The Little One sat between Ambrose and Margaret, chuckling to himself and gazing up at the newcomer, who suddenly bent forward and looked into his eyes, with a gasp. “What is this?” he whispered. “'Thy Little One, O God, ætat 2,' from the Mercer Lot,” returned Ambrose gently. “He is very quiet. Art not neglecting thy business, Little One? The lower walks are unvisited to-night.” “They are Ellen's eyes!” cried the other, moaning and rocking. “Did you call me? Were you mine?” “It is, written, 'Thy Little One, O God,'” murmured Ambrose. But the Little One only curled his feet up under his gown, and now chuckled contentedly. THE MUSIDORA SONNET THE clock in some invisible steeple struck one. The great snowflakes fell thickly, wavering and shrinking, delicate, barren seeds, conscious of their unfruitfulness. The sputter of the arc lights seemed explosive to the muffled silence of the street. With a bright corner at either end, the block was a canon, a passage in a nether world of lurking ghosts, where a frightened gaslight trembled, hesitated midway. And Noel Endicott conceived suddenly, between curb and curb, a sonnet, to be entitled “Dante in Tenth Street,” the appearance of it occupying, in black letter, a half page in the _Monthly Illustrated_, a gloomy pencilling above, and below it “Noel Endicott.” The noiselessness of his steps enlarged his imagination. I walked in 19th Street, not the Florentine, With ghosts more sad, and one like Beatrice Laid on my lips the sanction of her kiss. 'Twas---- It should be in a purgatorial key, in effect something cold, white and spiritual, portraying “her” with Dantesque symbolism, a definite being, a vision with a name. “'Twas--” In fact, who was she? He stopped. Tenth Street was worth more than a sonnet's confined austerity. It should be a story. Noel was one who beat tragic conceptions into manuscript, suffering rejection for improbability. Great actions thrilled him, great desires and despairs. The massive villainies of Borgia had fallen in days when art was strenuous. Of old, men threw a world away for a passion, an ambition. Intense and abundant life--one was compelled now to spin their symbols out of thin air, be rejected for improbability, and in the midst of a bold conception, in a snowstorm on canoned Tenth Street, be hungry and smitten with doubts of one's landlady. Mrs. Tibbett had been sharp that morning relative to a bill, and he had remonstrated but too rashly: “Why discuss it, Mrs. Tibbett? It's a negative, an unfruitful subject.” And she had, in effect, raved, and without doubt now had locked the outer door. Her temper, roused at one o'clock, would be hasty in action, final in result. He stood still and looked about him. Counting two half blocks as one, it was now one block to Mrs. Tibbett and that ambushed tragedy.