k the
window-pane!"

So the Mystic felt for the footstool, over which he had just stubbed
his toes, and used the corner of it to smash the glass.

"Ah," said the Asthmatic, with a long sigh of relief, "I am better.
There is nothing like fresh air."

Then they all went to sleep again.

The morning roused them slowly, and they lay on their backs looking
around the room. The windows were closed and the shades drawn.

But the glass door of the bookcase had a great hole in it!

"You see!" said the Mystic. "It was the faith cure. The Oversoul cured
you."

"Not at all," said the Sceptic. "It was the doubt cure. The way to get
rid of a thing is to doubt it."

"I think," said the Asthmatic, "that it was the nightmare, and that
miscellaneous cooking is the cause of human misery. We have travelled
enough, and yet we have found no better air than we left at home."

So they went back to the certain village and continued their
disputations very happily for the rest of their lives.

[Illustration]

THE NIGHT CALL

I

The first caprice of November snow had sketched the world in white for
an hour in the morning. After mid-day, the sun came out, the wind
turned warm, and the whiteness vanished from the landscape. By
evening, the low ridges and the long plain of New Jersey were rich and
sad again, in russet and dull crimson and old gold; for the foliage
still clung to the oaks and elms and birches, and the dying monarchy
of autumn retreated slowly before winter's cold republic.

In the old town of Calvinton, stretched along the highroad, the lamps
were lit early as the saffron sunset faded into humid night. A mist
rose from the long, wet street and the sodden lawns, muffling the
houses and the trees and the college towers with a double veil, under
which a pallid aureole encircled every light, while the moon above,
languid and tearful, waded slowly through the mounting fog. It was a
night of delay and expectation, a night of remembrance and mystery,
lonely and dim and full of strange, dull sounds.

In one of the smaller houses on the main street the light in the
window burned late. Leroy Carmichael was alone in his office reading
Balzac's story of "The Country Doctor." He was not a gloomy or
despondent person, but the spirit of the night had entered into him.
He had yielded himself, as young men of ardent temperament often do,
to the subduing magic of the fall. In his mind, as in the air, there
was a soft, clin