“Yes, indeed,” said J.M.

“Found the old town in good condition?”

“Excellent!” this with emphasis.

The president saw it all, explaining it competently to himself.  “Yes, yes, I see it from here—­vacation spent in renewing your youth playing with the children—­promised to go back at Christmas, I suppose.”

“Oh, yes, of course,” said J.M.

“Children cried when you came away, and gave you dotty little things they’d made themselves?”

“Just like that,” with a reminiscent smile.

“Well, well,” the president got to his feet.  “Of course, most natural thing in the world to take an interest in your brothers’ and sisters’ children.”

J.M. did not contradict the president.  He never contradicted the presidents.  He outlasted them so consistently that it was not necessary.  This time he took off his glasses and rubbed them on an awkwardly fashioned chamois spectacle-wiper made for him by little Molly McCartey.  He noticed the pattern of the silk in his visitor’s necktie and it made him think of one of Rosalie Loyette’s designs.  He smiled a little.

The president regarded this smiling silence with suspicion.  He cocked his eye penetratingly upon his librarian.  “But it is very queer, J.M., that as long as I have known you, I never heard that you had any family at all.”

J.M. put his clean and polished spectacles back on his nose and looked through them into the next room, where Ivan Petrofsky sat devouring his first lesson in political economy.  Then he turned, beaming like an amiable sphinx upon his interrogator.  “Do you know—­I never realized it myself until just lately,” he said.

BY ABANA AND PHARPAR

  Fields, green fields of Shining River,
      Lightly left too soon
  In the stormy equinoctial,
      In the hunter’s moon,—­

      Snow-blown fields of Shining River
      I shall once more tread;
  I shall walk their crested hollows,
      Living or dead.

FINIS

To old Mrs. Prentiss, watching apprehensively each low mountain dawn, the long, golden days of the warm autumn formed a series of blessed reprieves from the loom which hung over her.  With her inherited and trained sense of reality, she could not cheat herself into forgetting, even for a moment, that her fate was certain, but, nevertheless, she took a breathless enjoyment in each day, as it passed and did not bring the dreaded change in her life.  She spoke to her husband about this feeling as they sat on the front step one October evening, when the air was as mild as in late May, breaking the calm silence, in which they usually sat, by saying, “Seems as though this weather was just made for us, don’t it, father?”