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She took the curious little box and unfastened the cover. As she opened it, she drew back. There in the box was a little ivory figure of a man, all hunched up and shrunken, a hideous figure. She recoiled from it it reminded her too much of the Chinese devil-god she had seen, and she dropped the box. For a moment all stood looking at it in horrified amazement.

The bed had been dragged from the wall, and the squatter girl was sweeping out the dust of ages which settled again upon the coats and among the webby meshes of the net now dry and shrunken from disuse.

"Come out on the porch," she went on, tugging gently at him. "The air's stuffy in here." He rose obediently. She led him to the veranda and seated him comfortably, with a cushion in his back at the exact spot at which it was most comfortable. She patted his shrunken cheeks, stood off and looked at him. "Where's your sense of humor?" she cried.

"When the lights are out," he said; "when forever and a night the actor bids the stage farewell; when, stripped of mask and tinsel, he goes home to that Auditor who set him his part, then perhaps he will be told what manner of man he is. The glass that now he dresses before tells him not; but he thinks a truer glass would show a shrunken figure."

If not nourished day by day the power to live atrophies and dies; and no one can live well to-day on the shrunken memories of yesterday. A full and significant life is its own justification; and in a last analysis philosophies and theologies offer us only the life more abundantly which the great Teacher said he came into the world to bring.

The life-buoy a long slender cask was dropped from the stern, where it always hung obedient to a cunning spring; but no hand rose to seize it, and the sun having long beat upon this cask it had shrunken, so that it slowly filled, and that parched wood also filled at its every pore; and the studded iron-bound cask followed the sailor to the bottom, as if to yield him his pillow, though in sooth but a hard one.

And yet, in that shrunken bosom-in that figure, bent and shattered of age, there burns a passion for liberty and hatred of the oppressor more terrible than the hand that has made him the wretch he is. That tear! how forcibly it tells the tale of his sorrowing soul; how eloquently it foretells the downfall of that injustice holding him in its fierce chains!

In old age we see the effects of modification of membrane naturally induced; we see the fixed joint, the shrunken and feeble muscle, the dimmed eye, the deaf ear, the enfeebled nervous function. "It may possibly seem, at first sight, that I am leading immediately away from the subject of the secondary action of alcohol. It is not so. I am leading directly to it.

She rallied surprisingly and almost suddenly in the sunshine of her new life, and remained for several years at the higher physical level: her natural and now revived spirits sometimes, I imagine, lifting her beyond it. But her ailments were too radical for permanent cure, as the weak voice and shrunken form never ceased to attest.

"Well, I was a damned coward once and I've been trying to live it down ever since." Vibart looked at him incredulously and Mr. Carstyle caught the look with a smile. "Why not? Do I look like a Hercules?" He held up his loose-skinned hand and shrunken wrist. "Not built for the part, certainly; but that doesn't count, of course.