pen, credulous eyes of the quiet
folk dwelling about the Perdu, wore in greater or less degree the
complexion of the neighborhood. How this came to be is one of those nice
questions for which we need hardly expect definitive settlement. Whether
the people, in the course of generations, had gradually keyed themselves
to the dominant note of their surroundings, or whether the neighborhood
had been little by little wrought up to its pitch of supersensibility by
the continuous impact of superstitions, and expectations, and
apprehensions, and wonders, and visions, rained upon it from the
personalities of an imaginative and secluded people,--this might be
discussed with more argument than conclusiveness.

Of the dwellers about the Perdu none was more saturated with the magic
of the place than Reuben Waugh, a boy of thirteen. Reuben lived in a
small, yellow-ochre-colored cottage, on the hill behind the barn with
the red doors. Whenever Reuben descended to the level, and turned to
look back at the yellow dot of a house set in the vast expanse of pale
blue sky, he associated the picture with a vague but haunting conception
of some infinite forget-me-not flower. The boy had all the chores to do
about the little homestead; but even then there was always time to
dream. Besides, it was not a pushing neighborhood; and whenever he would
he took for himself a half-holiday. At such times he was more than
likely to stray over to the banks of the Perdu.

It would have been hard for Reuben to say just why he found the Perdu so
attractive. He might have said it was the fishing; for sometimes, though
not often, he would cast a timorous hook into its depths and tremble
lest he should lure from the pallid waters some portentous and dreadful
prey. He never captured, however, anything more terrifying than catfish;
but these were clad in no small measure of mystery, for the white waters
of the Perdu had bleached their scales to a ghastly pallor, and the
opalescence of their eyes was apt to haunt their captor's reveries. He
might have said, also, that it was his playmate, little Celia
Hansen,--whose hook he would bait whenever she wished to fish, and whose
careless hands, stained with berries, he would fill persistently with
bunches of the hot-hued orange lily.

But Reuben knew there was more to say than this. In a boyish way, and
all unrealizing, he loved the child with a sort of love that would one
day flower out as an absorbing passion. For t