She started from her somber reverie at the sound of a childish wail from the house. ...  “That’s Sigurd ...I knew that cat would scratch him!” she told me with instant, breathless agitation, as though the skies were falling, and darted back.  After a moment’s hesitation I too, went back and watched her bind up with stiff, unaccustomed old fingers the little scratched hand, watched the frightened little boy sob himself quiet on her old knees that had never before known a child’s soft weight saw the expression in her eyes as she looked down at the sleeping baby and gazed about the untidy room so full of mire, which had always been so orderly and so empty.

She lifted the little boy up higher so that his tousled yellow hair rested against her bosom.  He put an arm around her neck and she flushed with pleasure like a girl; but, although she held him close to her with a sudden wistful tenderness, there was in her eyes a gloomy austerity which forbade me to sentimentalize over the picture she made.

“But, Cousin Tryphena,” I urged, “it is a drop in the bucket, you know, and that’s something!”

She looked down at the child on her knee, she laid her cheek against his bright hair, but she told me with harsh, self-accusing rigor, “Tain’t right for me to be here alive enjoying that dead man’s little boy.”

* * * * *

That was eighteen months ago.  Mrs. Lindstrom is dead of consumption; but the two children are rosy and hearty and not to be distinguished from the other little Yankees of the village.  They are devotedly attached to their Aunt Tryphena and rule her despotically.

And so we live along, like a symbol of the great world, bewildered Cousin Tryphena toiling lovingly for her adopted children, with the memory of her descent into hell still darkening and confusing her kind eyes; Jomatiste clothing his old body in rags and his soul in flaming indignation as he batters hopefully at the ramparts of intrenched unrighteousness ... and the rest of us doing nothing at all.

THE GOLDEN TONGUE OF IRELAND

  Tongue of spice and salt and wine and honey,
      Magic, mystic, sweet, intemperate tongue! 
  Flower of lavish love and lyric fury,
      Mixed on lips forever rash and young,
  Wildly droll and quaintly tender;—­

      Hark, the hidden melodies of Elfland
      In the under, in the over tone;
  Clear faint wailing of the far-heard banshee,
      Out of lands where never the sun shone,
  Calling doom on chieftains dying....

PIPER TIM

I

When Moira O’Donnell was born, Timothy Moran was thirty-three years old, a faery number, as he often told himself afterward.  When he was forty and she was seven, another mystic number, he dedicated his life to her and she gave him back his lost kingdom of enchantment.  It was on the evening of her seventh birthday that she led him to the Land of Heart’s Desire he thought he had left forever in green and desolate Donegal, and her birthday fell on the seventh of October, and October is the month when the little people are busiest.  He never forgot what she did for him that evening, although her part in it was so brief.