hat. Do they play
Shakespeare?"

"I don't know, I'm sure," said the conductor, puzzled enough: "but I dare
say they do."

"Then I'm glad I never went to the theatre," thought Draxy, as she
settled herself in her new seat. For a few moments she could not banish
her disturbed and unhappy feeling. She could not stop fancying some of the
grand words which she most loved in Shakespeare, repeated by those
repulsive voices.

But soon she turned her eyes to the kindling sky, and forgot all else. The
moon was slowly turning from gold to silver; then it would turn from
silver to white cloud, then to film, then vanish away. Draxy knew that day
and the sun would conquer. "Oh, if I only understood it," sighed Draxy.
Then she fell to thinking about the first chapter in Genesis; and while
she looked upon that paling moon, she dreamed of other moons which no
human eyes ever saw. Draxy was a poet; but as yet she had never dared to
show even to her father the little verses she had not been able to help
writing. "Oh, how dare I do this; how dare I?" she said to herself, as
alone in her little room, she wrote line after line. "But if nobody ever
knows, it can do no harm. It is strange I love it, though, when I am so
ashamed."

This morning Draxy had that mysterious feeling as if all things were new,
which so often comes to poetic souls. It is at once the beauty and the
burden, the exhaustion and the redemption of their lives. No wonder that
even common men can sometimes see the transfiguration which often comes to
him before whose eyes death and resurrection are always following each
other, instant, perpetual, glorious. Draxy took out her little diary.
Folded very small, and hid in the pocket of it, was a short poem that she
had written the year before on a Tiarella plant which had blossomed in
her window. Mrs. White had brought it to her with some ferns and mosses
from the mountains; and all winter long it had flowered as if in summer.
Draxy wondered why this golden moon reminded her of the Tiarella. She did
not know the subtle underlying bonds in nature. These were the Tiarella
verses:--

My little Tiarella,
If thou art my own,
Tell me how thus in winter
Thy shining flowers have blown.
Art thou a fairy smuggler,
Defying law?
Didst take of last year's summer
More than summer saw?
Or hast thou stolen frost-flakes
Secretly at night?
Thy stamens tipped with silver,
Thy petals spotless white,
Are so lik