ve a rip
what kind of a car I rode in so long as I had such a handsome
_chauffeur_. And I reached out and patted him on the knee, but he was
too deep in his worries about business matters, I suppose, to pay any
attention to that unseemly advance.

To-night after supper, when the bairns were safely in bed, I opened up
the baby grand, intent on dying game, whatever happened or was to
happen. But my concert wasn't much of a success. When you do a thing
for the last time, and know it's to be the last time, it gives you a
graveyardy sort of feeling, no matter how you may struggle against it.
And the blither the tune the heavier it seemed to make my heart. So I
swung back to the statelier things that have come down to us out of
the cool and quiet of Time. I eased my soul with the _Sonata
Appassionata_ and lost myself in the _Moonlight_ and pounded out the
_Eroica_. But my fingers were stiff and my touch was wooden--so it was
small wonder my poor lord and master tried to bury himself in his
four-day-old newspaper. Then I tried Schubert's _Rosamonde_, though
that wasn't much of a success. So I wandered on through Liszt to
Chopin. And even Chopin struck me as too soft and sugary and far-away
for a homesteader's wife, so I sang

"In the dead av the night, acushla,
When the new big house is still,"--

to see if it would shake any sign of recognition out of my harried old
Dinky-Dunk.

As I beheld nothing more than an abstracted frown over the tip-top edge
of his paper, I defiantly swung into _The Humming Coon_, which
apparently had no more effect than Herman Lohr. So with malice
aforethought I slowly and deliberately pounded out the Beethoven Funeral
March. I lost myself, in fact, in that glorious and melodic wail of
sorrow, merged my own puny troubles in its god-like immensities, and was
brought down to earth by a sudden movement from Dinky-Dunk.

"Why rub it in?" he almost angrily demanded as he got up and left the
room....

But that stammering little soul-flight has done me good. It has given
me back my perspective. I refuse to be downed. I'm still the captain
of my soul. I'm still at the wheel, no matter if we are rolling a bit.
And life, in some way, is still going to be good, still well worth the
living!

_Wednesday the Eighth_

Dinky-Dunk has had word that Lady Alicia is on her way west. He seems
to regard that event as something very solemn, but I