"Me fate is hard," the old man sobbed, "And I am sick and sore. Me aged limbs of rest are robbed And skipping is a bore. "But Duty is the seaman's boast, And on this gallant ship You'll find the skipper at his post As long as he can skip." And so the Captain of the Cheese Skipped on again as one Who lofty satisfaction sees In duty bravely done. [Footnote 4: From "Nautical Lays of a Landsman," by Wallace Irwin. Copyright, 1904, by Dodd, Mead & Co.] MELINDA'S HUMOROUS STORY BY MAY McHENRY Melinda was dejected. She told herself that she was groping in the vale of despair, that life was a vast, gray, echoing void. She decided that ambition was dead--a case of starvation; that friendship had slipped through too eagerly grasping fingers; that love--ah, _love_!-- "You'd better take a dose of blue-mass," her aunt suggested when she had sighed seven times dolefully at the tea table. "Not _blue_-mass. Any other kind of mass you please, but _not_ blue," Melinda shuddered absently. No; she was not physically ill; the trouble was deeper--soul sickness, acute, threatening to become chronic, that defied allopathic doses of favorite and other philosophers, that would not yield even to hourly repetition of the formula handed down from her grandmother--"If you can not have what you want, try to want what you have." Yet she could lay her finger on no bleeding heart-wound, on no definite cause. It was true that the deeply analytical, painstakingly interesting historical novel on which she had worked all winter had been sent back from the publishers with a briefly polite note of thanks and regrets; but as she had never expected anything else, that could not depress her. Also, the slump in G.C. Copper stock had forced her to give up her long-planned southern trip and even to forego the consolatory purchase of a spring gown; but she had a mind that could soar above flesh-pot disappointments. Then, the Reverend John Graham;--but what John Graham did or said was nothing--absolutely nothing, to her. So Melinda clenched her hands and moaned in the same key with the east wind and told the four walls of her room that she could not endure it; she must _do_ something. Then it was, that in a flash of inspiration, it came to her--she would write a humorous story. The artistic fitness of the idea pleased her. She had always understood that humorists were marked by a deep-dyed melancholy, that the height of unhappiness was a vantage-ground from which to view the joke of existence. She would test the dictum; now, if ever, she would write humorously. The material was at hand, seething and crowding in her mind, in fact--the monumental dullness and complacent narrowness of the villagers, the egoism, the conceit, the bland shepherd-of-his-flock pomposity of John Graham. What more could a humorist desire? Yes; she would write.