all,
I suppose, to become aware of the time, had it not been for a faint,
sweet sound as of a child striking a stringed instrument. It was so
delicate and remote that I hardly heard it, but so joyous and tender
that I could not but listen, and when I heard it a second time it seemed
as if I caught the echo of a child's laugh. At first I was puzzled. Then
I remembered the little autoharp I had placed among the other things in
that pile of vanished toys. I said aloud:

"Farewell, dear little ghost. Go rest. Rest in joy, dear little ghost.
Farewell, farewell."

That was years ago, but there has been silence since. Elsbeth was always
an obedient little thing.

A SPECTRAL COLLIE

WILLIAM PERCY CECIL happened to be a younger son, so he left home--which
was England--and went to Kansas to ranch it. Thousands of younger sons
do the same, only their destination is not invariably Kansas.

An agent at Wichita picked out Cecil's farm for him and sent the deeds
over to England before Cecil left. He said there was a house on the
place. So Cecil's mother fitted him out for America just as she had
fitted out another superfluous boy for Africa, and parted from him
with an heroic front and big agonies of mother-ache which she kept to
herself.

The boy bore up the way a man of his blood ought, but when he went out
to the kennel to see Nita, his collie, he went to pieces somehow, and
rolled on the grass with her in his arms and wept like a booby. But the
remarkable part of it was that Nita wept too, big, hot dog tears which
her master wiped away. When he went off she howled like a hungry baby,
and had to be switched before she would give any one a night's sleep.

When Cecil got over on his Kansas place he fitted up the shack as
cosily as he could, and learned how to fry bacon and make soda biscuits.
Incidentally, he did farming, and sunk a heap of money, finding out
how not to do things. Meantime, the Americans laughed at him, and were
inclined to turn the cold shoulder, and his compatriots, of whom there
were a number in the county, did not prove to his liking. They consoled
themselves for their exiled state in fashions not in keeping with
Cecil's traditions. His homesickness went deeper than theirs, perhaps,
and American whiskey could not make up for the loss of his English home,
nor flirtations with the gay American village girls quite compensate
him for the loss of his English mother. So he kept to himself and had
nostal