "seeing 'em run."

The Holland stable was already quartered at Sheepshead Bay when the Colonel and Tim arrived with the two-year-olds. Pat Faulkner, the trainer, was there to meet them. He and the Colonel drew aside and left the boy to himself. The hours for morning gallops were long since over, and when Tim climbed the white rail fence that enclosed the back-stretch, the big and beautiful track was absolutely deserted.

"Well," said Faulkner, "what sort of a grist have you brought me this trip? I've been bitin' me nails off to find out, but not a word would you write."

They had out the chestnut colt with the one white foot, and the black with the white blaze, and the bay filly by Checkers-Flighty, and a few other individuals, while the trainer felt them over and looked them up and down and round about, and had them walked and trotted and cantered through the stable yard.

When it was all over, and he knew that here was material that would make his rivals sit up, Faulkner's eyes fell upon a slim shape sitting on the white rail fence.

"What's the kid?" he demanded.

"That?" said the Colonel, with a smile, "why, that's Tim Doolin, a champion jockey I've brought you." The trainer grunted.

"How old?" he asked.

"Going on fifteen, weighs seventy-three pounds, is kind and clever, knows the hosses, and they'll do for him. Try him out at exercise work, and if he makes good, give him a chance to ride."

That same night the Colonel departed.

After that Tim's work was cut out for him. There were twenty-six two-year-olds in the Holland stables, twelve three-year-olds, and six or eight thoroughbreds in the aged division. Faulkner kept a big staff of grooms and exercise boys, but there was always a day's work for each of them. Aside from the routine exercise for every horse in training, the feeding, the grooming, and so on, all the youngsters had to be broken to the starting barrier. Some trainers didn't pay much attention to that.

"Let 'em come to it in their races," said they. Not so, Faulkner. He drilled every last one of his two-year-olds till the starting gate was no more to them than so much steel and wood and webbing.

Tim was not long in winning the trainer's confidence. The job of breaking to the barrier was turned over to the stable foreman, under whose eyes the grooms and exercise boys worked. But one afternoon Faulkner himself came out to see how things were going. He noticed that the three two-year-olds that were Tim's especial care were already barrier-broken. He cross-examined the lad. Tim was reticent.

"I—I—jest get 'em used to it," he faltered.

"How?" demanded the trainer.

"I—I jest lead 'em up to it, first along, an' let 'em smell of it and look at it. Then I git one of the boys to spring it while I'm a-standin' by at their heads. They git used to it pretty soon. Then I ride 'em up to it."

"Humph!" grunted the trainer; but later he said to the foreman: "That kid's got sense."

It wasn't long before Tim was exercising three-year-olds, and one gray morning when he turned out of the loft where he slept, the foreman shouted:

"Hurry up, you Tim, an' git yer breakfast."

The boy wondered and obeyed. He gulped down the last of his oatmeal, shot out of the training kitchen, and ran up to the stables, where a negro groom was holding a big bay horse, about which Faulkner himself was busily working. The trainer arose as the boy ran up.

"Up you go, kid," he said and tossed Tim into the saddle.

And Tim knew that he was to exercise Lear! And everybody knew that the Holland stable was pointing Lear for the Brooklyn Handicap! It was a proud moment for Tim. But his honors didn't sit too heavily on his small shoulders, for Faulkner was a hard task-master.

"Jog him to the mile post and send him the last half in .55 an' keep yer eye on the flag," the trainer would order.

Then the boy would canter away through the gray light, and the trainer, handkerchief in one hand and stop-watch in the other, would mount the fence. If the clock said .57 for that last half mile, or anything between that and .55, there was a slap on the back and a "Good kid," for Tim, but woe to him if the clicking hand cut it down to .53.

Mistakes he made, and many of them, but they grew fewer and fewer. Good hands he had (for they are born with a boy, if he's ever to have them) and an intuitive knowledge of the temper of a horse. A good seat they had taught him at The Vale. And gradually, little by little and bit by bit, he came to be what only one jockey in fifty ever grows into—an unerring judge of pace.

Just what it is that tells a boy whether the muscles of steel that he bestrides are shooting him rhythmically over a furlong of dull brown earth or black and slimy mud in .12½ or .13¼, some person may perhaps be able to tell, but certain it is that no person ever has told it. Long after Tim had learned the secret as few boys have ever known it, I asked him.

"Why," said he, "yew know your hoss, an' after thet, why, yew jest feel it."

It was not until the autumn meeting at Gravesend that Tim first wore the colors. It was in an overnight selling race for two-year-olds, for which Faulkner had in despair named Gracious.

Gracious was a merry little short-bodied filly, who was bred as well as any of the Holland lot, but who hadn't done well. Out of six starts she had never shown anything, and Faulkner had determined to start her once more and then weed her out. The weight, eighty-seven pounds, was so light that the stable jockey couldn't make it. Then Faulkner remembered the Colonel's words: "Give him a chance, if he makes good."

"I'll do it," he said, and told Tim.

Tim didn't sleep well that night, and with wide eyes he welcomed the first light of the great day. At last he was to wear the colors!

"Just get her off well and take your time," said Faulkner, as he put the boy up. "Rate her along to the stretch and then drive her."

Tim did all that. Coming into the stretch, there were four horses ahead of him on the rail. But two of them were weakening. Then Tim called on the filly. She answered and went up. But the colt next her was staggering. He swerved, and Tim had to pull out. He got Gracious going again and landed her third, only a head behind the second horse. Faulkner was radiant as Tim dismounted.

"Good kid," he said. He had backed the filly a bit to run third. But Tim was almost weeping.

"I could have won," he moaned, "if thet there Blinger hed kep' straight."

The boy rode half a dozen races in the next month, all of them for two-year-olds. He won once and was second twice. Among the other apprentice riders he was already a personage, although, of course, he scarcely dared speak to the full-fledged jockeys.

And then the Terror came.

It was Gracious that brought it. There were eight two-years-olds in the seven-furlong sprint on the main track at Morris Park. The filly had gone slightly off her feed the night before the race, but she seemed perfectly fit otherwise, and Faulkner determined to start her.

"She won't finish as strong as she would a week ago," he told the boy, as the saddling bugle blew. "So you send her along a bit at the start and get the rail. Keep her goin' an' let her die in front."

"I reck'n," said Tim confidently, and they swung him into the saddle.

Gracious, under Tim's riding, was a quick breaker. She leaped away the instant the barrier rose, and from the middle of the track the boy took her to the rail before the run up the back-stretch was over. She held her lead till the field had rounded into the stretch, and then he felt her falter. In an instant he began to ride, first with hands, then with hands and feet, then with hands and feet and whip. But it was not in the filly to answer. At the six-furlong pole she had gone stale—gone stale between two jumps. But the boy kept at her with might and main.

"TIM AND HIS MOTHER HAD LEFT THEIR LITTLE CABIN AT THE FIRST CRACK OF DAWN"

It was useless. In six strides a brown muzzle crept up to his saddle girth. In two jumps more it reached the filly's shoulder. In three more strides the two were head and head; and then the brown muzzle was in front.

Suddenly the brown muzzle drooped, and the colt faltered. Tim took heart again. Perhaps, perhaps he might still nurse the filly home in front. He gripped her withers a bit tighter with his knees and spoke to her, softly and pleadingly, as was his wont, through his clenched teeth:

"Come on, yew gal—come on, yew baby—come jes' once mo'—jes' once—we's mos' home now—come—come. Come, yew gal!"

Back to the boy's stirrup came the saddle girth of the brown colt, as his stride shortened under the staggering drive. Tim's heart leaped in his bosom, for there was the wire not ten jumps away and—he was going to win.

"Come—come, yew baby," he whispered almost into the filly's ear, as he leaned far over her nodding head. The ecstasy of victory thrilled his small body to his very toes.

At that instant the brown colt swerved against him. The pungent odor of sweating horseflesh smote his nostrils—the roar of a horrified crowd filled his ears—the track rose up to meet him. A flash of red enveloped his brain—then came darkness and oblivion.

When he came to himself, the first faint light of dawn was sifting in through a window somewhere. "Time I was up fer exercisin'," he thought, and he struggled to rise. A flash of pain in his left arm turned him faint and sick. As he wondered over this, he became aware of a dull, steady roar that filled the room.

Again he opened his eyes. Dimly he made out the form of a white-capped woman standing over him. Then he knew that he was not lying in the loft at Sheepshead Bay.

"Are you awake, little boy?" said a soft voice.

"I—I reck'n," said Tim faintly.

There came the rattle of a heavy vehicle pounding over pavements, the shrill shriek of a whistle, the roar of horses' hoofs.

Then he remembered it all and turned his face to the wall.

That same evening Faulkner came in to see him.

"Well, Tim," he said, "'twas a bad tumble, hey? How d'you feel? better?"

"Sure," said the boy feebly.

"That's fine, that's fine," cried the trainer heartily. "'Twa'n't your fault. You done fine. You'd 'a' won, sure, 'f that chump Reilly had kep' his colt straight. But don't you care. We'll have you out in a few days, the Doc says. I telegraphed the Colonel you was all to the good, an' he'll tell yer ma, so don't you worry about that, kid." He leaned over, smiled kindly, and put a huge hand on the boy's head.

It smelled horribly of sweaty horseflesh. With a shudder Tim turned his head away.

"You musn't mind a little thing like a tumble," said the trainer anxiously. "They all get 'em. Why, I remember when I was ridin' a hoss named ——"

And the kindly horseman blundered on in an attempt to cheer the helpless lad. It seemed to Tim that he simply must cry out to him to stop, when the nurse came swiftly up and warned the trainer not to stay any longer.

"Well, so long, kid," was Faulkner's parting word. "Oh, 'course yer busted arm won't let yer ride again this fall, but the season's most over anyway. Only two more days o' Morris Park, and y' know we ain't got any cheap ones to start at Aqueduct. Anythin' I kin do f' you?" Tim opened his eyes again.

"Filly hurted?" he asked faintly.

The trainer laughed.

"Nothin' to hurt," he said. "Skinned her knees a bit, but I was goin' to put her out o' trainin' anyhow. She's O.K."

To Tim's unspeakable relief he lumbered away.

With his arm in a sling, Tim was out again at the end of a week. Much against the boy's will, Faulkner took him one day to the meeting at Aqueduct. There the trainer was soon surrounded by professional colleagues, and Tim fled to a seat in the highest row of the grandstand. Thence he looked down upon the first stages of a six-furlong sprint, but when three horses labored home in a tight-fit finish he buried his face in his hands that he might not see them.

When he lifted his face again, he glanced furtively about, thankful, oh, so thankful, that nobody had noticed him.

Then self-scorn descended upon him. If he could only go away somewhere and die! Furtively, he wept, wiping the tears away with one pudgy, brown fist. For some minutes he stared, heavy-eyed and broken, at his feet.

"Ta-ra-ta-ta-ta! Ta-ra-ta-ta!"

The bugle spoke, calling the handicap horses to the post.

Tim started up and edged toward the aisle. His racing feet carried him in panic half way down to the lawn. One idea possessed him—to get away—to hide himself, he didn't care where—anywhere where he couldn't see the horses run.

A hand seized him by the shoulder and spun him around.

"Hey, kid," said a voice, "how you feelin'? All to the mustard, hey?"

It was Bud Noble, star jockey of the Holland stable, radiant with all the prestige that comes with twenty thousand a year and the adulation of the racing public.

"I reck'n," said Tim, and fled again.

He had no notion of flight. His feet bore him along unsentiently. Suddenly they stopped. And then he knew that he couldn't run away. He must see that race. Something within him that would not be denied commanded it. Slowly he retraced his steps, muttering unconsciously: "I gotter do it. I gotter do it."

Presently he found himself back in the top row of the grandstand. As in a dream, he watched the parade of brilliant colors to the post. As in a dream, he saw the barrier flash up. The old-time roar "They're off!" came faint and faraway to his ears. Dreamlike, the field drifted up the back stretch, rounded the turn, and straightened out for home. He dug the fingers of his one good hand into the hard wooden bench and held his eyes upon the horses.

"I gotter do it. I gotter do it," he muttered still.

They were years in reaching the wire. No mortal thoroughbreds ever ran so slowly before since time began. But at last, at the end of the world, they finished. And up on the highest bench of the grandstand a little boy, with white face and wide eyes, sat back, limp and still.

Tim's arm was still in a sling when he got back to Lexington, and it was January before he could use it to any effect. The intervening weeks he spent at home, helping his mother as best he could in the round of her hard life, running her errands and bearing to and fro the various washings by which she lived. For the first time in his life it worried him to see her work so hard.

"A NEGRO GROOM WAS HOLDING A BIG BAY HORSE, ABOUT WHICH FALKNER WAS BUSILY WORKING"

"Nivver mind, Tim," she would say, lifting her bent back from the tub in the corner of the kitchen, "soon you'll be the famous jockey wid thousands a year. Thin it's your ould mother that'll be wearin' the fine duds and wurruk no more."

And then the boy, sick with shame and fear, would steal from the house—anywhere to be out of the sight of her and the sound of her voice.

Sometimes the Terror would grip him in his sleep, in the middle of the winter night, when the wind shrieked under the shingles on the cabin roof or the cold rain drove against the window-pane. More than once he started up, broad awake, with the smell of sweating horseflesh sharp and agonizing in his nostrils. Once it was the sound of his own voice that woke him, and he was crying out:

"Come on, yew baby, come, come, yew gal!"

Then he sat on the edge of his cot, with the blanket over his shoulders, until daybreak, with such thoughts as a boy may know.

But on a sunny morning in February, it was Tim who stood in the great doorway of the stallion stable at The Vale, saying to the Colonel:

"Thought mebbe I could help yew with the two-year-olds."

Day by day he strove with himself. Little by little he fought the Terror down. The very smell of the stables turned him faint for a week. He used to creep into King Faraway's box-stall when the big horse stood, wet under his blanket, after his morning gallop, and bury his face in the stallion's mane and rub his nose along the giant withers, till at last the horrible smell of sweating horseflesh had power to terrify him no more. It was weeks before he could mount without trembling, but at last he came to do it and—to hope.

At last came April, and one evening, as Tim was helping with the feeding, he heard the Colonel's voice calling him. He trembled a little, for he knew what was coming.

"I've a letter from Faulkner," said the Colonel, "and he's asking for you, Tim. Shall I tell him you'll be up with the new batch of youngsters?" It was the cast of the die.

"I reck'n," said Tim stoutly.

But it wasn't quite the same old Sheepshead Bay that Tim went back to. He did his work as faithfully and skilfully as ever. His hand was just as light and sure; he had not lost his sense of pace. But the first pale light of day did not send him out to the stables with every nerve in his lithe body tingling for very joy of the work that was coming. And once, when he saw a stable-boy thrown—the Terror rose at him again; not with the old terrible leap, to be sure, but he saw Its face for an instant.

He will never forget his first race that spring. Again he rode a two-year-old, and he won without difficulty, nobody guessed at what expense. As the season went on, he rode again and again, and sometimes he won, and oftener not.

But Faulkner saw and shook his head. If Tim's horse won, it was because its own speed and the judgment of its rider did it. Nobody ever saw Tim take a chance. Other boys might leave him space to squeeze through if they liked. He never did it. It was the longest way 'round and plain sailing for Tim. No mad, brilliant rush for the rail. No fine finishes from unlucky beginnings.

And Faulkner watched and saw it all. Once the boy caught the trainer looking at him, thoughtful and puzzled. A big lump rose in his throat and strangled him, and he stumbled away with his grief. It seemed to him that he could not live on any longer. He grew even more grave and silent as the days went on, shunned the other stable-boys, and kept stolidly to himself.

It had to end sometime, somehow, and the ending of it was notable—because Tim was Tim, I suppose.

For the Suburban Handicap, with the Brooklyn the greatest of the classic races for the older horses, the Holland stable had two candidates. The first was the five-year-old Gladstone, son of Juniper and winner of fifteen races, one of them a Metropolitan. The second was Kate Greenaway, a three-year-old filly by King Faraway, whose only claim to distinction was that she had won third place in the Futurity of the preceding year. But, though Gladstone was the stable's main reliance, the filly's work had been dazzling, and the shrewd Faulkner had hopes of her.

Bud Noble, as stable jockey, was to ride Gladstone, while the trainer relied on the light-weight Ban Johnson, on whom the stable had second call, to handle Kate Greenaway. Tim knew the filly as no one else knew her or could know her. Down at The Vale, before ever he came to the races, he had been the first to put halter and bridle on her; his small legs were the first to bestride her; he had broken her to the barrier until she seemed actually to like the thing, and in her work she had been his especial charge. But he had never ridden her in a race.

The running of a big handicap at a Metropolitan track is an impressive event, even to the man who knows nothing of horses. To him who loves the thoroughbred it is inspiring. To Tim it was something more than that—a thing to make you tremble.

All morning the boy hung uneasily about the stable. He ate scarcely any dinner and roved restlessly about until it was time to take the filly to the paddock. He got her there just as the horses were going to the post for the third race. The Suburban was the fourth. Up and down under the great shed he walked his charge, blanketed and hooded, in the wake of towering, black Gladstone. Soon a shouting from the grandstand announced that the third race was over.

Then came a rush of hundreds to see the Suburban horses saddled. One by one, the candidates filed out to the track for their warming-up gallops—Boston, top-weight, favorite and winner of the Metropolitan, and second in the Brooklyn; Carley, winner of the Advance the season before; Catchall, the speedy Hastings mare; and all the rest—all save Kate Greenaway. Once, in a warming-up gallop, she had run away, and Faulkner would never take chances with her after that. So Tim walked her up and down by herself, thankful, yet ashamed, that somebody else was to ride her.

Suddenly the stable foreman ran up.

"Hi, you Tim," he shouted, "hustle over to the dressin' room an' git on yer duds. Skin along, now, no time to lose."

Tim stood gaping.

"Git a move on—git a move! My Gawd! You ain't got no time to lose. Ban's fell down an' sprained his ankle."

Tim trudged over to the jockey's house, his eyes on the ground. Over in the paddock, Faulkner listened stubbornly to the foreman.

"I tell you," the latter was saying, "the kid's lost his nerve. Ain't you seen it all along? He ain't took a chance sence his tumble. Why dontcher give the mount to Tyson or Biff Barry? They ain't neither of 'em got a mount."

"Nothin' doin'," rejoined the trainer. "The kid knows the filly—brought her up, almost. He can ride, too, if he don't get in a tight place, an' that ain't likely. Tyson can't make the weight. B'sides, I told the Colonel I'd give the kid a chance. An'," he concluded, "this is it."

"All right," said the foreman, "but you'll see. He's lost his nerve. Why, he got white eraoun' the gills when I tol' him."

"HE SAT ON THE EDGE OF HIS COT, WITH THE BLANKET OVER HIS SHOULDERS, UNTIL DAYBREAK"

Tim had grown like a weed since he first saw Sheepshead Bay, but it was a slender, fragile figure that the trainer tossed into the chestnut filly's saddle when the bugle blew.

"Now, kid," said Faulkner quietly, throwing one arm over the crupper, "you're third from the rail. You know the filly as well as I do. She's fit to the minute. She'll run in 2.03, if she ain't rushed in the first half. Hold yer place an' let the sprinters do their sprintin'. They'll come back. Keep her goin' her pace for a mile, an' if you have to ride her the last quarter, make her sweat for it. She's game fer a drive. They don't make 'em no gamer."

The lad heard scarcely a word. He wasn't frightened. He was sullen, rebellious against—against everything. It was one more race to him—commonplace, perfunctory, tiresome. He was going to get through with it in the easiest way he could. He thought with relief of the wide spaces and easy turns of the great track.

"Keep up yer nerve, kid," said Bud Noble, turning in his saddle and looking back at Tim as the field filed through the paddock gate.

Tim grinned scornfully. What a notion! Why should anybody need nerve to gallop a horse around a track? He had only one idea—to keep out of trouble. So, perfectly calm and very much bored, he danced to the starting-gate on the chestnut filly. He paid little attention to the fretful doings there. He was haunted by no fear that he might be left. It was a nuisance to have to keep an eye on the vicious heels of Baldy, the swayback gelding at his left—that was all.

But Kate Greenaway had no intention of being left. She kept her dainty nose on the webbing from the instant she got it there, for hadn't Tim taught her that? And when, at last, all the fussing and fuming was over, and the whips of the starter's assistants had ceased their hissing, and the pleadings and threats of the starter himself were done, and the gate swished up before the fourteen racers, the filly's first bound beat the gate by half a length.

Tim was a trifle disgusted. "Blast the filly, anyhow!" he thought. It was no part of his plan to lead that roaring field. He took a double wrap on the reins, and his mount came back till two lithe, lean forms slid up abreast her on the rail, and a third on the outside. That was better, thought Tim, and the sprinters drew out ahead of him. Contentedly he fell in on the rail behind them.

A storm of dirt clods smote the filly in the face. Another pelted Tim on the forehead. He took a tighter hold on Kate Greenaway, and the sprinters drew away another length. It would have been an easy thing for him to choke her back still further, but somehow a surge of generous feeling for the game creature beat down his sullen selfishness, and he hadn't the heart to strangle her.