utical almanacs of a long bygone
date, and much other doubtful treasure.

The mother came into the brick-paved yard and shrilled 'Paul! Paul lay
quiet. The voice called up and down, and was lost in the recesses of
the heaped timber in the yard which lay beside the ill-kempt strip of
garden. The hedge which had once divided the neighbouring domains was
broken down in many places, and Paul and his brother played often on the
timber-stacks, and in the aromatic groves of sawn planks which inclined
towards each other in row on row, making an odorous cloistered shade,
excellent for enacted memories of Chingachgook and Uncas and the
Pathfinder. There was a sawpit in the yard, a favourite hiding-place for
the boys, and the turpentiny scent of fresh sawdust had always been a
thing to conjure with in the Solitary's memory. The smell of printer's
ink which hung about the dowdy, untidy, bankrupt printing-office had
a hint of it. Years afterwards and years ago in the studio of the
President of the Belgian Academy, when Paul was famous and on easy terms
with famous people, a servant uncorked a tin of turpentine to clean his
master's palette, and the sawpit yawned again, and every broken brick in
the floor of the old office showed so clear that he could have drawn
the finest crevice. The odour was in his nostrils now as he sat at the
tent-door, and he did not dream that it sweated from the sun-smitten
pines. It was all memory to his fancy, and the voice went shrilling
'Paul!' among the timber-stacks, and was lost in the cavernous shed at
the far-end of the yard. Then everything went quiet for an hour, and
Paul made acquaintance with the poverty-stricken artist who could not
take his mistress to the ball because she had no stockings fit to go
in, and who hit on the expedient of painting stockings on her legs. How
simply and innocently comic the episode was to the child's mind, to be
sure! and how harmless were the naughtiest adventures exposed under the
lifted roofs when the lame devil waved his crutch from the top of the
steeple!

But in the full tide of this retired joy Paul hears a step at the bottom
of the lumber-room stairs, and knows it for his mother's. She is coming
here, and there is no hiding-place for anything bigger than a rat. The
motherly temper is sharp, and the motherly hand is heavy. He has been
called and has not answered--a crime deserving punishment, and sure to
earn it. The step grows nearer and trouble more assur