kiss.'"

"Oh, the irony of it!" I cried out.

And Carquinez, in the firelight a veritable Mephistopheles in velvet
jacket, fixed me with his black eyes.

"And they won, you said? The world's judgment! I have told you, and I
know. They won as you are winning, here in your hills."

"But you," I demanded hotly; "you with your orgies of sound and sense,
with your mad cities and madder frolics--bethink you that you win?"

He shook his head slowly. "Because you with your sober bucolic regime,
lose, is no reason that I should win. We never win. Sometimes we think
we win. That is a little pleasantry of the gods."

THE APOSTATE

"Now I wake me up to work;
I pray the Lord I may not shirk.
If I should die before the night,
I pray the Lord my work's all right.
Amen."

"If you don't git up, Johnny, I won't give you a bite to eat!"

The threat had no effect on the boy. He clung stubbornly to sleep,
fighting for its oblivion as the dreamer fights for his dream. The boy's
hands loosely clenched themselves, and he made feeble, spasmodic blows
at the air. These blows were intended for his mother, but she betrayed
practised familiarity in avoiding them as she shook him roughly by the
shoulder.

"Lemme 'lone!"

It was a cry that began, muffled, in the deeps of sleep, that swiftly
rushed upward, like a wail, into passionate belligerence, and that died
away and sank down into an inarticulate whine. It was a bestial cry, as
of a soul in torment, filled with infinite protest and pain.

But she did not mind. She was a sad-eyed, tired-faced woman, and she had
grown used to this task, which she repeated every day of her life. She
got a grip on the bedclothes and tried to strip them down; but the boy,
ceasing his punching, clung to them desperately. In a huddle, at the
foot of the bed, he still remained covered. Then she tried dragging the
bedding to the floor. The boy opposed her. She braced herself. Hers
was the superior weight, and the boy and bedding gave, the former
instinctively following the latter in order to shelter against the chill
of the room that bit into his body.

As he toppled on the edge of the bed it seemed that he must fall
head-first to the floor. But consciousness fluttered up in him. He
righted himself and for a moment perilously balanced. Then he struck the
floor on his feet. On the instant his mother seized him by the shoulders
and shook him