“Sorry!  I have been thinking all the way home how glad I was to have won my sweet wife.  But we mustn’t stay shut up at home as much as we have; it’s not good for either of us.  We are to be asked to join the whist club—­what do you think of that?  You used to be a little card fiend once upon a time, I remember.”

She sighed.  “It is so long since I have been anywhere!  I’m afraid I haven’t any clothes, Will.  I suppose I might—­”

“What, dear?”

“Take the money I had put aside for Mary’s next quarter’s music lessons; I do really believe a little rest would do her good.”

“It would—­it would,” said Mr. Belden with suspicious eagerness.  Mary’s after-dinner practising hour had tinged much of his existence with gall.  “I insist that Mary shall have a rest.  And you shall join the reading society now.  Let us consider ourselves a little as well as the children; it’s really best for them, too.  Haven’t we immortal souls as well as they?  Can we expect them to seek the honey dew of paradise while they see us contented to feed on the grass of the field?”

“You call yourself an orator!” she scoffed.

He drew her to him by one end of the long braid, and solemnly kissed her.  Then he went into the hall and took something from the pocket of his mackintosh which he placed in his wife’s hand—­a little wooden dish covered with a paper, through which shone a bright yellow substance—­the pound of butter, a lump of gleaming fairy gold, the quest of which had changed a poor, commonplace existence into one scintillating with magic possibilities.

Fairy gold, indeed, cannot be coined into marketable eagles.  Mr. William Belden might never achieve either the mayoralty or the cashiership, but he had gained that of which money is only a trivial accessory.  The recognition of men, the flashing of high thought to high thought, the claim of brotherhood in the work of the world, and the generous social intercourse that warms the earth—­all these were to be his.  Not even his young ambition had promised a wider field, not the gold of the Indies could buy him more of honor and respect.

At home also the spell worked.  He had but to speak the word, to name the thing, and Nettie embodied his thought.  He called her young, and happy youth smiled from her clear eyes; beautiful, and a blushing loveliness enveloped her; clever, and her ready mind leaped to match with his in thought and study; dear, and love touched her with its transforming fire and breathed of long-forgotten things.

If men only knew what they could make of the women who love them—­but they do not, as the plodding, faded matrons who sit and sew by their household fires testify to us daily.

Happy indeed is he who can create a paradise by naming it!

[Illustration:  FIGURE I.—­APPARATUS USED BY PROFESSOR W.F.  MAGIE IN TAKING A SKIAGRAPH OF A HAND.

The Ruhmkorff coil in the background; the Crookes tube in front of it; under the hand is the photographic plate in its plate-holder.]