Elise. A Sequel to "The Voice of the Silence." T was late in November of the Chapter VII. year following that of the passing of Leona de Vere. Mrs. Randolph, hurrying home in the chill, grey dusk of a wet evening, came unxepectedly upon a visitor at her door. She recognized the stalwart figure in the heavy overcoat standing with bared head on the step in the drizzling rain, almost before her eyes had time to tell her who it was, and ran forward with his name upon her lips. He took the hand she gave him and held it lightly in his own. "I did not wish to go away without seeing you," he said. "They told me you would soon be home." "And left you to wait upon the doorstep?" cried Elise, in sudden indignation. "No, indeed no. It was my doing. I preferred it so." "Odin!" He laughed. "Set it down to sentiment, if you will. I am not ashamed to own that I could enter your door only at your bidding. If you insist I will If you insist I will stand here all night." "Come in," cried Elise, "this moment. I decline to be held responsible for a piece of foolishness that may result in your early taking off." She ran up the steps and rang the bell. "I started in to carry a latch key," she explained, "but after I had lost about a hundred or more I gave it up. You know I don't believe in locking doors, anyway." The solemn footman let them in. There was a fire in the great fireplace in the hall, but Elise led the way up to her own particular part of the house. "This is all I have left of the old life, Odin. This and the boy, you know. Is it not something like the cabin under the pines?" Odin glanced about the place. The bare rafters, the rough walls-the sealion pelts upon the floor. The fire that burned upon the hearth might have been built of driftwood and the shadows in the corner were like those that lurked about the room-that dear room where he had spent so many, many evenings with-this woman before him? He let his eyes rest upon her face, beautiful, as of old, but with something added. The mysterious tenderness that limns the countenance of the woman who has experienced life. "The same, yet not the same," he said, his thought taking form in words before he was aware. "True! Oh, what an irresponsible creature I was in those days, Odin, so thoughtless, so selfish, so-only say you forgive me." She held out her hand in her old, impulsive fashion, and as he clasped it, he said, smiling, "You are not so changed after all." Then more seriously: "You did not know, and now, after all these years, I find myself glad of your ignorance." she re She turned away and began divesting herself of her hat and gloves. "I brought you here first," marked, "that you might see for yourself and save me the trouble of telling you that I have not forgotten. And now, since I have impressed that fact upon your mind, I will ring for James to show you to your room. We dine at seven. Miss Farmer is coming and some other people, but they are going on to the play, and we shall have the whole evening. There is so much to say, so many things to ask about. I want to know how it is with Nellie-and -and-oh how it all comes back to me at the sight of you, Odin. You have brought the salt breath of the sea and the fragrance of the pines with you out of the Land of Nowhere, and my heart yearns, and my soul listens for the sound of the surf upon the shore. Do you remember the muffled roar of the breakers on a night like this?" She stood with her hands clasped against her breast, her eyes glowing like stars in the half-light of the fire. As she ceased speaking the Indian lad came forth from the deeper shadows and leaned beside her, his face hidden against her arm. pine white and "Let me go back," he whispered, so softly that only her ear could hear, "back to the cabin in the grove, where I can see the waves beat upon the sands the gulls flying toward the sea in the grey mist. I am sick for my own land." And Elise, swayed by the force of her own longing, drew him closer to her side and murmured, "You shall go." Then to her guest, "This is Nanita's son, and my dear comfort. I think he all but lives in this room." Th boy advanced and gave his hand, with a certain unconscious grace and dignity, and passed out. "He is a handsome boy," Odin said, "and you would not guess his origin if you did not know." "Wait till you see him angry; it comes out then in his eves. He is the peer of any white lad of his age I know, and yet at heart he is all Indian, and loyal to his mother's people. He pines for the wilds, and though I spare nothing that will contribute to his welfare and pleas ure, I know that he hates the restraints of civilization." "Let me take him back with me to the land he loves." "Ten, no, quarter past. Good-night, if you must go." To my regret, I must. Good-night." The tall footman came to show him out and Elise, left alone before the fire, fell to musing, and forgot to dress for dinner, until Katherine Farmer burst in upon her with the information that everybody was starving and the Colonel was distracted. "Would you? But what would you do with him?" "Take care of him, educate him; not, perhaps, as thoroughly as you would do it, but for your sake he would be as my own son-the son I might have had if the fates had willed it so." "O go back and tell them not to wait. Make any excuse you can think of for me. Say I have a raging headache, or -or anything. I will be down before you get to the fish." "For my sake, Odin, and because of the dear, past days, he shall go with you." So will. easy must go. is it for a woman to have her "Headache indeed!" exclaimed Katherine in disgust, "when everybody who knows you at all knows you never had a headache in your life. I shall say that you sprained your ankle-let me see, how had you better do it? Oh, yes, slipped in descending from your carriage, that sounds all right. Do hurry, and don't forget to enter the room with a halting step, an interesting limp. I shall make up a touching tale." "And now," said Odin, presently, "I I am sorry gagement prevents acceptance of your that a previous enkind invitation. But I will come, if I may, tomorrow." "Tomorrow morning, then." "At what hour shall I find you free?" But Elise, in the excitement of a hurried toilet, forgot all about the sprained ankle, and came in sweetly oblivious to the role so elaborately prepared for her. "You are a fraud," remarked Katherine, in an audible aside as her hostess took her seat. "An unmitigated fraud, and I want you to distinctly understand that I shall never strain my conscience to fib for you again." "Oh, cried Elise, in dismay, "forgive me, but really, I forgot." And then there followed laughing explanations, and Elise confessed. "To be perfectly frank," she said, with charming naivette, "I met an old friend whom I had not seen since my marriage, and we talked. It was unpardonable, I am afraid, but he belongs to the days on the river, and I was so glad to see him." "I wonder," remarked Mrs. Natron, if it could have been the gallant knight who came down your front steps just as my carriage drew up to the curb? Is he tall, Mrs. Randolph?" "About six feet, I should say." "Yes." "And handsome?" " "Why, I really don't know-I never thought about it-yes, I suppose you would call him that.' "Then it was the same, and I absolve you, on one condition, however.” "And that is?" asked the Colonel. "That she provides the opportunity and presents him to me. He is a man after my own heart." "Rather a sudden conviction, was it not?" remarked Mrs. Cory. "You had but a passing glimpse as he descended. the steps." "A little more-you know how it was raining, and the carriage door hung, somehow, and he came to the rescuehelped me out and across the pavement as if I had been Queen Elizabeth and he Sir Walter Raleigh. If there had only been a mud-puddle I am sure he would have taken off his overcoat." Chapter VIII. Things were not as they had been in Reese Alley. After repeated attempts to move an indifferent health board to action, and much vain endeavor to induce the property owners to make improvements and repairs, Elise purchased the rickety tenements that hived the wretched, swarming life of the Alley, razed them, burned the debris, and erected on the ground thus purified by fire, a number of beautiful flat buildings. It had been her husband's suggestion, this architectural experiment, and it had swallowed up a good share of her private fortune. For she had spared no expense in the transformation which she undertook with all the enthusiasm of a happy, hopeful woman, confident of the sympathy and co-operation of her husband. She no longer labored alone. As she had once remarked to Katherine Farmer, still her faithful assistant, "it needed a stronger hand than a woman's" to right the wrongs that daily confronted her in Reese Alley, and when the Colonel, contrite and eager to make atonement, brought to her aid his clearer masculine judgment and ready executive. ability, the tangles that had so disturbed. and perplexed her straightened out as if by magic. "It is simply hopeless," she had said. to him one evening, shortly after Leona de Vere's death. "It will be impossible to keep down the mortality rate with conditions as they are. The children will die by dozens when the hot weather comes on." "Buy the whole district, and make the conditions to suit yourself," replied her husband. "I cannot have you worried like this if I have to charter a fleet and ship your precious paupers off to Central Africa.' "Oh, they are not paupers; if they were it would be simpler.'" "Well, buy out the present owners, and make your own improvements." "Do you think I might?" "Certainly. I cannot say that I think the investment a good one, from a financial point of view, though it might be made to pay in the end; but you seem bent on spending your substance in philanthropic work, and you might as well do it thoroughly and effectually." It was, however, no easy matter to reconcile the inhabitants of the Alley to the new order of things. They rebelled at being robbed of their birthright of dirt and darkness. The suites of clean, well-lighted rooms, supplied with modern conveniences, at a lower rental than they had been wont to pay for a single, dingy cell, filled them with suspicion. It was Mam' Betts who, at this critical juncture, came forward and turned the tide of public opinion in favor of the new flats. "I knows a good thing when I sees it." she announced to a full convocation at the corner grocery the evening after the first building was opened for Occupancy. "Them air sunshiny rooms is just the place for kids, an' I move in tomorrer." "You won't never be allowed to go on no tears in there," jeered one of her listeners. "There'll be rules and regulations and sich." "An' who's afraid of them," she demanded. "I ain't never been asked to sign no pledge, least ways not by her. She ain't never made no rules and regulations yet, an' I'm a movin' in tomorrer." Gradually the majority followed the heroic example of Mam' Betts, and on the morning that Elise took Odin with her on her rounds there was not an empty room in any one of the three large buildings. And better than all, perhaps, was the fact that work was provided for all who were able to perform it. In addition to the school, whicn came directly under Katherine Farmer's supervision, there was a library with pleasant reading rooms, a gymnasium, public baths, and a little park well set with young trees and hardy shrubs. "And do you think, asked Odin, when they emerged from the Alley and were walking homeward, "Do you think they are better and happier than before?" "Undoubtedly," she replied. "They are better because they are happier. When people are happy they are removed from the temptation to sin." "And yet your Alley is hardly a paradise, judging from the profanity I overheard in the course of the morning." "Far enough from that, I know. But what would you? Is it possible, in one generation, to reconstruct human nature. It is in the children our hopes are placed." "I know," he said, "I, too, have learned patience, and have gained something of faith besides." A few days later he came to say goodbye, and to carry Nanita's son back with him to the Land of Nowhere. They stood together in the room that was a reminder of the river-Elise and Odin and the bov. "No, Elise was saying, "I shall never return to the cabin. It would not be the same. It is not well to try to repeat an experience. That chapter in my life. is finished. But you and the boy, you will come to me sometimes, and you will love me always." "Always," answered Odin, and bent his head and kissed her, tenderly, reverently, and the kiss was a farewell, for he knew that never again, upon this earth, would they two stand face to face, and therefore, for the first time, unasked and unsolicited, he kissed her. (The End.) Some Characteristics of the Georgian and By SUSAN WHALLEY ALLISON. the limits of a short paper it is manifestly impossible to do more than touch upon a few of the characteristics that distinguish the poetry of the later Georgian and the Victorian eras from that of the immediately preceding age. A revolution in poetry, ushering in what we might call the modern spirit, may be traced back to the efforts of three men, almost contemporaneous with each other: Wordsworth, Keats and Byron: "They were the passion." great means of bringing back English moonlight was that tallow candles could poetry from the sandy deserts of rhetoric, and recovering for her her triple inheritance of simplicity, sensuousness and be made of it." Now a revival from such literary deadness must be established, not only by a change of form, but by a change of thought as well, and, finally, by a complete change of heart. There must be infused into the new and living literature realism, the faculty for seeing and describing things as they are. Yet this realism, to be poetic, must be invested with feeling, and winged with idealism. It must soar to "Heaven's High Gate" with a melodious utterance. Leigh Hunt, the friend of Keats and Shelley, and the supreme literary critic of his day, says: "Thought by itself makes no poct at all; for the mere conclusions of the understanding can at best be only so many intellectual matters of fact. Imagination, teeming with action and character, makes the greatest poets; feeling and thought the next, fancy (by itself), the next; wit, the last." Yet how obvious is the difficulty of labeling the poet according to one of these four categories, and placing him irrevocably in his own proper niche. Keats, for instance, has all of the three first mentioned qualities in strong conjunction, Imagination, Feeling and Fancy. The The supreme faculty of imagination, indeed, generally includes all of the others. As an example of the instinctive voice of his imagination let us read the Overture to Keats' "Hyperion," "a torso equal to the finished work of any other Englisn poet after Shakespeare and Milton, perhaps even greater because a torso.' All the qualities termed imagination contribute to the majesty of Keats' "Hyperion." Again, for exquisite feeling, for perfection of form, for music produced by happy sound combinations, hear Keats in his matchless "Ode to a Nightingale." In a comparison of the works of the three men, whom we called poetical reformers, we find Wordsworth the only conscious reformer, the only man with a mission, the deepest thinker; Keats, from his temperament, the most essentially a poet, Byron the most keenly intellectual of the three. In all of Keats' writings his sensitiveness of organization is everywnere apparent, and he records the moods of his own tastes and feeling. Wordsworth, on the contrary, looks inward with a calm analytical mind and recollects his emotion in tranquility, to paraphrase his own characteristic definition of poetry. The result is an elevation of thought, that, far more than any qualities of the other two, has influenced the ideas of succeeding poets. How grandly he uplifts Nature poetry in the following lines: "And I have felt A presence that disturbs me with the joy Byron, impressible through the understanding, arraigns or illustrates the intellectual and moral wants of his time. He is, above all, the bard of self. Feeling and tenderness, except as infiltrated through the muddy medium of his own personality, have no place in his product. Of superb force, directness and passion, yet he became a conscious soliloquist on the stage. Where, in his love songs can be found the spontaneous, unstudied, healthy sentiment of Burns, as exhibited in "Highland Mary," or "To Mary in Heaven." Byron's instrument was not the violin of feeling; that Shelley might claim as his own, nor, in spite of fine apostrophes, could he blow "the bass of heaven's deep organ." That elemental tone was to be heard in our own time from Walt Whitman. Byron's music rolls from the drum. He is at his best in stirring martial lyrics like "Sennacherib," and "The Song of the Greek." Coleridge, who obscured a sublime. genius in drugs and the clouds of metaphysics, was perhaps the most highly endowed poet of modern times. "Christabel," with its exquisite fancy, its startling innovations upon the then rigid laws of rythm, revolutionized the age. "Christabel" awoke the muse of Walter Scott; it became the admiration and the despair of literary Europe. "The Ancient Mariner," the "Hymn at Sunrise in Chamouni," and the fragment of "Kubla Khan" attest the versatility of Coleridge's power. Shelley's genius, "the reed tipped with fire," ourns through and transfig |