The Montgomery advertiser., 1907-08-23
MELINDA,s KNIGHT.
By cecily Alien.

writing in an upstate business col- lege. She was a good stenographer, too. and would have done well in the city---if she had stuck to stenographic pot hooks and curlycues
 But Melinda would read novels. And when she had secured position and settled herself in hallroom at the working girls club, the novel habt reasserted itself more strongly than ever. This, perhaps because there was a second hand bookstore 9ust around the corner where she could buy novels for 10 cents and exchange them TOT different ones by paying just two cents more. In fact it was a circulating library system that made Melinda feel particularly elegant and independent and saved her a triweekly trip to the city library, a mile away.
 Melinda did not care much for the girls she met at the working girls club. They talked shop and shirt waists, and most of them worked in factories at less salary than Melinda received. She would not have remain ed at the club only she had to send her widowed mother Some money | every week, and the working girls club was a stern necessity In the adjustment of her finances. Melinda was also a little bored with conversat- | ion about shirt waists, because she had to make the ones she had brought from home do her all season. So what was the use of discussing bargain counter styles in blouses.
 | It was much more fun to read novels | particularly the sort of novels most common at the secondhand bookshop, | stories of English working lassies and 1 chiyalrous lords and dukes. who aband- oned scented drawing rooms and red coated hunting fields to besiege the hearts of the Aforementioned honest working lassies.
 Just about the time that Melinda had absorbed her three hundred and forty-ninth novel, the bookkeeper gave her a couple of passes for the theatre. It was just his luck, he explained, I that the baby had the whopping cough. when those passes came his way, put or course he wouldn't leave his wife alone of an evening under such circum- stances Melinda did not stop to con- slider that in an humble, twentieth centuary fashion this was rather knightly thing for an underpaid book keeper to do. but she took the theatre tickets gratefully and invited the as- sistant matron at the home to ac- company her to the theatre.
 It was a wonderful play, called "The Road to Yesterday" and the natural climax of Melinda's course in novel : reading. For in 1t, a young girl and . her lover and many other folk were transported back two hundred years and did all the things of which one reads in novels centuries old. Its moral -or one of them-was that the old spirit of knighthood lived in the twentieth century man. though 1t some- times had rather a practical way of manifesting itself.
 From that night, perhaps because of the play and perhaps because dog day. set in, Melinda read less novels and hunted methodically for her twentieth century knight. It was too hot for her to light the gas in the hallroonl, or even to burn a lamp. and 1t was just right to sit on the stoop and watch passing figures that might suddenly blossom out as knights So many oi the figures slouched or stopped that Melinda got a bit discouraged and be- gan to look for them by daylight--in the big office building where she work ed.
 But things had been going badly on the market, and most of the men who held possibilities of knighthood hurried past her with quick, nervous strides lowered heads and deep-ringed eyes. Her fellow-workers in the office were all married. The junior partner was engaged to a girl who had mil lions, a cIubfoot and had taste in frocks, so he held no knightly possibil- ities. To be sure, there was the boy who ran the elevator after 6 ?. m. He always held the car when he saw Melinda coming on those nights on which she worked overtime. But he was scarcely over five foot three. his cheeks were a bucolical pink in hue and his nose was freckled. Besides, he was paid to hold elevators and De obliging to tenants who worked over- time, and mere knighthood on salary . was not worth mentioning.
 Once or twice he had brought her . some garden flowers. the old fashioned kind, mignohette, heliotrope. phlox and ragged robins, that his mother raised in the garden of their suburban home , Melinda found them on her desk in a milk bottle without a card. A real knight, of course, would have card ; or leave a glove or something of the sort
 Her search for knight was lag ging partly because of the heat and partly because the hot, overworked men around her looked anything but knightly in midsummer, when the as- sistant matron. remembering the thea Ire tickets, asked Melinda to make Q trip down the bay and back one mercilessly hot night. Melinda as- sented languidly, and the assistant matron felt her heart stirred by a | state girl, who, somehow, amid all the artificiality and sordidness of her city life, managed to hold on to her old ideals. She was so different from the
 other inmates of the club--a bit silly
 about novels and music and flowers
 but still so shy and sweet.
 It was a great night on the bay moonlit and sparkling, after day oi
 relentless heat and humidity, and not
 a night for disaster at all. But one
 overlook them. a fiery sheet of flame beside which the suns ray of the day
 just closed were merciful. Melinde heard just one long. hoarse cry. saw one great flash of light, felt an arm jerk her to her feet and then every.
 thing was blank This may have beer
 because the day had been so long ant
 hard, or because the girl had never
 in all her reading days thought oi
 what one ought to do when fire broke
 out on a crowded boat.
 . Something cool and lovely was trick. . ling on her forehead, her eyes. hel
 cheeks, her lips. She was floating or
 A cloud. No. she was lying on wet
 sand. and the assistant matron was