JANE FISHER 270 HENRY BAKER, AT NEW YORK 277 LOVERIDGE CHASE 286 AT NICE 289 THE MAJOR AND ELENOR MURRAY AT NICE 305 THE CONVENT 312 BARRETT BAYS 319 ELENOR MURRAY 356 THE JURY DELIBERATES 377 THE VERDICT 395 DOMESDAY BOOK DOMESDAY BOOK Take any life you choose and study it: It gladdens, troubles, changes many lives. The life goes out, how many things result? Fate drops a stone, and to the utmost shores The circles spread. Now, such a book were endless, If every circle, riffle should be traced Of any life--and so of Elenor Murray, Whose life was humble and whose death was tragic. And yet behold the riffles spread, the lives That are affected, and the secrets gained Of lives she never knew of, as for that. For even the world could not contain the books That should be written, if all deeds were traced, Effects, results, gains, losses, of her life, And of her death. Concretely said, in brief, A man and woman have produced this child; What was the child's pre-natal circumstance? How did her birth affect the father, mother? What did their friends, old women, relatives Take from the child in feeling, joy or pain? What of her childhood friends, her days at school, Her teachers, girlhood sweethearts, lovers later, When she became a woman? What of these? And what of those who got effects because They knew this Elenor Murray? Then she dies. Read how the human secrets are exposed In many lives because she died--not all Lives, by her death affected, written here. The reader may trace out such other riffles As come to him--this book must have an end. Enough is shown to show what could be told If we should write a world of books. In brief One feature of the plot elaborates The closeness of one life, however humble With every life upon this globe. In truth I sit here in Chicago, housed and fed, And think the world secure, at peace, the clock Just striking three, in Europe striking eight: And in some province, in some palace, hut, Some words are spoken, or a fisticuff Results between two brawlers, and for that A blue-eyed boy, my grandson, we may say, Not even yet in seed, but to be born A half a century hence, is by those words, That fisticuff, drawn into war in Europe, Shrieks from a bullet through the groin, and lies Under the sod of France.