phasis.

The president saw it all, explaining it competently to himself. "Yes, yes,
I see it from here--vacation spent in renewing your youth playing with the
children--promised to go back at Christmas, I suppose."

"Oh, yes, of course," said J.M.

"Children cried when you came away, and gave you dotty little things
they'd made themselves?"

"Just like that," with a reminiscent smile.

"Well, well," the president got to his feet. "Of course, most natural
thing in the world to take an interest in your brothers' and sisters'
children."

J.M. did not contradict the president. He never contradicted the
presidents. He outlasted them so consistently that it was not necessary.
This time he took off his glasses and rubbed them on an awkwardly
fashioned chamois spectacle-wiper made for him by little Molly McCartey.
He noticed the pattern of the silk in his visitor's necktie and it made
him think of one of Rosalie Loyette's designs. He smiled a little.

The president regarded this smiling silence with suspicion. He cocked his
eye penetratingly upon his librarian. "But it is very queer, J.M., that as
long as I have known you, I never heard that you _had_ any family at all."

J.M. put his clean and polished spectacles back on his nose and looked
through them into the next room, where Ivan Petrofsky sat devouring his
first lesson in political economy. Then he turned, beaming like an amiable
sphinx upon his interrogator. "Do you know--I never realized it myself
until just lately," he said.

BY ABANA AND PHARPAR

Fields, green fields of Shining River,
Lightly left too soon
In the stormy equinoctial,
In the hunter's moon,--

Snow-blown fields of Shining River
I shall once more tread;
I shall walk their crested hollows,
Living or dead.

FINIS

To old Mrs. Prentiss, watching apprehensively each low mountain dawn, the
long, golden days of the warm autumn formed a series of blessed reprieves
from the loom which hung over her. With her inherited and trained sense of
reality, she could not cheat herself into forgetting, even for a moment,
that her fate was certain, but, nevertheless, she took a breathless
enjoyment in each day, as it passed and did not bring the dreaded change
in her life. She spoke to her husband about this feeling as they sat on
the front step one October evening, when the air was as mild as in late
May, breaking the calm silence, in which they usually