The Boy Who Was Mad

By Macron Boum°.

ERNST BORGMAN was sixteen years old, with down upon his cheeks and close-cropped curls framing his round fine. But he was so mad that little children clung to their mothers' skirts when he passed down the street, singing his meaningless songs.

Ever since the day he had been carried ashore from the broken fishing boat, with the blood running from his split head, he had been mad—and that was ten years ago, when he was a little boy, living near the anchorage with his aunt, who kept the store. When strangers asked the fishermen about the silver patch in his hair, they said It's where the moon struck him and sent him daft."

Sometimes he would run into the priest's garden, crying, with his hands pressed bard against his breast. Once the priest unbuttoned his coat and found his pale skin bruised by stones the boys had thrown at him, as they ran down the hill from the school house. The priest took hint to a bench beneath an old pear tree and bathed the bruises with warm water and told Ernst about Jesus, whose feet and hands had been nailed to a wooden cross. The priest picked him two cool pears from the overhanging tree and then he said, " Have no fear, my son, for when you run and when you walk, Jesus is always beside you." Then Ernst Borgman went out and down the road, with the pears in his pocket, and so truly did he believe what the priest had said to him, that he looked down to see if the bleeding feet made any marks upon the earth. .

In the mornings of the early spring,. Ernst Borgman would throw aside his brown blanket and look at his aunt sleeping in the -great bed. He would wash his face and hands and then, drawing on his -clothes, he would walk up the hill to pick flowers, in carefully numbered bunches, for the old gardener, whose.cart carried them into the town for the market.

The Mornings were crisp and cold and the mad boy had no thought beyond the long, unending rows of flowers. He could count up to fifty ; there were fifty yellow primroses in a bunch.. He worked until his hands were blue from the cold and his nails black with the damp earth that filled them. It 'was sO rupsy-Tone—two—three—four, up to fifty, a strip of =Ilia to tic them together, and then another one—two—three- four.- -ErnstRorgman's existence was a monotony. He always slept.In the same position, With his thin hands bunched up against his breast and his head turned towards the wall. He always. saw his aunt in the same magenta serge dress, and he always walked up the hill at the same slow, lumbering pace, to pick:the primroses, with the dew still trembling on their petals.

In the.summer, when the last primroses had faded and the green-leaves were curling and turning brown, Ernst and the other pickers climbed still higher up the hill, to pick straw-

berries for Mark Rivet!, whose gardens stretched far down the second hill, to the edge of the river.

The strawberry beds were made in long lines, like the lines in the book from which they had tried to teach him. Even the little strawberries. red and cool, glistening with a sheen that dried when they readied the market, meant nothing to him but one--two—three--four; so many to fill one of the little wooden boxes, so many boxes to lilt a crate and earn one mark.

Out of the slow monotony of the picking came Selma Muhring, the little girl who bent over the strawberries in the row in front of him. As long as she lived, he never spoke to her, and she never looked at him. Ile had heard his master speaking about her . . . " Poor little slut," he had said ; " she's got consumption and she's slow, but I couldn't turn her off the beds."

All that Ernst knew was that Selma Muhring would die very soon, and that something inside her was rotting nway. He thought of leaves rotting, of fruit rotting after it had fallen on the grass, and he knew that Selma was a thing to be pitied. But he never spoke to her. his mind moved up and down the lines of little plants. He knew the leaves. some dark green, after they were old, sonic light gret1 When they were new and small ; the little stems that branched out and made new roots, the fruit, some small, for the bottom of the little boxes, some big, for the top of the boxes, so that they would look elegant when they came to the market.

The priest had told bins about pity for things that suffer. When lie came to the end of the row and saw his crate waiting for the box he bad fulled, sometimes he stretched out his hand and put the little box with its scarlet fruit into Schtnis crate. He felt like a thief at first, but a happy thief. He would look this way and then that way, and when he knew that nobody saw him, lie would lower the full box into the crate in front of his.. He knew that every box made Selma more happy because she made More marks, and he knew that round silver marks, with the sunlight on them, made people very happy indeed. The priest had told him this also. The sunnier began. It rose to its height and then it died. Every day Ernst had watched Selma bending over the plants, her thin little fingers nipping the stems.

Once when lie went to the priest's garden with a box of strawberries, the old man made him kneel on the ground under the pear tree and pray aloud. His voice, so broken. so afraid, had formed the word Jesus and then it had died, for lie was afraid that it would be heard beyond the silence of the orchard and that all the boys from the school would stone him and shriek aloud when he passed. Then another name had come to his lips, and he had tried to say Jesus . . . Selma . . . but her second name would not conic. It stayed in his throat and he dug his fingers hard into the wooden seat, so hard that the wood yielded and he could feel the little holes his nails had made.

Selina died when the spring was over, and all through the summer that came Ernst Borgman filled his own crate with the boxes and never looked ahead, to see who had taken the place of the little girl with the pale fingers.

But he had seen the funeral, from far up the hill ; like a little black worm crawling down the road. He had wanted to.run quickly and madly down. the hill, to take her out of the box and run away with her into the hills. But he only lay in the dry grass, with his face close to the .ground, watching the ants passing and passing, the little cracks in the ground and the skeleton of a mouse the ants had left, white and bare, In the grass.

Sometimes, in the summer nights, he would steal out into the strawberry gardens and sit down contentedly beneath the stars. One night, a white figure, with feet that shone in the moonlight and hands that moved slowly in the air. came down the long row of strawberry plants. When Ernst Borgman looked up, he saw the face of Selma looking down at him. Her hand touched his head and he trembled and threw himself close against the ground and dared not move . . He stayed very still, so still that an hour passed, while he still clung to the earth and pressed his face against the wet strawberry leaves.

When he moved again, she was gone. Yet it is strange that the next morning a little silver streak appeared in his hair, where she had touched him,