Gillespie Printing Co., which occupied all of the second story.  There were, besides, three good building-lots on Merrion Avenue valued at $2,000 apiece, or at $5,500 for all three; the house on Woodson Street valued at $5,000; 110 acres of wooded mountainside with a farm-house, several hundred peach, apple and cherry trees, and a few acres of arable ground for which Gant received $120 a year in rent, and which they valued at $50 an acre, $5,500; two houses, one on Carter Street, and one on Duncan, rented to railway people, for which they received $25 a month apiece, and which they valued together at $4,500; forty-eight acres of land two miles above Biltburn, and four from Altamont, upon the important Reynoldsville Road, which they valued at $210 an acre, or $10,000; three houses in Niggertown--one on lower Valley Street, one on Beaumont Crescent, just below the negro Johnson's  big house, and one on Short Oak, valued at $600, $900, and $1,600 respectively, and drawing a room-rental of $8, $12, and $17 a month (total: $3,100 and $37 rental); two houses across the river, four miles away in West Altamont, valued at $2,750 and at $3,500, drawing a rental of $22 and $30 a month; three lots, lost in the growth of a rough hillside, a mile from the main highway through West Altamont, $500; and a house, unoccupied, object of Gantian anathema, on Lower Hatton Avenue, $4,500.

In addition, Gant held 10 shares, which were already worth $200 each ($2,000), in the newly organized Fidelity Bank; his stock of stones, monuments, and fly-specked angels represented an investment of $2,700, although he could not have sold them outright for so much; and he had about $3,000 deposited in the Fidelity, the Merchants, and the Battery Hill banks.

Thus, at the beginning of 1912, before the rapid and intensive development of Southern industry, and the consequent tripling of Altamont's population, and before the multiplication of her land values, the wealth of Gant and Eliza amounted to about $100,000, the great bulk of which was solidly founded in juicy well chosen pieces of property of Eliza's selection, yielding them a monthly rental of more than $200, which, added to their own earning capacities at the shop and Dixieland, gave them a combined yearly income of $8,000 or $10,000.  Although Gant often cried out bitterly against his business and declared, when he was not attacking property, that he had never made even a bare living from  his tombstones, he was rarely short of ready money: he usually hadone or two small commissions from country people, and he always carried a well-filled purse, containing $150 or $200 in five- and ten-dollar bills, which he allowed Eugene to count out frequently, enjoying his son's delight, and the feel of abundance.

Eliza had suffered one or two losses in her investments, led astray by a strain of wild romanticism which destroyed for the moment her shrewd caution.  She invested $1,200 in the Missouri Utopia of a colonizer, and received nothing for her money but a weakly copy of the man's newspaper, several beautiful prospectuses of the look of things when finished, and a piece of clay sculpture, eight inches in height, showing Big Brother with his little sisters Jenny and Kate, the last with thumb in her mouth.

"By God," said Gant, who made savage fun of the proceeding, "she ought to have it on her nose."

And Ben sneered, jerking his head toward it, saying:

"There's her $1,200."

But Eliza was preparing to go on by herself.  She saw that co-operation with Gant in the purchase of land was becoming more difficult each year.  And with something like pain, something assuredly like hunger, she saw various rich plums fall into other hands or go unbought.  She realized that in a very short time land values would soar beyond her present means.  And she proposed to be on hand when the pie was cut.

Across the street from Dixieland was the Brunswick, a well-built red brick house of twenty rooms.  The marble facings had been done by Gant himself twenty years before, the hardwood floors and oak timbering by Will Pentland.  It was an ugly gabled Victorian house, the marriage gift of a rich Northerner to his daughter, who died of tuberculosis.

"Not a better built house in town," said Gant.

Nevertheless he refused to buy it with Eliza, and with an aching heart she saw it go to St. Greenberg, the rich junk-man, for $8,500.  Within a year he had sold off five lots at the back, on the Yancy Street side, for $1,000 each, and was holding the house for $20,000.

"We could have had our money back by now three times over," Eliza fretted.

She did not have enough money at the time for any important investment.  She saved and she waited.

Will Pentland's fortune at this time was vaguely estimated at from $500,000 to $700,000.  It was mainly in property, a great deal of which was situated--warehouses and buildings--near the passenger depot of the railway.

Sometimes Altamont people, particularly the young men who loafed about Collister's drug-store, and who spent long dreamy hours estimating the wealth of the native plutocracy, called Will Pentland a millionaire.  At this time it was a distinction in American life to be a millionaire.  There were only six or eight thousand.  But Will Pentland wasn't one.  He was really worth only a half million.

Mr. Goulderbilt was a millionaire.  He was driven into town in a big Packard, but he got out and went along the streets like other men.

One time Gant pointed him out to Eugene.  He was about to enter a bank.

"There he is," whispered Gant.  "Do you see him?"

Eugene nodded, wagging his head mechanically.  He was unable to speak.  Mr. Goulderbilt was a small dapper man, with black hair, black clothes, and a black mustache.  His hands and feet were small.

"He's got over $50,000,000," said Gant.  "You'd never think it to look at him, would you?"

And Eugene dreamed of these money princes living in a princely fashion.  He wanted to see them riding down a street in a crested coach around which rode a teetering guard of liveried outriders. He wanted their fingers to be heavily gemmed, their clothes trimmed with ermine, their women coroneted with flashing mosaics of amethyst, beryl, ruby, topaz, sapphire, opal, emerald, and wearing thick ropes of pearls.  And he wanted to see them living in palaces of alabaster columns, eating in vast halls upon an immense creamy table from vessels of old silver--eating strange fabulous foods--swelling unctuous paps of a fat pregnant sow, oiled mushrooms, calvered salmon, jugged hare, the beards of barbels dressed with an exquisite and poignant sauce, carps' tongues, dormice and camels' heels, with spoons of amber headed with diamond and carbuncle, and cups of agate, studded with emeralds, hyacinths, and rubies--everything, in fact, for which Epicure Mammon wished.

Eugene met only one millionaire whose performances in public satisfied him, and he, unhappily, was crazy.  His name was Simon.

Simon, when Eugene first saw him, was a man of almost fifty years. He had a strong, rather heavy figure of middling height, a lean brown face, with shadowy hollows across the cheeks, always closely shaven, but sometimes badly scarred by his gouging fingernails, and a long thin mouth that curved slightly downward, subtle, sensitive,lighting his whole face at times with blazing demoniac glee.  He had straight abundant hair, heavily grayed, which he kept smartly brushed and flattened at the sides.  His clothing was loose and well cut: he wore a dark coat above baggy gray flannels, silk shirt rayed with broad stripes, a collar to match, and a generous loosely knotted tie.  His waistcoats were of a ruddy-brown chequered pattern.  He had an appearance of great distinction.

Simon and his two keepers first came to Dixieland when difficulties with several of the Altamont hotels forced them to look for private quarters.  The men took two rooms and a sleeping-porch, and paid generously.

"Why, pshaw!" said Eliza persuasively to Helen.  "I don't believe there's a thing wrong with him.  He's as quiet and well-behaved as you please."

At this moment there was a piercing yell upstairs, followed by a long peal of diabolical laughter.  Eugene bounded up and down the hall in his exultancy and delight, producing little squealing noises in his throat.  Ben, scowling, with a quick flicker of his mouth, drew back his hard white hand swiftly as if to cuff his brother.  Instead, he jerked his head sideways to Eliza, and said with a soft, scornful laugh:  "By God, mama, I don't see why you have to take them in.  You've got enough of them in the family already."

"Mama, in heaven's name--" Helen began furiously.  At this moment Gant strode in out of the dusk, carrying a mottled package of pork chops, and muttering rhetorically to himself.  There was another long peal of laughter above.  He halted abruptly, startled, and lifted his head.  Luke, listening attentively at the foot of the stairs, exploded in a loud boisterous guffaw, and the girl, her annoyance changing at once to angry amusement, walked toward her father's inquiring face, and prodded him several times in the ribs.

"Hey?" he said startled.  "What is it?"

"Miss Eliza's got a crazy man upstairs," she sniggered, enjoying his amazement.

"Jesus God!" Gant yelled frantically, wetting his big thumb swiftly on his tongue, and glancing up toward his Maker with an attitude of exaggerated supplication in his small gray eyes and the thrust of his huge bladelike nose.  Then, letting his arms slap heavily at his sides, in a gesture of defeat, he began to walk rapidly back and forth, clucking his deprecation loudly.  Eliza stood solidly, looking from one to another, her lips working rapidly, her white face hurt and bitter.

There was another long howl of mirth above.  Gant paused, caught Helen's eye, and began to grin suddenly in an unwilling sheepish manner.

"God have mercy on us," he chuckled.  "She'll have the place filled with all of Barnum's freaks the next thing you know."

At this moment, Simon, self-contained, distinguished and grave in his manner, descended the steps with Mr. Gilroy and Mr. Flannagan, his companions.  The two guards were red in the face, and breathed stertorously as if from some recent exertion.  Simon, however, preserved his habitual appearance of immaculate and well-washed urbanity.

"Good evening," he remarked suavely.  "I hope I have not kept you waiting long."  He caught sight of Eugene.

"Come here, my boy," he said very kindly.

"It's all right," remarked Mr. Gilroy, encouragingly.  "He wouldn't hurt a fly."

Eugene moved into the presence.

"And what is your name, young man?" said Simon with his beautiful devil's smile.

"Eugene."

"That's a very fine name," said Simon.  "Always try to live up to it."  He thrust his hand carelessly and magnificently into his coat pocket, drawing out under the boy's astonished eyes, a handful of shining five- and ten-cent pieces.

"Always be good to the birds, my boy," said Simon, and he poured the money into Eugene's cupped hands.

Every one looked doubtfully at Mr. Gilroy.

"Oh, that's all right!" said Mr. Gilroy cheerfully.  "He'll never miss it.  There's lots more where that came from."

"He's a mul-tye-millionaire," Mr. Flannagan explained proudly.  "We give him four or five dollars in small change every morning just to throw away."

Simon caught sight of Gant for the first time.

"Look out for the Stingaree," he cried.  "Remember the Maine."

"I tell you what," said Eliza laughing.  "He's not so crazy as you think."

'That's right," said Mr. Gilroy, noting Gant's grin.  "The Stingaree's a fish.  They have them in Florida."

"Don't forget the birds, my friends," said Simon, going out with his companions.  "Be good to the birds."

They became very fond of him.  Somehow he fitted into the pattern of their life.  None of them was uncomfortable in the presence of madness.  In the flowering darkness of Spring, prisoned in a room, his satanic laughter burst suddenly out: Eugene listened, thrilled, and slept, unable to forget the smile of dark flowering evil, the loose pocket chinking heavily with coins.

Night, the myriad rustle of tiny wings.  Heard lapping water of the inland seas.
 
 

--And the air will be filled with warm-throated plum-dropping bird-notes.  He was almost twelve.  He was done with childhood.  As that Spring ripened he felt entirely, for the first time, the full delight of loneliness.  Sheeted in his thin nightgown, he stood in darkness by the orchard window of the back room at Gant's, drinking the sweet air down, exulting in his isolation in darkness, hearing the strange wail of the whistle going west.

The prison walls of self had closed entirely round him; he was walled completely by the esymplastic power of his imagination?he had learned by now to project mechanically, before the world, an acceptable counterfeit of himself which would protect him from intrusion.  He no longer went through the torment of the recess flight and pursuit.  He was now in one of the upper grades of grammar school, he was one of the Big Boys.  His hair had been cut when he was nine years old, after a bitter siege against Eliza's obstinacy.  He no longer suffered because of the curls.  But he had grown like a weed, he already topped his mother by an inch or two; his body was big-boned but very thin and fragile, with no meat on it; his legs were absurdly long, thin, and straight, giving him a curious scissored look as he walked with long bounding strides.

Stuck on a thin undeveloped neck beneath a big wide-browed head  covered thickly by curling hair which had changed, since his infancy, from a light maple to dark brown-black, was a face so small, and so delicately sculptured, that it seemed not to belong to its body.  The strangeness, the remote quality of this face was enhanced by its brooding fabulous concentration, by its passionate dark intensity, across which every splinter of thought or sensation flashed like a streak of light across a pool.  The mouth was full, sensual, extraordinarily mobile, the lower lip deeply scooped and pouting.  His rapt dreaming intensity set the face usually in an expression of almost sullen contemplation; he smiled, oftener than he laughed, inwardly, at some extravagant invention, or some recollection of the absurd, now fully appreciated for the first time.  He did not open his lips to smile--there was a swift twisted flicker across his mouth.  His thick heavily arched eyebrows grew straight across the base of his nose.

That Spring he was more alone than ever.  Eliza's departure for Dixieland three or four years before, and the disruption of established life at Gant's, had begun the loosening of his firstfriendships with the neighborhood boys, Harry Tarkinton, Max Isaacs, and the others, and had now almost completely severed them. Occasionally he saw these boys again, occasionally he resumed again, at sporadic intervals, his association with them, but he now had no steady companionship, he had only a series of associations with children whose parents stayed for a time at Dixieland, with Tim O'Doyle, whose mother ran the Brunswick, with children here and there who briefly held his interest.

But he became passionately bored with them, plunged into a miasmic swamp of weariness and horror, after a time, because of the dullness and ugliness of their lives, their minds, their amusements.  Dull people filled him with terror: he was never so much frightened by tedium in his own life as in the lives of others--his early distaste for Pett Pentland and her grim rusty aunts came from submerged memories of the old house on Central Avenue, the smell of mellow apples and medicine in the hot room, the swooping howl of the wind outside, and the endless monotone of their conversation on disease, death, and misery.  He was filled with terror and anger against them because they were able to live, to thrive, in this horrible depression that sickened him.

Thus, the entire landscape, the whole physical background of his life, was now dappled by powerful prejudices of liking and distaste formed, God knows how, or by what intangible affinities of thought, feeling and connotation.  Thus, one street would seem to him to be a "good street"--to exist in the rich light of cheerful, abundant, and high-hearted living; another, inexplicably, a "bad street," touching him somehow with fear, hopelessness, depression.

Perhaps the cold red light of some remembered winter's afternoon, waning pallidly over a playing-field, with all its mockery of Spring, while lights flared up smokily in houses, the rabble-rout of children dirtily went in to supper, and men came back to the dull but warm imprisonment of home, oil lamps (which he hated), and bedtime, clotted in him a hatred of the place which remained even when the sensations that caused it were forgotten.

Or, returning from some country walk in late autumn, he would come back from Cove or Valley with dewy nose, clotted boots, the smell of a mashed persimmon on his knee, and the odor of wet earth and grass on the palms of his hands, and with a stubborn dislike and suspicion of the scene he had visited, and fear of the people who lived there.

He had the most extraordinary love of incandescence.  He hated dull lights, smoky lights, soft, or sombre lights.  At night he wanted to be in rooms brilliantly illuminated with beautiful, blazing, sharp, poignant lights.  After that, the dark.
 
 

He played games badly, although he took a violent interest in sports.  Max Isaacs continued to interest him as an athlete long after he had ceased to interest him as a person.  The game Max Isaacs excelled in was baseball.  Usually he played one of the outfield positions, ranging easily about in his field, when a ball was hit to him, with the speed of a panther, making impossible catches with effortless grace.  He was a terrific hitter, standing at the plate casually but alertly, and meeting the ball squarely with a level swinging smack of his heavy shoulders.  Eugene tried vainly to imitate the precision and power of this movement, which drove the ball in a smoking arc out of the lot, but he was never able: he chopped down clumsily and blindly, knocking a futile bounder to some nimble baseman.  In the field he was equally  useless: he never learned to play in a team, to become a limb of that single animal which united telepathically in a concerted movement.  He became nervous, highly excited, and erratic in team-play, but he spent hours alone with another boy, or, after the mid-day meal, with Ben, passing a ball back and forth.

He developed blinding speed, bending all the young suppleness of his long thin body behind the ball, exulting as it smoked into the pocket of the mitt with a loud smack, or streaked up with a sharp dropping curve.  Ben, taken by surprise by a fast drop, would curse him savagely, and in a rage hurl the ball back into his thin gloved hand.  In the Spring and Summer he went as often as he could afford it, or was invited, to the baseball games in the district league, a fanatic partisan of the town club and its best players, making a fantasy constantly of himself in a heroic game-saving ré

But he was in no way able to submit himself to the discipline, the hard labor, the acceptance of defeat and failure that make a good athlete; he wanted always to win, he wanted always to be the general, the heroic spear-head of victory.  And after that he wanted to be loved.  Victory and love.  In all of his swarming fantasies Eugene saw himself like this--unbeaten and beloved.  But moments of clear vision returned to him when all the defeat and misery of his life was revealed.  He saw his gangling and absurd figure, his remote unpractical brooding face, too like a dark strange flower to arouse any feeling among his companions and his kin, he thought, but discomfort, bitterness, and mockery; he remembered, with a drained sick heart, the countless humiliations, physical and verbal, he had endured, at the hands of school and family, before the world, and as he thought, the horns of victory died within the wood, the battle-drums of triumph stopped, the proud clangor of the gongs quivered away in silence.  His eagles had flown; he saw himself, in a moment of reason, as a madman playing César  He craned his head aside and covered his face with his hand.
 
 

16
 

The Spring grew ripe.  There was at mid-day a soft drowsiness in the sun.  Warm sporting gusts of wind howled faintly at the eaves; the young grass bent; the daisies twinkled.

He pressed his high knees uncomfortably against the bottom of his desk, grew nostalgic on his dreams.  Bessie Barnes scrawled vigorously two rows away, displaying her long full silken leg. Open for me the gates of delight.  Behind her sat a girl named Ruth, dark, with milk-white skin, eyes as gentle as her name, and thick black hair, parted in middle.  He thought of a wild life with Bessie and of a later resurrection, a pure holy life, with Ruth.

One day, after the noon recess, they were marshalled by the teachers--all of the children in the three upper grades?and marched upstairs to the big assembly hall.  They were excited, and gossiped in low voices as they went.  They had never been called upstairs at this hour.  Quite often the bells rang in the halls: they sprang quickly into line and were marched out in double files. That was fire drill.  They liked that.  Once they emptied the building in four minutes.

This was something new.  They marched into the big room and sat down in blocks of seats assigned to each class: they sat with a seat between each of them.  In a moment the door of the principal's office on the left--where little boys were beaten--was opened, and the principal came out.  He walked around the corner of the big room and stepped softly up on the platform.  He began to talk.

He was a new principal.  Young Armstrong, who had smelled the flower so delicately, and who had visited Daisy, and who once had almost beaten Eugene because of the smutty rhymes, was gone.  The new principal was older.  He was about thirty-eight years old.  He was a strong rather heavy man a little under six feet tall; he was one of a large family who had grown up on a Tennessee farm.  His father was poor but he had helped his children to get an education. All this Eugene knew already, because the principal made long talks to them in the morning and said he had never had their advantages. He pointed to himself with some pride.  And he urged the little boys, playfully but earnestly, to "be not like dumb, driven cattle, be a hero in the strife."  That was poetry, Longfellow.

The principal had thick powerful shoulders; clumsy white arms, knotted with big awkward country muscles.  Eugene had seen him once hoeing in the schoolyard; each of them had been given a plant to set out.  He got those muscles on the farm.  The boys said he beat very hard.  He walked with a clumsy stealthy tread--awkward and comical enough, it is true, but he could be up at a boy's back before you knew it.  Otto Krause called him Creeping Jesus.  The name stuck, among the tough crowd.  Eugene was a little shocked by it.

The principal had a white face of waxen transparency, with deep flat cheeks like the Pentlands, a pallid nose, a trifle deeper in its color than his face, and a thin slightly-bowed mouth.  His hair was coarse, black, and thick, but he never let it grow too long. He had short dry hands, strong, and always coated deeply with chalk.  When he passed near by, Eugene got the odor of chalk and of the schoolhouse: his heart grew cold with excitement and fear.  The sanctity of chalk and school hovered about the man's flesh.  He was the one who could touch without being touched, beat without being beaten.  Eugene had terrible fantasies of resistance, shuddering with horror as he thought of the awful consequences of fighting back: something like God's fist in lightning.  Then he looked around cautiously to see if any one had noticed.

The principal's name was Leonard.  He made long speeches to the children every morning, after a ten-minute prayer.  He had a high sonorous countrified voice which often trailed off in a comical drawl; he got lost very easily in revery, would pause in the middle of a sentence, gaze absently off with his mouth half-open and an expression of stupefaction on his face, and return presently to the business before him, his mind still loose, with witless distracted laugh.

He talked to the children aimlessly, pompously, dully for twenty minutes every morning: the teachers yawned carefully behind their hands, the students made furtive drawings, or passed notes.  He spoke to them of "the higher life" and of "the things of the mind." He assured them that they were the leaders of to-morrow and the hope of the world.  Then he quoted Longfellow.

He was a good man, a dull man, a man of honor.  He had a broad streak of coarse earthy brutality in him.  He loved a farm better than anything in the world except a school.  He had rented a big dilapidated house in a grove of lordly oaks on the outskirts of town: he lived there with his wife and his two children.  He had a cow--he was never without a cow: he would go out at night and morning to milk her, laughing his vacant silly laugh, and giving her a good smacking kick in the belly to make her come round into position.

He was a heavy-handed master.  He put down rebellion with good cornfield violence.  If a boy was impudent to him he would rip him powerfully from his seat, drag his wriggling figure into his office, breathing stertorously as he walked along at his clumsy rapid gait, and saying roundly, in tones of scathing contempt: "Why, you young upstart, we'll just see who's master here.  I'll show you, my sonny, if I'm to be dictated to by every two-by-four whippersnapper who comes along."  And once within the office, with the glazed door shut, he published the stern warning of his justice by the loud exertion of his breathing, the cutting swish of his rattan, and the yowls of pain and terror that he exacted from his captive.

He had called the school together that day to command it to write him a composition.  The children sat, staring dumbly up at him as he made a rambling explanation of what he wanted.  Finally he announced a prize.  He would give five dollars from his own pocket to the student who wrote the best paper.  That aroused them.  There was a rustle of interest.

They were to write a paper on the meaning of a French picture called The Song of the Lark.  It represented a French peasant girl, barefooted, with a sickle in one hand, and with face upturned in the morning-light of the fields as she listened to the bird-song. They were asked to describe what they saw in the expression of the girl's face.  They were asked to tell what the picture meant to them.  It had been reproduced in one of their readers.  A larger print was now hung up on the platform for their inspection.  Sheets of yellow paper were given them.  They stared, thoughtfully masticating their pencils.  Finally, the room was silent save for a minute scratching on paper.

The warm wind spouted about the eaves; the grasses bent, whistling gently.

Eugene wrote:  "The girl is hearing the song of the first lark. She knows that it means Spring has come.  She is about seventeen oreighteen years old.  Her people are very poor, she has never been anywhere.  In the winter she wears wooden shoes.  She is making out as if she was going to whistle.  But she doesn't let on to the bird that she has heard him.  The rest of her people are behind her, coming down the field, but we do not see them.  She has a father, a mother, and two brothers.  They have worked hard all their life. The girl is the youngest child.  She thinks she would like to go away somewhere and see the world.  Sometimes she hears the whistle of a train that is going to Paris.  She has never ridden on a train in her life.  She would like to go to Paris.  She would like to have some fine clothes, she would like to travel.  Perhaps she would like to start life new in America, the Land of Opportunity.The girl has had a hard time.  Her people do not understand her. If they saw her listening to the lark they would poke fun at her. She has never had the advantages of a good education, her people are so poor, but she would profit by her opportunity if she did, more than some people who have.  You can tell by looking at her that she's intelligent."

It was early in May; examinations came in another two weeks.  He thought of them with excitement and pleasure--he liked the period of hard cramming, the long reviews, the delight of emptying out abundantly on paper his stored knowledge.  The big assembly room had about it the odor of completion, of sharp nervous ecstasy.  All through the summer it would be drowsy-warm; if only here, alone, with the big plaster cast of Minerva, himself and Bessie Barnes, or  Miss--Miss--

"We want this boy," said Margaret Leonard.  She handed Eugene's paper over to her husband.  They were starting a private school for boys.  That was what the paper had been for.

Leonard took the paper, pretended to read half a page, looked off absently into eternity, and began to rub his chin reflectively, leaving a slight coating of chalk-dust on his face.  Then, catching her eye, he laughed idiotically, and said:  "Why, that little rascal!  Huh?  Do you suppose--?"

Feeling delightfully scattered, he bent over with a long suction of whining laughter, slapping his knee and leaving a chalk print, making a slobbering noise in his mouth.

"The Lord have mercy!" he gasped.

"Here!  Never you mind about that," she said, laughing with tender sharp amusement.  "Pull yourself together and see this boy's people."  She loved the man dearly, and he loved her.

A few days later Leonard assembled the children a second time.  He made a rambling speech, the purport of which was to inform them that one of them had won the prize, but to conceal the winner's name.  Then, after several divagations, which he thoroughly enjoyed, he read Eugene's paper, announced his name, and called him forward.

Chalkface took chalkhand.  The boy's heart thundered against his ribs.  The proud horns blared, he tasted glory.

Patiently, all through the summer, Leonard laid siege to Gant and Eliza.  Gant fidgeted, spoke shiftily, finally said:

"You'll have to see his mother."  Privately he was bitterly scornful, roared the merits of the public school as an incubator of citizenship.  The family was contemptuous.  Private school!  Mr. Vanderbilt!  Ruin him for good!

Which made Eliza reflective.  She had a good streak of snobbism. Mr. Vanderbilt?  She was as good as any of them.  They'd just see.

"Who are you going to have?" she asked.  "Have you drummed any one up yet?"

Leonard mentioned the sons of several fashionable and wealthy people,--of Dr. Kitchen, the eye, ear, nose and throat man, Mr. Arthur, the corporation lawyer, and Bishop Raper, of the Episcopal diocese.

Eliza grew more reflective.  She thought of Pett.  She needn't give herself airs.

"How much are you asking?" she said.

He told her the tuition was one hundred dollars a year.  She pursed her lips lingeringly before she answered.

"Hm-m!" she began, with a bantering smile, as she looked at Eugene. "That's a whole lot of money.  You know," she continued with her tremulous smile, "as the darkey says, we're pore-folks."

Eugene squirmed.

"Well what about it, boy?" said Eliza banteringly.  "Do you think you're worth that much money?"

Mr. Leonard placed his white dry hand upon Eugene's shoulders, affectionately sliding it down his back and across his kidneys, leaving white chalk prints everywhere.  Then he clamped his meaty palm tightly around the slender bracelet of boy-arm.

"That boy's worth it," he said, shaking him gently to and fro. "Yes, sir!"

Eugene smiled painfully.  Eliza continued to purse her lips.  She felt a strong psychic relation to Leonard.  They both took time.

"Say," she said, rubbing her broad red nose, and smiling slyly, "I used to be a school-teacher.  You didn't know that, did you?  But I didn't get any such prices as you're asking," she added.  "I thought myself mighty lucky if I got my board and twenty dollars a month."

"Is that so, Mrs.