His voice awakens the herdsman, who springs angrily to his feet. But the disturber of his peace soon assures him that it was not wanton mirth that has brought him here at this hour of the night, but a strange tale that he has to relate.

"We were lying at the fold on the borderland of the sloping meadow. The sheep were all asleep, their heads on one another's backs. Only the cry of an ewe lamb or the wind in the poplar-trees broke across the stillness, when suddenly Sultan began to bark. Moreover, we heard a voice in the village crying, 'I beg for mercy. Let me in. A child has been born to us and we have no fire. It dies of the cold.' What else was said we do not know, but no window went up and no door opened. Then the stranger came running across the fields and over the black thorn. The dogs were aroused, and stood before him with open mouths; but listen! they could not bite him. 'Praise God,' we said, 'the sheep lie between. He cannot reach us.' But give heed. No sooner had this thought flashed through our minds than we saw him coming over to us, stepping on the sheep's backs. They lay as still as if they were accustomed to the pressure of his feet.

"The full moon rose behind him as he stood there in our midst. Our faces were white as cheese and our knees trembled beneath us. But he said in a voice all kindness, 'Good shepherds, have you not a warm fire?' Then I took heart and replied, 'Ours is almost out, but there, over the way, by the great house, is the fire that burns the night through.' 'Then bring me there,' he begged, and thus I have done, although I would rather have done aught else in the world; but here the stranger is!"

The shepherds fall back as the stranger, clad in a rough mantle, and leaning heavily upon his staff, enters. Stretching out one hand towards the glowing fire, he begins in calm but earnest voice:

"Pardon me, shepherds. I am a poor carpenter, a stranger in these parts. Lend me a little fire. My wife has born a child, and I must have fire to warm them."

The herdsman's face has grown hard during this speech, and now he steps forward angrily. "Begging I could never

abide. And I know you, too, you magician, player with fire. With me your arts shall not succeed!" And he hurls his long spear at the stranger.

But the spear rebounds upon itself and sinks to the ground. The herdsman steps back abashed as it falls at his feet. "What night of wonders didst thou bring with thee, stranger, that all bow before thee?" he stammers. "The savage dogs can only dumbly show their teeth, the ram, that cares only for its fodder, does not attack thee. A word from thy mouth silences the lads, and my trusty spear recoils from thy very glance. I am not afraid, and yet I shiver. Take as much as thou wishest from my fire," he adds scornfully, seeing there is no shovel nor tongs near by.

But the stranger unhesitatingly bends over the hearthstones, and taking a few of the live coals in his bare hands, wraps them beneath his mantle, and with a word of thanks turns to go, while the shepherds look from one to the other in amazement, crying, "See, the fire does not burn him!"

And the herdsman arrests the departing stranger, begging him to tell what power it is that can subdue both hatred and heat. "Tell me," he begs, "for I, too, would gladly give my heart to such a power."

The stranger's reply is simple. "I do not know. I am anxious for my wife and child. Farewell."

Still dazed, the herdsman turns to the boys. "Up, let us follow him and see if we can find the meaning to these wonders."

Softly sound the shepherd flutes as the curtain falls.

Again the orchestra plays, giving us the lonely beauty, the thousand voice, the treacherous ways, the manifold mysteries of a winter's night on the Dachau moor. In the midst of it a strange troop is seen coming down through the audience; a swarthy-faced little figure, clad in a turban bound with jewels and garments of Oriental splendour, comes on the stage surrounded by princely escort and speaks. "We are three princes from the East, led hither by a beautiful star, that ever guided our feet northwards, bidding us ever hasten, for a king was near the earth. Last night we slept in Munich, but now

we stand on the cold moor, and our star has set. A moment before King Herod rode by and begged us to bear his greetings to the poor little naked child."

The other wisemen have come upon the stage, and now they ask together:

Thou little child king, livest thou far from here?

So still is the world shut in by snow.

And the second wiseman turns his face back again to the East, as he thinks of the sunlight on the palm-trees and the great ripening fruit of Paradise back in the homeland, while his heart rebels against the grey moor and the star now set that has led them on this idle quest. But the others chide him, for they see that the star has not set, but is just rising, and with its light they perceive another band approaching them. It is the stranger carrying home his coals of fire, followed by the shepherds.

The wisemen accost them. "We have come hither, led by a star, that told us that here, lost in the night, a king should be born. There on the hilltop we see a castle stands. Do you know if a king has been born there to-night?"

The herdsman shakes his head. "Nay, the old castle is empty. But I ask you to pardon me if I tarry no longer. The stranger here is in great haste. His little naked child is dying of cold on its mother's breast."

The first wiseman turns towards the stranger and speaks as if thinking aloud, "Did not Herod speak of such a poor, naked babe? Where is your little child? Could it be a king?"

With the same calm dignity that has always characterised the stranger, he replies:

"A king, sirs, such as you seek lies not on hay and straw, but on a bed of down, like King Solomon. And still my little. baby's face is full of heavenly light, and round his little forehead shines a crown of glistening stars. And, as the light of heaven breaks o'er the village from yon star, so glows from out his eyes a wondrous light. Now mother and child await the fire I bring. We dwell within a cattle stall. The way is not so bad; follow me up the hill and through the quiet lane,

that I can show you mother and child, forsaken by all the world."

The curtain falls, to rise again on Mary, the peasant mother, watching over her babe as it lies wrapped in its swaddling clothes on his little pallet of straw. A host of child angels guard the mother on either side, and before the baby kneels the stranger, the shepherds and the wisemen. The herdsman's voice breaks the silence as he presses forward beseeching the stranger to take his sheepskin coat to cover his little child.

"When my own little child died I killed his favourite lamb to avenge my grief," he continues, "and bound the skin against my aching heart. As I look at your little babe lying there in the cold my old pain awakes again. Wrap the child in this lambskin. But what vision is this?" The herdsman falls back, for as he spreads the coat over the child the hut becomes flooded with light, and there among the angels he perceives the smiling face of his own child, while with the song of the chorus the curtain falls.

The early grey twilight was falling over Dachau some three days later, and the young composer had closed his piano in despair and rushed down the stairs. into the street. With the freedom from rehearsals and the excitement of the performances now outlived, he could see only the problems confronting future years and the failure ever to reach the border line of his ideal.

As he wandered down the hill's slope the school doors opened and a laughing, shouting crowd of boys tumbled out about him. In their midst he recognised three faces, swarthy yet, of the proud kings of Witschi, Wutschi and Sarkapaud, who had absolutely refused to return to their natural selves again. A score of caps came off as the little urchins noticed the passing figure wrapped in his long cape, and a smile broke over his solemn face as he responded with many a "Grüss dich Gott." His step grew elastic again, and he threw back his head to watch for the evening star just rising. The song that he had been trying in vain to catch all day sang itself calmly and sweetly within his ear. As he strolled along the familiar pathway to the woods, memory after memory flashed by. He saw him

self a boy again, his hand in his father's, and felt again that pain deep in his heart because he had no Christmas-tree, and then there welled up within him the music of his Kriepenspiel, born of this pain. He thought again of the children, the shepherd lads telling their riddles about the fire, and the dark-faced little princes coming across the moor. He saw again the little fellows who refused to have the black washed off their faces, and heard the voices of the children as they plead with him after the play to promise them a part next Christmas. And then his thoughts spanned the years to come, when these lads should be grown to manhood. He saw their faces heavy and stolid now, their shoulders bent, their hands hard and callous, as they went out to their work at sunrise and returned silent and weary at evening. And he saw

them turning back to their boyhood again as he so often did to his, particularly at Christmastide; seeing again that dim room, hearing the music and the simple story of the Night of Wonders.

He paused for a moment as he stood before the forest pool looking down into its silent depths. A tiny pebble slipped from his fingers and fell into the dark water. He watched it sink, and then saw the circles rise upon the surface, one around the other, each one larger than the one before, until the last swelled and blended with the shadows of the pool, and then he knew again that a lifetime is but as the smallest inmost circle, and that only in the passing of generation into generation can one measure how his art has spanned the distance between human life and the boundaries of his ideal.

Maude Barrows Dutton.

YOUNG married American woman living in London was presented to Queen Victoria, who paid her a pretty personal compliment. A couple of hours later, at a tea at the American Embassy, a daughter of the Queen conveyed an intimation to the same American lady that she would soon be invited to Windsor Castle. This unusual incident was, naturally, much the talk of society in London, and I heard every particular, for I was at the time visiting the home of the young American woman and her husband. Some years later I worked the incident into a story, and it was pretty generally sneered at by reviewers. as a silly example of a writer venturing into social places about which, of course, he could know nothing. I'm case-hardened against that sort of criticism, but I took notice of a polite personal letter from a college lecturer on literature, who

wrote to me condemning the use of such a highly improbable invention. To him I explained. He was all right; he wrote and delivered a lecture on the inexpediency of the use of fact in fiction!

I've had lots of fun out of an assumption in certain places that I am Boweryderived an assumption which has aided some of my critics in knowing that I know nothing about polite people. I once made use, in a short story, of some adventures I shared with a couple of Harvard men while travelling in the Hawaiian Islands. This made one Harvard undergraduate so angry that he could not resist the call to rebuke me. That I should presume to speak of men and measures not of the Bowery made him sad, he said; but that I should attempt to tell what a Harvard man would do under any circumstance was a piece of impertinence he could not encounter without protest. His further remarks and advice conveyed the impression that Har

vard, as a social institution, depended much upon his sprightly resentment of such offending as mine. Not long after that I was a guest of Harvard Union, and inquired as to my correspondent, but no one could inform me. One took the trouble, however, to pursue his search as far as the records, and reported that there was, indeed, such a person there, but that he "was a mucker no one knew."

In my youth I reported for a newspaper a trial at law, famous throughout the mining States and Territories, which revealed that a mine swindle had been perpetrated through the "salting" of a bag of ore samples by an injection of a solution of gold. The cautious expert, who had personally broken down the samples of ore, had placed the bag containing them under his pillow at night, but the needle of the syringe had got there tout de même. Well, I used that incident in a magazine story not long ago, and promptly received a letter from a man whose letter-head acclaimed him to be a metallurgist and assayer, firmly informing me that such a trick was a chemical impossibility, and adding that I should shun such technicalities in fiction. One more story of this kind and then I'll tell what I'm driving at. In Lees and Leaven there is a deed to be recorded under circumstances related to the plot, and I told how it was done. From out of the West, where that part of the story lay, I received a number of letters protesting against my highly illegal procedure. I don't know about that, either, for I had asked a lawyer who attends to such matters for a number of important industrial corporations, and I had recorded the deed. strictly in accordance with his advice.

Here, then, is the point: am I alone among writers in this matter of receiving letters condemning me for errors I have not committed? I set down these few cases, but I recall scores. I think that many such fault-finding letters have been rejected by some newspaper, and the writers send them to authors after failing to get them into print. They sound like "letters to the editor," and I wonder if other authors do not receive many more than they have admitted in this series of confessions. The man who approves is usually in a state of mind milder than

that which moves him who disapproves, and the latter is the one who more often feels that the world will be better if he weeps forth his feelings from a fountain pen.

Harper's Weekly once turned over to me a letter from a Cincinnati lawyer scolding that excellent repository of Mr. Harvey's thoughts for printing a "Chimmie Fadden" sketch wherein, asserted the indignant letter writer, I had been guilty of absolute indecency in "Chimmie's" account of a night at the opera. In dismay I turned to the printed page and found that "Chimmie" had related, with some such reservations as one would make in telling the story to a child, the plot of Faust! That letter I answered, pointing out that the Faust story in some form had been able to maintain a respectable place in literature so long that my Bowdlerised edition did not deserve the scorn of even the righteous. But the letter writer was not satisfied; he saw a low purpose on my part in thrusting such a story before the pure eyes of Harpers' readers, who, he told me, were a different sort, morally, from the godless patrons of the opera.