A Last Year's Bird's Nest 219 



wonder world about us. From a tenement, where 

 foreigners were herded like cattle, he had climbed 

 to the ownership of a big factory, an ill-smelling 

 factory, from which dollars came in a stream and 

 this stream had been augmented by war profits 

 till it was a torrent submerging all the landmarks 

 and carrying him out on a lonesome ocean, where 

 there were nothing but dollars and where dollars 

 would no longer buy a thing all quite valueless. 

 He was in the last stages of a new disease, that 

 doctors could do worse than call Millionitis. 



When the wretched, sleepless, wandering 

 Croesus had eliminated himself from the land- 

 scape, the owner of the half shell shyly opened 

 his hand and the first glance convinced him that 

 the fairies had been doing things, while he had 

 been only talking, for the blue had collected all 

 the other rich coloring of a world of beauty. His 

 eyes were suddenly ravished with the light of 

 dawns, sunsets, waterfalls, rainbows, and look- 

 ing to see that he was not observed, he held the 

 fragment of shell to his ear, and as the sea shell 

 sings of the ocean, his being was suddenly flooded 

 with the bird song of the universe, a feathered 

 "choir invisible." 



Time, like everything else in these days, is to 

 be Hooverized and as a matter of fact, the 

 man with the half shell had only stopped his lawn 

 mower long enough to dip up a little of the dewy 



