limp over the rocks and up the steep road, but when they reached the level, she dropped his hand, and they walked home slowly, looking back at the moon, so that they might not overtake the other couple. Once or twice they stopped and sat on lumber piles in the street, talking of nothing, and it was after ten o'clock when they came to the gate. The girl looked anxiously up the walk toward the house. "They've come and gone," she said. She moved as if to go away. "I wish you wouldn't go right in," he begged. "Oh--I ought to," she replied. They were silent. The roar of the water over the dam came to them on the evening breeze. She put out her hand. "Well," he sighed as he rested his lame foot, and started, "well--good-by." She turned to go, and then swiftly stepped toward him, and kissed him, and ran gasping and laughing up the walk. The boy gazed after her a moment, wondering if he should follow her, but while he waited she was gone, and he heard her lock the door after her. Then he limped down the road in a kind of swoon of joy. Sometimes he tried to whistle--he tried a bar of Schubert's "Serenade," but consciously stopped. Again and again under his breath as loud as he dared, he called the name "Ellen" and stood gazing at the moon, and then tried to hippety-hop, but his limp stopped that. Then he tried whistling the "Miserere," but he pitched it too high, and it ran out, so he sang as he turned across the commons toward home, and that helped a little; and he opened the door of his home singing, "How can I leave thee--how can I bear to part?" The light was burning in the kitchen, and he went to his mother and kissed her. His face was aglow, and she saw what had happened to him. She put him aside with, "Run on to bed now, sonny; I've got a little work out here." And he left her. In the sitting room only the moon gave light. He stood at the window a moment, and then turned to his melodeon. His hands fell on the major chord of "G," and without knowing what he was playing he began "Largo." He played his soul into his music, and looking up, whispered the name "Ellen" rapturously over and over, and then as the music mounted to its climax the whole world's mystery, and his personal thought of the meaning of life revelled through his brain, and he played on, not stopping at the close but wandering into he knew not what mazes of harmony. When his hands dropped, he was playing "The Long and Weary Day," and his mother was standing behind him humming it. When he rose from the bench, she ran her fingers through his hair and spoke the words of the song, "'My lone watch keeping,' John, 'my lone watch keeping.' But I think it has been worth while." Then she left him and he went to bed, with the moon in his room, and the murmur of waters lulling him to sleep. But he looked out into the sky a long time before his dream came, and then it slipped in gently