"You don't care for 'The Headless Horseman'?" said Robert to little Elsie Barlow, who was sitting on his knee in Emily's parlor. "Which of the stories do you like best of all?"

Elsie shut up her book of fairy tales, trying to think.

"You ask mamma which she likes best, Bessie or me?"

"Oh, Elsie, that's dodging," laughed Robert.

"No, 'tisn't dodging," protested Elsie. "'Cause mamma don't like either of us best; and I like 'The House of Clocks' and 'The Ball of Gold' just the same as each other."

"'The Ball of Gold'—what a charming title! Tell me that. It can't help being pretty."

"Well, you see there was a great, tall giant," began Elsie, hunting diligently for his picture in the wonder-book, "and this giant had a ball of gold that rested on a saucer in his castle, just like an egg in its cup. It was round-shaped like a crystal and weighed, oh, ever so many tons. See, there he is."

"Ugh!" Robert shuddered realistically. "What a monster!"

"And oh, so cruel! Every knight that rode by he would challenge him to battle, and the giant would cut off his head and hang them around his belt, and the bodies he would throw to three great, savage dogs. That was all they had to eat."

"What cannibals!"

"Here comes Emily," said Mrs. Barlow, who had been rocking in her chair. The young lady wore a water lily at her bosom and was reading from the Sunday Beacon.

"Six lives lost, Robert," she cried, "and the Beacon has started a subscription for their families."

"But I haven't finished my story," pouted forgotten little Elsie.

"Put it away, dear," said her mother, riding roughshod over the child's wishes, as the best of mothers do. Perhaps these crosses are educational.

The following list printed in heavy capitals was the first paragraph Emily read:

"At midnight," she continued, reading aloud, "Rosanna Moxom, a lace-worker, was reported dying, and the injuries of nearly a dozen others are serious enough to excite alarm."

"Did you say the Beacon has started a relief fund for their families?" asked Robert.

"Yes, and headed it with $1,000."

Robert inwardly resolved to make the total $1,025.

"Most of those dead or likely to die," continued Emily, while Robert held Elsie and Mrs. Barlow rocked in her easy-chair, "belonged to the hapless group that had been penned in the top story of the Harmon building. They were employes of the firm of Carter & Hallowell, lace dealers. Shut off by a solid wall from the Cazenove street side of the building, they had not heard the shouts of fire until too late. A broad sheet of flame barred their exit to the stairs, which were midway along the corridor. Over fifteen of the girls, however, had come down safely in the elevator, and Alexander, the colored elevator boy, had promised to make a return trip for the others. He was true to his word and was seen remounting as high as the fifth story. But here the heated iron cables refused to work, and the poor fellow, stuck fast between two floors, unable to escape from his wooden box, must have suffered a martyr's death."

"Poor boy!" murmured Mrs. Barlow. Perhaps she was thinking of her own 17-year-old son, whose death within a twelvemonth had deprived her home of its only masculine presence.

"Heroism!" cried Robert. "It is all around us in homespun, and yet we run back to search for it under togas or coats of mail."

"Oscar Schubert's death was equally mysterious," continued Emily, turning the Beacon inside out. "He was a hook-and-ladder man, attached to company 3, a German, and in every way a valuable servant. The poor fellow left a wife and two flaxen-haired children, whose lamentations at the hospital when the body proved to be that of their father brought tears to the eyes even of the stoical attendants, accustomed as they are to the surroundings of death."

Here Emily was interrupted by a glee of laughter from a romping group downstairs. It was the children coming home from Sunday school. A tiptoe peep at the visitor magically hushed their merriment, but Robert persuaded the youngest to intrust herself to his unoccupied knee, where he held her as a counterpoise to Elsie, inwardly resolving to increase his subscription to $50 for the sake of Oscar Schubert's two little ones.

"But the tenderest sympathy," read Emily, "is reserved for the Lacy girls, sole supports of a large family, the cares of which, however, did not seem to weigh upon their amiable dispositions. They had embraced each other on the ledge before jumping, and leaped together, arm in arm, missing the extended net by taking too strong a horizontal impulse, which threw them almost to the curbstone. In the case of Mary, the elder sister, death was instantaneous, but the features were not marred in the least. The face of Florence, the younger, had been crushed in beyond recognition, yet she lingered on and it was nearly two hours before her heart finally ceased to beat. A feeble mother, an irresponsible brother and several small sisters are left to mourn these truly estimable young women."

During this paragraph Robert's promissory subscription had silently risen to $100. If it continued mounting he would soon have little ready cash to meet his current expenses with. Little Elsie and Bessie, the midget of all, listened wonderingly on his knee; and it is not surprising if during the paragraph that followed, all about money losses and insurance policies and proprietors' histories, his thoughts, startled by a casual mention of Prof. Arnold's name in the reading, roamed away to his own teens, when he used to sit on his Uncle Benjamin's knee, as the little girls were sitting on his.

He called up a picture of the Yorkshire youth who had been brought over to the new world, with a younger brother and sister, by parents richer in virtue than in coin of the world. Both the sons had won wealth and Benjamin fame. Beginning as a gardener, he soon wrung recognition for his botanical learning from a world which he affronted from beginning to end by an independence passing far over the line into the region of eccentricity. He belonged to the rare class of self-made scholars, and a popular herb-balsam of his compounding had laid the corner-stone of a fortune which sixty years of prudent addition had reared even higher than that of his brother Henry, the banker. An Englishman by birth, he had refused to change his allegiance. "Salute the flag you're born under," was the motto he preached; and, consistently inconsistent in this regard, he applauded the equally strong American loyalty of his sister's son, Robert Floyd.

How upright, how unimpeachable, he had been, thought Robert, in his old-school fixity of principle! Overbearing to those he distrusted, irritable among shams, he was charity itself to real merit and to the poor. His pet aversions made a long and amusing list—lawyers, electric lights, theaters, agnostics, cats; but each was only the reverse side of a medal whose obverse was passionate love. If, for instance, he was known to have stoned stray kittens from his garden, he made up for his cruelty by treating dogs almost as human beings.

"You and I have the canine temperament," he would say to Robert, a touch of self-sufficiency mingling with his character, as is not unusual in really benevolent men. "You and I have the canine temperament. Thank the heaven that blessed us, and beware of cats. Two-foot and four-foot, it's all the same. Feline! Catty!" The last word was pronounced with all the explosive scorn which features as incapable of sneering as a hound's could manage to express. Robert saw the great smooth face rise before him now, tinged by time and weather to a pure cherry-wood red, and crowned with luxuriant silver hair fringing out from under the skull-cap. Sometimes, indeed, in the drawn corners of the mouth and the limpid brown eyes, he had read a true affinity to the noble St. Bernard who used to lie stretched upon the mat between them.

"Three o'clock, latest. Here's something special." Emily's rise of tone recalled the young man out of his dream. Elsie was once more deep in her wonder-book and Bessie had slipped down from his knee and run to the window.

"At 2:49 Rosanna Moxom passed away at the hospital, making the sixth victim of the fire. An employe of John Kalinovitch, the furrier, who occupied rooms on the same floor with Carter & Hallowell, has identified the unknown girl as Katie Galuby, a young Polish maiden——"

"Katie Galuby?" cried Mrs. Barlow. "Can that be the girl we know?"

"What about Katie Galuby, mamma?" asked Elsie, looking up.

"She's dead," said mamma, and Elsie's lip quivered at the awful word.

"A young Polish maiden, who stitched pelts in their musky establishment. She had probably run the wrong way," Emily read, "as children will—for Katie was no more than a child, though a workwoman these two years—and so, finding herself with the Carter & Hallowell group, had followed them in their random flight and shared their unhappy fate. This was the girl Patrolman Chandler caught in his arms, who laughed and then fainted away. The smile was still on her lips in death, and her face looked sweet in its expression of happy innocence, though old, prematurely old and wan."

"Perhaps the poor girl is more blessed out of this world," said Mrs. Barlow, whose eyes showed that she herself had not had a fair-weather voyage through life. The Galubys lived in the next block, where there was a colony of poor Poles, and she had often spoken to Katie.

"Listen," cried Emily, reading another paragraph: "Up to 2:30 o'clock no news has been received of Ellen Greeley, the cook in Prof. Arnold's house. Inquiries made at her sister's failed to throw any light on the question of her whereabouts. Dark rumors afloat, however, at a late hour, emanating from an authoritative source and rapidly taking shape, seemed to put her disappearance in close connection with other mysterious facts, to the detriment of a well-known young man's reputation."

"I wonder who that can be?" asked Mrs. Barlow, but before any one could answer a loud murmur in the street interrupted the quiet party.

"Look, mamma, see all the people coming!" cried Bessie, pulling Mrs. Barlow nearer to the window. Oaths and imprecations in some unknown tongue thrilled the little group of listeners.

"It's a riot among the Poles," said Mrs. Barlow. Emily and Robert at once joined the group in the bay window.

"There he is!" shouted some one in the crowd, pointing, and immediately the covered heads became a sea of upturned faces—for the parlor was one flight up—foreign faces, inflamed with passion. A hatless father, brandishing a hatchet, led them on. But whither?

"They are breaking in our door!" shrieked Mrs. Barlow. "And Mr. Galuby at their head."

Almost instantly a volley of stones crashed against the side of the house and the windows were riddled. Emily and her mother drew back, with the whimpering little ones, but Robert stood his ground, watching old Galuby hacking at the door like a madman.

"What are you doing?" he called down, raising the sash.

There was a furious ring at the bell, followed by a snap, as if the cord were pulled out. A small pebble sailed through the open window and struck Robert in the cheek. At sight of the blood, though it was no more than a strawberry splash, Emily seized his arm.

"I must go down and stop this, Emily."

"No, Robert; they are savages when they get excited."

"What do they want?"

"Heaven knows! We have never quarreled with them!"

By this time the mob was augmented by swarms of gamins and roughs of the neighborhood, but a change of tone in the uproar indicated that there was some opposition to their mischief-making.

"It is the police who have come," said Mrs. Barlow, but Emily clung to Robert, so that he could neither approach the window nor go downstairs to the door without violence to the fragile girl he loved. For many minutes she held him there, till the murmurs below were mingled with shrieks of pain, and their dispersion and diminution told of the scattering of the crowd. Mrs. Barlow cautiously peeped out.

"They are arresting Mr. Galuby. He is covered with blood," she cried. Just then came a loud knocking at the front door. Robert tore himself free and ran down to open it. A police sergeant stepped inside.

"What is it all about?" asked Floyd.

"We'll give you safe escort to the cars. Hurry up!"

"Why should I be escorted?"

"Galuby's girl was killed in the fire and the Poles learned you were here."

"What of that?"

"Why, it's all over town that you set it."