Dear solacer and goddess of the hearth, O mother! whose enfolding arms and breast Cradle the infant world from dawn’s fair birth To the sun’s ripening noon with loving girth; How oft, in dreaming, of thy sheltering rest, Whose ingle-glow now kindles to new worth Our souls, we see thy phantom figure blest, Still ministrant, in light and beauty dressed. Where light is, thitherward the spirit tends: Mankind were yet within the womb of night, From joy imprison’d save for thy sweet might, Save for the flame thy love forever lends. While beacon-like thy fire throws its spark, We shall not fear, though all the world grow dark. [Illustration: Color-Tone, engraved for ~The Century~ by H. C. Merrill and H. Davidson “’YOU’RE ALIVE, THANK HEAVEN!... SHALL I SEND FOR A PARSON?’” DRAWN BY HARRY RALEIGH] [Illustration] A GARAGE IN THE SUNSHINE BY JOSEPH ERNEST WITH A PICTURE BY HARRY RALEIGH Falling in love is specially a critical business for simple-minded persons who have room in their heads for only one idea at a time. It has a tendency to shift the basis of their existence in a perilous degree before they are in the least aware what has happened to them. Like most persons who earn their living at the daily risk of their lives, Teddy Rocco was not burdened with too active an imagination. He did his regular ninety miles an hour round the motordromes on a “Yellow Fiend” autocycle with a simple faith in his luck and no higher aspirations than he could express in this way: “No, sir, you won’t find me in this speed game one day longer than it takes me to clean up the price of a share in a cement garage, with machine-tools complete, and beat it back to sunny Jax, Florida.” It was this ambition that led him, when he was not racing, to give exhibitions at Santoni’s velodrome at Palmetto Beach, a track known to the speed profession as the “Devil’s Soup-plate.” It was the same lack of imagination that enabled him to hear of the introduction of Miss Sadie Simmons to the soup-plate with feelings of unmingled disgust. “A girl!” he ejaculated, and made for Santoni’s office with his features richly adorned with chain lubricant. “A girl! Yes, and a speed limit, too, I reckon, and pretty-pretty stunts, and bouquets--what do you know? Better call it the ’Angel’s Roundabout,’ and be done!” The graphite lubricant failed to conceal the scowl on his face as he burst into the office. The proprietor, a keen purveyor of popular excitement, was rubbing his hands in Mephistophelian satisfaction over a new poster. “Daredevil Ted Rocco,” it said, and “Wild Will Ryan”; and below, in big red type that crowded the rest almost off the sheet, “Miss Sadie Simmons, America’s Queen of the Track.” From which the sagacious reader will infer that Miss Simmons was new and unproved; otherwise Santoni would infallibly have billed her as “Crazy Sadie,” in suggestion of death-defying recklessness.