ain's bulwarks, but this was worse, for it flared and glared right into our faces, and the vile letters, which were red and green one second and yellow the next, ran in a long line from top to bottom of the high shot-tower. In this crude light, our breweries ceased to be palaces in the night, our campanili again became chimneys. Gone was our 'Fairyland,' gone our 'River of Dreams.' The falling of twilight gave a hideous jog to our memory, and would not let us forget that we lived in a nation of shopkeepers. The Socialist, part of whose stock-in-trade is perversity, liked it, or said he did; but the

other tenants were outraged, and an indignation meeting was called. Four attended, together with the Solicitor and the Surveyor of the estate, and the Publisher, who took the chair. It was of no use. We learned that our nerves might be shattered and our eyes offended, that our joy in the miracle of night might be destroyed forever, but if we could prove no physical harm, legal redress would be denied to us, and our defiance of the Vandal must be in vain. And so there the disgraceful advertisement remains, flaring and glaring defiance at us from across the river, the one serpent in our paradise.

to Clara because it was easy, somehow, to tell her that he loved her. Emma Mellish was the kind of girl it would be hard to tell a thing like that to. Evidently other men had experienced the same difficulty that Peckham had experienced.

Never having told his love, it had the charm of the unexpressed; the memory of his early attachment was sweetly sad, like a pale, pathetic ghost; but during the present sojourn, the ghost, to Peckham's vague disquiet, had assumed something of the hue of life. Emma's old attraction for him seemed to have come back; and although the relation was absolutely tacit, Miss Mellish was perfectly aware of it, and Mrs. Peckham felt it the most keenly of them all.

Toward many things Miss Mellish's attitude was tacit; she felt rather than thought that Clara Peckham, through her absorption in domestic duties, had missed the higher things of life, and had rendered herself incapable of meeting her husband on the intellectual plane where he was happiest and most at home; and Mrs. Peckham, on the other hand, pitied Emma for her state of single-blessedness and for the necessity that had driven her to teaching school, little dreaming that moulding immature minds was the most fascinating interest in Emma Mellish's life.

Peckham's attitude toward everything was of a masculine simplicity. He was devoted to his business, the manufacture of a smoke-consuming device of his own invention, which had prospered beyond his fondest hopes; he loved his three daughters and his one son, who, in obedience to the universal instinct to scatter, were now enjoying the summer in four separate watering-places, unconsciously seeking their mates; he loved his home; and, until the visit to Eastport Harbor, he had thought that he loved his wife.

His existence in the city had fallen into a routine which delighted his orderly mind. All day he was busy at his factory in lower Manhattan, inventing improvements in his smoke-consuming device, experimenting with recalcitrant fuels, watching his sales grow. Every evening he spent in his oldfashioned house on Columbia Heights, Brooklyn, reading scientific books or the Brooklyn Eagle, unless his wife and he attended a symphony concert at the new Academy of Music or listened to a lecture of the Brooklyn Institute. Peckham preferred the Brooklyn Institute lectures; and Mrs. Peckham preferred the symphony concerts; but, as good Brooklynites, they attended both.

This routine was broken by Mrs. Peckham herself. The children, having grown up and dispersed for the summer with the friends of their generation, left Mrs. Peckham to concentrate the expression of her maternal instinct on her husband. She said he was getting thin and wearing himself out in his business; she insisted that he take a long vacation; and Miss Mellish having mentioned in a letter that she purposed spending the summer at a charming resort in a corner of the Massachusetts coast, the Peckhams joined her at Eastport Harbor.

Peckham found the enforced idleness of the place the hardest work he had ever done. The life led by his fellow guests at the hotel perplexed him; it seemed to have no meaning. Neither Miss Mellish nor his wife nor himself were sea-bathers or dancers; but Mrs. Peckham was placidly content to sit on the veranda, talking and tatting with other ladies similarly engaged; and Emma Mellish found great enjoyment and inspiration in long walks amid the wide, wonderful spaces of sea and sky.

She was very fond of landscapes; and the hand that did n't hold her para

sol generally held some treasured volume closed at a choice passage on her slender forefinger. She had brought with her a formidable collection of books, ranging from The Sea Beach at Ebb-tide to The Quintessence of Ibsenism. The Sea Beach at Ebb-tide had been Peckham's salvation; later he had made a thorough investigation of the only local industry, poultry-raising; but at the end of a month, he felt that he was sufficiently informed as to marine growths, the respective merits of White Brahmas and Rhode Island Reds, and the advantages of incubators over the natural method.

The trio approached the bathing-pavilion. It was eleven o'clock, the fashionable hour. Practically all the guests of the hotel were in the pavilion, or on the sands, or in the sea. Babies played with their tin pails and shovels; mothers, in light, summery dresses, sat on the sand under gay parasols; stout, middle-aged men, looking strangely vulnerable and of an unhealthy whiteness in their bathing-suits, went down to the water for a gasping plunge and a quick, shivery return; children with the charming slenderness of infancy, excited, happy, frightened, ventured into the water until it reached their knees.

Four or five bronzed young men had improvised a game of pitch-and-toss, umpired by a frenzied fox-terrier; a youth and maiden, just emerged from the water, were running a race for the sake of circulation and the fun of it; other youths and maidens who had not yet entered the water lay on the beach, covering each other with sand with an air of intimacy and unconventionality possibly more apparent than real. The surf was dotted with bobbing heads and flashing arms; shouts and laughter rose from it, and now and then a scream of delighted terror. The tonic breeze from Brazil blew on bathers and spec

tators alike; even the most timid spectator was enjoying an involuntary bath of the August sunshine.

Peckham viewed this scene with a certain disquiet; he knew there was no reason why he should disapprove of it, and yet he couldn't give it his approval. He felt a strange nostalgia, sad, uncomfortable, seductively sweet. He wanted to plunge into the ocean, he wanted to join the game of pitch-and-toss, he wanted to run a foot-race, he wanted to be buried in the sand.

Neither Emma nor Clara considered this scene as curiously as Peckham did. Indefatigable Miss Mellish announced her purpose to continue her quest for marine treasures along the beach; and Mrs. Peckham remarked that she was somewhat tired, and would seek the shelter of the hotel veranda; she was not overfond of uncomfortable positions on the shifting sands. Peckham would have preferred to remain to watch the bathers or to accompany Miss Mellish in her quest, during his sojourn at Eastport Harbor he had not been alone with Miss Mellish for ten minutes, but with that invisible chain connecting married people, he turned his back alike on the bathers and Miss Mellish, and went with his wife to the hotel.

This structure, directly back of the bathing-beach, had originally been a large farmhouse, but in adapting itself to its new destiny had thrown out several heterogeneous extensions that followed the conformation of the low, granite ledge, so that, in passing from one part to another, guests were forced either to go down two steps or to go up three. There was a broad modern veranda across the front of the main building, giving a view of the bathingpavilion, the beach, the sea; and Mrs. Peckham without undue haste selected a comfortable rocking-chair, and drew her tatting utensils from her pocket.

The veranda was deserted; even the man from New Haven with incipient locomotor ataxia had managed to shuffle down to the beach.

Mrs. Peckham had nothing to say to her husband, and said it; Peckham had as little to say to his wife. He had never noticed until this visit to Eastport Harbor how little he and his wife had to say to each other when alone. Early in his married life, he had tried to interest her in the technical side of his business, but she never waxed enthusiastic over grate-bars or drafts, although she was interested in the financial side of his affairs. Peckham was not a smoker, nor had he been initiated into the mysteries of tatting, so that at the present moment he could express his native energy only by sitting in a rocking-chair and rocking with more or less vehemence.

This exercise, however, could not suffice him long. After a moment or two, he went to his room and returned with a book he was reading with a mystified interest. It was a copy of Man and Superman which Miss Mellish had loaned him from her comprehensive collection.

He had reached the fourth act, the stirring climax of the play, and as he sat beside his wife, who continued placidly to tat in silence, Peckham read with increased interest and diminished mystification. Tanner's views of marriage, expressed with an abounding eloquence, echoed and made articulate his own feelings.

Peckham was accustomed to turn to his wife in any moral perplexity; his speech and her silence usually clarified his views; and he now turned to her to express the ideas brought into his mind by Man and Superman. He craftily attenuated his thoughts, how

ever.

"This fellow, Shaw, has written rather a suggestive book. It's really a book

against marriage, and there's really something in it.'

"Yes?' said Mrs. Peckham, continuing her tatting.

'He says that a married man decays like a thing that's served its purpose; he describes husbands as greasy-eyed. He says that when a man marries, he renounces romance and freedom.'

'And do you believe that?'

Mrs. Peckham looked at her husband with serious, sagacious eyes. Under her gaze, his own eager eyes dropped.

'Well, a married man does give up his freedom. I felt that this morning.' 'Why, what did you want to do this morning that you could n't do?' Peckham searched his mind a mo

ment.

'I wanted to stay on the beach; I wanted to go in bathing.'

'Why did n't you, then?'

'Because I thought it my duty to come up here with you.'

Mrs. Peckham's face had not lost its look of seriousness; and after the little pause that followed, she said slowly and gravely, 'Robert, I want you to feel free to do whatever you want to do.'

This ready permission irritated Peckham, he could not tell why. He got to his feet with one of his quick motions.

'Well, I will,' he said sulkily, and he put his hat on and walked away from her.

He had scarcely stepped off the veranda, however, before the irritation and the sulkiness vanished. Instead, he felt grateful to his wife for her ungrudging sanction. He thought what a good wife she was, and how much he cared for her. Her sanction had been formulated in the most general terms, and his expedition was without any definite objective; but the vagueness only added to the adventure of it. Wonderful possibilities seemed to lurk, invisible, in the golden air; he felt a lightness, as of a physical burden lifted