own, than to the men from Red Martin's
gambling-room, and even the woman in red, whom all the town knows but
whom no one ever mentions, got a kind word from Mehronay as they met
upon the street. He always called her sister.

And so another year went by and Mehronay's "pieces" made the circulation
grow, and we were prosperous. It became known about town long before we
knew it in the office that if Mehronay kept sober for three years she
would have him, and when we finally heard it he was on the last half of
the third year and was growing sombre. "In the Cottage by the Sea" was
his favourite song, and "Put Away the Little Playthings" also was much
in his throat when he wrote. We thought, perhaps--and now we know--that
he was thinking of a home that was gone. The day before Mehronay's
wedding a child died over near the railroad, and on the morning he was
to be married we found this on the copy hook when we came down to open
the office, after Mehronay had gone to claim his bride:

"A ten-line item appeared in last night's paper, away down in one
corner, that brought more hearts together in a common bond--the bond of
fear and sympathy and sorrow--than any other item has done for a long
time. The item told of the death, by scarlet fever, of little Flossie
Yengst. Probably the child was not known outside of her little group of
playmates; her father and mother are not of that advertised clique known
of men as prominent people; he is an engineer on the Santa Fe, and the
mother moves in that small circle of friends and neighbours which
circumscribes American motherhood of the best type. And yet last night,
when that little ten-line item was read by a thousand firesides in this
town, thousands and thousands of hearts turned to that desolate home by
the track, and poured upon it the benediction of their sympathies. That
home was the meeting-place where rich and poor, great and weak, good and
bad, stood equals. For there is something in the death of a little
child, something in its infinite pathos, that makes all human creatures
mourn. Because in every heart that is not a dead heart, calloused to all
joy or sorrow, some little child is enshrined--either dead or
living--and so child-love is the one universal emotion of the soul, and
child-death is the saddest thing in all the world.

"A child's soul is such a small thing, and the world and the systems of
worlds, and the infinite stretches of illimitable space, are so wide for
a chi