"Owl! Owl!" yelled Sapphira. "Hold your hair "Valuable bird, that," said the doctor.

on, do."

“'Tain't a bird at all times," muttered Dan ruefully. “It's a-a- He looked round nervously at Sapphira as she impatiently knocked her beak against the cage and then opened her mouth wide as if to show her round tongue "blackened with lies," so Dan declared.

"Mary's chick-a-biddy," said the parrot.

This immediately sent Dan upstairs to see his wife. Dan touched the little curled-up fingers of his son as if they would break.

"Perfect, sure enough," he muttered, "nails and all complete. It's miracle work," he added as he stooped to kiss Mary. "I shall never feel the same again, my dear, after this," he continued, smoothing the baby's bald head gently with the back of his forefinger. "Gosh! how he do drink! You'd think he was learnt all about it afore he got here. Chimneys have taken the third place now in my estimation, by the side of you and this lightning conductor. My! what wrinkles he have got and no troubles to speak on like you and me.”

Mary said she felt very tired but so happy she believed she must be purring.

Dan's wife never recovered from the birth and death of the boy. "Little bald pate," as his father lovingly called him, had been seriously handicapped at the outset and Mary, thirteen weeks after her child died, got a serious chill which developed into pneumonia and she was soon gone. Dan nursed her night and day with the quiet doggedness characteristic of him. He gave up all his work, as chimneys were one thing and Mary another, he argued. He never failed her. Her least wish was law to Dan and he got into the way of making three hours' sleep a night suffice him. He fought death as he fought soot, but this time he was "beatened." He could not save his Mary.

"They'm jealous up above, we're told," he argued, when he could collect his wits and think at all. The likes of we can't calculate the likes of she nor the meaning of they up atop. The Lord's will be past finding out, I reckon, but whoever had a hand

in the make-up of Mary can be trusted with the end of we, I'm thinking."

Sapphira's cage was by Mary's bed to the last and Dan was afraid the bird was going, too, for she lost all her spirit. The day Mary was buried Dan " gave up, like a thing." He let no one touch his wife. He lifted her reverently into her coffin with a strange feeling that he was dead himself. He could not " compass it." Clean man as he was, he never washed his hands for hours after touching her cold forehead. In a dull sort of way he felt there was nothing left for him but to die, too. He was glad it rained so. No damping Cornish mist, but such a downpour as had rarely been seen. Dan was glad, for it kept the gaping crowds at home. He would have hated the sun to shine. It would have hurt like a knife. Blessed be the corpse the rain pours on," said Dan, as he carried the narrow coffin downstairs with Bill Thomas, who always had a tender spot for Dan's "missis."

"She was most like a wild wood anemone, mate," said Bill, as he looked in Dan's grief-stricken face. They'm wonderful to look upon and faces the wind brave enough, but anybody can see they'm unearthly, in a manner of speaking."

"Yes," answered Dan," they face the first sun but don't stay for no summer, and they'd make no headway in autumn, much less winter. Best she than me if one of us had to pass. I can face it and go like mad for chimneys again, but she would have quailed before this rending apart. If I'd gone and left she I'd have never behaved myself even in heaven. It's best as it is. She and the little chap be safe and after all, this world be a wilderness, we're told."

"Take another missis, dear," Mary had said again and again to Dan when she knew she must leave him. "I can't die in peace unless I know someone will tend you and joke with you. Sapphira be human like you and me, but she won't suffice no more once you've had me and the child. Take another missis if I'm to rest in peace."

Dan, with quiet patience, cleaned up the house after the funeral, paid for the coffin and the grave, gave orders for a tombstone more appropriate for a county magnate than his

simple Mary, and then sat down to consider the situation. He had denied his wife nothing while she lived and he knew he could not refuse to fulfil her last wish. But what could he do?

"Best drown myself, I reckon," he muttered, and Sapphira yelled in response, in Mary's voice, "Take another missis, Dan." Love had overtaken him before he was aware of it and Love had left him, just as he had got used to its bewildering deliciousness. He had meant to have a cosy corner, he had always said, and Mary had brought into that corner a strange peace and happiness he was only realizing fully now that it had left him. But had it left him? He sat wondering about these things in the long, lonely nights. Mary seemed to be very near him somehow. He felt less sad by the fire with Sapphira than when a friend came in to cheer him up. It took him nearly all his spare time to keep the house neat and clean like Mary had it. He changed his waistcoat and coat and put on a clean collar when he came in as if his wife was by his side as he ate his supper. As he prayed he wondered if she knew how lonely he was and then he suddenly hoped she did not know, as it might spoil heaven a bit for her and there was no sense in that, he argued. Better bide his time. The idea, once in his brain, that Mary might worry over him, took possession of him and he tried to make up his mind to marry again and soon. He had generally only thought of the dead in the churchyard and had felt vaguely that his mother knew when he put flowers on her grave. Now he began to wonder if the dead were even nearer than that, like the wind was near though you could not see it.

What intensified this idea of his was the strange conduct of Sapphira. He was certain she saw things he could not see. Sometimes, when they were quite quiet he noticed her feathers stand up and her keen, bead-like eyes grow more intent and fix themselves on one spot for a long time. He grew more and more uneasy when Sapphira repeated again and again, with feathers erect and in that peculiarly gentle voice he knew so well, "Take a missis, Dan dear, take a missis." What did it mean? He had heard people say the dead could not rest if their wishes were unfulfilled. What was he to do? It made

him icy cold to think of it all and even on warm nights he often got up shivering to see if the door was shut and the window fastened. It was all very odd and he wished he knew something about other things besides chimneys. Sapphira had lost nearly all her spirit and he certainly was losing his. Dan thought once the bird was in a fit and she rarely laughed and never called for her bath. Was she going to die and if so, what should he do then? Surely, even the birds outside did not sing the same as when Mary was alive and nothing, he noticed, seemed really happy like they did once.

He thought over the two years of their married life. How very sweet she was! There was a "tripetty" bend in her way of walking that sometimes made him quite faint with longing to kiss her when he watched her picking her way through the lanes or going into chapel. It was at one with her sweet smile which somehow seemed all over her, even in her hands, if you watched them close enough. Dan only realized, when he saw Mary dead, how much a part of herself her smile was. Had he never seen her without it, he wondered, or had Death just turned her stiff and cold like most folkses seemed to be even when they were alive? He left the death chamber hurriedly, after his first unconscious realization of this, for he argued, in his quaint way, that as Mary hated him to come home and find her in a torn dress or in one a bit soiled she would dislike it much more if he saw her now, with all her smile with all her smile gone. The beautiful coils of hair seemed the only testimony to the witchery and charm that had made Dan wholly hers. As he wet a corner of his handkerchief and gently wiped away the clammy moisture from the corners of the closed eyes he knew that all the earth could give him or heaven take away would count as very little with him after this. He supposed he must have loved her very much, but he had never thought about it. that he would rather do what she wanted, was, than anything else he could think of. first coming he had not found it a bit hard to give up tobacco, though he never "made use of " much of it as it "minded him of soot." That it made Mary sick showed him what nasty stuff it was. He tried to smoke again after she died in order

All he knew was however slight it When the boy was

to cheer himself, but his pipe tasted " rancerous and bitter, like a thing." For the first time in his life he took a tonic, a bitter, evil-smelling liquid the kindly doctor gave him.

"It may fortify the system," said Dan to one of his mates, "but a feller would need to take another bottle to clean out the flues afterwards." The tonic, however, so strengthened his nervous system that he definitely made up his mind to marry again. He had found favor in the eyes of nearly all the local women because of his devotion to Mary and also because it was well known that he had saved "a pile of money." He could easily earn from twelve to fifteen shillings a day at sweeping chimneys and in these times, when the price of a loaf was as uncertain as the state of the weather, it was no small standby to be sure of three or four pounds a week, with a man who never grumbled at his meals, thrown in. Dan was too weary and sad to realize that this time it was he who was the wooed. seemly and staid" woman of about thirty-five made, what her rivals considered, "a frantic dash" for Dan when she realized how matters stood. She had confided to her mother that, in her observation of men and things, widowers must be "took on the hop or not at all. Let 'em slew down and they'll stay in the same rut to the end of their days, but catch 'em lonely and a bit homesick over what's gone and there you are! Dan Trenowden and his sort be more helpless when they'm left alone, if they've had a good mother like he had and a wife like Mary, than if they'd been browbeaten same as Nathan Treweeke, as a youngster, and henpecked later on like Matthew Bennett."

A

Tryphena Jane Hocking further confided to her mother that Mary was a delicate, winsome morsel, but so soft and clinging that she would believe her right hand was her left if Dan told her so. She had confided to Tryphena herself, once, that she had asked Dan what books he would like her to read. Tryphena Jane tossed her head as she told this story and added that at any rate Dan was man enough to tell Mary she might as well ask the parrot what to read as ask him. Except for The Dialogue of Devils and The Pilgrim's Progress, he had never had a stomach for books beyond the wish to write one