ich his mother had once used to
hang clothes upon, he dragged him along to a huge town, where the two
dwelled together in sorrow and want.

The young man had now become an old man, but he was still smoking his
new pipe which too had become old.

One evening Thomas died. People came from the police department, and
carried off his carcass somewhere.

The old man was now all alone with his old pipe. A great cold fell
upon him and a terrible trembling. And he knew that his time had come,
and that he never would be able to smoke again. So from the wretched
bag which he once had brought with him from his home, he took a sad
old hat, and in this he wrapped his pipe.

Then he threw a cape, greenish with age, about his feverish shoulders,
and dragged himself painfully to a little square near by, taking care
that no policeman should see him. He knelt down, and dug in the earth
with his finger nails, and devoutly buried his old pipe underneath a
tuft of flowers. Then he returned to his dwelling-place and died.

MAL DE VIVRE

A poet, Laurent Laurini by name, was sick unto death with the illness,
called weariness of life. It is a terrible malady, and those who have
fallen prey to it are unable to look upon men, animals, and things
without frightful suffering. Great scruples poison his heart.

The poet went away from the town where he dwelled. He sought out the
fields to gaze at the trees and the corn and the waters, to listen to
the quails that sing like fountains and to the falling of the weavers'
looms and the hum of the telegraph wires. These things and these
sounds saddened him.

The gentlest thoughts were bitterness to him. And when he picked a
little flower in order to escape his terrible malady, he wept because
he had plucked it.

He entered a village on an evening sweet with the perfume of pears.
It was a beautiful village like those he had often described in his
books. There was a town square, a church, a cemetery, gardens, a
smithy, and a dark inn. Blue smoke rose from it, and within was the
sheen of glasses. There was also a stream which wound in and out under
the wild nut-trees.

The poet with his sick heart sat down mournfully on a stone. He was
thinking of the torment he was enduring, of his old mother crying
because of his absence, of the women who had deceived him, and he had
homesickness for the time of his first communion.

"My heart," he thought, "my sad heart cannot change."

Suddenly he s