sorrow."

The folk in the verger's lodge noticed a little brown bird flitting about
the Cathedral precincts, and admired its beautiful singing. "But it is a
pity," said they, "that all that warbling should be lost and wasted far
out of hearing up on the parapet." They were poor, but they understood
the principles of political economy. So they caught the bird and put it
in a little wicker cage outside the lodge door.

That night the little songster was missing from its accustomed haunt, and
the Dark Image knew more than ever the bitterness of loneliness. Perhaps
his little friend had been killed by a prowling cat or hurt by a stone.
Perhaps . . . perhaps he had flown elsewhere. But when morning came
there floated up to him, through the noise and bustle of the Cathedral
world, a faint heart-aching message from the prisoner in the wicker cage
far below. And every day, at high noon, when the fat pigeons were
stupefied into silence after their midday meal and the sparrows were
washing themselves in the street-puddles, the song of the little bird
came up to the parapets--a song of hunger and longing and hopelessness, a
cry that could never be answered. The pigeons remarked, between
mealtimes, that the figure leaned forward more than ever out of the
perpendicular.

One day no song came up from the little wicker cage. It was the coldest
day of the winter, and the pigeons and sparrows on the Cathedral roof
looked anxiously on all sides for the scraps of food which they were
dependent on in hard weather.

"Have the lodge-folk thrown out anything on to the dust-heap?" inquired
one pigeon of another which was peering over the edge of the north
parapet.

"Only a little dead bird," was the answer.

There was a crackling sound in the night on the Cathedral roof and a
noise as of falling masonry. The belfry jackdaw said the frost was
affecting the fabric, and as he had experienced many frosts it must have
been so. In the morning it was seen that the Figure of the Lost Soul had
toppled from its cornice and lay now in a broken mass on the dust-heap
outside the verger's lodge.

"It is just as well," cooed the fat pigeons, after they had peered at the
matter for some minutes; "now we shall have a nice angel put up there.
Certainly they will put an angel there."

"After joy . . . sorrow," rang out the great bell.

THE PURPLE OF THE BALKAN KINGS

Luitpold Wolkenstein, financier and diplomat on a small, obtrusiv