“—and The Queen of Sheba had nothing on Cynthy.”—p. 22.

   Sometimes, even yet, Maw and I talk about the time she was fined ten dollars for writing her name. “It might have

   been worse,” said she to me. “When we was coming through some place a ways back we heard about a man there that was sentenced to be hung after he had been tried several times. His friends done what they could with the governor, but it didn't come to nothing. So after a while his lawyer come in the jail, and he says: 'Bill, I can't do nothing more for you. On next Monday morning at six o'clock you've got to be hung by the neck until you're dead, and may God have mercy on your soul.' 'Well, all I can say,' says Bill, 'that's a fine way to begin the week, ain't it now?'”

   The time she wrote her name upon the geyser will always remain the great event in Maw's life. When she makes down her bedquilt bed in the pine woods, from which she can hear the music of the hotel orchestra when the nocturnal dance has begun, and can see the searchlight playing on the towering pillar of Old Faithful, once more in its twenty-four daily essays from the bowels of the mysterious earth

   shooting up into the mysterious blackness of the night sky, Maw on her hands and knees says to herself: “I'm glad my name ain't on that thing. It was too little to go with that, even if for a minute I felt like somebody.”

   Speaking of the midnight and the music, sometimes I go over to the hotel to tread a measure with Stella O'Cleave, able for a moment to forget Stella's father in the opulent beauty of Stella herself. Her mother is what is called a fine figure of a woman, and so will Stella be some day. Sometimes, when we have left the dance floor to sit along the rail where the yellow cars will line up next morning to sweep Stella away within a day after she and her putties have come into my young life, I may say that I find Stella O'Cleave not difficult to look upon. I always feel a sense of Oriental luxury, as though I had bought a new rug, when Stella turns on me the slumberous midnight of her eyes. I am enamored of the piled black shadows

   of Stella's hair, even as displayed in the somewhat extreme cootie garages which, in the vernacular of the A. E. F., indicate the presence of her ears. I admire the long sure lines which her evidently expensive New York tailor has given to hers; they are among the best I have seen in the park. I could wish that the heels on Stella's French shoes were less than five inches high. I could 

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