lations: The time when the Sixth Seal was opened.
Alas! when the Son of Man cometh out of the clouds and round about the
throne are the four-winged beasts, what will he see?

"Nothing--nothing, I tell you.

"Unbelief will have killed the very soul of creation itself. And where
once burned the eye of the Cosmos will be naught but a hideous
emptiness.

"Helas! mes enfants, I could drink one more absinthe; my soul grieves
for my lost faith, my lost music, my lost Frederic, my lost life." ...

But they went away. It was past the hour of closing and the host was not
in a humor for parleying.

"Ah! the old pig, the old blasphemer!" he said, shaking his head as he
locked the doors.

They watched him until he turned the corner of the Rue Puteaux and was
lost to them.

He moved slowly, painfully, one leg striking the pavement in
syncopation, for it was sadly crippled by disease. He did not twist his
thin head as he went along the Batignolles. Then the band passed once
more up to the warmer lights of the Clichy Quarter and argued art far
into the night.

They one and all hated Wagner, adoring Chopin's magic music.

THE PIPER OF DREAMS

The desert of my soul is peopled with black gods,
Huge blocks of wood;
Brave with gilded horns and shining gems,
The black and silent gods
Tower in the naked desert of my soul.

With eyes of wolves they watch me in the night;
With eyes like moons.
My gods are they; in each the evil grows,
The grandiose evil darkens over each
And each black god, silent
Under the iron skies, dreams
Of his omnipotence--the taciturn black gods!

And my flesh and my brain are underneath their feet;
I am the victim, and I perish
Under the weight of these nocturnal gods
And in the iron winds of their unceasing wrath.

--LINGWOOD EVANS.

I

It was opera night, and the lights burned with an official brilliancy
that challenged the radiance of the Cafe Monferino across the asphalt.
There, all was decorous gaiety; and the doubles of Pilsner never
vanished from the little round metal tables that overflowed into the
juncture of the streets Gluck and Halevy. Among the brasseries in Paris
this the most desirable to lovers of the Bohemian brew. The cooking,
Neapolitan and Viennese, perhaps explained the presence, one June
evening in the year 1930, of tall, blond, blue-eyed Illowski, the
notorious Russian symphonist. With several ad