Something else was whirling along the way with them--it loomed near her window. Again the cry, almost within reach. “Courage a little longer, Diâne. Now! Hold closely to me!” Our Lady had indeed looked with favor on her handmaiden, for who, think you, had brought the stranger over sea and land, through storm and peril, by snowshoe and sled track, even into the darkness, to answer to the call of the bell in Diâne’s great need? Who had made him listen to the song of his heart, even though the music of home had been loud in his ears, and brought him dreams such as he had dreamed by his campfire that summer, until he could hear Diâne’s voice--and his baby’s? Israel Gagnon knows, and Victor Brassard knows and Grandmère Touchette knows and the little _habitant girl_ at her flax wheel knows. For as the vesper tones ebb and flow around the hills and along the valley I hear her murmur Diâne’s name and a little prayer to Our Lady, for our little maid, too, has a lover; and as I listen to the bell, now “so beeg it feel all de worl’, beeger den all de mountain’,” and now “so small an’ sof’ I can jus’ feel it inside me,” I, too, know who brought the stranger back to his wife and child. _Pictorial_ THE EVENING RICE BY ACHMED ABDULLAH THE EVENING RICE[10] By ACHMED ABDULLAH Up there in the gray North a great triple tomb thrusts its frowning parapet obliquely into space. On its outer walls, to left and right of the entrance, are bas-reliefs in sea-green majolica, representing five-claw, imperial dragons. It is the Fu-Ling, the Happy and August Tomb, where lies the T’ai Tzu, the Nurhachi, the Iron-capped Prince, the founder of the Manchu dynasty, who centuries ago swept out of the barren Central Asian wastes at the head of his host of red-skinned, flat-nosed horsemen, and turned placid China into a crimson shambles. Last year the hereditary keeper of the sacred tomb, a Ch’i-jên, a Manchu bannerman, sold it to a moon faced Chinese farmer for a lean sack of clipped silver taels. Next year it will house the farmer’s squealing, red-bristled pigs. And still the Manchu has his sword and the strength of his sword-arm; still the moon-faced coolie is a coward who shrinks at the swish and crackle of naked steel. Yet, next year, the pigs will dirty the tomb’s yellow imperial tiles. And the pigs, too, are symbolic--and necessary. For what is the evening rice without a few slivers of fried pork?