After all John Webster, a man of the middle age, was sitting on a bed with his daughter talking of an experience of his youth. In spite of himself he was giving the tale of that experience a curiously perverted twist. No doubt he was lying to his daughter. Had that young man on the hillside, in the long ago, had the many and complicated feelings with which he was now endowing him?

Now and then he stopped talking and shook his head while a smile played across his face.

How firmly now things were arranged between himself and his daughter. There was no doubt a miracle had been wrought.

He even fancied she knew he was lying, that he was throwing a certain mantle of romance over the experience of his young manhood, but he fancied she knew also that it was only by lying to the limit he could come at truth.

Eternity

By Yvor Winters

The small schoolroom was up stairs, and from the narrow window I could see the hills. The schoolyard was bare, with a few cinder-piles, and the leaves had already fallen from the trees.

The days were grey and still, and the camp was silent. The shacks were dull blue, grey, and brown, and most of them had been there forty years. Back of the main street their arrangement was indefinite. The sides of the valleys rose sharply, stiff lines of red and yellow.

For days there was no change, and then the snow fell. Change was an abstraction on the air. We were more than ever shut in.

I sat at my desk, barely conscious of the class. My knowing dimmed their brains, and they watched the soundless air secretly.

Sometimes one whispered, and I slapped his hand with a ruler. The hand of a certain negro boy was grey and wrinkled, and curled slowly after the ruler left it; and his mouth widened and contracted a little, slowly, like the hand.

I had seen this boy often, for nearly every night he hunched close to the stove while the men were eating; and after supper he gathered up what laundry he could, looked at the men with his meaningless smile, and stepped carefully into the winter night. Then I withdrew to an empty room I shared with an indeterminate consciousness. There was no heat, and the soiled blankets were thin.

I did not believe in the existence of precisions. It was no matter whether I sat behind my desk or behind the window of my room. Often I heard the pale Slavs stamping and shouting below me, and one night a man wept with drunkenness.

The cinders in the moonlight were the same; I saw nothing but perpetuity.

*

NOW one was back in fancy on the hillside again. There was an opening among the trees and through this one looked, seeing the whole valley below. There was a large town down the river somewhere, not the town where he and his bride had got off the train, but a much larger one with factories. Some people had come up river in boats from the town and were preparing to have a picnic in a grove of trees, up stream and across the river from her uncle's house.