miraculous machines, won to the mastership of the mills, and in the end
took her in his arms and kissed her soberly on the brow.

But that was all in the long ago, before he had grown too old and tired to
love. Also, she had married and gone away, and his mind had gone to sleep.
Yet it had been a wonderful experience, and he used often to look back upon
it as other men and women look back upon the time they believed in fairies.
He had never believed in fairies nor Santa Claus; but he had believed
implicitly in the smiling future his imagination had wrought into the
steaming cloth stream.

He had become a man very early in life. At seven, when he drew his first
wages, began his adolescence. A certain feeling of independence crept up
in him, and the relationship between him and his mother changed. Somehow,
as an earner and breadwinner, doing his own work in the world, he was more
like an equal with her. Manhood, full-blown manhood, had come when he was
eleven, at which time he had gone to work on the night shift for six
months. No child works on the night shift and remains a child.

There had been several great events in his life. One of these had been
when his mother bought some California prunes. Two others had been the two
times when she cooked custard. Those had been events. He remembered them
kindly. And at that time his mother had told him of a blissful dish she
would sometime make--"floating island," she had called it, "better than
custard." For years he had looked forward to the day when he would sit
down to the table with floating island before him, until at last he had
relegated the idea of it to the limbo of unattainable ideals.

Once he found a silver quarter lying on the sidewalk. That, also, was a
great event in his life, withal a tragic one. He knew his duty on the