_Boyesen._ I rejoice that New York has found such a subtly appreciative and faithful chronicler as you show yourself to be in "A Hazard of New Fortunes." To the equipment of a great city--a world-city as the Germans say--belongs a great novelist; that is to say, at least one. And even though your modesty may rebel, I shall persist in regarding you henceforth as _the_ novelist _par excellence_ of New York. _Howells._ Ah, you don't expect me to live up to _that_ bit of taffy! PARABLES OF A PROVINCE.--I. THE NYMPH OF THE EDDY. BY GILBERT PARKER. It lay in the sharp angle of a wooded shore near Pontiac. When the river was high it had all the temper of a maelstrom, but in the hot summer, when the logs had ceased to run, and the river wallowed idly away to the rapids, it was like a molten mirror which, with the regularity of a pulse, resolved itself into a funnel, as though somewhere beneath there was a blowhole. It had a look of hunger. Even the children noticed that, and they fed it with many things. What it passed into its rumbling bowels you never saw again. You threw a stick upon the shivering surface, and you saw it travel, first slowly, then very swiftly, round and round the sides, till the throat of the eddy seemed to open suddenly, and it ran straight down into darkness, and presently the funnel filled up again. It was shadowed by a huge cedar tree. If you came suddenly into the thicket above it, you were stilled with wonder. The place was different from all others on the river. It looked damp, it was so strangely green; the grass and trees showed so juicy; you fancied you could slice the fallen logs through with a penknife. Every sound there carried with a peculiar distinctness, yet the air was almost painfully still. Through the stillness there ran ever a sound, metallic, monotonous, pleasant--a clean cling-clung, cling-clung. It never varied, was the river high or low. If you lay down in the mossy grass you were lulled by that sing-song vibration, behind which you heard the low sucking breath of the eddy. The two sounds belonged to each other, and had a peculiar sympathy of tone. The birds never sang in the place, not because it was gloomy, maybe, but as though not to break in upon other rights. There was nothing mysterious about that unceasing cling-clung, it was merely the ram of a force-pump. If you followed the pipe that led from the ram up the hill, you came to a large white house. Many a summer day, and especially of a morning, a young girl came dancing down to the eddy, to sit beside it. She and it were very good friends; she used to tell it her secrets, and she made up a little song about it--a simple, almost foolish little song such as a clever young girl can write--Laure had been to the convent in Montreal, so she was not a common village maid. "Green, so green, is the cedar tree, And green is the moss that's under; Can you hear the things that he says to me? Do you like them? O Eddy, I wonder."