water ditches silver in the light;
A swift, bright lance hurled low across the world;
A sudden sickness for the hills of home.

--_From April Twilights._

THE DOINGS OF THE DEVIL

BY HARVEY J. O'HIGGINS

ILLUSTRATIONS BY THOMAS FOGARTY

Mrs. Cregan wept, and her tears were ludicrous. She was as fat as a
Falstaff. Her features were as ill-suited for the expression of grief as
a circus clown's. She had not even a channel in her plump cheeks to
drain the tears from the corners of her eyes; and the slow drops, large
and unctuous, trickled down her round jowl and soaked into her
bonnet-strings, leaving her cheeks as fresh and as ruddy in the sunlight
as if they had been merely wet with perspiration. Her eyes stared,
unpuckered, apparently unconscious that they wept. Her mouth was tight
in an expression of resentful determination. Only her little round chin
trembled--like a child's.

And yet Mrs. Cregan was as nearly heart-broken as she had ever been in
her life. She was leaving her husband; what was more grievous to her,
she was leaving her home; she was on the streets of New York, with her
small savings in her greasy purse--clasped tightly in her two hands
under her "Sunday cape," that was trimmed with fringe and tassels in a
way to remind you of a lambrequin. She did not know where to go. There
was no one to whom she could turn for aid, and she would not go to any
one for pity. Behind her was the wreck of a breakfast table--the visible
symbol of her ruined home--with a cursing Irishman, whom nobody could
live with any longer, shouting, "_Your_ house, is it? I'll show yeh
whose house it is! I'll show yeh! I'll break ev'ry danged thing in the
place!" Before her were the crooked byways of what had once been
"Greenwich village," as quiet as a desert, and as indifferent, in the
early morning radiance, with shuttered windows and closed doors.

The domestic peace of those old streets made her own homelessness the
more pitiful to her. She felt as she had felt once before--years
before--in her childhood, when she had set sail with her parents for
America. It had been a cold day; and the mists had steamed up horridly
from the water, with a desolate, wet sea-odor; and the memory of the
sunlight on green fields and the warm perfume of the land had been like
a longing for health and daylight to the darkness of a death-bed. The
future had threatened her with the terrors of an unknown world. The
past--despite its p