ing victor from a
scrimmage with a hippo, which was fond of deadly fray.

He was shot with poisoned arrows and his tale of anguish harrows up the
bosom of the reader, but he lived to journey home; he was chased by
wolves in Russia, thrown in prison cell in Prussia, and was captured by
fierce bandits in the neighborhood of Rome. He had lived where dwells
the savage whose ambition is to ravage and to fill his cozy wigwam with
a handsome line of scalps; he had lived with desert races, sought the
strange and distant places, he had stood upon the summit of the
loftiest of Alps.

To his home at last returning, filled with sentimental yearning, "Now,"
he cried, "farewell to danger--I have left its stormy track!" Far from
scenes of strife and riot he desired long years of quiet, but a casting
from an airship fell three miles and broke his back.

THEY ALL COME BACK

The stars will come back to the azure vault when the clouds are all
blown away; and the sun will come back when the night is done, and give
us another day; the cows will come back from the meadows lush, and the
birds to their trysting tree, but the money I paid to a mining shark
will never come back to me! The leaves will come back to the naked
boughs, the flowers to the frosty brae; the spring will come back like
a blooming bride, and the breezes that blow in May; and joy will come
back to the stricken heart, and laughter and hope and glee, but the
money I blew for some mining stock will never come back to me!

HOME BUILDERS

Old Bullion has a stack of rich things in his shack; of Persian rugs
and antique jugs and costly bric-a-brac. There's art work in the hall,
fine paintings on the wall; and yet a gloom as of the tomb is hanging
over all. Here costly books abound. "This cost a thousand pound; that
trade-mark blur means Elzivir--I've nothing cheap around. Here's Venus
in the foam; the statue came from Rome; I bought the best the world
possessed when I built up this home." Thus proudly Bullion talks, as
through his home he walks, and tells the cost of things embossed, of
vases, screens and crocks. No children's laughter rings, among those
costly things; no sounds of play by night or day; no happy housewife
sings. For romping girl or boy might easily destroy a priceless jug,
or stain a rug, and ruin Bullion's joy. The guests of Bullion yawn,
impatient to be gone, afraid they'll mar some lacquered jar, or tread
some fan upon.

Down her