a stout man in a rocking chair, reading the
newspaper. At the side of the house two little girls with pig-tails were
playing croquet. Some one in the parlour was executing "After the Ball
is Over" on a mechanical piano.

Luke accosted a stranger who passed him. "Excuse me, but can you tell me
whether this is Mr. Matthew Wilson's house?"

"It used to be," said the stranger, "but old man Wilson has been dead
these ten years."

"And who lives here now?" asked Luke.

"Mr. Woods: he married Wilson's daughter," said the stranger, and went
on his way.

"Well," said Luke to himself, "this is just a little queer. Woods was my
name for a while, when I lived here, but now, I suppose, I'm Luke Dubois
again. Dashed if I can understand it. Somebody must have been dreaming."

So he went back to the white canoe, and paddled away up the river, and
nobody in Scroll-Saw City ever set eyes on him again.

THE OTHER WISE MAN

You know the story of the Three Wise Men of the East, and how they
travelled from far away to offer their gifts at the manger-cradle in
Bethlehem. But have you ever heard the story of the Other Wise Man, who
also saw the star in its rising, and set out to follow it, yet did not
arrive with his brethren in the presence of the young child Jesus? Of
the great desire of this fourth pilgrim, and how it was denied, yet
accomplished in the denial; of his many wanderings and the probations
of his soul; of the long way of his seeking and the strange way of his
finding the One whom he sought--I would tell the tale as I have heard
fragments of it in the Hall of Dreams, in the palace of the Heart of
Man.

I

In the days when Augustus Caesar was master of many kings and Herod
reigned in Jerusalem, there lived in the city of Ecbatana, among the
mountains of Persia, a certain man named Artaban. His house stood close
to the outermost of the walls which encircled the royal treasury. From
his roof he could look over the seven-fold battlements of black and
white and crimson and blue and red and silver and gold, to the hill
where the summer palace of the Parthian emperors glittered like a jewel
in a crown.

Around the dwelling of Artaban spread a fair garden, a tangle of flowers
and fruit-trees, watered by a score of streams descending from the
slopes of Mount Orontes, and made musical by innumerable birds. But all
colour was lost in the soft and odorous darkness of the late September
night, and all sounds were hush