was left in him, that he was able to restore light to the room, and to rush to his friend. When he reached poor Tim he was stone-still with paralysis. They took him home to the woman, who nursed him out of that attack—and later on worried him into another.
When he was able to sit up and jeer at things a little again, and help himself to the quail the woman broiled for him, Dodson, sitting beside him, said:
“Did you call that little exhibition of yours legerdemain, Tim, you sweep? Or are you really the Devil's bairn?”
“It was the Shape of Fear,” said Tim, quite seriously.
“But it seemed mild as mother's milk.”
“It was compounded of the good I might have done. It is that which I fear.”
He would explain no more. Later—many months later—he died patiently and sweetly in the madhouse, praying for rest. The little beast with the yellow eyes had high mass celebrated for him, which, all things considered, was almost as pathetic as it was amusing.
Dodson was in Vienna when he heard of it.
“Sa, sa!” cried he. “I wish it wasn't so dark in the tomb! What do you suppose Tim is looking at?”
As for Jim O'Malley, he was with difficulty kept from illuminating the grave with electricity.
ON THE NORTHERN ICE
THE winter nights up at Sault Ste. Marie are as white and luminous as the Milky Way. The silence which rests upon the solitude appears to be white also. Even sound has been included in Nature's arrestment, for, indeed, save the still white frost, all things seem to be obliterated. The stars have a poignant brightness, but they belong to heaven and not to earth, and between their immeasurable height and the still ice rolls the ebon ether in vast, liquid billows.
In such a place it is difficult to believe that the world is actually peopled. It seems as if it might be the dark of the day
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