will stop his special at Turntable,
and seated in the little parlor he seems a glowing metal mass of a man
to Molly, standing apart in awe of him. But the time is at hand when she
must appeal to him or never at all in this world, so the saints inspire
her to speak a message to the man of power and she smiles with shy pride
of their confidence in her.

"Faith, I will talk to him as a boy again," she plans; "'Danny,' I will
say, 'when the lanterns of the yard do beckon to your ambition is there
not one light above and beyond, brighter than all the others, which
beckons the spirit?' Then he will be guided by it," reasons old Molly
with her solemn gaze fixed on the future of Dan.

But it chances that Dan's visit is delayed and Molly feels that the
saints are impatient of her worldly lingering.

"I must put the message into writing lest it be lost entirely," she says
then. "Anyhow Danny will read it over and over in memory of me, having
that tender a heart toward his mother, for all his hardness to others."

So that the message of the farthest lantern is at last about to be
written, on an evening when the little cottage with crusted eaves and
hoary glimmering windows seems but the bivouac of winter elves in folk
story. And as old Molly by the cleared table, with pen in hand and
bottle of ink and the paper she bought when Michael died--to write his
second cousin in Kildare a letter of sympathy, y' understand--as old
Molly makes ready for the writing, after a stick laid on the fire and
hearth brushed, the snow drifts solidly to the window but is swept clean
of the doorstep, leaving a scratch of firelight under the door on the
path beyond.

"The Farthest Lantern," she writes, as a headline, for 't is certain
that Danny before reading will wish to know what it is about; and then
pleased with the successful beginning she holds it up to the shaded lamp
to read over, then because of the wrinkled hands shaking lays it down on
the table, surely as steady as rock.

Divil a thing can she make out except blots and scratches, so that the
headline is done over with more care. And only then it becomes plain
that what with the rheumatism and palsy Molly has written her last,
except scratches, which the most credulous could not accept at all as a
message of interest, y' understand.

Now well would it be for old Mistress Regan's memory if she had put
aside the message with resignation and thought no more about it. But
there is no dou