dear father in a very big city, and out of
the maze of all its tangled marvels of sound and sight he had brought and
made his own forever one image: the image of a mighty foot carved in
marble, set on a pedestal at the bottom of a dark stairway. It had been
severed at the ankle, and around the top was modestly chiselled a border
of lace. It was a foot larger than his whole body, and he had passed
eager, questioning hands over its whole surface, pressing it from heel to
each perfect toe. Of course, this must be one of the Feet to which Milo
Barrus might come; he wondered if the other would be up that dark
stairway, and if Milo Barrus would go up to look for it--and what did you
have to do when you got to the Feet? The possibility of not getting to
them, or of finding only one of them, began to fill his inner life quite
as the sombre shadows filled and made a presence of themselves in the
Front Room--particularly of a Sabbath, when one must be uncommonly good
because God seemed to take more notice than on week-days.

During the week, indeed, Clytie often relaxed her austerity. She would
even read to him verses of her own composition, of which he never tired
and of which he learned to repeat not a few. One of her pastoral poems
told of a visit she had once made to the home of a relative in a
neighbouring State. It began thus:

"New Hampshire is a pretty place,
I did go there to see
The maple-sugar being boiled
By one that's dear to me."

Bernal came to know it all as far as the stanza--

"I loved to hear the banjo hum,
It sounds so very calmly;
If a happy home you wish to find,
Visit the Thompson family."

After this the verses became less direct, and, to his mind, rather wordy
and purposeless, though he never failed of joy in the mere verbal music of
them when Clytie read, with sometimes a kind of warm tremble in her
voice--

"At lovers' promises fates grow merrilee;
Some are made on land,
Some on the deep sea.
Love does sometimes leave
Streams of tears."

He thought she looked very beautiful when she read this, in a voice that
sounded like crying, with her big, square face, her fat cheeks that looked
like russet apples, her very tiny black moustache, her smooth, oily black
hair with a semicircle of tight little curls over her brow, and her
beautiful, big, rounded, shining forehead.

Yet he preferred her poems of action, like that of Salmon Faubel, whose
bride became so homesick