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There would never be any position for little Gargoyle, as John Strang called him, to "accept." "Let the child run about," the village doctors had advised. "Let him run about in the sun and make himself useful." But people who "run about in the sun" are seldom inclined to make themselves useful, and no one could make Gargoyle so.

Taking the flowers from the thin hands, he laid them on the rug at his wife's feet, then gently motioned the intruder away. Gargoyle flitted contentedly down the broad steps to the smooth drive, and was soon hidden by masses of rhododendron on the quadrangle. Only one guest raised questioning eyebrows as Strang resumed his seat.

"The news is, sir," Hinge answered, standing in attitude of attention, and smiling like a happy Gargoyle "the news is, sir, as the Italians is playing Old Harry at Milan with them Austrians, and old Louis Philippe turned up at Newhaven, England, yesterday." I made my toilet with unusual haste, and in the meantime Hinge brought the papers and read out the news.

From the half-light he will suddenly thrust out before you a grinning gargoyle head, to which he will give in an instant more a pair of spider legs, and then, with one roll, stretch it out into a crocodile, whose jaws seem so near snapping that you involuntarily draw your chair further back.

The great gargoyle shone with an infernal light of its own! "Phosphorescent paint," whispered Kennedy to me. Still, it did not detract from the weird effect to know what caused it. There was a startling noise in the general hush. "Sata!" cried one of the devotees. A door opened and there appeared the veritable priest of the Devil pale of face, nose sharp, mouth bitter, eyes glassy.

Satan, terrified, ran away, and the saint, seizing a stick, pursued him. They ran through the halls, turning round the pillars, running up the staircases, galloping along the cornices, jumping from gargoyle to gargoyle. The poor devil, who was woefully ill, was running about madly and trying hard to escape.

It might not be worth while to waste words of counsel on one so evidently godless; and, with a heavier scowl than usual, he tramped on, swinging his bell with lusty force. "No Christmas! No Christmas!" echoed through the darkening streets, and, as he passed, the girl contracted her features into a grimace that would have done credit to the wide-mouthed gargoyle of a Gothic cathedral.

He wanted it to serve as a model for a new gargoyle, or rain spout, for the roof of churches. Carved in stone, or baked in clay, which turns red and is called terra cotta, the new style of monster became very popular. The knickerbocker named it after a new devil, that had been expelled by the prayers of the saints, and speedily made a fortune, by selling it to stone cutters and architects.

A curious society the research student of a later date might make of it an upper world of the colorless successful, illustrated by chance-saved collar advertisements and magazine covers; an underworld of grotesque scamps, clowns, and hyphenates drawn from the comic supplement; and all red-blooded hero and modern gargoyle alike always in good humor.

While they hesitated and exclaimed and debated, they heard a step crunch on the gravel far below, and looking down, saw a dripping umbrella, a broad back, and two long legs striding down the walk. Just above the attic window where they crouched, a grinning gargoyle spouted a stream of water past the tiny diamond panes. Through this miniature cataract they watched their departing guest.