saw the new playmate take possession of the secret house and of the boy. He saw how she mocked at his belief in the woodland sprites; how she shamed him for the pleasure he took in his games with invisible companions. Then with horror he saw how the child's interest in her new sports of a cruder kind than his own was gradually awakened, and how the girl won him over to her rough, blind ways, because he was so small a child that her authority bewildered and subdued him. The elf wrung his little cold hands in anguish as he watched them.

Meanwhile the wind rose higher and clouds shut out the sun. The girl saw the oncoming storm and hurried the child out of the grove and across the fields. He had to run to keep pace with her. The elf watched them till they were out of sight. Then he flew up into the chestnut tree and sat there shivering.

That night there was a great storm. The wild, bleak wind rushed through the grove with the noise of a roaring beast, and with it came the first snow. In the morning the sun looked over the white powdered fields and peeped beneath the branches of the chestnut tree. But the little elf was gone.

ETHEL BARSTOW HOWARD.

THE TEMPLE BELL

In the dusk of the mystic dawning,
When serpentine shadows gray
Stealthily creep through the darkness,
As the night-shades sink away;
Whilst the listening world, expectant,
In quivering silence thrills,
With the hope of day triumphant
Crowning the eastern hills;

At the solemn birth of morning

When the soul to earth returns,-
Haply from dreams of Paradise-
And impotently yearns

For freedom, and light, and knowledge,
And truth's all-quickening ray,
To dispel the phantoms of ignorance
In the night of faith's decay ;-

List! through the tremulous stillness,
Hushed as with holy spell,

In silvery cadence falling,

The voice of a temple bell!

Like an Angel of peace and healing
It calls the recreant soul;
Stilling its petty restlessness

In the thought of the perfect Whole
Who framed our little life,

And rounds its pigmy strife

With the calm unfathomed deep

Of Nirvana's dreamless sleep!

RUTH LOUISE GAINES.

A Presbyterian minister's children are born with the guilt of Adam's first sin, and a hazy familiarity with the shorter catechism of the Westminster Assembly

Concerning Catechism of Divines; and an unholy content with this vague knowledge is among the earliest and most distressing manifestations of the corruption of their whole nature.

After dinner every Sunday, Will and I retired with father to his study, and spent half an hour in spirited discussion about the precise location of the week's assignment of catechism. Ten questions a Sunday was our stent, so it speaks great things for our powers of debate, that while the first pages of our catechisms grew weekly more thumb-marked and ragged, until we were forced to rely on memory for everything before God's words of providence, the commandments and petitions remained always white and crisp.

As soon as it had been decided, by a series of concessions and compromises, just where we were to begin for the day, and after father had turned a deaf ear to sundry hints looking toward a shortening of our lesson, we adjourned to the attic. We had tried every room in the house before we hit upon this retreat; but once discovered, it was never abandoned. Father's. study would seem to have an atmosphere conducive to the acquisition of catechism, but somehow, after half an hour in there we found. ourselves deep in Pilgrim's Progress or Mrs. Barbauld; and what was worse, when father woke up from his nap, he found us that way, too, though never, even to ourselves, could we give satisfactory account of how or when the change had taken place. Mother or Aunt Anne was sure to be in the sitting room reading. The parlor was dark and cool, but it was depressing to know that we not only ought not, but dared not bang the furniture,

not one tiny bang, over the knottiest point of doctrine. Study in a bedroom always merged into a pillow fight with more serious after effects. Of course the nursery, where our toys fairly shouted temptation from every shelf and cupboard, was out of the question.

But the attic was perfection. When we were in a mood to give ourselves up to gloom and despair, the trunks were merely trunks, submitting stolidly to our battering, giving no sign that they noticed our tears. But when we were more cheerful, those trunks could rouse themselves from their lethargy, and play all sorts of spirited rôles. They made excellent Methodists. When we wanted a camp-meeting, we would divide the trunks between us, each undertaking to voice the experience of certain ones, in the language of the catechism. My favorite, a little black hair trunk with wickedly dancing brass nails, must have been at heart as frivolous as she looked. She never could master Effectual Calling, nor even Justification-but, poor dear, she was filled with party dresses; what could one expect? A big, square, sallow, leathern-visaged deacon of Will's preserved his reputation for infallibility by refusing to answer to calls for testimony save by such curt responses as, "The fall brought mankind into an estate of sin and misery." The trouble was, that our friends the trunks, had so much individuality that after a couple of Sabbaths, we found the vocabulary of the Westminster Divines inadequate, and unsuited to our camp-meeting drama, and brought down wrath upon our heads by spending the afternoon in true Arminian forms of worship, neglecting the faith, and catechism of our fathers.

After a short period of stern Calvinistic reaction, we drifted into Salvation Army work. To the motley assemblage of trunks-I know it went hard with my little black-haired aristocrat to be merged with the rabble-Will and I, mounted upon the cedar chest, gave forth the sounding periods of the catechism in lively colloquial tones of exhortation, or as hymns or chants, set to some popular air. I cannot to this day say over "The decrees of God" without mentally putting it to the tune of "Golden Slippers".

These are but examples of the varied uses to which the catechism was put at our vandal hands. One might have supposed that our ever fresh interest and enthusiasm, our disinclination to have done with the matter once for all, by a burst of concen

trated, prosaic effort, would have brought joy to our parents' hearts. But no. At the age of eighteen months, we had lisped "Man's chief end" in unison, to their delight and their friends' amazement. And now, when all our contemporaries among the children of the laity had received, and the piously inclined among them, had well-nigh worn out, the Bibles offered by the Sunday School as prizes for reciting the catechism word for word from beginning to end ;-now, at the mature age of ten, here we were, stumbling over Sanctification, and as ignorant as Hottentots of what we pray for in the first petition. In vain we pled that we had much nicer Bibles of our own; and that the certificates tidily pasted in the front of the Sunday School Bibles looked offensively like soap-wrappers. In vain we protested that if, when we were grown up, we should feel the need of catechism, it would be a simple matter to keep a copy always about our persons. The matter had reached the point where it was no longer one of personal preference, but of family honor. And so, one Monday morning, after an unusually merry and unprofitable Sunday with the catechism, we found our ragged little books at our places at the breakfast table; and by supper time we had recited the whole hundred and seven questions and answers to father, and mother had bathed away all traces of rebellious tears, and was helping us consider the pros and cons. of exchanging my black kitten and a kildeen's egg and Will's new knife for Walter Lyon's puppy. But Sunday afternoons have never been the same thing since. And though I could tell you the misery of that estate whereunto man fell, in my sleep, I haven't an idea what we pray for in the first petition. JEAN SHAW WILSON.

WOOD-LILIES

With lush midsummer faint along the highways

I wandered in the deep cool woods

Where shifting golden sunlight plays
On mosses brown and green.

Then rambling down a wood road still
I found wood-lilies ranking tall.
Each seemed a fairy torch to fill

A fairy world with light.

With dreaming eyes I saw the fays

Come tripping o'er the grass.

From tawny cups streamed golden rays

To light the woodland dance.

ELIZABETH LORE MCGREW.

MY BOOKS

The dusk has gathered in the curtained room
Where, clad in russet garments, proudly plain,
Their ordered rows show dimly through the gloom,
A Midas-trove the rich might buy in vain.
The shadow'd air is dumb, yet all a-thrill
With magic of old story,-and my feet
Pause like an alien's, doubtful, on the sill.

I fear to desecrate that still retreat
Where hold communion mystic with their kind
The glorious spirits from the dream-world fair,
Those flame and dew creations of the mind
That wring the souls they rise from, phoenix-rare.
But lo! a voice-" Who loves us, enter free!
To such we owe our immortality."

EDITH DEBLOIS LASKEY.

(She.) "My dear girl, come here this minute, shut the door and listen, for I have something perfectly thrilling to tell you! Of course you won't tell a soul for it's

Two Points of View a dead secret. It's serious too-it makes me feel quite old. It's about Ned, of course, and it happened last night when he asked me to drive with him. He wouldn't talk very much and I had to do it all, until suddenly right in the middle of my sentence he turned around and looked straight at me and said, "Polly don't you know I love you-have loved for years-and I want you to marry me?" Now did you ever hear anything so stupid! It wasn't romantic a bit and I came very near laughing in his face, and I couldn't think of anything proper to say, so I just said I couldn't, and his face got all white- as they do in books; that was quite well done. I really felt rather sorry, because he's awfully rich, but such an idiot! He adores me I guess and it makes me feel so important to think I might make him happy, but of course I couldn't marry him! I hope I shan't ruin