bowl, just as careful! Say, ain't she fleshy, though?

"Heigho, Mat,' I says. 'I stopped in to set a spell,' I says. That your new red table-cloth you got down to Portland? Ain't it pritty? Now if you had a pink-glass sugar and creamer like Miss Judson's So Judge Emten's wife is getting talked about or so they say. Well, I always knew it had to come,' I

says.

"Mat, she kep' a-studyin' that there old cracked sugar-bowl, sort of polishin' it with her apron. I gapped right out loud.

"Hear me? I says. 'My, my, my, ain't it warm?' I dropped into a chair. 'I'm all het up with walkin',' I says.

"Mat, she never took no more notice of me than ef I'd been a bunch of pusley. "Say,' she says, 'did you ever hear about a thing called a glaze?' she says. 'I've bin lookin' it up in my dictionary gramper left me; seems it's a thing come down to us from 'way back to I don't know when, before our Lord walked the earth, and this here sugarbowl that my grammer brought from her young home (God knows where) has the same glaze onto it. Now ain't that as excitin' as anything you could read into a book?' she says.

"You're glazed, Mat Lemmons,' I says 'you're glazed, you and your sugar-bowl.' I says it contemptuous, just like that, but she didn't take no notice.

"Them there fellers that made the glaze is all dead and gone this long time,' this long time,' says Mat, and as it was, they wasn't never civilized like we are; they only lived along by the sea in outlandish shacks, sort of, sayin' and doin' all sloven kind of ways; but, even so, how come it that that glaze they made is better 'n anything the smartest men can make to-day? Take the factories by and large. Say, don't it make you itch to know how them barbarians done it?' "You're glazed!' I says again. 'For the land's sake!' I says, and I bust out laughin'. Mat, she laughed, too; she don't never hold nothin' against nobody, Mat don't. But ain't she terrible large?"

The men had notions of Mat.

also their humorous They related stories

VOL. CXXXVI.-No. 812.-23

about her, as, mending their nets, they saw her, skirts held high, striding through the wet fields where wild strawberries grew. At such times it was considered clever to call out:

"Hey, there, Mat! Don't sink the pasture! Wait a moment, Mat; he's lookin' for yer, the fat somebody that wants to marry yer."

Mat's answer was invariably a curving, good-humored smile of appreciation, which, with its richness and freedom, seemed to the average yokel mind to mean more than it should. As a result of this misunderstanding, the big woman's fist had once gone smashing into a leering Swede's face.

There was one person, however, to whom Mat's good-humored bulk had long been a grateful sight. This was Myella Boggs, the little paralytic who did embroidery and lived alone in the rickety house down by the cove. Myella's forebears, building on the rocky ledge of the harbor, had taken care to have the one down-stairs window cut too high to see out from, so for the little recluse there was no possible view of the water, the tide coming in, the faroff, pensive peaks of sails, and the rocks hung with gold and green seaweed. But the smell of strings of drying fish no absence of windows could exclude, and there were hot days when Myella would hold claw-like fingers to a bony nose, and, pale eyes looking over bloodless hand, register acute displeasure.

At such times Mat, her great bosom heaving with compassion, would stand regarding her.

"It's bad again to-day, ain't it, with the wind blowin' so? Lady Macbeth, with all of them perfumes of her'n, couldn't hardly ha' stood it."

"Who's she?" moaned the nose-holding invalid.

"Some big bug in a novel one of the boarders had last summer," returned Mat, cheerfully-"a sort of high-toned hist'ry lady, as near as I could make out. Seems she was anxious about sumpin' she'd got on her hands, and, as she'd been complimented on their size and all, she was reel provoked to think she couldn't get it off. Sounds kind of oldfashioned, don't it? She could ha' used lemon and salt."

The little paralytic sniffed irrelevantly. "Them bad fish," she moaned.

It was a hot and airless day, and Mat, with senses alert, conceived what the reek of the dead fish must have been to the sensitive, chained perceptions. She cast about for a way to relieve it.

"Whassay you train you'self to like it?" the big woman urged. "Who knows," suggested Mat, "but what, ef we'd always thought dead fish was nice to smell, they'd be nice to smell? Don't you think about them scaly, bloody things with their dried eyes turned inwards; think of something delightsome-think of (what's this place I keep seeing into the newspapers?)The Occident-think of the Occident!" "The Occident?" Myella, eyes bulging over her hand, repeated the word with nasal suspiciousness.

Mat, who had come as was her custom to clean house for her friend, carried a pail of dirty water to the front door; with fine disregard of possible mosquitobreeding, she swashed the water on the ground, replying:

"Yep, the Occident. Sounds funny, don't it? Like a nigger sayin' 'Accident.' But it ain't no smash-up; it's a place, far away and full of curios like on wall-paper or a boarder's kimona-and yet, by all accounts, as reel as Boston." Myella, trying though the smell of drying fish might be, now removed her hand from before her nose and pursued her questions unchecked, whereupon her visitor, dusting the haircloth sofa, declaimed:

"The Occident.' (I'll give it to you just like I learned it into my dictionary.) The Occident-the countries lyin' west of Asia and the Turkish dominions.""

Mat's great full lips recited the thing like a sort of chant. Her eyes took on a curious fire; the little invalid, false front askew, pale eyes bulging, leaned from her chair to peer at her friend.

"Lyin' west," Myella repeated, dazedly. "The west is out back of Tim Hophoffer's barn, ain't it? It's as if the barn covered the most of it; there's a long spell in winter when I can't see the sunset for them barns-they spite

me!"

Mat, vigorously sweeping the corner where the sofa had stood, noted the

rasped edge of the complaining voice and answered, soothingly:

"Don't look at them barns. Don't notice 'em," she commanded. "I gave up lookin' at barns when I was so high! I got sick of 'em; they riled me; nowadays nobody couldn't make me see a barn unless I had a mind to see it!"

Myella, a speculative look in her faded eyes, grasped her embroidery. This particular piece was a huge circular centerpiece done in mammoth grapes in shades of degenerate purple. As fast as Myella finished a cluster of these decadent grapes, she would sew a piece of protecting tissue-paper over their dazzling luster. As she had nearly completed the centerpiece, there was the rattling of many delicate bits of tissuepaper; when the little invalid moved, this crackling was increased, so that with spectacles set high in an intense. wrinkled forehead Myella suggested a small, ethereal rattlesnake.

"Mat Lemmons! Not see them red barns!" she demanded, reproachfully. "Why, the two of them is as red as radishes, and winter days they loom over the snow as bloated as balloons, 'n' you dare to say you don't never see 'em!"

The house-cleaning visitor passed her hand over a work-wet forehead and

frowned majestically. "I tell you I don't see them barns! I look right through 'em at anything I want to see, anything I happen to be thinkin' about. I look straight through them barns into the big city stores and all interesting places like California and Asia and Turkey.'

The tissue-paper rattled with new agitations. "Turkey?" Myella questioned, curiously. "That's a place has always interested me. It's getting lots of mention in the papers nowadays. What's it like down there, anyway?"

Mat, her head turned aside, grinned broadly. With unflagging blows she beat a faded bit of carpet, vouchsafing between strokes:

"You wouldn't care for it much; Turkey's kind er excitin', but yet, for all, low down. Everything is all rugs, and red-like window-curtings, and fearful goin's-on among the wimmen; it ain't refined, Turkey ain't," concluded Mat, solemnly. She fixed a look of sophisti

cated counsel upon her hearer, and concluded, austerely. "You keep away from Turkey. That's all I've got to say!"

To no one else on Cobble Island did Mat talk after this manner. The reason for this particular style the big woman had once confessed to Mrs. Porter, the artist's wife.

"Myella wants wakin' up," Mat had explained. "She needs you should jolt her some. Twenty years now she's set alone in that there house. The rest of us has had the boat from Portland, and the carryin'-ons of the Judge's wife, and Rupe Sheboygan's grampohone, and little drowned Emmy Brooks, and the summer boarders' different hats and rings; but Myella, she 'ain't had nothing but the smell of them God-forsaken fish, unless it's the summer people going in and out like toads gettin' her nervous over the new knittin' stitches and whether or not she ought to turn Christian Scientist." Mat's strong face contracted as she thought on these things. "That's all that poor little mite has had to chew on these twenty years," the big woman worried. "Long ago I see she needed to be sort of scandalized, so I took to tellin' her Bible stories; but got 'em too reel-that's where I made my mistake. Myella, she was all of a tremble nights for fear Elijah and Them might come to her door disguised as rag-men or umbrella-menders, and she not able to do for 'em. So then"-Mat with a sympathetic hearer was freely explanatory-"so then I'd get out my dictionary that gramper left me, and I'd pick out a few reel pritty words (the kind that ain't in the language, ye know), and I'd go down to her house, and whilst I'd be cleanin' up I'd talk them new words to her. Well, it seems it done her more good than smellin'salts. I've got her now so's she'll jump like a cat at a bone for a likely word."

I

And yet between Mat and Myella was a great social gulf fixed. This gulf, paradoxical as it may seem, was made by the former's flesh. The little paralytic herself had a sick daintiness and captiousness more impressive to the world on Cobble Island than was the healthy well-being of her friend.

Myella's false front, slanting like a

roof over her faded eyes, even attracted one of the other sex. To this bachelor, dried and plaintive as an autumn seedpod, she would pour out esthetic dissatisfactions.

"She's handy, Mat is, but yet for all so rough, sort of like a man.

Mr. Crim, the Cobble Island bachelor, sitting in Myella's doorway, crossed one thin leg in its heavy woolen sock over the other and, chewing scientifically on a blade of timothy, remarked, with rickety raillery:

"Some men ain't so rough, neither; some men is as handy and inseeing as wimmen."

For answer Myella tittered; there was the ethereal rattle of the protecting bits of tissue-paper as she held the purple centerpiece up for her visitor's admiration, remarking: "There, that's the last bunch! Remember when I began this piece? The night old man Bridges was took to the horspital! I put in that shaded one then. Them grapes do look as natural as onto a chromo, if I do say it. I'll be terrible lonesome for this here centerpiece; I don't know will I ever get my nerve up to send it to the exhibition.

Mr. Crim, still chewing the straw of timothy, timothy, surveyed the large purplespotted disk and nodded in profound admiration. "When," he asked, facetiously-"when do I get my fancyworked vest you're goin' to make for me?"

At such audacities Myella would giggle, put her hand over her face, and ejaculate, "Oh, you!" in a way that made Mr. Crim remove the blade of timothy from his mouth and descant upon the everlasting charm of women— of some women, of course, not of a great hulking figure of fun like Mat Lemmons! Then they would fall to discussing Mat's personality, the breadth of her form, the hugeness of her arms, the great men's shoes she wore, the curious fact that, though she had been approached by this one and that one, she had "never" married. The two, like small ants, carrying crumbs of stale gossip, ran back and forth over the heap of their common experience.

Meanwhile summer advanced and the summer people began arriving on Cobble

Island. These casual persons of eccentric leisure and homely preferences affected the islanders something in the way pickles affect the palate; they were invariably foreign and piquant, yet not entirely disagreeable to the taste.

For instance, there were the mother and daughter, who summered in the little portable house on the hill, whose garden was kept ablaze with the homelier flowers of old garden lore. CobbleIslanders, impressed by a certain quality in the two, blocked out their supposed history in which it was agreed that "She, being left a widder, and havin' only this one to do for, had spent her all to educate the girl, and was now put to it no hired help nor nothin'!"

When it was discovered that the lady and her daughter were of a name and material substance almost fabulously important, the islanders were majestically unimpressed.

"Sumpin' wrong somewhere," it was decided, "or else why should they do their own dishes?"

There was the band of school-teachers, whose outing hats, worn with mysterious rakishness, betokened things curiously disassociated from pedagogical severities. There was the literary man, who had often been seen "away off on the rocks before sun-up" with a book sticking out of one pocket and a banana out of the other, and the "musical gentleman' who, it was remarked, 'wouldn't never sing a tune, but got up early in the mornings and went down and hollered to the sea.

66

And there were Mr. and Mrs. Porter, the artists, who, it was explained, had "traveled about everywhere, so's he could paint It, but never settled down, which come hard on Her. It seemed he hadn't never been able to give her much for clothes, for she wore nothin' but white dresses and an old red hat some furrin' fisherman had giv' her."

The Porters invariably took their meals at Mat's. They were easy-going persons, who exclaimed over fresh lobster with pretty much the same ardor that they exclaimed over the Cobble Island sunsets. Mat was always glowingly happy when they arrived. As she moved about her long table, cheeks warm from cooking, hair a black mist of

curls, neck white as milk and her whole being electric with vitality, the other boarders eyed her with unimaginative tolerance, but the Porters would touch feet under the table and murmur, "Glorious!" They were magnetized by the great sweeps with which the bare arms passed huge platters of smoking corn, their envious eyes rested now and again on the vivid face alight with the strong reflexes of the healthy human. countenance.

"Have some of these here beans," Mat would urge; "they're the biggest limas on the island, if I did grow myself."

'Great Snakes!" Porter would murmur to his wife. "I say, you know, a green-and-copper sort of robe, a bright yellow brass bowl full of grapes and nectarines, or a torch. I would do her as Judith, only it would need a tremendous Holofernes to to equal her. What do you say to Rahab-those black eyes and the scarlet cord and the window, by Jove!"

"You will do her as nothing," Mrs. Porter would say, with great firmness; anyway, not this summer-not until you are much better."

"I wonder if Michelangelo's wife kept saying, 'My dear, not this summer,' Porter would growl, disgustedly. "I tell you I've got to do her or bust! She's an elemental wonder, a great sunrise, mountain-peak sort of woman!"

"Michelangelo hadn't any wife, and he hadn't had a nervous break-down,' the cool rejoinder would come. Then Mrs. Porter would soften and say gently, "Do be patient, dear man; next year, perhaps.'

But as the seasons passed, the popularity of Mat Lemmons's boarding-house had been steadily waning. CobbleIslanders, master-hands at conjecture and speculation, shook their heads and advanced many reasons why. It gave Mat's neighbors a gratifying sense of discrimination to warn tentative eaters away from her table. With arm-akimbo emphasis her prospects were discussed by one and another.

"It ain't that she can't cook good," speculated the drug clerk; he delicately rearranged a highly polished assortment of bottles of cosmetics, continuing with

effects of strict adherence to altruistic standards. "Of course, I don't want to say nothin' against Mat Lemmons's character. I'ain't never heard nawthing against her mawrels." The drug clerk sighed heavily; he chose a fresh toothpick from the pearly bunch exposed for sale, and the school-teacher in whom he confided decided that at the next meal she would scan Mat a little more closely. So do certain elements in a provincial community distil that mysterious and baleful atmosphere known as "the prevailing impression."

After two hard winters, when the prices of food and coal became tyrannical and the cold crept through the clapboards of the gray houses on Cobble Island, Myella fell ill. Neighborhood conclusions were made with the usual morbid emphasis on the probabilities of a swift demise. It was island etiquette, in such cases, to make ante-mortem remarks, as: "Poor little soul; nothin' before her but a gray casket or the county-house!" "They say that last spell she had has left her as weak as a baby; she'll be better off in her Long Home." Cobble-Islanders rolled their eyes; they heaved sensation - loving bosoms at the inevitable, and waited for Myella's death with a fatalism bordering on impatience. To them it would have been sacrilege to suggest that her case was not hopeless, and the day when the little paralytic, weakly protesting, should be borne to the asylum was looked for with a sympathy that, if sympathy, was, nevertheless, eager.

Therefore it was to defeat a keen zest for sensation that Mat Lemmons, on the day finally chosen for the deplored event, swept down the hill like a Valkyr, and, like an offended goddess, routed out the minister. The big woman, standing at the door of the parsonage, pointed majestically over to the dreary house of Boggs with its windowless sides.

"Leave that poor little paralytic to go to that ramshackle poorhouse?" was Mat's vigorous point of argument. "Say -that's a nice thing to do, that is! Why," said the big woman, scarlet with indignation, "you might as well shut her up in a room full of corpses." Mat glared into the mild face of the minister.

Makes me think," she said, pushing

back a strand of her black hair-"makes me think of a word I was readin' into my dictionary only last night—pusillanimous; that means sort of whitelivered and sneakin', but I don't know but what the word suits this cat-fed crowd on Cobble Island."

After a heated argument the minister, swayed by the imperious vitality of the big protectress, met in council with the promoters of the poorhouse scheme, with the result that Mat herself assumed entire care of the invalid.

In

But Myella, removed from the sound of the sea and the sociable popping of motor-boats, was fretful and exacting. She found immense fault with her surroundings. Even the smell of dry fish, now that she was removed from it, seemed less evil by comparison. Mat's low-roofed house set in a hollow in the fields there was nothing at all to be seen-no "pass," no folks "steppin' in to set a spell," no speculative scrutiny of men going by with nets or lobsterpots. And Mr. Crim, rheumatic and meticulous, had gigglingly remarked that it "would seem strange to be keeping company up to Mat's," and then sent cruel, uncertain messages by the grocer-boy that he "might stop around when the weather was settled, or when he see his way to it."

To make a bad situation worse, when spring and summer made their slow approach to Cobble Island, there were no letters from the summer folk bespeaking places at Mat's table. Mat, striding down to the post-office on a raw afternoon, would come home empty-handed except for an occasional embroidery periodical addressed to "Miss Myella Clio Boggs." The big woman, silent and worried, did not go to her neighbors for sympathy. To Cobble-Islanders, saturated in prejudice, like mackerel in brine, it seemed just and right that any one as "fleshy" and unrefined as Mat Lemmons should finally fail in these nice social adjustments which govern the financial success of boarding-houses.

Nor did the fact of Mat's having assumed a heavy burden in the feeble person of Myella convey anything heroic. "She's made her bed," was the universal comment, "now leave her lay on it!" Huge sentimentality, however,