Chapter IV: Part 4

"She's thriving under it, my dear." Well, presently we arrived at our destination, and I saw that those kids had worn a little path, not very deep of course, all round what used to be rather a spacious 'door yard.' The winning-post was the pump. By its side Cecelia Anne disposed her burden like a theatrical 'dresser' getting things ready for his principal. She hung her tin pail on the pump's snout and pumped it full of water, laid it beside the bath towel, threw the sponge into it, gave a final testing jerk to her tight little braids and divested herself of her jumpers and the dress she wore under them. Then she resumed the jumpers, took the rifle and crossed the 'track.' Jimmie, meanwhile, had stripped to trousers and the upper part of his bathing-suit, had donned his running shoes, set his feet in holes kicked in the ground for that purpose and bent forward, his back professionally hunched and in his hands the essential pieces of cork. Cecelia Anne gabbled the words of starting, shut her eyes tightly, fired the rifle into the air, threw it on the ground and set off after the swiftly moving Jimmie. Early in his first lap she was up to him. As they passed the pump, she was ahead. In the succeeding laps she kept a comfortable distance in the lead, until the end of the third when she sprinted for 'home,' grabbed the towel and, as Jimmie came bounding up, wrapped him in it, rubbed him down, fanned him with it, moistened his brow with vinegar from the long bottle, tied the sweater around his neck by its red sleeves and held the dripping sponge to his lips. Then she found time for me.

"Oh, father," she cried, "did you _ever_ see _any_body who could run as fast as Jimmie? Don't you just know he'll win that race?"

"There's but one chance against it," said I. "And really, Mr. Debrett, that boy can run. He's a little bit heavy maybe, but he holds himself well together and keeps up a pretty good pace. I timed him and measured up the distance roughly afterward. It was pretty good going for a little chap. Cecelia Anne is so much smaller that we often forget what a little fellow he is after all. But that baby--whew--I wish you'd seen her fly. It wasn't running. She just blew over the ground and arrived at the pump as cool as a cucumber although Jimmie was puffing like an automobile of the vintage of 1890."

"You see," said Jimmie to me as he lay magnificently on the grass waiting to grow cool while Cecelia still fanned him with the towel, "you see it don't hurt her to pace me round the track."

"Apparently not," said I, and although he's my own boy and I know him pretty well, I couldn't for the life of me decide whether he, as well as Cecelia Anne, had really failed to grasp the fact that she beats him to a standstill every morning. I suppose we'll know on the Fourth. If she runs, then he does not know. But if he refuses to let her run; it will be because he does know."

"I'm not so sure of that," said Mrs. Hawtry.

* * * * *

Cecelia Anne _was_ allowed to run. First, in a girl's race among the giggling, amateurish, self-conscious girls whom she outdistanced by a lap or two and, later, in the race for all winners, where she had to compete with Charlie Anderson, the beau of the hotel, Len Fogarty, the milkman's son, and her own incomparable Jimmie.

The master of ceremonies gave the signal and the event of the day was on. First to collapse was Charlie Anderson. Jimmie was then in the lead with Len Fogarty a close second, and Cecelia Anne beside him. So they went for a lap. Then Jimmie, missing perhaps the blue little figure of his pacemaker, wavered a little, only a little, but enough to allow Len Fogarty to forge past him. Len Fogarty! The blatant, hated Len Fogarty, always shouting defiance from his father's milk-wagon! Then forward sprang Cecelia Anne. Not for all the riches of the earth would she have beaten Jimmie, but not for all the glory of heaven would she allow any one else to beat him. And so by an easy spectacular ten seconds, she outran Len Fogarty.

Then wild was the enthusiasm of the audience and black was the brow of Len Fogarty. A chorus of: "Let a girl lick you," "Call yourself a runner," "Come up to the house an' race me baby brother," has not a soothing effect when added to the disappointment of being forever shut off from the business end of rockets and Roman candles. These things Cecelia Anne knew and so accepted, sadly and resignedly, the glare with which Len turned away from her little attempts at explanations.

But she was not prepared, nothing in her short life could ever have prepared her, to find the same expression on Jimmie's face when she broke through a shower of congratulations and followed him up the road; to expect praise and to meet _such_ a rebuff would have been sufficient to make even stiffer laurels than Cecelia Anne's trail in the dust.

"Why Jimmie," she whimpered contrary to his most stringent rule. "Why Jimmie what's the matter?"

"You're a sneak," said Jimmie darkly and vouchsafed no more. There was indeed no more to say. It was the last word of opprobrium.

They pattered on in silence for a short but dusty distance, Cecelia Anne struggling with the temptation to lie down and die; Jimmie upborne by furious temper.

"Who taught you how to run?" he at last broke out. "Wasn't it me? Didn't I give you lessons every morning in the old lot? And then didn't you go and beat me when Len Fogarty, Charlie Anderson, Billy Van Derwater, and all the other fellows were there?"

Cecelia Anne returned his angry gaze with her blue and loyal eyes.

"I didn't beat you 't all," she answered. "I didn't beat anybody but Len Fogarty."

Her mentor studied her for a while and then a grin overspread his once more placid features.

"I guess it'll be all right," he condescended. "Maybe you didn't mean it the way it looked. But say, Cecelia Anne, if you're afraid of fire-crackers what are you going to do about the rockets and the Roman candles? You know sparks fly out of them like rain. And if the smell of old cartridge shells makes you sick, I don't know just how you'll get along to-night."

The victor stopped short under the weight of this overwhelming spoil.

"I forgot all about it," she whispered. "Oh, Jimmie, I guess I ought to have let Len Fogarty win that race. He could set off rockets and Roman candles and Catherine wheels. I guess it'll kill me when the sparks and the smoke come out. Maybe I'd better go and see Mr. Anstell and ask to be excused."

"Aw, I wouldn't do that," Jimmie advised her, "you don't want everyone to know about your nerve. You just tell him your dress is too light and that you want me to attend to the fireworks for you."

In the transports of gratitude to which this knightly offer reduced her, Cecelia Anne fared on by Jimmie's side until they reached the house and their enquiring parents. Mrs. Hawtry was on the steps as they came up and she gathered Cecelia Anne into her arms. For a moment no one spoke. Then Jimmie made his declaration.

"Cecelia Anne beat Len Fogarty all to nothing. You ought to have been there to see her."

"Was there any one else in the race?" queried Mr. Hawtry in what his son considered most questionable taste.

"Oh, yes," he was constrained to answer. "Charlie Anderson was in it. She beat him, too. And I _started_ with them but I thought it would do those boys more good to be licked by a little girl than to have me 'tend to them myself." And Jimmie proceeded leisurely into the house.

"But I don't have to set off the fireworks," Cecelia Anne explained happily. "Jimmie says I don't have to if I don't want to. He's going to do it for me."

"Kind brother," ejaculated Mr. Hawtry. And across the bright gold braids of her little Atalanta, Mrs. Hawtry looked at her husband.

"_Did_ he know?" she questioned, "or did he not? You thought we could be sure if he let her start."

"Well," was Mr. Hawtry's cryptic utterance, "he knows now."

THEODORA, GIFT OF GOD

"And then," cried Mary breathlessly, "what did they do then?"

"And then," her father obediently continued, "the two doughty knights smote lustily with their swords. And each smote the other on the helmet and clove him to the middle. It was a fair battle and sightly."

But Mary's interest was unabated. "And then," she urged, "what did they do then?"

"Not much, I think. Even a knight of the Table Round stops fighting for a while when that happens to him."

"Didn't they do anything 'tall?" the audience insisted. "You aren't leaving it out, are you? Didn't they bleed nor nothing?"

"Oh, yes, they bled."

"Then tell me that part."

"Well, they bled. They never stinteth bleeding for three days and three nights until they were pale as the very earth for bleeding. And they made a great dole."

"And then, when they couldn't bleed any more nor make any more dole, what did they do?"

"They died."

"And then--"

"That's the end of the story," said the narrator definitely.

"Then tell me another," she pleaded, "and don't let them die so soon."

"There wouldn't be time for another long one," he pointed out as he encouraged his horse into an ambling trot. "We are nearly there now."

"After supper will you tell me one?"

"Yes," he promised.

"One about Lancelot and Elaine?"

"Yes," he repeated. "Anything you choose."

"I choose Lancelot," she declared.

"A great many ladies did," commented her father as the horse sedately stopped before the office of the Arcady _Herald-Journal_, of which he was day and night editor, sporting editor, proprietor, society editor, chief of the advertising department, and occasionally type-setter and printer and printer's devil.

Mary held the horse, which stood in need of no such restraint, while this composite of newspaper secured his mail, and then they jogged off through the spring sunshine, side by side, in the ramshackle old buggy on a leisurely canvass of outlying districts in search of news or advertisements, or suggestions for the forthcoming issue.

In the wide-set, round, opened eyes of his small daughter, Herbert Buckley was the most wonderful person in the world. No stories were so enthralling as his. No songs so tuneful, no invention so fertile, no temper so sweet, no companionship so precious. And her nine happy years of life had shown her no better way of spending summer days or winter evenings than in journeying, led by his hand and guided by his voice, through the pleasant ways of Camelot and the shining times of chivalry.

Upon a morning later in this ninth summer of her life Mary was perched high up in an apple tree enjoying the day, the green apples, and herself. The day was a glorious one in mid July, the apples were of a wondrous greenness and hardness, and Mary, for the first time in many weeks, was free to enjoy her own society. A month ago a grandmother and a maiden aunt had descended out of the land which had until then given forth only letters, birthday presents, and Christmas cards. And they had proved to be not at all the idyllic creatures which these manifestations had seemed to prophesy, but a pair of very interfering old ladies with a manner of over-ruling Mary's gentle mother, brow-beating her genial father and cloistering herself.

This morning had contributed another female assuming airs of instant intimacy. She had gone up to the last remaining spare chamber, donned a costume all of crackling white linen, and had introduced herself, entirely uninvited, into the dim privacy of Mary's mother's room, whence Mary had been sternly banished.

"Another aunt!" was the outcast's instant inference, as in a moment of accountable preoccupation on the part of the elders she had escaped to her own happy and familiar country--the world of out-of-doors--where female relatives seldom intruded, and where the lovely things of life were waiting.

When she had consumed all the green apples her constitution would accept, and they seemed pitifully few to her more robust mind, she descended from the source of her refreshment and set out upon a comprehensive tour of her domain. She liked living upon the road to Camelot. It made life interesting to be within measurable distance of the knights and ladies who lived and played and loved in the many-towered city of which one could gain so clear a view from the topmost branches of the hickory tree in the upper pasture. She liked to crouch in the elder bushes where a lane, winding and green-arched, crossed a corner of the cornfield, and to wait, through the long, still summer mornings for Lancelot or Galahad or Tristram or some other of her friends to come pricking his way through the sunshine. She could hear the clinking of his golden armor, the whinnying of his steed, the soft brushing of the branches as they parted before his helmet or his spear; the rustling of the daisies against his great white charger's feet. And then there was the river "where the aspens dusk and quiver," and where barges laden with sweet ladies passed and left ripples of foam on the water and ripples of light laughter in the air as, brilliant and fair bedight, they went winding down to Camelot.

This morning she revisited all these hallowed spots. She thrilled on the very verge of the river and quivered amid the waving corn. She scaled the sentinel hickory and turned her eyes upon the Southern city. It was nearly a week since she had been allowed to wander so far afield, and Camelot seemed more than ever wonderful as it lay in the shimmering distance gleaming and glistening beyond the hills. Trails of smoke waved above all the towers, showing where Sir Beaumanis still served his kitchen apprenticeship for his knighthood and his place at the Table Round. Thousands of windows flashed back the light.

"I could get there," pondered Mary, "if God would send me that goat and wagon. I guess there's quite a demand for goats and wagons. I could dress my goat all up in skirts like the ladies dressed their palfreys, an' I'd wear my hair loose on my shoulders--it's real goldy when it's loose--an' my best hat. I guess Queen Guinevere would be real glad to see me. Oh, dear," she fretted as these visions came thronging back to her, "I wish Heaven would hurry up."

Between the pasture and the distant city she could distinguish the roofs of another of the havens of her dear desire--the house where the old ladies lived. Four old ladies there were, in the sweet autumn of their lives, and Mary's admiration of them was as passionate as were all her psychic states. She never could be quite sure as to which of the four she most adored. There was the gentle Miss Ann, who taught her to recite verses of piercing and wilting sensibility; the brisk Miss Jane, who explained and demonstrated the construction of many an old-time cake or pastry; the silent Miss Agnes, who silently accepted assistance in her never-ending process of skeletonizing leaves and arranging them in prim designs upon cardboard, and the garrulous Miss Sabina, who, with a crochet needle, a hair-pin, a spool with four pins driven into it, knitting needles and other shining implements, could fashion, and teach Mary to fashion, weavings and spinnings which might shame the most accomplished spider. Aided by her and by the re-enforced spool above mentioned, Mary had already achieved five dirty inches of red woollen reins for the expected goat. But the house was distant just three fields, a barb-wire fence, a low stone wall, and a cross bull, and Mary knew that her unaccustomed leisure could not be expected to endure long enough for so perilous a pilgrimage.

Her dissatisfied gaze wandered back to her quiet home surrounded by its neatly laid out meadows, cornfield, orchard, barns, and garden. And a shadow fell upon her wistful little face.

"That old aunt," she grumbled, "she makes me awful tired. She's always pokin' round an' callin' me."

Such, indeed, seemed the present habit and intent of the prim lady who was approaching, alternately clanging a dinner-bell and calling in a tone of resolute sweetness:

"Mary, O Mary, dear."

Mary parted the branches of her tree and watched, but made no sound.

"Mary," repeated the oncoming relative, "Mary, I want to tell you something," and added as she spied her niece's abandoned sunbonnet on the grass, "I know you're here and I shall wait until you come to me."

"I _ain't_ coming," announced the Dryad, and thereby disclosed her position, both actual and mental. "I suppose it's something I've done and I don't want to hear it, so there!" Then, her temper having been worn thin by much admonishing, she anticipated: "I _ain't_ sorry I've been bad. I _ain't_ ashamed to behave so when my mamma is sick in bed. And I don't care if you _do_ tell my papa when he comes home to-night."

The intruding relative, discerning her, stopped and smiled. And the smile was as a banderilla to her niece's goaded spirit.

"Jiminy!" gasped that young person, "she's got a smile just like a teacher."

"Mary, dear," the intruder gushed, "God has sent you something."

The hickory flashed forth black and white and red. Mary stood upon the ground.

"Where are they?" she demanded.

"They?" repeated the lady. "There is only one."

"Why, I prayed for two. Which did he send?"

"Which do you think?" parried the lady. "Which do you hope it is?"

Even Mary's scorn was unprepared for this weak-mindedness. "The goat, of course," she responded curtly. "Is it the goat?"

"Goat!" gasped the scandalized aunt. "Goat! Why, God has sent you a baby sister, dear."

"A sister! a baby!" gasped Mary in her turn. "I don't _need_ no sister. I prayed for a goat just as plain as plain. 'Dear God,' I says, 'please bless everybody, and make me a good girl, an' send me a goat an' wagon.' And they went an' changed it to a baby sister! Why, I never s'posed they made mistakes like that."

Crestfallen and puzzled she allowed herself to be led back to the darkened house where her grandmother met her with the heavenly substitute wrapped in flannel. And as she held it against the square and unresponsive bosom of her apron she realized how the "Bible gentleman" must have felt when he asked for bread and was given a stone.

During the weeks that followed, the weight of the stone grew heavier and heavier while the hunger for bread grew daily more acute. Not even the departure of interfering relatives could bring freedom, for the baby's stumpy arms bound Mary to the house as inexorably as bolts and bars could have done. She passed weary hours in a hushed room watching the baby, when outside the sun was shining, the birds calling, the apples waxing greener and larger, and the shining knights and ladies winding down to Camelot. She sat upon the porch, still beside the baby, while the river rippled, the wheatfields wimpled, and the cows came trailing down from the pasture, down from the upland pasture where the sentinel hickory stood and watched until the sun went down, and, one by one, the lights came out in distant Camelot. She listened for the light laughter of the ladies, the jingling of the golden armor, the swishing of the branches and of the waves. Listened all in vain, for Theodora, that gift of God, had powerful lungs and a passion for exercising them so that minor sounds were overwhelmed and only yells remained.

But the deprivation against which she most passionately rebelled was that of her father's society. Before the advent of Theodora she had been his constant companion. They were perfectly happy together, for the poet who at nineteen had burned to challenge the princes of the past and to mold the destinies of the future was, at twenty-nine, very nearly content to busy himself about the occurrences of the present and to edit a weekly paper in the town which had known and honored his father, and was proud of, if puzzled by, their well-informed debonair son. Even himself he sometimes puzzled. He knew that this was not to be his life's work, this chronicling of the very smallest beer, this gossip and friendliness and good cheer. But it served to fill his leisure and his modest exchequer until such time as he could finish his great tragedy and take his destined place among the writers of his time. Meanwhile, he told himself, with somewhat rueful humor, there was always an editor ready to think well of his minor poems and an audience ready to marvel at them, "which is more, my dear," he pointed out to his admiring wife, "than Burns could have said for himself--or Coleridge."

And when his confidence and his hopes flickered, as the strongest of hopes and confidence sometimes will, when his tragedy seemed far from completion, his paper paltry, and his life narrow, he could always look into his daughter's eyes and there find faith in himself and strength and sunny patience.

Formerly these fountains of perpetual youth had been beside him all the long days through. From village to village, from store to farm, they had jogged, side by side, in a lazy old buggy; he smoking long, silent pipes, perhaps, or entertaining his companion with tales and poems of the days of chivalry when men were brave and women fair and all the world was young. And, Mary, inthralled, enrapt, adoring her father, and seeing every picture conjured up by his sonorous rhythm or quaint phrase, was much more familiar with the deeds and gossip of King Arthur's court than with events of her own day and country.

So that while Mary, tied to the baby, yearned for the wide spaces of her freedom, Mr. Buckley, lonely in a dusty buggy, jogging over the familiar roads, thought longingly of a little figure in an irresponsible sunbonnet, and found it difficult to bear patiently with matronly neighbors, who congratulated him upon this arrangement, and assured him that his little play-fellow would now quickly outgrow her old-fashioned ways and become as other children, "which she would never have, Mr. Buckley, as long as you let her tag around with you and filled her head with impossible nonsense."

It was not a desire for any such alteration which made him acquiesce in the separation. It was a very grave concern for his wife's health, and a very sharp realization that, until he could devise some means of increasing his income, he could not afford to engage a more experienced nurse for the new arrival. He had no ideas of the suffering entailed upon his elder daughter. He was deceived, as was every one else, by the gentle uncomplainingness with which she waited upon Theodora, for whose existence she regarded herself as entirely to blame. Had she not, without consulting her parents, applied to high heaven for an increase in live stock, and was not the answer to this application, however inexact, manifestly her responsibility.

"They're awful good to me," she pondered. "They ain't scolded me a mite, an' I just know how they must feel about it. Mamma ain't had her health ever since that baby come, an' papa looks worried most to death. If they'd 'a' sent that goat an' wagon I could 'a' took mamma riding. Ain't prayers terrible when they go wrong!" And in gratitude for their forbearance she, erstwhile the companion, or at least the audience, of fealty knight and ladies, bowed her small head to the swathed and shapeless feet of heaven's error and became waiting woman to a flannel bundle.

Only her dreams remained to her. She could still look forward to the glorious time of "when I'm big." She could still unbind her dun-colored hair and shake it in the sun. She could still quiver with anticipation as she surveyed her brilliant future. A beautiful prince was coming to woo her. He would ride to the door and kneel upon the front porch while all his shining retinue filled the front yard and overflowed into the road. Then she would appear and, since these things were to happen in the days of her maturity, perhaps when she was twelve years old, she would be radiantly beautiful, and her hair would be all goldy gold and curly, and it would trail upon the ground a yard or two behind her as she walked. And the prince would be transfixed. And when he was all through being that--Mary often wondered what it was--he would arise and sing "Nicolette, the Bright of Brow," or some other disguised personality, while all his shining retinue would unsling hautboys and lyres and--and--mouth organs and play ravishing music.

And when she rode away to be the prince's bride and to rule his fair lands, her father and her mother should ride with her, all in the sunshine of the days "when I'm big"--the wonderful days "when I'm big."

Meanwhile, being but little, she served the flannel bundle even as Sir Beaumanis had served a yet lowlier apprenticeship. But she still stormed high heaven to rectify its mistake.

"And please, dear God, if you are all out of goats and wagons, send rabbits. But anyway come and take away this baby. My mamma ain't well enough to take care of it an' I can't spare the time. We don't need babies, but we do need that goat and wagon."

And the powers above, with a mismanagement which struck their petitioner dumb, sent a wagon--only a wagon--and it was a gocart for the baby, and Mary was to be the goat.

With this millstone tied about her neck she was allowed to look upon the scenes of her early freedom, and no inquisitor could have devised a more anguishing torture than that to which Mary's suffering and unsuspecting mother daily consigned her suffering and uncomplaining daughter.

"Walk slowly up and down the paths, dear, and don't leave your sister for a moment. Isn't it nice that you have somebody to play with now?"

"Yes, ma'am," said Mary. "But she ain't what I'd call playful."

"You used to be so much alone," Mrs. Buckley continued. Mary breathed sharply, and her mother kissed her sympathetically. "But now you always have your sister with you. Isn't it fine, dearie?"

"Yes, ma'am," repeated the victim, and bent her little energies to the treadmill task of wheeling the gocart to the orchard gate, where all wonders began, and then, with an effort as exhausting to the will as to the body, turning her back upon the lane, the river, and the sentinel tree, to trundle her Juggernaut between serried rows of cabbages and carrots.

Then slowly she began to hate, with a deep, abiding hatred, the flannel bundle. She loathed the very smell of flannel before Theodora was six short weeks old, and the sight of the diminutive laundry, which hung upon the line between the cherry trees, almost drove her to arson.

The shy, quick-darting creature--half child and half humming bird--was forced to drag that monstrous perambulator on all her expeditions. After a month's confinement to the garden, where knights and ladies never penetrate, she managed to bump her responsibility out into the orchard. But the glory was all in the treetops, and Mary soon grew restless under her mother's explicit directions. "Up and down the walks" meant imprisonment, despair. Theodora should have tried to make her role of Albatross as acceptable as it might be made to the long-suffering mariner about whose neck she hung, but she showed a callousness and a heartless selfishness which nothing could excuse. Mary would sometimes plead with all gentleness and courtesy for a few short moments' freedom.

"Theodora," she would begin, "Theodora, listen to me a minute," and the gift of God would make aimless pugilistic passes at her interlocutor.

"O Theodora, I'm awful tired of stayin' down here on the ground. Wouldn't you just as lieves play you was a mad bull an' I was a lady in a red dress?"

Theodora, after some space spent in apparent contemplation, would wave a cheerful acquiescence.

"An' then I'll be scared of you, an' I'll run away an' climb as high as anything in the hickory tree up there on the hill. Let's play it right now, Theodora. There's something I want to see up there."

Taking her sister's bland smile for ratification and agreement, Mary would set about her personification, shed her apron lest its damaged appearance convict her in older eyes, and speed toward her goal. But the mad bull's shrieks of protest and repudiation would startle every bit of chivalry for miles and miles around.

Several experiences of this nature taught Mary, that, in dealing with infants of changeable and rudimentary mind, honesty was an impossible policy and candor a very boomerang, which returned and smote one with savage force. So she stooped to guile and detested the flannel all the more deeply because of the state to which it was debasing an upright conscience and a high sense of honor.

At first her lapses from the right were all negative. She neglected the gift of God. She would abandon it, always in a safe and shady spot and always with its covers smoothly tucked in, its wabbly parasol adjusted at the proper angle, and always with a large piece of wood tied to the perambulator's handle by a labyrinth of elastic strings. These Mary had drawn from abandoned garters, sling shots, and other mysterious sources, and they allowed the wood to jerk unsteadily up and down, and to soothe the unsuspecting Theodora with a spasmodic rhythm very like the ministrations of her preoccupied nurse.

Meanwhile the nurse would be far afield upon her own concerns, and Theodora was never one of them. The river, the lane, the tall hickory knew her again and again. Camelot shone out across the miles of hill and tree and valley. But the river was silent and the lane empty, and Camelot seemed very far as autumn cleared the air. Perhaps this was because knights and ladies manifest themselves only to the pure of heart. Perhaps because Mary was always either consciously or subconsciously listening for the recalling shrieks of the abandoned and disprized gift of God.

"Stop it, I tell you," she admonished her purple-faced and convulsive charge one afternoon when all the world was gold. "Stop it, or mamma will be coming after us, and making us stay on the back porch." But Theodora, in the boastfulness of her new lungs, yelled uninterruptedly on. Then did Mary try cajolery. She removed her sister from the perambulator and staggered back in a sitting posture with suddenness and force. The jar gave Theodora pause, and Mary crammed the silence full of promise. "If you'll stop yellin' now I'll see that my prince husband lets you be a goose-girl on the hills behind our palace. Its awful nice being a goose-girl," she hastened to add lest the prospect fail to charm. "If I didn't have to marry that prince an' be a queen I guess I'd been a goose-girl myself. Yes, sir, it's lovely work on the hills behind a palace with all the knights ridin' by an' sayin', 'Fair maid, did'st see a boar pass by this way?' You don't have to be afraid--you'd never have to see one. In all the books the goose-girls didn't never see no boars, and the knights gave 'em a piece of gold an' smiled on 'em, and the sunshine shined on 'em, an' they had a lovely time."

Having stumbled into the road to peace of conscience, Mary trod it bravely and joyously. Theodora's future rank increased with the decrease of her present comfort, but her posts, though lofty and remunerative, were never such as would bring her into intimate contact with the person of the queen.

She was betrothed to the son of a noble, and very distant, house after an afternoon when the perambulator, ill-trained to cross-country work, balked at the first stone wall on the way to the old ladies' house. It was then dragged backward for a judicious distance and faced at the obstacle at a mad gallop. Umbrella down, handle up, wheels madly whirring, it was forced to the jump.

Again it refused, reared high into the air, stood for an instant upon its hind wheels and then fell supinely on its side, shedding its blankets, its pillows, and Theodora upon the cold, hard stones.

After that her rise was rapid, and the distance separating her from her sister's elaborate court more perilous and more beset with seas and boars and mountains and robbers. She was allowed to wed her high-born betrothed when she had been forgotten for three hours while Mary learned a heart-rending poem commencing, "Oh, hath she then failed in her troth, the beautiful maid I adore?" until even Miss Susan could only weep in intense enjoyment and could suggest; no improvement in the recitation.

On another occasion Mary was obliged to borrow the perambulator for the conveyance of leaves and branches with which to build a bower withal; and Theodora, having been established in unfortunate proximity to an ant hill, was thoroughly explored by its inhabitants ere her ministering sister realized that her cries and agitation were anything more than her usual attitude of protest against whatever chanced to be going on. By the time the bower was finished and the perambulator ready for its customary occupant that young person was in a position to claim heavy damages.

"Don't you care," said Mary cheerfully, as she relieved Theodora from the excessive animation. "I can make it up to you when I'm big. My prince husband--I guess he'd better be a king by that time--will go over to your country an' kill your husband's father an' his grandfather an' all the kings an' princes until there's nobody only your husband to be king. Then you'll be a queen you see, an' live in a palace. So now hush up." And one future majesty was rocked upside down by another until the royal face of the younger queen was purple and her voice was still.

Mary found it more difficult to quiet her new and painful agnosticism, and in her efforts to reconcile dogma with manifestation she evolved a series of theological and economical questions which surprised her father and made her mother's head reel. She further manifested a courteous attention when the minister came to call, and she engaged him in spiritual converse until he writhed again. For a space her investigations led her no whither, and then, without warning, the man of peace solved her dilemma and shed light upon her path.

A neighbor ripe in years and good works had died. The funeral was over and the man of God had stopped to rest in the pleasant shade of Mrs. Buckley's trees and in the pleasant sound of Mrs. Buckley's voice. Mary, the gocart, and Theodora completed the group, and the minister spoke.

"A good man," he repeated, "Ah, Mrs. Buckley, he will be sadly missed! But the Lord giveth and the Lord taketh away. Blessed be--"

"When?" demanded Mary breathlessly. "When does he take away?"

"In His own good time."

"When's that?"

"'Tis not for sinful man to say. He sends His message to the man in the pride of his youth or to the babe in its cradle. He reaches forth His hand and takes away."

"But when--" Mary was beginning when her mother, familiar with the Socratic nature of her daughter's conversation and its exhaustive effect upon the interlocutor, interposed a remark which guided the current of talk out of heavenly channels and back to the material plain.

But Mary had learned all that she cared to know. It was not necessary that she should suffer the exactions of the baby or subject her family to them. The Lord had given and would take away! The minister had said so, and the minister knew all about the Lord. And if the powers above were not ready to send for the baby, it would be easy enough to deposit it in the Lord's own house, which showed its white spire beyond the first turn in the road which led to Camelot. There the Lord would find it and take it away. This would be, she reflected, the quiet, dignified, lady-like thing to do. And the morrow, she decided, would be an admirable day on which to do it.

Therefore, on the morrow she carefully decked Theodora in small finery, hung garlands of red and yellow maple leaves upon the perambulator, twined chains of winter-green berries about its handle, tied a bunch of gorgeous golden rod to its parasol, and trundled it by devious and obscure ways to the sacred precincts of God's house.

"They look real well," she commented. "If I was sure about that goat I might keep the cart, but it really ain't the right kind for a goat. I guess I'd better take 'em back just like they are an' when the Lord sees how I got 'em all fancied up, he'll know I ain't a careless child, an' maybe I'd get that goat after all."

So the disprized little gifts of God were bumped up the church steps, wheeled up the aisle, and bestowed in a prominent spot before the chancel rail. Some one was playing soft music at the unseen organ, but Mary accepted soft music as a phenomenon natural to churches, and failed to connect it with human agency. Sedately she set out Theodora's bows and ruffles to the best advantage. Carefully she rearranged the floral decorations of the perambulator, and set her elastic understudy in erratic motion. Complacently she surveyed the whole and walked out into the sunshine--free. And presently the minister, the intricacies of a new hymn reconciled to the disabilities of a lack of ear and a lack of training, came out into the body of the church, where the gifts of God, bland in smiles and enwreathed in verdure, were waiting to be taken away.

"Mrs. Buckley's baby," was his first thought. "I wonder where that queer little Mary is," was his second. And his third, it came when he was tired of waiting for some solution of his second, was an embarrassed realization that he would be obliged to take his unexpected guest home to its mother. And the quiet town of Arcady rocked upon its foundations as he did it.

"In the church," marveled Mrs. Buckley. "How careless of Mary!" she apologized, and "How good of you!" she smiled. "No, I'm not in the least worried. She always had a way of trotting off to her own diversions when she was not with her father. And lately she has been astonishingly patient about spending her time with baby. I have felt quite guilty, about it. But after to-day she will be free, as Mr. Buckley has found a nurse to relieve her. He was beginning to grow desperate about Mary and me--said we neither of us had a moment to waste on him--and yet could not find a nurse whom we felt we could afford. And yesterday a young woman walked into his office to put an advertisement in his paper for just such a position as we had to offer. She is a German, wants to learn English, and she will be here this afternoon."

"Perhaps your little girl resented her coming," he suggested vaguely. "Perhaps that was the reason."

"Mary resentful!" laughed Mrs. Buckley.

"She doesn't, bless her gentle little heart, know the meaning of the word. Besides which we haven't told her about the girl, as we are rather looking forward to that first interview, and wondering how Mary will acquit herself in a conversational Waterloo. She can't, you know, make life miserable and information bitter to a German who speaks no English. 'Ja' or 'nein' alternately and interchangeably may baffle even her skill in questioning."

Mary, meanwhile, was hurrying along the way to Camelot. She had not planned the expedition in advance. Rather, it was the inevitable reaction toward license which marks the success of any revolution. She had cast off the bonds of the baby carriage, her time and her life were her own, and the road stretched white and straight toward Camelot.

It was afternoon and the sun was near its setting when at last she reached the towered city and found it in all ways delightful but in some surprising. She was prepared for the moat and for the drawbridge across it, but not for the exceeding dirtiness of its water and the dinginess of its barges. She had expected it to be wider and perhaps cleaner, and the castles struck her as being ill-adapted to resist siege and the shocks of war since nearly all their walls were windows. And through these windows she caught glimpses of the strangest interiors which ever palaces boasted. Miles and acres of bare wooden tables stood under the shade of straight iron trees. From the trees black ribbons depended. In the treetops there were wheels and shining iron bars, and all about the tables there were other iron bars and bolts and bands of greasy leather.

"I don't see a round table anywhere," she reflected. "What do you s'pose they do with all those little square ones?" She sought the answer to this question through many a dirty pane and many a high-walled street. But the palaces and the streets were empty and the explorer discovered with a quick-sinking heart and confidence that she was alone and hungry and very far from home. She was treading close upon the verge of tears when her path debouched upon the central square of Camelot. And straightway she forgot her doubts and puzzlements, her hunger and her increasing weariness, for she had found "The Court." Across a fair green plaisance, all seemly beset with flower and shrub, the wide doors of a church stood open. Tall palaces were all about, and in every window, on every step, on the green benches which dotted the plaisance, on every possible elevation or post of observation, the good folk of Camelot stood or hung or even fought, to watch the procession of beauty and chivalry as it came foaming down the steps, broke into eddies, and disappeared among the thronging carriages. Mary found it quite easy to identify the illustrious personages in the procession when once she had realized that they would, of course, not be in armor on a summer's afternoon, and at what even, to her inexperienced eyes, was manifestly a wedding.

First to emerge was a group of the younger knights, frock-coated, silk-hatted, pale gray of waistcoat and gloves, white and effulgent of _boutonniere_. Excitement, almost riot, resulted among the much-caparisoned horses, the much-favored coachmen, and the much-beribboned equipages of state. But the noise increased to clamor and eagerness to violence when an ethereal figure in floating tulle and clinging lace was led out into the afternoon light by a more resplendent edition of black-coated, gray-trousered knighthood.

The next wave was all of pink chiffon and nodding plumes. The first wave, after trickling about the carriages and the coachmen, receded up the steps again to be lost and mingled in the third, and then both swept down to the carriages again and were absorbed. Then the steady tide of departing royalty set in. Then horses plunged, elderly knights fussed, court ladies commented upon the heat, the bride, the presents, or their neighbors. Then the bride's father mopped his brow and the bridegroom's mother wept a little. Then there was much shaking or waving of hands or of handkerchiefs. Then the bridal carriage began to move, the bride began to smile, and rice and flowers and confetti and good wishes and slippers filled the air. Then other carriages followed, then the good folk of Camelot followed, an aged man closed the wide church doors, and the square was left to the sparrows, pink sunshine, confetti, rice, and Mary.

The little pilgrim's sunbonnet was hanging down her back, her hair was loose upon her shoulders, "an' real goldy" where it caught the sun, and her eyes were wide and deep with happiness and faith. She crossed the wide plaisance and stood upon the steps, she gathered up three white roses and a shred of lace, she sat down to rest upon the topmost step, she laid her cheek against the inhospitable doors, and, in the language of the stories she loved so well, "so fell she on sleep" with the tired flowers in her tired hands.

And there Herbert Buckley found her. He had traveled far afield on that autumn afternoon; but it is not every day that the daughter of the owner of one-half the mills in a manufacturing town is married to the owner of the other half, and when such things do occur to the accompaniment of illustrious visitors, a half-holiday in all the mills, perfect weather, and unlimited hospitality, it behooves the progressive journalist and reporter for miles around to sing "haste to the wedding," and to draw largely upon his adjectives and his fountain pen. The editorial staff of the Arcady _Herald-Journal_ turned homeward, and was evolving phrases in which to describe that gala day when his eye caught the color of a familiar little sunbonnet, the outline of a familiar little figure. But such a drooping little sunbonnet! Such a relaxed little figure! Such a weary little face! And such a wildly impossible place in which to find a little daughter. Then he remembered having seen Miss Ann and Miss Agnes among the spectators and his wonder changed to indignation.

It was nearly dark when Mary opened her eyes again and found herself sheltered in her father's arm and rocked by the old familiar motion of the buggy.

"And then," she prompted sleepily as her old habit was, "what did they do then?"

"They were married," his quiet voice replied.

"And then?"

"Oh, then they went away together and lived happily ever after."

For some space there was silence and a star came out. Mary watched it drowsily and then drowsily began:

"When I was to Camelot--"

"Where?" demanded her father.

"When I was to Camelot," she repeated, cuddling close to him as if to show that there were dearer places than that gorgeous city, "I saw a knight and a lady getting married. And lots of other knights were there--they didn't wear their fighting clothes--and lots of other ladies, pink ones. An' Arthur wore a stovepipe hat an' Guinevere wore a white dress, an' she had white feathers in her crown. An' Lancelot, he was there, all getting married. Daddy, dear," she broke off to question, "were you ever to Camelot?"

"Oh, yes, I was there," he answered, "but it was a great many years ago."

"Did you find roses?" she asked, exhibiting her wilted treasures.

"I found your mother there, my dear."

"And then, what did you do then?"

"Well, then we were married and lived happily ever after."

"And then--?"

"There was you, and we lived happier ever after."

And Mary fell on sleep again in the shelter of her father's arm while the stars came out and the glow of joyant Camelot lit all the southern sky.

GREAT OAKS FROM LITTLE ACORNS

Among the influences which, in America, promote harmony between alien races, the public school plays a most important part. The children, the teachers, the parents--whether of emigrant or native origin--the relatives and friends in distant countries, are all brought more or less under its amalgamating influences. In the schoolroom the child finds friends and playmates belonging to races widely different from his own; there Greek meets not only Greek, but Turk, American, Irish, German, French, English, Italian and Hungarian, and representatives of every other nation under the sun. The lion lying down with the lamb was nothing to it, because the lamb, though its feelings are not enlarged upon, must have been distinctly uncomfortable. But in the schoolroom Jew and Gentile work and play together; and black and white learn love and knowledge side by side.

And long after more formal instruction has faded with the passing of the years a man of, perhaps, German origin will think kindly of the whole irresponsible Irish race when he remembers little Bridget O'Connor, who sat across the aisle in the old Cherry Street school, her quick temper and her swift remorse.

Of course, all these nationalities are rarely encountered in one district, but a teacher often finds herself responsible for fifty children representing five or six of them. In the lower grades eight or ten may be so lately arrived as to speak no English. The teacher presiding over this polyglot community is often, herself, of foreign birth, yet they get on very well together, are very fond of one another, and very happy. The little foreigners, assisted by their more well-informed comrades, learn the language of the land, I regret to say that it is often tinctured with the language of the Bowery, in from six to twelve weeks, six weeks for the Jews, and twelve for the slower among the Germans' children. And again, it will be difficult to stir Otto Schmidt, at any stage of his career, into antagonism against the Jewish race, when he remembers the patience and loving kindness with which Maxie Fishandler labored with him and guided his first steps through the wilderness of the English tongue.

These indirect but constant influences are undeniably the strongest, but at school the child is taught in history of the heroism and the strength of men and nations other than his own; he learns, with some degree of consternation, that Christopher Columbus was a "Dago," George Washington an officer in the English Army, and Christ, our Lord, a Jew. Geography, as it is now taught with copious illustrations and descriptions, shows undreamed-of beauties in countries hitherto despised. And gradually, as the pupils move on from class to class, they learn true democracy and man's brotherhood to man.

But the work of the American public school does not stop with the children who come directly under its control. The board of education reaches, as no other organization does, the great mass of the population. All the other boards and departments established for the help and guidance of these people only succeed in badgering and frightening them. They are met, even at Ellis Island, by the board of health and they are subjected to all kinds of disagreeable and humiliating experiences culminating sometimes in quarantine and sometimes in deportation. Even after they have passed the barrier of the emigration office, the monster still pursues them. It disinfects their houses, it confiscates the rotten fish and vegetables which they hopefully display on their push-carts, it objects to their wrenching off and selling the plumbing appliances in their apartments, it interferes with them in twenty ways a day and hedges them round about with a hundred laws which they can only learn, as Parnell advised a follower to learn the rules of the House of Commons, by breaking them.

Then comes the department of street cleaning, with its extraordinary ideas of the use of a thoroughfare. The new-comer is taught that the street is not the place for dead cats and cabbage stalks, and other trifles for which he has no further use. Neither may it be used, except with restrictions, as a bedroom or a nursery. The emigrant, puzzled but obliging, picks his progeny out of the gutter and lays it on the fire-escape. He then makes acquaintance of the fire department, and listens to its heated arguments. So perhaps he, still willing to please, reclaims the dead cat and the cabbage stalk, and proceeds to cremate them in the privacy of the back yard. Again the fire department, this time in snorting and horrible form, descends upon him. And all these manifestations of freedom are attended by the blue-coated police who interdict the few relaxations unprovided for by the other powers. These human monsters confiscate stilettos and razors; discourage pocket-picking, brick-throwing, the gathering of crowds and the general enjoyment of life. Their name is legion. Their appetite for figs, dates, oranges and bananas and graft is insatiable; they are omnipresent; they are argus-eyed; and their speech is always, "Keep movin' there. Keep movin'." And all these baneful influences may be summoned and set in action by another, but worse than all of them, known as the Gerry Society. This tyrant denies the parent's right in his own child, forbids him to allow a minor to work in sweatshop, store, or even on the stage, and enforces these commands, even to the extreme of removing the child altogether and putting it in an institution.