Thomas Fool and His Parchment Bird

Psalm 1, David, enthroned, playing the harp; f. Psalm 26, Standing figure of Christ pointing to his eye; f. Psalm 38, David pointing to his tongue; f. Psalm 51, A nimbed figure with pincers pulling the tongue of a seated man; f. Psalm 52, A fool holding a bladder balloon or bauble; f. Psalm 68, A bearded, crowned king, standing naked in water up to his chest in a shaft sunk into the earth; f. Psalm 80, David, enthroned, playing a psaltery; f.

LETTER the FIRST.

Psalm 97, Five clerics in vestments singing from a book containing musical notation on a lectern; f. Psalm , Man kneeling before the Lord in the heavens; f. The subjects of the smaller historiated initials are: Bust of a young man; f. Head of the Lord, listening from above to the prayer of a kneeling bearded king; f. Bust of a king; f. Christ showing his wounds; f. Bust of a fool wearing a jester's hood with a bell on the end; f. A man knocking at the door of a gilded triple spired church, surrounded by waves or clouds; f.

A king kneeling in prayer; f. Head of a bearded man; f. The beheading of John the Baptist by a blue-coloured executioner with a golden sword the execution takes place in a building resembling the Tower of London ; f. A lady playing a rote; f. Head of a lady; f. A man confronted by two beggars; f. Christ with a kneeling soul; f. The Virgin and Child, with a bird; f. Christ with David kneeling; f. David with seven men, all clapping hands; f. Two hybrid creatures human heads with serpent tails and wings ; f. David praying to a head with a halo; f. A prelate reading or singing from a book to a hybrid creature; f.

Christ standing and blessing; f. Christ holding a book, with a kneeling man; f. Two laymen singing; f. Two birds singing; f. A soul praying to a head with halo; f. The Lord, seated with head on hand, hearing the confession of a kneeling young man; f. Three boys kneeling; f. Two clerks singing with music on a lectern. The subjects of the bas-de-page scenes include: Scenes from the life of Christ; f. A miller in his windmill; f. A wattle pen full of sheep; f.

The city of Constantinople; ff. A sequence of agricultural scenes such as ploughing f. SAD Musidora all in woe,. Set to Musick by Mr. LET the Tempest of War,. TO Fanny Fair I would impart,. YE Shepherds give Ear to my Lay,. No more ye'd prate of Hybla's Hill,. Arne, Sung at Ranelagh. Who always beat France when they tock her in Hand,. Let us sing our own Treasures Old England's good Cheer,. Shou'd the French dare invade us thus arm'd with our Poles'. WHEN first we see the Ruddy,.

THE HISTORY OF TOM FOOL.

Sung by Mis, Young. With Change of Habits Strephon press'd,. This found his Courtship Strephon ends,. COME here, fellow Servants, and lislen to me,. NO Lass on fam'd Hiberrigs Plains,. AS May in all her youthful Dress,. IN all the Sex some Charms I find;. Adzooks, cries he, could'st fancy me?

I like the wond'rous well, I like thee wond'rous well. Let's sit and chat a While with thee, my bonny Nell: I like thy Person well, I like thy Person well. Young Roger, your mistaken, the Damsel then reply'd;. O no indeed, not I;. I'll neither wait, nor chat, nor prate; I've other Fish to fry, I've other Fish to fry.

What tho' my Name be Roger, that goes to Plow and Cart,. There's buxom Joan, it is well known, she loves me as her Life, she loves me as her Life. Pray what of buxom Joan? For she has ne'er a Penny, and I am bouncing Nell,. O then, my dear, I'll draw a Chair, and chat with thee a While, and chat with thee a While. NOW the Snow-drops lift their Heads,. Thus Sylvia in the conscious Grove,. HOW blithe was I each Morn to see,. ASK if yon Damask Rose is sweet.

If Daphne doubts, let Hymen 's Bands. SAY, lovely Peace, that grac'd our Isle,. As Rome of old her Terrors huri'd,. WHO has e'er been at Baldock must needs know the Mill,. I'd swore she was Venus just sprung from the Flood. Prometheus stole Fire, as the Poets all say,. Young Daphne I saw, in the Net I was caught,.

The next was young Phillis as bright as the Morn,. I Search'd the Fields of ev'ry Kind,. Here Hyacinthus ting'd with Blood,. HOW few like you, would dare advise. WHO, to win a Woman's Favour,. Celia wanted, Celia wanted,. THE Lass that would know how to manage a Man,. Dapperwit offers his Hand,. As Hebe she's fair, and as Hercules strong,. MY Mother cries, Betty be shy,. If free with Alexis, she'll chide,. Last May Morn I tript o'er the Plain,.

Bacchus all his Treasure lends,. NO more the festive Train I'll join,. THE Heroes preparing to finish the War,.

COME, live with me, and be my Love,. When Zephyr on the Vi'let blows,. Baildon, Sung by Mr. Sung in the Chaplet. Mess mates, what Cheer? May Britain's proud Flag still exult o'er the Main,. George saw him there whenever he glanced across, yet he never saw him do anything but look out of the window with a fixed, abstracted stare. Then Esther, having observed him there, pointed to him one day and said merrily:. What do you suppose he distributes? Have you noticed him — hah? What do you suppose a man like that can do? And after that, as soon as Esther came in every day, she would glance across the street and cry out in a jolly voice which had in it the note of affectionate satisfaction and assurance that people have when they see some familiar and expected object:.

She would turn away, laughing. George protested that her rhyme made no sense, but she threw back her encrimsoned face and screamed with laughter. But after a while they stopped laughing about the man.

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For, obscure as his employment seemed, incredible and comical as his indolence had been when they first noticed it, there came to be something impressive, immense, and formidable in the quality of that fixed stare. Day by day, a thronging traffic of life and business passed before him in the street; day by day, the great vans came, the drivers, handlers, and packers swarmed before his eyes, filling, the air with their oaths and cries, irritably intent upon their labour but the man in the window never looked at them, never gave any, sign that he heard them, never seemed to be aware of their existence — he just sat there and looked out, his eyes fixed in an abstracted stare.

Immutable, calm, impassive, it became for him the symbol of a kind of permanence in the rush and sweep of chaos in the city, where all things come and go and pass and are so soon forgotten. For, day after day, as he watched the man and tried to penetrate his mystery, at last it seemed to him that he had found the answer. Without-violence or heat, the last rays of the sun fell on the warm brick of the building and painted it with a sad, unearthly light. In the window the man sat, always looking out. He never wavered in his gaze, his eyes were calm and sorrowful, and on his face was legible the exile of an imprisoned spirit.

Darkness and of Time. It never spoke, and yet it had a voice — a voice that seemed to have the whole earth in it. It was the voice of evening and of night, and in it were the blended tongues of all those men who have passed through the heat and fury of the day, and who now lean quietly upon the sills of evening. In it was the whole vast hush and weariness that comes upon the city at the hour of dusk, when the chaos of another day is ended, and when everything — streets, buildings, and eight million people — breathe slowly, with a tired and sorrowful joy.

And in that single tongueless voice was the knowledge of all their tongues. Son, son, you have been mad and drunken, furious and wild, filled with hatred and despair, and all the dark confusions of the soul — but so have we. You found the earth too great for your one life, you found your brain and sinew smaller than the hunger and desire that fed on them — but it has been this way with all men.

You have stumbled on in darkness, you have been pulled in opposite directions, you have faltered, you have missed the way — but, child, this is the chronicle of the earth. And now, because you have known madness and despair, and because you will grow desperate again before you come to evening, we who have stormed the ramparts of the furious earth and been hurled back, we who have been maddened by the unknowable and bitter mystery of love, we who have hungered after fame and savoured all of life, the tumult, pain, and frenzy, and now sit quietly by our windows watching all that henceforth never more shall touch us — we call upon you to take heart, for we can swear to you that these things pass.

We shall not go into the dark again, nor suffer madness, nor admit despair: We shall not hear the docks of time strike out on foreign air, nor wake at morning in some alien land to think of home: Some things will always be the same. Lean down your ear upon the earth, and listen. Only the earth endures, but it endures for ever.

Pain and death will always be the same. But under the pavements trembling like a pulse, under the buildings trembling like a cry, under the waste of time, under the hoof of the beast above the broken bones of cities, there will be something growing like a flower, something bursting from the earth again, for ever deathless, faithful, coming into life again like April. Hand looked at the yellow envelope curiously and turned it over and over in his hand.

It gave him a feeling of uneasiness and suppressed excitement to see his name through the transparent front. He was not used to receiving telegrams. Instinctively he delayed opening it because he dreaded what it might contain. Some forgotten incident in his childhood made him associate telegrams with bad news. Who could have sent it? And what could it be about?

Well, open it, you fool, and find out! He ripped off the flap and took out the message. He read it quickly, first glancing at the signature. It was from his Uncle Mark Joyner:. No explanation of what she had died of. Old age, most likely. Nothing else could have killed her. The news shook him profoundly. She was a spinster, the older sister of his mother and of his Uncle Mark, and she had taken charge of him and brought him up with all the inflexible zeal of her puritanical nature.

She had done her best to make a Joyner of him and a credit to the narrow, provincial, mountain clan to which she belonged. He had known this for a long time; but now he realised, too, more clearly than he had, ever done before, that she had never faltered in her duty to him as she saw it. As he thought about her life the felt an inexpressible pity for her, and a surge of tenderness and affection almost choked him. As far back as he could remember, Aunt Maw had seemed to him an ageless crone, as old as God.

He could still hear her voice — that croaking monotone which had gone on and on in endless stories of her past, peopling his childhood world with the whole host of Joyners dead and buried in the hills of Zebulon in ancient days before the Civil War. And almost every tale she had told him was a chronicle of sickness, death, and sorrow. She had known about all the Joyners for the last hundred years, and whether they had died of consumption, typhoid fever, pneumonia, meningitis, or pellagra, and she had relived each incident in their lives with an air of croaking relish.

From her he had got a picture of his mountain kinsmen that was constantly dark with the terrors of misery and sudden death, a picture made ghostly at frequent intervals by supernatural revelations. The Joyners, so she thought, had been endowed with occult powers by the Almighty, and weft for ever popping up on country roads and speaking to people as they passed, only to have it turn out later that they had been fifty miles away at the time. They were for ever hearing voices and receiving premonitions. And he had felt somehow that although other men would live their day and die, the Joyners were a race apart, not subject to this law.

They fed on death and were triumphant over it, and the Joyners would go on for ever. But now Aunt Maw the oldest and most death-triumphant Joyner of them all, was dead. The funeral was to be on Thursday. If he took the train today, he would arrive tomorrow. He knew that all the Joyners from the hills of Zebulon County in Old Catawba would be gathering even now to hold their tribal rites of death and sorrow, and if he got there so soon he would not be able to escape the horror of their brooding talk.

It would be better to wait a day and turn up just before the funeral. It was now early September. The new term at the School for Utility Cultures would not begin until after the middle of the month, George had not been back to Libya Hill in several years, and he thought he might remain a week or so to see the town again. But he dreaded the prospect of staying with his Joyner relatives, especially at a time like this. Then he remembered Randy Shepperton, who lived next door. Shepperton were both dead now, and the older girl had married and moved away.

Randy had a good job in the town and lived on in the family place with his sister Margaret, who kept house for him. Perhaps they could put him up. They would understand his feelings. So he sent a telegram to Randy, asking for his hospitality, and telling what train he would arrive on. The human mind is a fearful instrument of adaptation, and in nothing is this more clearly shown than in its mysterious powers of resilience, self-protection, and self-healing. The prospect of the funeral filled him with dread, but that was still a day off; meanwhile he had a long train ride ahead of him, and he pushed his sombre feelings into the background and allowed himself to savour freely the eager excitement which any journey by train always gave him.

The station, as he entered it, was murmurous with the immense and distant sound of time. It had the murmur of a distant sea, the languorous lapse and flow of waters on a beach. It was elemental, detached, indifferent to the lives of men. They contributed to it as drops of rain contribute to a river that draws its flood and movement majestically from great depths, out of purple hills at evening.

Few buildings are vast enough to hold the sound of time, and now it seemed to George that there was a superb fitness in the fact that the one which held it better than all others should be a railway station. For here, as nowhere else on earth, men were brought together for a moment at the beginning or end of their innumerable journeys, here one saw their greetings and farewells, here, in a single instant, one got the entire picture of the human destiny.

Men came and went, they passed and vanished, and all were moving through the moments of their lives to death, all made small tickings in the sound of time — but the voice of time remained aloof and unperturbed, a drowsy and eternal murmur below the immense and distant roof. Each man and woman was full of his own journey. For each it was his journey, and he cared nothing about the journeys of the others.

Here, as George waited, was a traveller who was afraid that he would miss his train. He was excited, his movements were feverish and abrupt, he shouted to his porter, he went to the window to buy his ticket, he had to wait in line, he fairly pranced with nervousness and kept looking at the clock. Then his wife came quickly towards him over the polished floor. When she was still some distance off, she shouted:. The man in front turned on him menacingly. I was here before you were! A quarrel now developed between them. The other travellers who were waiting for their tickets grew angry and began to mutter.

The ticket agent drummed impatiently on his window and peered out at them with a sour visage. Finally some young tough down the line called out in tones of whining irritation:. Give the rest of us a chance! At last the man got his tickets and rushed towards his porter, hot and excited. The negro waited suave and smiling, full of easy reassurance:. You got lotsa time to make that train. Here were a few of them: There were all sorts and conditions of men and travellers: There were people who saw everything, and people who saw nothing; people who were weary, sullen, sour, and people who laughed, shouted, and were exultant with the thrill of the voyage; people who thrust and jostled, and people who stood quietly and watched and waited; people with amused, superior looks, and people who glared and bristled pugnaciously.

Young, old, rich, poor, Jews, Gentiles, Negroes, Italians, Greeks, Americans — they were all there in the station, their infinitely varied destinies suddenly harmonised and given a moment of intense and sombre meaning as they were gathered into the murmurous, all-taking unity of time. George had a berth in car K It was not really different in any respect from any other pullman car, yet for George it had a very special quality and meaning.

For every day K19 bound together two points upon the continent — the great city and the small town of Libya Hill where he had been born, eight hundred miles away. It left New York at one-thirty-five each afternoon, and it arrived in Libya Hill at eleven-twenty the next morning. The moment he entered the pullman he was transported instantly from the vast allness of general humanity in the station into the familiar geography of his home town. The beaming porter took his bag with a cheerful greeting: Glad to see you, suh! Even before these words, were out of mind, another voice from the seat behind was raised in greeting, and George did not have to turn to know who it was.

It was Sol Isaacs, of The Toggery, and George knew that he had been up to the city on a buying trip, a pilgrimage that he made four times a year. George looked around him now to see if there were any others that he knew. Yes, there was the tall, spare, brittle, sandy-complexioned figure of the banker, Jarvis Riggs, and on the seat opposite, engaged in conversation with him, were two other local dignitaries. They were talking earnestly and loudly, and George could overhear fragments of their conversation:.

Could this be Libya Hill that they were talking about? He rose from his seat and went over to the group. How are you, son?

Thomas Nashe’s Summers Last Will and Testament

Yes, yes, of course. Well, your aunt was pretty old. Got to expect that sort of thing at her time of life. She was a good woman, a good woman. Sorry, son, that such a sad occasion brings you home. There was a short silence after this, as if the others wished it understood that the Mayor had voiced their sentiments, too. Then, this mark of respect to the dead being accomplished, Jarvis Riggs spoke up heartily:.

Things are booming down our way. Why, only the other day Mack Judson paid three hundred thousand for the Draper Block. The building is a dump, of course — what he paid for was the land. Pretty good for Libya Hill, eh? Within a few years Libya Hill is going to be the largest and most beautiful city in the state. You mark my words.

A syndicate wants to tear down the hardware store and put up a big hotel. George returned to his seat feeling confused and bewildered. He was going back home for the first time in several years, and he wanted to see the town as he remembered it. Evidently he would find it considerably changed. But what was this that was happening to it? The train had hurtled like a projectile through its tube beneath the Hudson River to emerge in the dazzling sunlight of a September afternoon, and now it was racing across the flat desolation of the Jersey meadows. George sat by the window and saw the smouldering dumps, the bogs, the blackened factories slide past, and felt that one of the most wonderful things in the world is the experience of being on a train.

It is so different from watching a train go by. And all of a sudden the watcher feels the vastness and loneliness of America, and the nothingness of all those little lives burled past upon the immensity of the continent. But if one is inside the train, everything is different.

One feels the brakes go on when the train is coming to a river, and one knows that the old gloved hand of cunning is at the throttle. And all the other people, how real they are! One sees the fat black porter with his ivory teeth and the great swollen gland on the back of his neck, and one warms with friendship for him. One looks at all the pretty girls with a sharpened eye and an awakened pulse. One observes all the other passengers with lively interest, and feels that he has known them for ever. In the morning most of them will be gone out of his life; some will drop out silently at night through the dark, drugged snoring of the sleepers; but now all are caught upon the wing and held for a moment in the peculiar intimacy of this pullman-car which has become their common home for a night.

Two travelling salesmen have struck up a chance acquaintance in the smoking-room, entering immediately the vast confraternity of their trade, and in a moment they are laying out the continent as familiarly as if it were their own backyard. They tell about running into So-and-So in St. Paul last July, and ——. With such talk as this one grows instantly familiar. One enters naturally into the lives of all these people, caught here for just a night and hurtled down together across the continent at sixty miles an hour, and one becomes a member of the whole huge family of the earth.

Perhaps this is our strange and haunting paradox here in America — that we are fixed and certain only when we are in movement. At any rate, that is how it seemed to young George Webber, who was never so assured of his purpose as when he was going somewhere on a train. And he never had the sense of home so much as when he felt that he was going there. It was only when he got there that his homelessness began. At the far end of the car a man stood up and started back down the aisle towards the washroom.

He walked with a slight limp and leaned upon a cane, and with his free hand he held on to the backs of the seats to brace himself against the lurching of the train. As he came abreast of George, who sat there gazing out the window, the man stopped abruptly. A strong, good-natured voice, warm, easy, bantering, unafraid, unchanged — exactly as it was when it was fourteen years of age — broke like a flood of living light upon his consciousness:.

At the sound of the old jesting nickname George looked up quickly. It was Nebraska Crane. The square, freckled, sunburned visage had the same humorous friendliness it had always had, and the tar-black Cherokee eyes looked out with the same straight, deadly fearlessness. The big brown paw came out and they clasped each other firmly.

And, instantly, it was like coming home to a strong and friendly place. In another moment they were seated together, talking with the familiarity of people whom no gulf of years and distance could alter or separate. George had seen Nebraska Crane only once in all the years since he himself had first left Libya Hill and gone away to college. But he had not lost sight of him.

Nobody had lost sight of Nebraska Crane. The newspapers had had a lot to do with his seeing Nebraska that other time.

It was in August , just after George had returned to New York from his first trip abroad. He read the account of the game eagerly, and felt a strong desire to see Nebraska again and to get back in his blood once more the honest tang of America. Acting on a sudden impulse, he decided to call him up. Sure enough, his name was in the book, with an address way up in the Bronx. He gave the number and waited. Is that you, Bras?

Is that you , Monk? How the hell are you, boy? So it was agreed. George went to the game and saw Nebraska knock another home run, but he remembered best what happened afterwards. When the player had had his shower and had dressed, the two friends left the ball park, and as they went out a crowd of young boys who had been waiting at the gate rushed upon them. They were those dark-faced, dark-eyed, dark-haired little urchins who spring up like dragon seed from the grim pavements of New York, but in whose tough little faces and raucous voices there still remains, curiously, the innocence and faith of children everywhere.

He behaved with the spontaneous warmth and kindliness of his character. He scrawled his name out rapidly on a dozen grimy bits of paper, skilfully working his way along through the yelling, pushing, jumping group, and all the time keeping up a rapid fire of banter, badinage, and good-natured reproof:. I signed my name fer you at least a dozen times! They grinned, delighted at the chagrin of their fellow petitioner. I jest want yoeh ottygraph! For a moment more Nebraska stood looking down at the child with an expression of mock sternness; at last he took the outstretched note-book, rapidly scratched his name across a page, and handed it back.

The apartment where Nebraska lived was like a hundred thousand others in the Bronx. The ugly yellow brick building had a false front, with meaningless little turrets at the corners of the roof, and a general air of spurious luxury about it. The rooms were rather small and cramped, and were made even more so by the heavy, over-stuffed Grand Rapids furniture. Her corn-silk hair was frizzled in a halo about her face, and her chubby features were heavily accented by rouge and lipstick.

But she was simple and natural in her talk and bearing, and George liked her at once. She welcomed him with a warm and friendly smile and said she had heard a lot about him. They all sat down. Nebraska and Myrtle asked George a lot of questions about himself, what he had been doing, where he had been, and especially what countries he had visited in Europe. They seemed to think of Europe as a place so far away that anyone who had actually been there was touched with an unbelievable aura of strangeness and romance.

Then, suddenly, he looked at George as though he were just seeing him for the first time, and he reached over and slapped him on the knee and exclaimed: Why, the way you got around out there today you looked like a colt! When you been in this business as long as I have, you know it. Do you want me to come today or not? All this had happened four years ago. Now the two friends had met again, and were seated side by side in the speeding train, talking and catching up on one another.

When George explained the reason for his going home, Nebraska turned to him with open-mouthed astonishment, genuine concern written in the frown upon his brown and homely face. Then, after a moment: I never will fergit it! Remember how she used to feed us kids — every danged one of us in the whole neighbourhood?

George asked him what had happened. Nebraska was only thirty-one now, and George was incredulous. Nebraska smiled good-naturedly again:. I went up when I was twenty-one. The quiet resignation of the player touched his friend with sadness. It was hard and painful for him to face the fact that this strong and fearless creature, who had stood in his life always for courage and for victory, should now be speaking with such ready acceptance of defeat.

They already got me all tied up with string. As Nebraska talked, George saw that the Cherokee in him was the same now as it had been when he was a boy. His cheerful fatalism had always been the source of his great strength and courage. That was why he had never been afraid of anything, not even death. After that they sell you down the river. Them first three weeks is just plain hell. The first time you go after a grounder you can hear your joints creak. By the time the season starts, along in April, you feel pretty good. You straighten out a fast one. But now — boy! He sat there looking out the window at the factory-blighted landscape of New Jersey.

Then he laughed a little wearily:. The player grinned and shook his head: There were some good ones, too!

He used to wrastle all over the country — he was way up there, one of the best in the business. Do you remember the Masked Marvel? Only the real Masked Marvel never came to town. It all comes back! George sat by the window and watched the stifled land stroke past him. It was unseasonably hot for September, there had been no rain for weeks, and all afternoon the contours of the eastern seaboard faded away into the weary hazes of the heat. The soil was parched and dusty, and under a glazed and burning sky coarse yellow grasses and the withered stalks of weeds simmered and flashed beside the tracks.

The whole continent seemed to be gasping for its breath. In the hot green depths of the train a powder of fine cinders beat in through the meshes of the screens, and during the pauses at stations the little fans at both ends of the car hummed monotonously, with a sound that seemed to be the voice of the heat itself. During these intervals when the train stood still, enormous engines steamed slowly by on adjacent tracks, or stood panting, passive as great cats, and their engineers wiped wads of blackened waste across their grimy faces, while the passengers fanned feebly with sheaves of languid paper or sat in soaked and sweltering dejection.

For a long time George sat alone beside his window. His eyes took in every detail of the changing scene, but his thoughts were turned inward, absorbed in recollections which his meeting with Nebraska Crane had brought alive again. The great train pounded down across New Jersey, across Pennsylvania, across the tip of Delaware, and into Maryland.

The unfolding panorama of the land was itself like a sequence on the scroll of time. George felt lost and a little sick. His talk with his boyhood friend had driven him back across the years. The changes in Nebraska and his quiet acceptance of defeat had added an undertone of sadness to the vague, uneasy sense of foreboding which he had got from his conversation with the banker, the politician, and the Mayor.

At Baltimore, when the train slowed to a stop in the gloom beneath the station, he caught a-momentary glimpse of a face on the platform as it slid past his window. All that he could see was a blur of thin, white features and a sunken mouth, but at the corners of the mouth he thought he also caught the shadow of a smile — faint, evil, ghostly — and at sight of it a sudden and unreasoning terror seized him.

Could that be Judge Rumford Bland? As the train started up again and passed through the tunnel on the other side of the city, a blind man appeared at the rear of the car. The other people were talking, reading, or dozing, and the blind man came in so quietly that none of them noticed him enter. He took the first seat at the end and sat down. When the train emerged into the waning sunlight of this September day, George looked round and saw him sitting there. He just sat quietly, gripping a heavy walnut walking-stick with a frail hand, the sightless eyes fixed in vacancy, the thin and sunken face listening with that terrible intent stillness that only the blind know, and around the mouth hovered that faint suggestion of a smile, which, hardly perceptible though it was, had in it a kind of terrible vitality and the mercurial attractiveness of a ruined angel.

It was Judge Rumford Bland! George had not seen him in fifteen years. At that time he was not blind, but already his eyes were beginning to fail. Even then, before blindness had come upon him, some nocturnal urge had made him seek deserted pavements beneath the blank and sterile corner lights, past windows that were always dark, past doors that were for ever locked. He came from an old and distinguished family, and, like all his male ancestors for one hundred years or more, he had been trained in the profession of the law.

But he had fallen grievously from the high estate his family held. He had a shabby office in a disreputable old building which he owned, and his name was on the door as an attorney, but his living was earned by other and more devious means. Indeed, his legal skill and knowledge had been used more for the purpose of circumventing the law and defeating justice than in maintaining them.

It was a second-hand furniture store, and it occupied the ground floor and basement of the building. It was, of course, nothing but a blind for his illegal transactions with the negroes. A hasty and appalled inspection of the mountainous heap of ill-smelling junk which it contained would have been enough to convince one that if the owner had to depend on the sale of his stock he would have to close his doors within a month.

In the dirty window was a pool table, taken as brutal tribute from some negro billiard parlour. But what a pool table! Surely it had not a fellow in all the relics in the land. Its surface was full of lumps and dents and ridges. Not a pocket remained without a hole in the bottom big enough to drop a baseball through. The green cloth-covering had worn through or become unfixed in a dozen places. The edges of the table and the cloth itself were seared and burnt with the marks of innumerable cigarettes. Yet this dilapidated object was by all odds the most grandiose adornment of the whole store.

As one peered back into the gloom of the interior he became aware of the most fantastic collection of nigger junk that was ever brought together in one place. On the street floor as well as in the basement it was piled up to the ceiling, and all jumbled together as if some gigantic steam-shovel had opened its jaws and dumped everything just as it was. There were broken-down rocking-chairs, bureaus with cracked mirrors and no bottoms in the drawers, tables with one, two, or three of their legs missing, rusty old kitchen stoves with burnt-out grates and elbows of sooty pipe, blackened frying pans encased in the grease of years, flat irons, chipped plates and bowls and pitchers, washtubs, chamber-pots, and a thousand other objects, all worn out, cracked, and broken.

What, then, was the purpose of this store, since it was filled with objects of so little value that even the poorest negroes could get slight use from them?

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The purpose, and the way Judge Rumford Bland used it, was quite simple:. Sometimes he needed as little as five or ten dollars, occasionally as much as fifty dollars, but usually it was less than that. Judge Bland would then demand to know what security he had. The negro, of course, had none, save perhaps a few personal possessions and some wretched little furniture — a bed, a chair, a table, a kitchen stove. Judge Bland would send his collector, bulldog, and chief lieutenant — a ferret-faced man named Clyde Beals — to inspect these miserable possessions, and if he thought the junk important enough to its owner to justify the loan, he would advance the money, extracting from it, however, the first instalment of his interest.

From this point on, the game was plainly and flagrantly usurious. The interest was payable weekly, every Saturday night. On a ten-dollar loan Judge Bland extracted interest of fifty cents a week; on a twenty-dollar loan, interest of a dollar a week; and so on.

That is why the amount of the loans was rarely as much as fifty dollars. Not only were the contents of most negro shacks less than that, but to pay two dollars and a half in weekly interest was beyond the capacity of most negroes, whose wage, if they were men, might not be more than five or six dollars a week, and if they were women — cooks or house-servants in the town — might be only three or four dollars.

Enough had to be left them for a bare existence or it was no game. The purpose and skill of the game came in lending the negro a sum of money somewhat greater than his weekly wage and his consequent ability to pay back, but also a sum whose weekly interest was within the range of his small income.

Judge Bland had on his books the names of negroes who had paid him fifty cents or a dollar a week over a period of years, on an original loan of ten or twenty dollars. Many of these poor and ignorant people were unable to comprehend what had happened to them. They could only feel mournfully, dumbly, with the slave-like submissiveness of their whole training and conditioning, that at some time in the distant past they had got their money, spent it, and had their fling, and that now they must pay perpetual tribute for that privilege.

Such men and women as these would come to that dim-lit place of filth and misery on Saturday night, and there the Judge himself, black-frocked, white-shirted, beneath one dingy, fly-specked bulb, would hold his private court:.