years before, the only part that had whistled at every flood, was shattered from top to bottom.

'Down from the church-hill, clump, clump with his cane, limps Father Cyril. All bareheaded, with his beard uncombed, the wind twirls his gray hair like cobwebs in a granary door. ""Behold and verily," he calls out, "do you believe now?"

"The lightning struck it," Bogdan answers back. "No mortar is proof against lightning."

'But the other men cross themselves and spit over their left shoulders.

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'Gospody pomiluy!" he chants, and runs his fingers through his beard, the holy man. "A human soul we must have in the cornerstone. A man's soul cannot be spared; we need every one to protect the village, for the Lord God knows when Turks may come our way too. To hold such a bridge, a child's soul is not strong enough; so a woman's soul must be mixed with our mortar." 'Bogdan protested, but the men listened to the priest.

""Behold and verily," he goes on, "the manner in which we shall select her, saith the Lord. One week from this day, she, the one who first brings her husband's dinner to the bridge, she shall be the matron honored above all Zavoy women. He who breathes so much as a syllable of this to a woman, him the Lord God will curse, him and his wife, and his daughters unto countless generations! Gospody pomiluy! Amen!" So they all swore they would keep it secret.

'Radda waited all day for her man; she even dared the storm to look for him by the river; but she could n't find him. So she put a candle in the windowsill and set her down to watch. When she did hear his step on the cobblestones and ran out to meet him, he

pushed her aside as if she were a beg

gar-woman.

""Don't be running always after me like that," he growled at her, but kept looking at the ground. "You shame me with your ways. Folks clear their throats halfway across the road when you go by." "Radda's

heart wavered. "What have I done?" she cried.

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'Psst with your questions!" he snarled. "Mind your child, tend your spinning, your weaving, keep to your housework - that's a woman's business. Don't lick your lips at me like a lovesick silly at a horovodnik.”

"What ails you, Bogdan?" she wept out loud.

'But he stretched himself crosswise over the bedclothes and would n't say another word to her; so what was she, poor woman, to do? She wrapped herself in a blanket and lay in a corner.

""He's drunk with grief," she excused him, God's little cow. "He's drunk with grief," she says, "for he does n't smell of drink."

'In the morning she was up and out before light to prepare his breakfast, but he shoved her aside. "Tend your baby, I'll get my own breakfast, yes, and dinner too, from Stavry's tavern.

"And don't leave the child alone in the house," he called back as he slammed the door. "Wait till high noon before you come to the bridge. It makes me a laughing-stock to have you lugging me dinner in the middle of the morning, before any other woman gets there."

'But womankind is a puzzle, Stefan. The more he scolded her, the more anxious she was to please him, the better dinners she cooked him. Of course she tried not to be loving with him before the others, and stood aside knitting stockings while he ate; but she worried over his ways, and on the fourth night, she gathered up her courage.

swept, he cooked, he carried wood and water. But what is wood and water? A strange ailment had taken hold of her: like a lily of the valley after a frost, she faded and withered up, and died in a few weeks. They buried her at the base of the great pillar of the new bridge.

'And now, Stefan, listen. That was over a hundred years ago,' Uncle Dimo concluded, brushing back his gray hair, 'but you can go to Zavoy village and there stands the old bridge as it has stood against a hundred spring floods. Radda's soul is holding it firm. They call it Radda's Bridge.'

It had grown dark in the tool-shack. Outside, the night-sheen of moon and star and gleaming water and water-polished rock played about tents and cabins. Gusts of snow-kissed air whisked around the camp and fanned the smoky fire in front of the cook-tent, where crouching and sprawling figures and bent heads were still outlined. Farther down the track glowed dingily the lantern-lit window of Mister Jim's cabin. The two men waited silently, in almost complete darkness. Uncle Dimo evidently expected a word from the young man, but the latter did not speak.

'It is God's plan with us workingmen,' the old man took it.up again; 'there is no kicking against the pricks. What are we? Sweaty, ill-smelling bodies. Yet God chooses from among us some one to strengthen every work of man. You are young, you do not know yet; but be sure, Stefan, there is not one bridge, there is not one big building, if it is to last, that does not have some human soul at its foundation to give it strength and life. I've told you just one story; there are a thousand more. It is God's way. The rich man, he comes and orders and pays with his money; but money cannot buy this honor. God must elect you to it, if you are a good workman, as he elected Radda, as he has elected Dobry.'

And Uncle Dimo crossed himself piously. piously. The Americanized Bulgar involuntarily followed the old man's example. He felt uneasy, stupid. After what he had heard, to persist in offering the bereaved father money seemed sacrilegious.

Once more Dimo broke the silence. 'I was going to ask you one thing. The iron plate at the foot of the big pillar, that plate with the writing on it what is it about?'

'It has the names of the company's directors, Uncle Dimo, the directors and chief engineers and so forth.'

'But, Zasho, you know, told me it was about some president, that fellow with the gold chain in both pockets.'

"Yes, President Addison Van Allen Goldman, of the Directors of the Rocky Mountain Construction Company. The bridge will be named for him.'

'So they had picked him out? But see, God has chosen my Dobry first. It is for God to choose, not for man.'

Steve shuffled his feet uneasily.

'It is for God to choose and honor, Stefan, tell Mister Jim that. If a man scorns that choice, God brings damnation to that man. They must change the plate, make it right, as God wills it. Of course, as soon as they hear about Dobry, they themselves will want to do it, for the sake of the bridge.

'I don't know English, but when they ask, you tell them; let them write it simply, "The Bridge of Dobry." It needs nothing more; God will remember Dobry when He sees it.'

'I will tell them, Uncle Dimo.'
But the old man still hesitated.

"You know,' he added, "I am not sure about this next thing; you tell them not to do it if they think it is vain in God's sight-but perhaps they might add: "Dobry, only son of Dimo of Zavoy village, grandson of Radda's child." Let them put that too, if they don't think it vain in God's sight.'

It is very salutary now and then to let the mind run whither it listeth.

I waked this morning out of a dream in which I had been harkening to a voice cry in dolorous accents,

'Glamis hath murthered sleep, and therefore Cawdor

Shall sleep no more; Macbeth shall sleep no more.'

The voice had been pursuing me, I would have said, for hours, through tortuous corridors, in and out of postern gates, along battlements, and into subterranean dungeons. Suddenly it was arrested by the clangor of a bell.

'Go, bid thy mistress, when my drink is ready, She strike upon the bell.'

I waked, as I have said. My alarmclock was hammering away on the chair at my side. It was seven o'clock.

I reached over and silenced the detestable thing. Rain was splashing somewhere, and the piece of sky visible was leaden. 'I must get up,' said I to myself; and then, of course, turned over and looked at the wall-paper.

And so I laye a-thynkynge.

It was no cause for surprise that I had dreamed of Macbeth's castle. Only yesterday in class I read the very lines I have quoted, noting with pleasure how little Miss B sat on the edge of her chair, shivering, with speculative eyes, as if she saw the trembling thane with his hangman's hands. What is surprising is that now, as I looked at the wall-paper, I thought, not of the class of yesterday, but of incidents of

space, and performs greater miracles than Ariel's in the twentieth part of a minute.

As I lay between waking and sleeping, I was back in the corridor of a college hall, watching a lank figure, all arms and legs, that moved along before me 'with Tarquin's ravishing strides,' and ever and anon cast over its shoulder a look of unutterable horror.

'Is this a dagger which I see before me,
The handle toward my hand?'

said a voice as from the grave. The figure paused. I could see the shaggy brows, the high-bridged nose, the black eyes fixed on space; and below, the loose-jointed body and shaking knees. A moment the form stood rigid, and then shot into the air with a swoop of a long arm and a howl like a coyote's,

'Come, let me clutch thee!'

And so disappeared in a series of leapings and swoopings so purposely ungainly that I leaned against the wall in laughter. I had been sole spectator of a part of Shaughnessy's locally famous parody of the murder of Duncan.

I wish I could describe that parody, but find I cannot. Charlotte Cushman once said that Macbeth is the great ancestor of all the Bowery ruffians, 'a foolish word,' but an excellent hint for parody, and one that Shaughnessy must have chanced upon. He went to classes seeing air-drawn daggers and clutching at them with the gesture of one catching flies; he pounced upon us hissing, 'There's blood upon thy face!' he scared under-classmen out of their

wits by screaming at them, 'The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon! Where got'st thou that goose look?'

I have not decided yet whether or not Shawn, as we called him, was a genius; but I had no doubt then. There was a little group of us, - Hetherington and Mangan and Winckelmann were the others, each, doubtless, except possibly Mangan, queer enough in his own way. Because genius is often queer, it is the part of sanguine youth to think that queerness denotes genius; and I suppose that we were queer to the top of our bent. Shaughnessy, six feet two, of northern Irish, dark Irish, extraction, gaunt of face and loose of limb, was the versatile member of our circle. He could act, and play the 'cello, and sing baritone, and draw in charcoal, all so well that he was despondent of ever choosing among his talents one which he could bear to cultivate at the expense of the rest.

I remember my admiring envy of him one day as we sat in the studio on the top floor under old Professor Hertz, drawing from the plaster cast of a foot. It was a Greek foot that had never known a shoe, round and beautiful. Shaughnessy's charcoal sketch grew as if by magic, in black lines, muscular, until Old Hertzy, as we lovingly called him, exclaimed with lifted hands, 'Mein Gott, dot foot could kick!' My sketch, which before had seemed plump and soft and Grecian,' suddenly came to look like a pincushion; although Old Hertzy, gentle always as a woman, sought to comfort me by declaring that there were plump and skeeny feet, and which one liked best was a 'madder of dasde.' He did not see the point. The point was that I had merely drawn the cast, while Shaughnessy, looking at the same plaster, had seen the straining ground-spurning foot of Atalanta or Diana, and had drawn that. It was

useless to argue with me. I knew. Shaughnessy had what I called genius.

Hetherington had it, too; but his ran to literature. He could write you a poem, an essay, a story, or make you a speech, at a moment's notice. He could speak French like a Frenchman. He could lead all his classes, and yet never be detected studying. I was quite sure that he, too, was a genius, though his special abilities were more within my apprehension.

And Winckelmann had it, perhaps more truly than either of the others. He was a German, thorough, burningly sincere. His industry was terrifying. He was a glutton in his reading. At one time he read Carlyle through, — Sartor, Frederick, the Revolution, the Essays, — every word. It took him six months, but he did it. He read Sir Thomas Browne through, too, even to the Vulgar Errors. And of course he smoked. All men who love Sir Thomas smoke, usually immoderately. He was philosophically inclined and was ready at any time to argue you up hill and down dale, all day and all night, on any subject in metaphysics or morals you cared to propound. In college, I remember, his hobby was convictions. Just to get him to talk, I used to scoff at convictions as a source of action, declaring that all my best decisions were the fruit of chance or impulse. Such heresy was all that was needed to set him going; and many a night we talked 'the low moon out of the sky' and 'drummed up the dawn,' amid clouds of smoke and thicker clouds of speculation. When he was in fettle, he was superb; his face was suffused, his eyes flashed, his hands beat the air, he shouted, he roared with laughter, he all but wept.

We men are accustomed to deride the garrulity of women; yet I doubt if any women under the sun could compete in loquacity with a pair or trio or quartette of young men engaged in the