in ordinary day clothes and checked, cravatless flannel shirts, holding guitars. Finally came two old women, dumpy of figure and gray of hair. That was all; no scenery, and, except for the two young girls at the end, no costuming nor make-up. The two guitarists struck up a staccato rhythm in a minor key. Suddenly the whole company, their legs going like pistons, began a stamping which sounded like the roll of a bass drum. Into this rhythm burst a hard clapping of their hands a sound like that of castanets or snare-drums. This drum-beating became faster and more continuous, and the wailing of the guitars rose louder. One of the young girls sprang to her feet, then the other; and they danced wildly. The steps seemed to me those of the Spanish dance, and I saw nothing unusual in the performance except that it was faster, a little more abandoned than any of the performances which I had seen in Madrid; also there were curious attitudes of the hands and the body.

The two girls, with a final pirouette, sank to a bow; the applause, which had been going on by bursts, grew to a roar as La Sorda rose, beamed a serene smile which had, somehow, nothing of the stage about it, advanced to the footlights.

And La Sorda danced the gipsy dance. Watching her after the others was like watching Hal Chase play first base after witnessing a high-school game, like watching Sothern act "Hamlet" after hearing it recited by a village elocutionist. Crouched in the posture of an Indian on the trail, she began with a rolling stamping of her feet. Straightening up as she went on, she threw head and torso back and whirled in a wild step. There was beauty in every pose and movement. It was mounting toward beauty inexpressible when arms, hands, and torso began to fall into poses almost grotesque, like those of the Japanese stage. Now her mysterious eyes shot fire, now they grew soft; but always, they projected across the footlights a current of personality. Had you seen but her head,

you must have watched, just for the play of her expression. "The gipsy heart!" You began to see and understand now what Tortola Valencia meant; why none but a gipsy could express it. With the music and the motion you felt long, free nights under the stars, the beating of wild wings of the soul-and then-snap! -she had slid into a series of grotesque. poses and you were the gipsy trickster, selling doctored horses, whispering gross flatteries over a lady's palm, and doing it not so much for the money as to satisfy your own untamed, whimsical sense of humor. Then it beat wilder and wilder, to a crescendo of stamping, clapping, beats of the guitars, and you were the gipsy with his soul free, all his pagan longings fulfilled. You were the soaring birds, the winds, the air-a sudden roll of clapping, and La Sorda had stopped, panting a little, bowing. . . . They encored her again and again, until she had to refuse with a gesture, to signal for the curtain.

During the entre'acte, she came into the audience on the way to our stall. Her appearance brought another ovation. Men rose from their seats and clapped their hands in her very face. Then she came back among us, panting a little, wearing again that expression of good-humored serenity. So, presently, while the house partly cleared and partly refilled, while the program began again with the purely Spanish dancers, La Sorda talked to us of many things. José, seated just across the little table from her, took the conversation from her, and translated; she, leaning on her elbows, spelled our answers from his lips. Occasionally, when she wished to be emphatic, she would shift her gaze from his mouth to our faces and smile or nod or drive in her point with a slow, dignified Spanish gesture. It is La Sorda speaking now, though in the voice of José, and I shall smooth out his struggles with English.

"I was born deaf," said La Sorda. "They say I could distinguish some sound before I was five. I think so my

self, because I seem to remember what hearing is like. But it all went finally, and I learned the deaf-and-dumb alphabet. Then my mother showed me how to speak and to read the lips. Mother learned it from a teacher of the deaf. I had spoken a little, already, before I was five, so that was not hard. It was many years before I could read the lips."

"And when did you begin to dance?" "I don't know. My mother loved dancing she danced gipsy fashion. When I was little I danced with her. There were others who taught me when I was a child many old women were still doing the real gipsy dance. I learned from them in Gitano camps when they came to Seville, and over by the caves at Granada. When I began really to dance, my cousin played the guitar for me. By and by I could catch the vibration of the guitar a little-feel it in my fingers. I don't know why, but the guitars are always with me and I with the guitars."

"Tortola told me that the gipsy dance cannot be taught-to any one but an old-fashioned gipsy."

"It is true. Many people come for lessons. They cannot learn. La Argentinita was here last month." La Argentinita, a slender, appealing, pretty girl from the Argentine, who could make castanets talk, was at this period the newest craze in Madrid.

"Whenever she tried, she was only graceful and Spanish-so." And the hands and arms of La Sorda flowed into a sweeping, billowy gesture. "But another woman does it. She dances in Granada. She is better than I. You see, I am thirty-eight and not so supple as I used to be. And lately I am troubled with the breath. I must be here from nine in the evening until four in the morning, dancing three times every night. The air of this place is smoky, as you see. Then distinguished patrons come, and I must often sit and drink wine with them. I usually pretend I am drinking when I am not"- here La here La Sorda gave again her tinkling laugh of an

amused child-"but sometimes they catch me and I must drink a little. All that is very bad for the breathing and I must have breath to dance my best."

We paid her some compliments then; told her, through José, what we thought of her performance, what Tortola Valencia and others had said. Through all that she merely smiled and maintained her serene expression.

"Did you ever dance outside of Seville?" I asked, in the end. "I should think you would be a furore abroad."

"I have had two offers," said La Sorda. "One, years ago, I nearly accepted. A very rich manager from the Argentine saw me and wanted to take me to Buenos Aires. But I could not leave my mother."

"But they got you to Madrid once," said José.

"Yes, that is true," replied La Sorda, laughing again, "for two weeks. It was a three months' engagement. But after two weeks I found I could not live away from my mother. I told them to keep their money, and came back."

We did not ask the obvious questionwhy she did not take mother along? Somehow, by these and other references, La Sorda made it plain that mother was an irremovable fixture of Seville. soon think of moving the cathedral or the Alhambra to Madrid or Buenos Aires as to displace mother!

As

"So I stay in Seville," concluded La Sorda, "and play here nights, and in the afternoon I give lessons in the Spanish dance and in the gipsy dance to those who think they can learn."

"I wonder," I said to José in English, "how much money she gets for all this? If she had gone to Madrid or the Argentine she would have earned the salary of a bull-fighter. She might be a rich woman."

"Oh, she won't mind telling you in the least," said José. Her attention was turned from us for a moment; she was holding a smiling exchange of lip-reading with some one on the floor. José touched her arm.

"La Sorda," he asked in Spanish, "what do they pay you here?"

"Four pesetas a night," said La Sorda.

Four pesetas is eighty cents. Spanish incomes are incredibly small.

"And how much for your teaching?" pursued José.

"Two to four pesetas an hour," replied La Sorda. She tossed off these figures in a careless aside; she was laughing now at some joke from a far corner of the audience.

"Sometimes rich patrons give her presents," said José, on his own account. "She has bought with these presents a little house across the river. There she lives with her mother, and her cousin cooks for them. She lives very well, as things go with the Gitanos."

I watched her then, still chatting across the noise to people on the floor; spying, with her art of lip-reading, on a dozen conversations, all of which amused her, and quite oblivious to us. In Madrid, which loves dancing and novelty, she would have been a craze. With a Madrid reputation she might have gone on to the Argentine and to all rich, lavish Latin America. Suites at luxurious hotels, jewels, automobiles, the company of the rich and great in all the Spanish world-this was the prospect open to La

Sorda when, years ago, she went to Madrid. If she were of a saving nature, she might have had much money. Her very affliction would have served as a priceless instrument for her press agent.

Yet here she was, with her expression of good-humored serenity and her easy, tinkling laughter of a child, dancing for the boys of Seville in a small, dingy theater, working hard for an income which could not possibly exceed, regularly, fifteen dollars a week. Still-that expression, that laugh- Suddenly I realized that the elusive bluebird of happiness had for a moment brushed us with his wings. She, this deaf woman of Seville, was plying an art in which she was supreme, loving it, confident in it. Every night she gained that instant, generous applause which is the consolation of the actor. No Irving in London, no Booth in New York, got quicker or more hearty appreciation than she in that obscure, drab quarter of a Spanish provincial city. She was queen in her little world; it existed for her, because of her; it loved her, that queer little world, amused her, satisfied her. Above all, she was doing well a job which she loved. Between acts of that gigantic drama of unhappiness being played to the north, I had encountered the happy life.

ALL

LL my life I have been afraid of death. I think the like is true of every one, and I think it is also true that now, when old and nearer death, in the order of life, than ever before, I am less afraid of dying than when I was young and naturally far from it. I believe this again is true of all men, but it may not be at all true of others. Perhaps in age, as in sickness, when the vital forces are lowered we lose something of that universal and perpetual dread, until, as observation, if not experience, teaches, we survive it altogether and make the good end common to the dying. Apparently the fear of death does not always mount with the loss of faith in a life hereafter, but sometimes the contrary. Until I was thirty-five years old I had no question but if I died I should livé again; yet the swift loss of that faith, through the almost universal lapse of it in the prevailing agnosticism of the eighteen-seventies and 'eighties, was a relief from that fear. I had hitherto felt that, being a sinner, as I did not doubt I was, I should suffer for my sins after death; yet, now that the fear of hell was effectively gone, a certain stress was lifted from me which had weighed upon my soul. When I was a well-grown boy I used to pray before I slept at night that I might not die before morning and that I might not go to hell, but neither of my petitions had been inspired by the wise and kind doctrine of Swedenborg which I had been taught from my earliest years, and so I must suppose that my terror was a remnant of the ancestral, the anthropoidal fear which once possessed all human life.

In age, in youth, most people believe in God because they cannot deny

the existence of a cause of things. The universe did not happen of itself, though we may, in middle life, say so sometimes. Even then I felt that there was a Creator of Heaven and Earth, but I had not the sense of a Father in Heaven, though I prayed to Him every night by that name. I had not the sense of loving Him, though I feared Him because I knew myself a wrong-doer in my thoughts and deeds, and imagined Him a just judge. The fear of His judgment has passed from me more and more as I have grown older; but at no time have I thought irreverently of Him or spoken so of Him. Still I have not affectionately prayed to Him outside of the Scriptural words. I have not praised Him in the terms of flattery which must, if He is the divine consciousness we imagine Him, make Him sick at heart. I do not say this is the case with other old men, but I note it in my own case with whatever humility the utmost piety would have.

My fear of Him has not grown upon me; neither do I think it has lessened, as it seems to me my fear of death has. There is apparently no reason for this diminishing dread, and I do not account for it as a universal experience. There seems to be a shrinkage of the emotions as of the forces from youth to age. When we are young life fills us full to the verge of being and leaves us no vantage-point from which we have any perspective of ourselves. For instance, I cannot recall inquiring what I was at twenty, thirty, forty, fifty, and hardly at sixty, as I am now inquiring what I am at eighty-two, though I have always been keenly interested in the analysis of life and character. But experience grows with age, and the study of it may be

the last stage of introspection, though hardly, I should say, could it prevail till ninety or after.

The greatest and most dramatic shrinkage of consciousness is, of course, that which follows from the cooling of the passions, and is something apparently quite physical. Love at its best means marriage, and is altogether the most beautiful thing in life. It is never self-consciously ridiculous, though often ridiculous enough to the witness. Its perversion is the ugliest thing in life and the shamefulest, but for a day, for an hour of its bliss, one would give all one's other years; yet it does not escape the imperfection which mars everything. The best of existence, the home and the children, proceed from it; without it ✓ there can be no death, and the rending of the dearest ties and the anguish of grief come from love, too; the grave as well as the home awaits it.

There are faults which age redeems us from, and there are virtues which turn to vices with the lapse of years. The worst of these is thrift, which in early and middle life it is wisdom and duty to practise for a provision against destitution. As time goes on this virtue is apt to turn into the ugliest, cruelest, shabbiest of the vices. Then the victim of it finds himself hoarding past all probable need of saving for himself or those next him, to the deprivation of the remoter kindred of the race. In the earlier time when gain was symbolized by gold or silver, the miser had a sensual joy in the touch of his riches, in hearing the coins. clink in their fall through his fingers, and in gloating upon their increase sensible to the hand and eye. Then the miser had his place among the great figures of misdoing; he was of a dramatic effect, like a murderer or a robber; and something of this bad distinction clung to him even when his specie had changed to paper currency, the clean, white notes of the only English bank, or the greenbacks of our innumerable banks of issue; but when the sense of riches had been transmuted to the balance in his favor at

his banker's, or the bonds in his drawer at the safety-deposit vault, all splendor had gone out of his vice. His bad eminence was gone, but he clung to the lust of gain which had ranked him with the picturesque or histrionic wrong-doers, and which only ruin from without could save him from, unless he gave his remnant of strength to saving himself from it. Most aging men are sensible of all this, but few have the frankness of that aging man who once said that he who died rich died disgraced, and died the other day in the comparative penury of fifty millions.

Few old men have the strength to save themselves from their faults, perhaps because they have no longer the resilience of youth in any sort. It would be interesting to know when this ceases in mind or body; but without calling other dotards to witness, I will record that, physically, it had ceased in me half-way through my seventies, as I once found when I jumped from a carriage at the suggestion of the young driver who said he did not like the way the horse was acting. I myself saw nothing wrong in the horse's behavior, but I reasoned that a driver so young must know better, and I struck the ground with the resilience of an iron casting of the same weight.

Yet any time within the seventies I should say that one still felt young in body if not in mind; after that one feels young oftenest in spirit; a beautiful morning will go far to find the joy of youth in the octogenarian, as a gloomy sunset will find the pathos of it. I imagine, in fact, that youth lurks about in holes and corners of us as long as we live, but we must not make too free with it. We may go a good long walk in the forenoon, and feel the fresher; but we must not be tempted to another walk in the afternoon, lest the next morning find us fully as old as we are. Exercise is not for age unless it is the carriage exercise which used to be prescribed by the physicians of the rich; certainly not motor exercise, which is