a pat of
butter, and tried to look like some one who was somewhere else.

Miss O'Malley closed the door behind her with extreme gentleness.

So the matter lay. But the position was unchanged. For a little time
peace would reign in that household, but the same driving necessity
remained, and before long another, and perhaps more virulent, serpent
would have to be requisitioned for the assuagement of those urgent
woes. A man's moustaches will arise with the sun; not Joshua could
constrain them to the pillow after the lark had sung reveille. A woman
will sit pitilessly at the breakfast table however the male eye may
shift and quail. It is the business and the art of life to degrade
permanencies. Fluidity is existence, there is no other, and for ever
the chief attraction of Paradise must be that there is a serpent in it
to keep it lively and wholesome. Lacking the serpent we are no longer
in Paradise, we are at home, and our sole entertainment is to yawn when
we wish to.

THE DAISIES

In the scented bud of the morning--O,
When the windy grass went rippling far,
I saw my dear one walking slow
In the field where the daisies are.

We did not laugh and we did not speak
As we wandered happily to and fro;
I kissed my dear on either cheek
In the bud of the morning--O.

A lark sang up from the breezy land,
A lark sang down from a cloud afar,
And she and I went hand in hand
In the field where the daisies are.

THREE ANGRY PEOPLE

I

He sat cross-legged on the roadside beside a heap of stones, and with
slow regularity his hammer swung up and down, cracking a stone into
small pieces at each descent. But his heart was not in the work. He
hit whatever stone chanced to be nearest. There was no cunning
selection in his hammer, nor any of these oddities of stroke which a
curious and interested worker would have essayed for the mere trial of
his artistry.

He was not difficult to become acquainted with, and, after a little
conversation, I discovered that all the sorrows of the world were
sagging from his shoulders. Everything he had ever done was wrong, he
said. Everything that people had done to him was wrong, that he
affirmed; nor had he any hope that matters would mend, for life was
poisoned at the fountain-head and there was no justice anywhere.
Justice! he raised his eyebrows with the horrid stare of a man who
searches for apparitions; he lowered them again to the bored blink of