receiving no
answer, forced his way in. Tig, half awake, saw him enter with no
surprise. He felt no surprise when he put a letter in his hand bearing
the name of the magazine to which he had sent his short story. He was
not even surprised, when, tearing it open with suddenly alert hands, he
found within the check for the first prize--the check he had expected.

All that day, as the April sunlight spread itself upon his floor, he
felt his strength grow. Late in the afternoon the Sparrow came back,
paler, and more bony than ever, and sank, breathing hard, upon the
floor, with his sack of coal.

"I've been sick," he said, trying to smile. "Terrible sick, but I come
as soon as I could."

"Build up the fire," cried Tig, in a voice so strong it made the Sparrow
start as if a stone had struck him. "Build up the fire, and forget you
are sick. For, by the shade of Nora Finnegan, you shall be hungry no
more!"

FROM THE LOOM OF THE DEAD

WHEN Urda Bjarnason tells a tale all the men stop their talking to
listen, for they know her to be wise with the wisdom of the old people,
and that she has more learning than can be got even from the great
schools at Reykjavik. She is especially prized by them here in this
new country where the Icelandmen are settled--this America, so new in
letters, where the people speak foolishly and write unthinking books.
So the men who know that it is given to the mothers of earth to be
very wise, stop their six part singing, or their jangles about the
free-thinkers, and give attentive ear when Urda Bjarnason lights her
pipe and begins her tale.

She is very old. Her daughters and sons are all dead, but her
granddaughter, who is most respectable, and the cousin of a physician,
says that Urda is twenty-four and a hundred, and there are others who
say that she is older still. She watches all that the Iceland people do
in the new land; she knows about the building of the five villages on
the North Dakota plain, and of the founding of the churches and the
schools, and the tilling of the wheat farms. She notes with suspicion
the actions of the women who bring home webs of cloth from the store,
instead of spinning them as their mothers did before them; and she
shakes her head at the wives who run to the village grocery store every
fortnight, imitating the wasteful American women, who throw butter in
the fire faster than it can be turned from the churn.

She watches yet other things. All winter l