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and a good many young ones, who would gladly pay that amount for your investments, for your securities.”

Now, the lad, with eager, upturned countenance, did not conceal his amusement while the man drew this picture of him as a living, ragged gold-mine, as actually put together and made up of pieces of fabulous treasure. A child's notion of wealth is the power to pay for what it has not. The wealth that childhood is, escapes childhood; it does not escape the old. What most concerned the lad as to these priceless feet and hands and eyes and ears was the hard-knocked-in fact that many a time he ached throughout this reputed treasury of his being for a five-cent piece, and these reputed millionaires, acting together and doing their level best, could not produce one.

Nevertheless, the fresh and never-before-imagined image of his self-riches staggered him. It somehow put him over into the class of enormously opulent things; and finding himself a little lonely on that mental landscape, he cast about for some object of comparison. Thus his mind was led to the richest of all near-by objects.

"If I were worth a hundred million," he said, with a satisfied twinkle in his eyes, "I would be as rich as the cathedral."

A significant silence followed. man broke it gravely:

and keep straight on around until you come out at Simon. St. Big Jim and St. Pete are in the middle of the row." He laughed.

"Surely, no one of the Apostles was called Big Jim!" protested the man, with forced sobriety and wholesome reverence.

"I call him that sometimes. He is really James the Greater. He's no bigger than the others; they are all nine and a half feet. The Archangel Gabriel on the roof he 's nine and a half. Everybody standing around on the outside is nine and a half. If Gabriel had been turned a little to one side, he would blow his trumpet straight over our roof. He did n't blow anywhere one night, for a big wind came up behind him and blew him down, and he blew at the gutter. But he did n't stay down," boasted the lad with a prompt, proud joy.

Throughout this talk he made it clear that the cathedral was a neighborhood affair, that its haps and mishaps possessed the flesh-and-blood interest of a living neighbor. Plainly his affections were imbedded in it. Love always takes mental possession of its object, and by virtue of his love it was his.

"You seem rather interested in the cathedral, very much interested," observed the man, with increased attention.

"Why, of course, Mister. I've been The passing there nearly every day since I 've been selling papers on the avenue. Sometimes I stop and watch the masons. Granny tells me to. When I went with

"How did you happen to think of the cathedral?"

"I did n't happen to think of it; I her to the art school this morning, she could n't help thinking of it."

"Have you ever been in the cathedral?" inquired the man, incredulously.

"Been in it! We go there all the time. It's our church. Why, good Lord! Mister, we are descended from a bishop!"

The man laughed long and heartily. "Thank you for telling me," he said as one who feels himself a very small object in the neighborhood of such hereditary beatitudes and ecclesiastical sanctities. "Are you, indeed? I am glad to know."

"Why, Mister, we have been watching the cathedral from our windows for years. We can see the workmen away up in the air as they finish one part and then another part. I can count the Apostles on the roof. You begin with James the Less,

told me to go home that way. I have just been over there. They are building another one of the chapels now, and the men were up on the scaffolding. They had carried more rock up than they wanted, and they would walk to the edge and throw big pieces of it down with a smash. The old house they are using for the choir school is just under there. Sometimes when the class is practising, I can hear them from the outside. If they sing high, I sing high; if they sing low, I sing low. Why, Mister, I can sing "

He broke off abruptly. He had been pouring out all kinds of confidences to his new-found friend. Now he hesitated. The boldness of his nature deserted him. The deadly preparedness ran short. A shy, appealing look came into his eyes as

he asked his next question-a grave question indeed:

Mister, do you love music?"

"Do I love music?" echoed the startled musician, pierced by the spear-like sincerity of the question, which seemed to go clean through him and through all his knowledge and to point back to childhood's springs of feeling. "Do I love music? Yes, some music, I hope. Some kinds of music, I hope."

These moderate, chastened words restored the boy's confidence and captured his friendship completely. Now he felt sure of his comrade, and he put to him a more daring question:

"Do you know anything about the cathedral?"

The man smiled guiltily.

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"A little. I know a little about the play on the thoroughfare that skirts the cathedral," he admitted.

And now the whole secret came out: "Do you know how boys get into the cathedral choir school?"

The man did not answer, but stood looking down at the lad, in whose eyes all at once a great baffled desire told its story. Then he pulled out his watch and merely said:

"I must be going. Good morning." He turned his way across the rock.

Disappointment darkened the lad's face when he saw that he was to receive no answer; withering blight dried up its joy. But he recovered himself quickly.

"Well, I must be going, too," he said bravely and sweetly. "Good morning." He turned his way across the rock. But he had had a good time talking with this stranger, and, after all, he was a Southerner; and so, as his head was about to disappear below the cliff, he called back in his frank, human way, "I 'm glad I met you, Mister."

The man went up, and the boy went down.

The man, having climbed to the parapet, leaned over the stone wall. The tops of some of the tall poplar-trees, rooted far below, were on a level with his eyes. Often he stopped there to watch them swaying like upright plumes against the wind. They swayed now in the silvery April air with a ripple of silvery leaves. His eyes sought out intimately the barely swollen buds on the boughs of other forest trees yet far from leaf. They lingered

park alongside the row of houses.

He himself turned and went in the direction of the cathedral.

As he walked slowly along, one thing haunted him acutely-the upturned face of the lad and the look in his eyes as he asked the question which brought out the secret desire of a life: "Do you know how boys get into the cathedral choir school?" Then the blight of disappointment when there was no answer.

The man walked thoughtfully on, seemingly as one who was turning over and over in his mind some difficult, delicate matter, looking at it on all sides and in every light, as he must do.

Finally he quickened his pace as though having decided what ought to be done.

III

THAT night in an attic-like room of an old building opposite Morningside Park a tiny supper-table for two stood ready in the middle of the floor; the supper itself, the entire meal, was spread. There is a victory which human nature in thousands of lives daily wins over want, that though it cannot drive poverty from the scene, it can hide its desolation in the open by the genius of choice and of touch. A battle of that brave and desperate kind had been won in this garret. Lacking every luxury, it had the charm of tasteful bareness, of exquisite penury. The supper-table, cheap wood roughly carpentered, was hidden under a piece of fine, long-used tablelinen; into the gleaming damask were

wrought clusters of snowballs. The glare of a plain glass lamp was softened by a too costly silk shade. Over the rim of a common vase hung a few daffodils, too costly daffodils. The supper, frugal to a bargain, tempted by the good sense with which it had been chosen and prepared. Thus the whole scene betokened human nature at bay, but victorious in the presence of that wolf whose near-by howl startles the poor out of their sleep.

Into this empty room sounds penetrated through a door. They proceeded from piano-keys evidently so old that one wondered whether possibly they had not begun their labors in the days of Beethoven, whether they were not such as were new on the clavichord of Bach. The fingers that pressed them were unmistakably those of a child. As the hands wandered up and down the keyboard, the ear now and then took notice of a broken string. There were many of these broken strings. The instrument plainly announced itself to be a remote, well-nigh mythical ancestor, preternaturally lingering on amid an innumerable deafening modern progeny. It suggested a superannuated human being whose loudest utterances for the world had sunk to ghostly whispers in a corner. Once the wandering hands stopped, and a voice was heard. It sounded as though pitched to reach some one in an inner room farther away, possibly a person who might just have passed from a kitchen to a bedroom to make some change of dress. It was a very affectionate voice, very true and sweet, very tender, very endearing.

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Another string snapped to-day. There's another key silent. There won't be any but silent keys soon."

The speaker seemed sorry without feeling obliged to be sorry; remorseful, but not troubled by remorse.

There must have been a reply. Responding to it, the voice at the piano sounded again, this time very loyal and devoted to an object closer at hand:

"But when we do get a new one, we won't throw the old one away. It has done its best."

Whereupon the musical ancestor was encouraged to speak up again while he had a chance, being a very dear ancestor, and not by any means dead in some regions. Soon, however, the voice pleaded anew with a kind of patient impatience:

"I'm awfully hungry. Are n't you nearly ready?"

The reply could not be heard.

"Are you putting on the dress I like?" The reply was not heard. "Don't you want me to bring you a daffodil to wear?”

The reply was lost. For a few minutes the progenitor emptied his ancient lungs of some further moribund intimations of tone. Later came another protest, truly plaintive:

"You could n't look any nicer. I'm awfully hungry."

Then all at once, as though the deathdue musical lungs had in a spasm fallen in upon themselves, there was a tremendous smash on the keys, a joyous smash, and a moment afterward the door was softly opened.

Mother and son entered the supperroom. One of his arms was around her waist, one of hers enfolded him about the neck and shoulders; they were laughing.

The teacher of the portrait class and his pupils would hardly have recognized their model; the stranger on the hillside might not at once have identified the newsboy. For model and newsboy, having laid aside the masks of the day that so often in New York people find it necessary to wear,-the tragic mask, the comic mask, the callous, coarse, brutal mask, the mask of the human pack, the mask of the human sty,-reappeared at home with each other as nearly what in truth they were as the denials of life would allow.

There entered the room a woman of high breeding, with a certain Pallas-like purity and energy of mien, clasping to her side her only child, a son whom she secretly believed to be destined to greatness. She was dressed not with the studied plainness and abnegation of the model in the studio, but out of regard for her true station and her motherly responsibilities. Her utmost wish was that in years to come, when he looked back upon his childhood, he would always remember his evenings with his mother. During the day he must see her drudge, and many a picture of herself on a plane of life below her own she knew to be fastened to his growing brain; but as nearly as possible blotting these out, daily blotting them out one by one, must be the evening pictures

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