I looked at her in poignant surprise. It was so absolutely the voice of her mother when she was a girl, the spirit and the expression. It is exactly that feature that my poor sister would have first taken into account; it might have been Laura herself. I turned away in order not to cloud their delight. The poetry of life is the only thing worth living for, yet what a toll the world exacts on that commodity! Griselda, in spite of all temptation, had declined to come. "Is there a good kitchen?" she demanded. I told her I thought there was. "Then I will not waste my time looking for the birdies in the trees or the paint on the roof," she retorted stoutly. She even demurred at Alicia’s coming. "There’s over much to do," she protested darkly. Of discomfort and wretchedness let none speak. I have sounded both and so much else that is unpleasant to the abysmal depths that I shall never again look with the same eyes upon the impassive faces of the men in the moving express train. They have all no doubt lived and suffered even as I, these, my brothers! I have moved the household to my suburb, and this is a lament _de profundis_. The legendary mandrake is a gurgling infant to the way my books cried upon removing. They not only screamed; they sobbed and quivered like broken souls to be dislodged from their place that has known and loved them so well and so long. Every object in the flat was a whole plantation of mandrakes. Their wailing and ululation resounds yet in their new and changed surroundings. Roses peeping in, indeed! To my books this is a house of sorrow. Forlorn and jumbled and still unsorted they stand and lie in heaps so that their fallen state wrings my lacerated heart. Alicia, to whom I sadly complained of this condition, consolingly answered: "But my English teacher in school would say that that was a ’pathetic fallacy’, Mr. Ranny. Books and things don’t really feel, do they?" "Don’t they!" I bitterly exclaimed. "Let unemotional pedants speak as they stupidly will, Alicia. Nothing can be more poignantly pathetic than a fallacy!" "Yes, sir," murmured Alicia and with reverent fingers she silently helped me to place some of those books. She has a tender touch for the objects of other people’s love, a charming attribute in a woman. And from the physical chaos in the châlet at Crestlands I am whirled madly every morning in a crowded express train, then in a convulsively serried subway car, to the more subtle chaos in the office of Salmon and Byrd—to sell Roumanian bonds. Roumanian bonds are overrunning those offices like the rats in the town of Hamelin. Ah, will not some piper, pied or otherwise, come and pipe them all into the sea? The answer, I grieve to say, is no! The impossibility of shifting one’s burdens is the fundamental mistake of Creation.