AN afternoon of early summer, at the edge of a quiet Kentucky town, on the slope of a grassy hillside within one of those dreamy enclosures where our earthly dreams are ended, the sunlight began to descend slantingly for the first time--as on white silvery wings--upon a newly placed memorial for a child. Across the top of the memorial was carved a single legend hoary with the guilt and shame of men and women of centuries long since gone. Beside the memorial stood a young evergreen as the living forest substitute of him sleeping below: it was of about his age and height. The ancient stone with its legend of atonement and the young tree thus brought together stood there as if the offending and the innocent had come to one of their meeting-places--and in life they meet so often. Tree and mound and marble stood within an open enclosure of turf encircled at a score of yards by old evergreens touching one another. Early in the afternoon two of these evergreens had some of their lower interlapping boughs softly pushed apart, and into the open space there stepped excitedly a frail little figure in a frock of forget-me-not blue. Just inside the boughs which folded behind her like living doors so that she was screened from view, she hesitated for a moment and looked about her for the dreaded spot which she knew she was doomed to find. Having located it, she advanced with uncertain footsteps as though there could be no straight path for her to the scene of such a loss. When she reached it, she sat hurriedly down, dropped her bouquet on the grass beside herself, jerked off her spectacles and pressing her hands to her eyes, burst into an agony of weeping. Long she sat there, helpless in her anguish. Once holding her hand before her eyes, she drew from her pocket a fresh handkerchief; she had brought two: she knew her tears would be many. At last she dried her red swollen eyes and brushed back from her temples the long sunny strands of wind-woven hair; she put on her glasses and picked up her little round brilliant country picnic bouquet; and with quivering lips and quivering nostrils looked where she must place it. With tear-wet forefinger and thumb she forced the flowers apart on one side and peeped at the card pushed deep within within--"From Elizabeth." She got up then and went slowly away, fading out behind the pines like a little wandering strip of heaven's remembering blue. * * * * *