One would run thus, in the shallow water, and the clear white beach—east of the creek’s mouth—would seem but a few steps away, and then one would be plunged suddenly down into the narrow deep current, sweeping under the eastern bank, the current that carried the main body of the water of the stream. And May Edgley plunged in there, still clinging to Lillian’s white hat—the white willow plume bobbing up and down in the swift current—and was swept into the bay. Her body, caught by an eddy was carried in and lodged among the submerged tree roots, where it stayed, lodged, until the farmer and his hired man accidentally found it and laid it tenderly on the boards beside the farmer’s barn. The little hard fist clung to the hat, the white grotesque hat that Lil Edgley was in the habit of putting on when she wanted to look her best—when she wanted, I presume, to be beautiful. May may have thought the hat was beautiful. She may have thought of it as the most beautiful thing she had ever seen in the actuality of her life. Of that one cannot speak too definitely, and I only know that, if the hat ever had been beautiful, it had lost its beauty when, a few days later, it fell under the eyes of a boy who saw the bedraggled remains of it, clutched in the drowned woman’s hand. ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A CHICAGO HAMLET ------------------------------------------------------------------------ A CHICAGO HAMLET THERE was one time in Tom’s life when he came near dying, came so close to it that for several days he held his own life in his hand, as a boy would hold a ball. He had only to open his fingers to let it drop. How vividly I remember the night when he told me the story. We had gone to dine together at a little combined saloon and restaurant in what is now Wells Street in Chicago. It was a wet cold night in early October. In Chicago October and November are usually the most charming months of the year but that year the first weeks of October were cold and rainy. Everyone who lives in our industrial lake cities has a disease of the nasal passages and a week of such weather starts everyone coughing and sneezing. The warm little den into which Tom and I had got seemed cosy and comfortable. We had drinks of whiskey to drive the chill out of our bodies and then, after eating, Tom began to talk.