"No. Things have changed since then. It was one woman who changed them at Big Annie Farm."

"Was Big Annie the woman?" "God, no! Big Annie was a myth even when I first came here, and wasn't the one, I guess, to make things more sanitary. This was a woman from the States, mother of one of the new men. Her name was Riddle. She came and stayed three years—until her son died—and made our lives worth living. Then she went away." "I know her," I said. "Knew her, rather."

"She's dead, then?" Driscoll asked. "Last year."

He was silent for some time. "I suppose she had to die, like every one else," ," he said. "I wonder what she's doing now?"

That speculation, coming from Driscoll, made me jump, so that my chair creaked. "Does that surprise you?" he asked. "My wondering what she's doing now? It shouldn't, if the Mrs. Riddle you knew is the same one I knew. I can't imagine her staying in her grave, or in heaven for that matter, if there was anything for her to do in hell." He lit a cigarette. "Espinosa was near enough hell in those days. She kept house at Anita Grande for three years.

"When you knew her," he went on after another pause, "did she ever show you a gold owl? Maya work? She might have worn it sometimes on a ribbon or a chain."

"She generally wore it." I remembered the ornament well-a queer and handsome bit of old work.

"I'm glad she liked it that much. I gave it to her. A small matter, but I wanted her to remember me-what she did for me, anyhow."

"Did she nurse you through something, or what?"

"Yellow fever. But that wasn't all I wanted her to remember. I was on the beach in those days-practically. She cured me of that, too."

She had indeed, as I learned in that long evening, with the banana fronds pattering like rain beyond the screens, and hot odors drifting in from the jungle and the garden. Mrs. Riddle had planted that garden, for she had lived at Què Tal

Farm as well as at Anita Grande-had pervaded the place, as she seemed to pervade it now. Certainly, as Driscoll talked on in that indistinct voice of his, it seemed as though she must have joined us quietly and was sitting in the third chair on the veranda. The aura of her high and sporting spirit was as palpable there as it had ever been at Gristmill, so that Què Tal seemed her world and not my own. Why not? It too had felt her indomitability, so that even the bush which she had driven back from her garden did not encroach on it as it did on other clearingswas kept out by this man who was talking to me-kept out because she still walked by night among her flowers. Even the hothouse perfume of frangipani, as different as possible from the freshness of cold violets which had always suggested her to me, seemed by some magic to be her fragrance.

"So you see," Driscoll said as he threw away his last cigarette and rose, "why I wondered what she was doing now. Some of us may die altogether, and a good job too, but not Mrs. Riddle."

The next day he took me to visit a distant farm. We spent the day riding over it; when we reached the railroad-track once more, it was already dusk.

"Jake Stein will feed us at Grenadilla," said Driscoll, and added to his motor-boy, "Shove along, mon."

The negro pushed us a few steps, running behind, and jumping aboard the track motor when the explosions began. Conversation became impossible. We banged along the track for half an hour or so, running without train orders, of course, as all men did habitually in Espinosa until accidents compelled a change of custom. The probability of meeting an engine three rail-heads away made the curves interesting. Darkness came down on us before we had gone a mile.

We stuttered into the yards of Grenadilla Junction, going more slowly on account of adverse switch points, and stopped in front of the cantina and general store. A tall sort of a barracks loomed behind it, with yellow light pouring in wedges out of open doors, illuminating three tiers of galleries. In reality, it was quiet except for domestic disputes in three different and equally unintelligible

languages, but, somehow, it gave the impression of crawling life, of disorganized and continuous noise. Stein's cantina, however, was clean enough, and deserted at this hour; Stein himself was sitting behind his bar. He heaved himself to his feet and offered us drink; a moment later he shouted into the general obscurity:

"Juana! Supper for two!"

A disembodied voice answered him, and pots clattered somewhere. Stein turned on the single unshaded bulb over one of the tables; we took our drinks over to it and sat down.

"Your first visit to Espinosa?" Stein asked me. "Yes? Und you find it inderesting?"

"Very," I said.

"Any gountry is inderesting, if you do not haf to lif in it. Here, dere is notting to talk aboud but bananas."

"They're interesting, if you've never seen them except in a grocery," I replied. "Ja. In a grocery, it is nice to see bananas. Here" He shrugged and buried his mustache in a glass of Espinosan beer.

"Williams, here," said Driscoll, "knew Mrs. Riddle."

"Knew her? She is, then, dead?" "Last winter, he tells me.' "So?" Stein, his head dropping a little forward, sat motionless for a time. A burst of rain assaulted the iron roof of the cantina; he reached up and closed the wooden shutter above our heads. Then he stepped behind the bar and pulled a coat over his damp-looking shirt. He sat down again and finished his beer. "So, she is dead," he said, and there was a quality of regret in his voice, a certain softening of his gutturals, even. "Vell, vell. Burcell vill be sorry to hear that." "What's become of Purcell?" Driscoll asked. "I haven't seen him lately."

"Burcell is as usual," Stein answered. "Sometimes I wonder if it was right for Mrs. Riddle to pull him through that time. But she always did vat she could for any sort of a yellow dog, or for the fleas on his hide, even. So she is dead. Vell." He meditated-a hunched frog of a man in a sweaty and collarless shirt, yet, just then, with a certain unexpected decency about him. A yellow girl with flopping slippers on her bare feet brought

us our supper, and we began on it in silence. Stein filled his glass again. "Mrs. Riddle," he said, "vas afraid of notting."

"Not even of life," Driscoll added. "Not even of life. Not even of Burcell's niggers that time he was sick und they got nasty. You remember?" "Tell Williams."

"Burcell vas sick, und he had no money, und no food in der house, und his vife had to dig up roots in the basture und gollect dry branches for der fire. Mrs. Riddle heard about it und vent to his place on a hand-car-her yard-man und her house-man bumping it."

"Without train orders?" I asked.

"Oh, ja. Certainly, vithout orders. She found der niggers-Haitians and Barbadians-on Burcell's platform, very nasty, as I have said. She ordered them off-spoke once to them in a low voice, I bet-und they vent." Stein laughed. "Then she came back here, und before I know vat I do, I load her car for her—a hundred pounds of flour, tea, canned milk-oh, many other things. It was a brivilege so to do."

Before my mind's eye at that moment rose a picture of her perfect tea-table in Gristmill-of the firelight in the autumn dusk, of Henry Page and his liver, of the score of pleasant people who had revolved about her there and had claimed her as their peculiar property and product. When I tried to pay for my supper, Stein closed my hand over the money I offered him, and said:

"No friendt of Mrs. Riddle can bay here. She vas here but three years, but she belongs to us.'

Once more before I left the Caribbean her name came up, this time at Havana, where an acquaintance of mine took me to dinner at the American Legation. After dinner, we sat on the roof overlooking the Maleçon and the sea beyond, and the talk skipped about over the world-from Petrograd to Pekin and back again. The minister at that time was particular about his subordinates, excluding the finikin type of secretary; therefore, the evening was interesting and pleasant. The first secretary, it seemed, had once crossed from the mainland with Mrs. Riddle. They had dined at the legation, as I was

doing, and had rejoined the ship at three in the morning, an hour before it sailed. They had hurried, and when one hurries in a Havana Ford, one risks body and soul. They had been wrecked once and arrested once. Diplomatic pressure failed with the policeman until Mrs. Riddle began to talk with him; he ended by deserting his post at the foot of the Calle O'Reilly and riding on the step of the car to the gate of the dock, which he had opened for them.

"A wonderful and charming old lady," said the first secretary. "And to think that she had lived most of her life in Vermont-in a hick town."

From Havana I returned to Gristmill and took up my work again. Mrs. Riddle's house was occupied by some one

else, and I did not enter it that winter. Her name occurred frequently in conversation. Once, when I was talking to Mrs. Corcoran, I mentioned the Caribbean.

"I've heard, of course, that she had been in that part of the world," Mrs. Corcoran admitted. "She told me so herself, in fact. In several other countries, too. I've heard all that, and it means nothing. She always-always-lived here, and couldn't have lived anywhere else." "Well," I assented, "perhaps she did. Driscoll-Stein-the first secretary-all felt the same way, but they must have been dreaming."

I

E'S a good mixer and a straight Republican." Thus, somewhat informally, was the coming of President Vergilius Alden Cook heralded by one of the trustees of Harmonia, the women's college of Metropole.

More formally, at the public induction into office, he was presented to his students, his faculty, and to the town's citizens as "one of the State's leading educators, in honoring whom Metropole honors itself." A stirring speech on "Democracy and Education" by the State commissioner of the latter led gracefully to the encomium on Doctor Cook delivered by the president of Doctor Cook's own Alma Mater. Such terms as "the glory of America," "American

womanhood," "a true scholar," "every inch a gentleman" peppered the oration and called forth good-natured applause. Then, with a modesty that should be suggestive of Lincoln, tempered by a dignity that comes from the knowledge of one's worth, Doctor Cook rose to acknowledge the tribute and to present his own platform for education. At a previously determined signal the massed student body came spontaneously to its feet and broke into a well-rehearsed song about:

"Doctor Cook, with pen and book
We are all for you.
To you and to Harmonia

We will e'er be true."

This gracious testimony of loyalty moved the new president to wipe his eyes furtively and to gulp a few times before proceeding with his carefully memorized speech.

So flushed were the students, however, with the success of their part in the evening's ceremony that they were not very attentive to the new president's address and never did learn what his educational programme was. But, as a matter of fact, no one else in the audience, however attentive, learned it either.

Properly introduced, Doctor Cook now belonged. Harmonia was willing to cooperate; at any rate, to do nothing to prevent the man's showing what he was. There were, of course, on the part of the student body and of the more curious members of the faculty, attempts to penetrate the arcana of his earlier history. As pieces of information were brought to light they were joined, analyzed, and verified until a suggestive, if sketchy, biography was obtained.

II

VERGILIUS ALDEN COOK was born and brought up in Watertown, a small country settlement. There he had received a stern religious drilling from a fundamentalist grandmother; a political training, in which his father, the village lawyer, served as model; and a rigid intellectual discipline at the hands of a conscientious country schoolmaster. A certain college tradition ran in the Cook family; so at seventeen, with his father's "Trigonometry" and his "Horace," Vergilius left his home for one of the smaller New England colleges.

The boy Vergilius was a good boy. His ancestry was American; his father a man of some position. He joined the college glee-club. He played on the college nine. He did well enough, but not too well, in his studies. And so he made the proper fraternity. He had received the accolade of rightness-even of superiority.

Superiority. Yes, one knew that in his heart; but, openly, one could not afford to be too snobbish. A little cordiality, a show of interest, a hearty hand-clasp, these rather than icy superiority were effective in winning the success represented by class office.

The genial attitude, moreover, was in keeping with a new spirit that on the campus was becoming intellectually ac

ceptable, a spirit expressing itself through some of the faculty and a few of the students in catchwords like "capital and labor," "frenzied finance," "social consciousness," "individualism," "democracy," "Americanism," "opportunity." A mind, not keenly aware of a struggling, growing outside world, had difficulty in understanding the significance of such terms. Vergilius tried to reconcile these new ideas with the ideas of the correct static universe with which he was familiar. Of course, and even his father would agree, there should be equality of opportunity; every American should have a fair chance to get what he rightfully desired. But no American wanted anything that Vergilius, himself, didn't want. An American- Well, an American wasn't one of those dirty, greasy foreigners who came to this country, made bombs, and tried to upset a perfectly functioning government. Still-it was here that his broad college training showed its value-a little shoulder-patting and hand-shaking often won a Wop or a Mick to the side of righteousness. Vergilius decided to hand-shake.

With this well-defined social policy and with his B. A. and M. A. degrees, Vergilius returned to a slightly changed Watertown. A twist of fortune had set its industries humming. Its population had increased; and if the staid settlers shuddered at the thought of the foreigners who were coming to work in factory and mill, who were turning old family mansions into slum tenements, they still did not refuse to accept the increased rents, the booming profits, or other benefits of a thriving town. There was a welcome air of prosperity and, as an outward and visible sign, a new high-school building with a newly incorporated State normal training course.

Two degrees and a father's political influence made Vergilius a welcome addition to the school faculty. With energy and the application of successful business methods, he soon became principal and saw the school flourish. His position naturally threw him into close contact with all sorts of people. The presence of Watertown's irritating foreign section could not be ignored. But had not college prepared Vergilius Cook to handle