He halted, but, having been seen by her, he approached. She stood laughing at him. When she had driven him to the verge of anger she explained.

Twenty years agone her mother wrote the note he had found in his dressing gown. His reply had fallen into her hands, and she had been his correspondent. She had secured the introduction and had since been amusing herself by continuing the correspondence, thus furnishing herself with amusement. ROSALIE WHITING.

"-must part with that infernal canary," he went on, ignoring the information, "or either she or I will have to leave. For three days now I've listened to its noise till I'm in such a state of mind that I can't evolve a single clear thought or reason syllogistically. It's absurd."

Mrs. Martin hadn't perhaps the faintest idea what the "evolution of a clear thought" meant nor what "syllogistic reasoning" implied, but she had a most excellent idea of what George Char

The Canary's Mission.

BY VIRGINIA LEILA WENTZ.
(Copyright, 1907, by E. C. Parcells.)

George Charlemagne Tower rang for his landlady, with an impatient frown on his scholastic brow. As she entered his library she found him pacing up and down the Bokhara rug.

"That person who's rented your room back there"- he began.

"A young girl, sir," ventured Mrs. Martin.

-By request of Bro. H. E. Wilson, Div. 90. lemagne Tower's occupation of the best part of her apartment meant and what his threat implied. For five years now he had been her model star lodger, a bachelor and a heart whole man. had come to look upon him as a comfortable fixture and so had her husband, who was something of an idler, having found no position in life exactly suited to his gifted irresponsibilities.

She

"Miss Clemmens-that's the young girl, sir-won't part with her canary, I know," observed the landlady nervously,

picking up a paperweight. "She's uncommonly fond of the bird, but I'll tell her I'd like the room when her week's up." Mrs. Martin laid down the paperweight with the air of a martyr.

"Very well," grunted Mr. Tower, pulling up the shade of his library's back window with a jerk so that the morning sunlight struck like gold upon the big rubber plant. Then he opened the window. It was very warm in the room. "Suppose I'll have to stand the nuisance a few days longer. That's all. Good morning." He sat down at his mahogany desk with an air of dismissal and drew some papers toward him.

As he bent over his manuscripts, goosequill in hand, suddenly there sounded the whir of tiny wings in the stillness of the room, and there on the very sunniest leaf of his rubber plant perched a little yellow canary.

After an alert, coquettish inspection of the room and its occupant, the bird lifted its slender neck and emitted several penetrating chirps; then it filled its lungs with air, its soft chest expanded, and it burst into a gust of song.

"Come in, come in," called Mr. Tower brusquely in response to a knock upon his half-closed door. He looked up over his glasses. There, straight and slender and very, very young, stood a girl, the splendid morning light bathing her and turning the bronze of her soft hair to fire. "You see-my canary, she explained. "I was giving him a bath, and he spied your plant in the sunlight, and Will you close your window, please, and let

me

coax him back? I'm your new neighbor, Gracioca Clemmens, in Mrs. Martin's back room there. She nodded prettily over her shoulder, down the side of the long apartment.

"Gracioca!" ejaculated Mr. George Charlemagne Tower half to himself as he closed the window. There had never been but one of that name outside the covers of the old green fairy book. That one was a girl he had known in Yale in his freshman year. At that tender age she had been sufficiently older than he to lay siege upon his susceptibilities. Lordy, Lordy, how far away that seemed

now! "She was a Miss Barr," he said reflectively, fingering his watch chain as he looked at the girl coaxing the canary, "and she went West."

"Uh-huh," acquiesced the girl brightly; "that's where she met father." The bird flew to her shoulder, and with one hand she covered it daintily and bent down her coral lips to caress its tiny, fluffy head. "But how ever did you come to know mother? Think I look like her?"

"Very much indeed," said the man gravely, answering the last question. "Only prettier," he added mentally, looking down confusedly on the fine white parting that separated the burnished golden waves of hair.

"She's disturbed my train of thought," he said helplessly after she had disappeared. "So her mother died when she was a baby, and she's all alone in the world, poor child!"

For the next hour George Charlemagne Tower scribbled away idly over his desk -idly, for visions of a goddess with burnished hair got mixed up with everything he wrote. Finally he pressed the electric button. When Mrs. Martin appeared, he explained to her that he'd changed his mind about the canaryrather fancied he liked its singing, after all-so she need not disturb herself about complaining to its owner. She had not already done so, he hoped.

Mrs. Martin's kindly, motherly face beamed. No, she had not. She was deferring that unpleasant mission till evening. Miss Clemmens went out to work every morning. That was she who closed the hall door a half hour ago. And she was afraid it might upset the poor girl for the day's duties, telling her just as she left, etc.

When Mrs. Martin had gone, the bachelor straightened up and laughed, and with the laugh he was transformed. He pushed his pen and ink away, put the paperweight over his unfinished manuscript, strode into the hall and rang for the lift with the swagger of youth. His slightly bent, scholarly walk was discarded. What man could be old with a face like Gracioca's in his heart?

A day or two later when he found that

this embodiment of youth was "Motherly Mamie" of the Young Girls' Embroidery Bazaar and that her duties were to lead the young mind into the mysteries of purling, drop stitch and sentiment he acknowledged that there was some humor in life, after all.

Life was not only humorous; it was gradually becoming luminous as well. Gone were the days when his desk and his books were Mr. Tower's sole companions. In the daytime now he often listened to the song of the canary and lived in thoughts of its owner. In the evenings he was allowed to chat with the girl herself.

Mrs. Martin watched the growing romance with self-effacing interest, and on many a cozy evening spent around the log fire in the library grate she would invent some excuse and absent herself so that the two might be alone.

The bachelor had fingered his glasses nervously when he asked the question of questions, and when in her cool, confident little way the girl had said "No" he urged no further.

"I understand," he said to himself that night as he dropped his head down on the desk, "I am too-too old. Such a fool to dream of it!"

The girl, however, in the privacy of her room, wore a wistful, sad little face. Now and then a tear would fall with a splash.

"He doesn't seem so awfully, awfully old, Blix," she pleaded, going up to the cage where the canary slept with his head tucked unresponsively under his wing. "How could I do without him now? He never guesses how this silly little heart of mine listens for his step in the hall or the sound of his voice, nor how it flutters when it hears them. Is it so very, very dreadful, Blix, to marry a man who thinks he's too old? I wonder if" Her sentence trailed off indistinguishably as she knelt to say her

prayers.

But she didn't wonder long. Mrs. Martin wouldn't let her. And so on the following Sunday she tripped into the library carrying her canary cage. Blix

wasn't feeling very well, and she had promised him a sun bath by the rubber plant.

As Mr. George Charlemagne Tower hung the cage he seemed overflowingly happy. Evidently that cool, confident little "No" had been withdrawn for the purpose of amendment-it would have been even safe to guess that a "Yes" had been supplied. Gracioca had nestled herself into a big leather chair near the fire, as if she intended to stay there forever. It was a way she had-one of the many ways her lover had found so ineffably charming. Possibly other girls had them, too. He didn't know.

He stood before her for a second; then, stooping, his two patrician hands framing each side of her oval face, he turned it up to his.

"Think, dear," he said, "you might have come and stopped awhile and gonejust like the dozen and one other occupants of that room back there-if❞— "If it hadn't been for Blix,' twinkled she, dimpling divinely.

"Precious little Blix!" ejaculated he, his voice lost somewhere among the coils of the girl's fluffy hair.

And the canary, forgetting he wasn't feeling well, extended his slender body, filled his tiny lungs with air and sang pompously. It was, for all the world, as if he were proud of the mission he had performed.

Thanks to the Weather.

BY JOANNA SINGLE. Copyrighted, 1907, by E. C. Parcells.)

It was the weather in the first place, thought Edith very drearily as she watched the rain beat against the window. If she and Richard had not been caught in a sudden shower to the utter ruin of her prettiest dress, she would never have been irritable and quarreled with him about nothing at all, and she would not have expected him to take the fault upon himself when she alone-after the weather-was to blame. And now it had rained for nearly a week, and the inaction was driving her wild. She could only think, think and vainly try to overcome her pride and send for him.