prayer as his Maker touched the bell.  Bob Brownley’s great brown eyes were closed, his clasped hands had dropped against his wife’s head, and in dropping had unloosed the glorious golden-brown waves until in fond abandon they had coiled around his arms and brow as though she for whom he had sacrificed all was shielding his beloved head from the chills and dark mists of the black river that laps the brink of the eternal rest.  The “System” had skewered Robert Brownley’s heart too.  I staggered to his side.  As I touched his now fast-icing brow my eyes fell upon the great black headlines spread across the top of the paper that Beulah Sands had been reading when the all-kind God had cut her bonds: 

   Friday the thirteenth

And beneath in one column: 

   Terrible tragedy in Virginia

   The richest man in the state, Thomas Reinhart, multi-millionaire, while
   temporarily insane from the loss of his wife and daughter, and of his
   enormous fortune, which was shattered in to-day’s awful panic, cut his
   throat.  His death was instantaneous.

In another column: 

   Robert Brownley creates the most awful panic in history, and spreads
   wreck and ruin throughout the civilised world.

* * * * *

Publisher’s Note

The following are fac-similes of a few of the letters received by the author during the serial publication of “Friday, the Thirteenth."

Residence of
the PAULIST fathers
2158 Pine street

San Francisco, Ca
21 October 1906

My Dear Mr. Dawson

Kindly allow one of your countless admirers to express his extreme gratification with the announcement that you will add fiction to your distinguished literary achievements.  Your gifts as a writer are so wonderful and fascinating that I look forward eagerly to your work in this new field—­and I pray God to prosper you in all good.

Sincerely,
John Marus Haudly

70 Kirkland St., Cambridge Dec. 26, 1906.

Mr. T. W. Lawson,
Boston, Mass.

My Dear Sir:  Allow me to congratulate you on your last move and on your story, “Friday, the Thirteenth”.

It is the best yet, not merely as a story but as an eye opener.  I can begin to see daylight in spots, where it looks like a remedy and a real one.  I can’t see how you will work it; but I think I do get a hint, and it holds me tightly.