One Minute with the Editor

"The Conspiracy" Is the Title

A JOUSE party, a half-dozen pretty girls, a gentleman burglar, a midnight alarm,—there you have the stage setting for "The Conspiracy," next week's leading story, by Justus Miles Foreman.

You know that old proverb, "In the land of promise a man may die of hunger." We don't know just where that land of promise is; but we've always suspected that it is the glorious land of "our next number," toward which editors are forever waving their patient readers.

For ourselves, we made no promises; but we should like to draw your attention to the fat that this week's leading story is By Meredith Nicholson, and next week's by Justus Miles Foreman. If you choose to construe that as a promise that the fiction in this magazine will be, well worth reading every week, far be it from us to dissuade you.

What Shall We Say to This Boy?

WHY he should have put his problem up to us is a mystery; but he did. Here is his letter:

I am employed by a manufacturer whose product has recently been denounced by a scientific journal as being very harmful. My employer does not ask me personally to do anything dishonorable; but that does not satisfy me. Do you think I am justified in continuing to work for a concern whose business I cannot respect?

We have passed the letter on to our good friend the Rev. A. T. Lloyd, D. D., to whom a thousand worried men and women have brought their problems in the past. If his answer is received in time, it will be published next week.

Successful Women

THERE aren't so many women who own and conduct large businesses; in fact, Edward Mott Woolley, to whom we submitted the problem, succeeded in finding only about half a dozen. Each one of these captains—or should we say captainesses?—of industry is intensely interesting. You'll read their stories next week.

Remember—$3

For every picture of an Interesting Person,—not a famous person: and interesting one, remember,—for photographs of unusual events, new inventions, or curious happenings, we will pay $3, and regular magazine rates for the descriptive text.

This is a magazine of human interest. Send us such bits of human interest as the camera can catch.

A Big Thought for the Week

THE LOVE OF A WOMAN

By Steen Vanwyck

The love of a woman is the best thing that can come to a man soul. It is religion, in a form suited for universal consumption. It is religion, fortressed in the primal instincts.

It makes him loyal, brave, tender, and high-souled. No man works so well as when he works for a woman's sake.

It is the woman that makes his fighting fine, his work good. Without her he struggles as a best; for her he contends as a knight.

His respect for her has more ethical force than his own self-respect.

That his love for her is rooted in the flesh need not make him think the less of it; for all the high spiritualities rest on the ground: they do not float in the air.

The lily springs from the much; the mother of the rose is the black earth. Out of the dark decays of life grow its delicate creations.

So the magic wand of Rue Love touches the fierce potencies of sex, and all the flames of flesh rise into the divinest dynamic.

If you have found the One Woman, cling to her, for better or for worse. Who knows? Through her eyes you may climb up to God.

Made-in-America Babies

THERE are good men and true in the medical profession and in our pulpits today who believe with Martin Luther that "If a woman die from bearing, let her die; for that was she created."

But the newly formed Twilight Sleep Association, composed for the most part of mothers whose children have been born under the new method, thinks otherwise. About three thousand American mothers have now had children without the traditional accompaniments of fear or pain. Pain is losing its old prestige as a builder of character. It has been proved not only disagreeable, but dangerous and destructive. The Twilight Sleep mother, who suffers none of the shock that usually accompanies childbirth, is up the second day, and going about the fourth.

The association's honorary resident, Mrs. C. Temple Emmet, herself the mother of three fine Twilight Sleep children, says, "We exist for the purpose of keeping the method in the hospitals, where it has been so successfully tried out, and of eventually founding a hospital where the method may be learned by physicians. The fact that this will involve extra equipment and additions of nursing and medical staffs does not weigh with us. Men physicians have too long shown beautiful patience about the suffering of the mothers under their care. The poets may now cease celebrating our bravery when we 'go down into the Valley.' We have the memory of our own mothers' needless agony to strengthen us; so we cannot lose heart in this fight to preserve and extend the use of Twilight Sleep."

Sleep in Your Motorcar

IT is an easy matter to arrange an automobile so that the owners can sleep in it when touring or making trips lasting over night. A slat mattress makes sweet dreams possible in a rural-road Pullman. Between two thicknesses of canvas the size of the car bed tack a number of thin strips of tough wood. about an inch apart. This forms a rigid, flat surface to spread over the backs of the car seats. A notch should be cut in the lower left-hand corner so that the slat mattress will fit snugly about the steering wheel, holding it solidly in position. Over this spread blankets, and place pillows.

A "bedroom" for children may be made in the space in the back seat immediately under the mattress. This is the "lower berth." When traveling the slat mattress may be rolled up and tied on the running board at the side of the car.

Hunting Boa Constrictors in Brazil

TO be deliriously ill of malaria 800 miles from a city and 700 from the nearest white man was Ferdinand Bartels' experience in Brazil last winter. Bartels' brother is an animal importer, and needed a new supply of parrots, pythons, marmosets, and any rare beast or bird. So he sailed for Bahia, Brazil, on February 6, and has returned with his menagerie only lately.

From Bahia he traveled two days on a railroad—or rather a steam-dragged cart with a rough bench down the center. Then for a week, with two packmules, and eight negroes in charge of an interpreter, he struck inland, canoeing and tramping.

He finally reached the negro village of Miaweriea. On the edge of country still unexplored 500 baked clay huts form a settlement, where occasional hunters and rubber growers are the only white visitors.

To fulfil Bartels' orders, fifty negroes started out every morning at four o'clock under the direction of the chief, Warooma, to ransack the jungle for boa constrictors, monkeys, and parrots. The parrots are easily captured, as they sit in long rows on the branches of a tree, and a chain can be slipped round their feet.

A trap is built for the monkeys, with a raised gate. Bananas are thrown inside, the monkeys immediately run in, and the gate is dropped.

It was a very good season to get the boa constrictors; for they were shedding their coats. As they lie coiled in the sun-baked mud, the old skin drawn over their heads blinds them, so that they cannot escape the nets with which the negroes hunt them, or make any attack. Bartels has been bitten only once by a boa constrictor, and that was in the New York shop, removing one with a decayed tooth from its box.

Bartels himself spent the first two days fishing for water constrictors. The negroes built a corral in the shallows, threw in dead fowl, and when the stench grew unendurable grappled for whatever might have come there for a feast.

In spite of all his precautions to have the water boiled, the malaria captured Bartels on the third day, when he was planning a hunt for pumas. Living in the hut of a native family, who fed him quinine, farina baked into bread, and cocoanut milk, he lay delirious on a grass-mattressed cot, protected from the scorpions and tennites only by mosquito netting.

Bartels expects to go to South America again this season, possibly to hunt jaguars. He has already been to Europe five times since the war began, in search of canaries.

$50 a Week Raising Butterflies

ACCORDING to the latest census there is only one butterfly farmer in this country—perhaps in the world. This one representative of what sounds to be a fascinating profession is Miss Ximena McGlashan of Truckee, California.

Problem of the Butterfly Hunter

SHE became a butterfly farmer without the slightest idea that she was inventing a new profession. She loved butterflies, and because the region about her father's home abounded with them she started out to catch some of the rarer varieties, having heard that good prices were paid for perfect specimens. She soon discovered that the difficulty was not to find the butterflies, even the most rare ones, but to capture them without injuring them. Confronted with this problem, which had been troubling butterfly hunters for years, she decided she would raise butterflies, and so get them without the use of the disfiguring net.

How She Feeds Them

INSTEAD of releasing battered and unsalable butterflies, she put them into boxes, barrels, large-mouthed jars, any suitable receptacle that came handy. By observing the plant on which the butterfly was feeding, or about which it was hovering when captured, she learned its food plant. In this way a captured butterfly was supplied with the food it wanted.

It is from the eggs that Miss McGlashan gets her perfect butterflies. Hatching them as tiny caterpillars, she tends them and gives them their favorite food until they attain their growth and envelop themselves in their cocoons. From these they cut their way out as perfect butterflies.

Talking about her stock, Miss McGlashan is as matter of fact as any chicken raiser or breeder of horses. "I have taken as many as 627 moths in a single night, sugaring the trees about my father's house," she states. "I have taken 100 larvae from one bush by beating it, and have had more than 500 eggs to hatch in a day.

"Test tubes, securely corked, are excellent receptacles for eggs, because you must examine them every day. The eggs are of every conceivable shade and shape. During the winter they must be kept in cold storage, so that the larvae will not hatch out until their food plant is on hand to feed them. The care of the caterpillars is about the most exacting part of my business. When the eggs have hatched, if you do not know what to feed the caterpillars, all you have to do is to insert a leaf of various sorts of grass or plants that grow in the neighborhood, until you find the one the little caterpillars like best.

A Growing Business

ALL larvae grow by molting. Those of butterflies molt five or six times. When the larvae spin cocoons or pupate in the ground you have no further work with them, except to remove them carefully to the hatching boxes or barrels. These must be covered with fine gauze until the perfect moth or butterfly emerges from the pupa."

The first year that Miss McGlashan began her unique business she averaged fifty dollars a week during the fall and summer months, besides laying up in cold storage, which in her case was her father's cellar, a large number of eggs. This second year crop she disposed of to a wealthy collector in the East, and the price he paid is said to have been more than $3,000.

A Maker of Mobs

DO you want to use a mob? George R. White, who sits all day at his desk in a skyscraper office building on Broadway, will get one for you. It doesn't matter whether you want a little fifty-man mob or a mob of a thousand men, White will deliver it for you at the specified time and place.

Mr. White is not a strike breaker; nor is he a labor contractor. His mobs are for the moving-picture producers. Naturally these companies cannot keep on their payroll a thousand people whom they need only occasionally. Yet, when they are ready to make a picture demanding anywhere from fifty to a thousand or more people; they must have them without delay. Fifteen years ago Mr. White discovered this condition, and promptly proceeded to deal exclusively in "mobs."

Today he is the most successful maker of mobs in the world. If you have any doubts about it, call him up any afternoon before three o'clock, and by six the next morning your mob will be delivered at your place of business, awaiting orders. Moreover, you can have almost any nationality you wish,—Italians, Greeks, Syrians, Arabs, or Russian Jews.

A moving-picture company about to make a big film telephoned Mr. White one Monday, and asked him to have a mob of fifteen hundred Italians at Third avenue and 129th street the following morning at eight o'clock. This company was making a picture based on the career of the famous Italian patriot, Garibaldi, and the scene had to be filled with a surging mass of excited "Roman citizens." It was a hurry order, and put White's clockwork system to a rigid test. Upon receiving the order he pushed a button on his desk, and the corralling machine was in motion. A brisk young woman entered from the outer offices. Mr. White told her what was wanted. In five minutes she was in touch by telephone with one of White's nine lieutenants.

Each of these nine lieutenants is under the direct command of Mr. White. In every case they are men of the same nationality as the people among whom they work, and for that reason they know their haunts, their likes and dislikes, and the best way of gathering them together. All the people with whom the lieutenant deals are of the class of so-called unskilled labor. The lieutenant in question takes down the order, and a few seconds later is busy rounding up his regiment.

While the assistant was talking with the lieutenant, White got out a large ledger containing the names, descriptions, and addresses of over a thousand persons who have registered at his recruiting station. These are people of the unskilled class, who do not come under control of the lieutenants.

By one o'clock Mr. White got a report from his lieutenant, telling him that one thousand Italians would be ready for work by eight o'clock the next morning. Mr. White added to this number five hundred of his recruits. His mob of fifteen hundred men was "delivered" on time.

"I like to give those fellows on the bread line a chance," remarked Mr. White. "In most cases they are only too glad to get it; but you'd be surprised at the number of times I've been turned down by men

there. You would think that two donor earned by simply walking in front of camera would sound good to them; but some of them are simply too indifferent or too lazy to want work. It sounds absurd; but it's true." It is quick work and efficient work; but it is the product of over fifteen years [?] gradual development until today it is [?] system as sensitive to the press of the little button on Mr. White's desk as is the buzzer at the other end of the wire. The men who make up the mobs have grown to have confidence in White and his assistants. They know that when he sends them out on a picture they are not going to [?] the possibility of sitting around in the rain or hot sun all day, and ending by having the picture called off. They know that when ever they get a call from White, "the boss," it means a dollar and a half tucked away in their jeans or two dollars, or whatever it may be.

The Heart Cure at Banning Farms

by MEREDITH NICHOLSON

MRS. KATE STUART LYBRAND had come to the breakfast table dressed for the street, and was deep in the morning mail when her son lounged in and bade her a mournful good morning.

"Well, Stuart, how are you this morning?" she asked, glancing at him absently over her eyeglasses, and then, without waiting for his reply, fixing her attention again upon the letter before her.

"Very well, thank you, Mother," he replied, with a sigh that belied his words; whereupon he sighed again and began pecking at a grapefruit.

This was a regular routine in the Lybrand household. Mrs. Lybrand was always down early, always ate a substantial breakfast, and was always absorbed in the large mail she received as president or chairman of the executive committees of leagues, associations, and societies without number that sought the common uplift. She had been a widow for twenty years. By shrewd investments she had doubled the fortune left by her husband. Her health had never given her the slightest concern, and she could preside over an obstreperous convention all day and appear fresh and vigorous at three receptions the same evening. All Chicago knew Mrs. Lybrand as a woman of spirit and action. Not only did the city for whose civic and moral advancement she had striven so long recognize her as an organizer of rare skill, but there were few American capitals in which she had not been seen, heard, and admired.

Stuart Lybrand was twenty-nine, and nobody understood him. His mother, blessed with a robust constitution and a buoyant outlook on life, did not understand him; did not indeed have the slightest conception of the pains, discomforts, and annoyances that had made him for five years the prey of doctors and a familiar figure in the most expensive sanatoriums on both sides of the Atlantic. Far from regretting his mother's lack of sympathy, Stuart derived from it the greatest pleasure. The more he was misunderstood the happier he was. He firmly believed that the moment his secret sufferings, his soul tortures, should be analyzed and labeled, that moment he would cease to interest himself, and nothing would remain for him but to drown himself in his bathtub and let his much occupied mother and unfeeling friends realize at last their cruel heartlessness.

Stuart had inherited a large interest in a prosperous bank, which he rarely visited. Between sanatoriums he studied his symptoms, cultivated the society of a few rheumatic elderly men at his club, and collected first editions. His mother sniffed at the symptoms (her own doctor had inspected Stuart frequently and pronounced him as sound as prize corn), and she had no patience with gouty old men. And it is too much to expect a woman who revels in statistical reports and publishes pamphlets of her own to become emotional over dingy "firsts" so costly that a fireproof vault has to be built to hide them in.

MRS. LYBRAND scratched "yes" on an invitation to speak before a franchise league convention in Portland, Maine, and placed the letter on a pile to be delivered later to her secretary in the office she maintained in a skyscraper downtown. Stuart complained to the butler of the lumps in a new breakfast food he was trying. With a paper cutter thrust into a fresh letter, Mrs. Lybrand paused to listen to the colloquy. Stuart was constantly changing his morning pabulum, and it was not surprising that the cook failed occasionally to prepare it to his satisfaction.

The butler haughtily bore the rejected cereal back to the pantry, and told the cook that Stuart was getting crankier every day; which was true.

"Just make a memorandum of how you want that stuff cooked, Stuart, and I'll speak to Delia about it," Mrs. Lybrand observed. "Won't you let me order you a bit of broiled ham? I found it delicious."

Before his politely scornful thanks reached her she was absorbed in another letter telling of the splendid progress making by one of her "causes" in Rio Janeiro. That she should, in his low state of mind and health, suggest the eating of swine flesh, was further proof that she had no comprehension whatever of his misery. He drank a cup of hot water, nibbled a piece of toast with martyr-like resignation, and began opening his own mail,—half a dozen letters in undeniable feminine handwriting. His mother glanced at him several times as he read, and when he thrust the epistles into his pocket she remarked with her usual terseness:

"Stuart, I notice that you get a good many letters from Syracuse. You don't mean to tell me that Gordon woman is still pursuing you! The first thing you know some of these creatures you meet in sanatoriums will drag you to the altar and marry you in spite of yourself. For Heaven's sake, if you want to marry, don't choose a neurasthenic!"

He fidgeted and colored deeply, and his gaze shifted under his mother's scrutiny. On the platform, with the gavel in her hand, her eye was a cold one to encounter when persons antagonistic to her aims sought recognition, and Stuart resented being treated like a convention.

"Mrs. Gordon is not an invalid, Mother," he said rebukingly. "The death of her husband prostrated her; and when I met her at Edgefield she was only resting. You may read her letter if you like," he added, thrusting his hand into his breast pocket.

"Thanks, I don't care to read your letters. I haven't anything against the woman. All I know is what I heard from some Syracuse people I met in Minneapolis at the Woman's Civic League Convention. They said her husband didn't leave her anything, and she's looking for a good catch. And you're just the least bit susceptible, Stuart. These pretty invalids that are always posing around sanatoriums are dangerous acquaintances for one of your temperament."

She ignored his protests and turned

---

over the pages of a large red-leather notebook till she came upon this item, "Stuart—health—Isabel," against which she placed a cryptic check-mark.

"I've been thinking over your case, Stuart, and something's got to be done about it," she said decisively, as though now that the matter had become the subject of a memorandum it was a part of the day's work, to be disposed of and dismissed. "That California place you went to last didn't do you any good. Where was it you said you were going next?"

It had not been a California resort but a sanatorium in the Ozarks that had last enjoyed his patronage. His mother's failure to remember was further proof of her complete lack of comprehension and sympathy. Mrs. Lybrand had not, in fact, forgotten. She never forgot anything. This was only her fashion of dealing with matters she considered unimportant.

"I was thinking of Banning Farms, that new place in Connecticut. I just now had a letter from the superintendent. I think I'll run down there for a couple of weeks. I couldn't sleep last night—my pulse ran up to 118, and I had that queer numbness in the left side of my face."

She ignored his symptoms, referred to her datebook, and suggested that they could travel together as far as New York: she had a convention there three days later. "I'm convinced that your inactive life is responsible for your difficulties. If you once had a good stirring up, you'd feel like a live human being."

"I had a good shaking up when you dragged me over Europe two years ago and I got pneumonia," he replied testily.

"Don't be foolish, Stuart. You hadn't pneumonia any more than you had smallpox: it was a mild tonsilitis—at worst."

Discussion of the nature of the malady with which he had been seized when coaching through the Trossachs would not be profitable. They had debated it frequently. She scratched a line in her memorandum book, "Wire for appointment with Isabel," and bade him ring for the machine.

He put her into her car and settled himself to sulk in the library. His mother was very unfair to Fanny Gordon, whose letter, which had fallen under the keen maternal eye, announced that she too was considering a flight to Banning Farms. He sighed, thrust a clinical thermometer into his mouth, assured himself that his pulse was dropping one beat in ten, swallowed a tablet, and began studying book-fanciers' catalogues.

IT is good of you to come," said Mrs. Gordon, extending her hand languidly from her invalid chair on the broad veranda of Banning Farms.

She was beyond question a pretty woman, with light, fluffy hair and big, appealing violet eyes. She had mastered all the arts of graceful invalidism. Her filmy boudoir cap with its lilac ribbons, and even the lilac blanket in which she was wrapped to protect her from the May breezes, had been chosen with an eye to effect.

"You seem much better than when I saw you last," he remarked, as a hovering nurse placed a wind-chair for him and threw a blanket over his shoulders.

"Oh, I am better, and—your coming—" The violet eyes finished the sentence with practised eloquence. "We must have some walks—but no," she corrected herself hastily, "I can see that you are not up to that. I can't allow you to overtax yourself. We must wait till you've pulled yourself together a bit."

"I came, you know, largely because you were to be here," he said intensely.

"If you had failed me!" she sighed expressively. "I don't know a soul, and I should have died here."

"Nor I! And I don't want to meet anyone. It's detachment—complete detachment—that I need. And you will be nice to me, won't you?"

Her eyes answered that this was the most absurd of questions. She brought the conversation back to his own misery. He must try a new electric bath—for which Banning Farms had purchased the exclusive American rights from an eminent German nerve specialist.

"I'm sorry to see you so run down. I'm afraid you have been overdoing," she said in her low, melancholy voice. "Oh, you American men!" She sighed helplessly.

As he had done nothing since his last sanatorium but acquire a few first editions of dubious value, her sympathy was a trifle exaggerated; but he accepted it gratefully. It was as balm to his soul. If no one else understood him, this adorable woman, herself a sufferer, knew just the comforting anodynes to apply to his tortured spirit.

The nurse warned him that the hour had arrived for his static, and he left her after receiving a reassuring pressure from the slenderest and whitest of hands.

SHE had promised to come down for dinner, and he was lounging in the office with his eye on the elevator, talking to a woman who insisted on acquainting him with the state of her arteries, when the superintendent's secretary, who was otherwise a promoter of social relations, asked if he might introduce him to some patients who had just arrived. Stuart was bored at the thought of it; but the secretary ignored his reluctance, and he followed with the depressed air and languid step he had cultivated.

"Miss Crosby, Miss Walling, Miss Harkness, Miss Sanderson."

Stuart's spirits rose as he found himself confronting four bright-eyed, smiling young women and not familiar sanatorium Types. Still, he must be on guard. The fact that Banning Farms boasted a social secretary was in itself depressing. It hadn't been mentioned in the prospectus. Possibly these newcomers concealed tiresome mothers, and these introductions were preliminary to overtures for bridge with dingy and uninteresting parents; and he hated bridge. But these girls did not simper, and their clothes were from city shops. Stuart Lybrand was, as his mother had intimated, not without his susceptibilities, and the decorative value of four undeniably pretty girls—girls who did not say "Yes, Sir," or stand on one foot when spoken to, was not lost upon him.

"Please tell us, Mr. Lybrand, are all these people going to die?" asked Miss Walling, who had fluffy light hair, and blue eyes of beguiling innocence.

"Er—well, let's hope not yet," he replied with a wan smile. "But of course there are some very, very sick people here," he added as though remembering that he must defend the dignity of the institution as a refuge for dying humanity.

"We've all been awfully sick," said Miss Sanderson, whose bronze-brown eyes he noted as worthy of further study.

"They really have," Miss Crosby affirmed. "There was an epidemic of scarlet fever in their school, and I've come up to play with them while they put the edge on their convalescence."

A shadow of fear crossed Stuart's face. Miss Crosby laughed merrily.

"Oh, there's not a particle of danger. They were out of quarantine a month ago, and have been at their homes till the doctor sent them for a run in the country."

MRS. GORDON crossed the room with a nurse trailing after her bearing cushions, the lilac blanket, and the half-read novel that someone is always carrying around in sanatoriums.

"Is that one of the bad cases?" asked Miss Walling, following Stuart's gaze.

"Yes, a very sad case," he replied hastily, planning his escape. "She's a Mrs. Gordon—very nice. To look at her you'd never imagine the suffering she's endured."

"I certainly shouldn't," remarked Miss Harkness. "I don't care much for that gown; do you, Ethel?"

Ethel Sanderson said she did not care much for it: a blasphemous utterance that caused Stuart to frown. However, Miss Crosby, after a careless glance at the retreating figure, remarked gently that one couldn't always tell: that people with incurable maladies often faced the world bravely.

"Yes—yes," exclaimed Stuart gratefully. "That's quite true. I've been doing this sort of thing for five long years," this with a gesture and sigh of despair, "and I've seen the most heartbreaking courage."

The three girls murmured their awe of his wide experience of suffering mankind.

"But they promise the panacea here: you have but to come to be cured!" said Miss Crosby cheerfully. Then, seeing that the hope of speedy restoration awakened no response in him, she made haste to add, "But of course there are cases that are quite hopeless, I suppose."

"Yes—yes!" he muttered lugubriously.

"Oh, we've been keeping you standing! Sha'n't I bring you a chair?"

"No, thanks," he gulped, alarmed at the thought of further detention. It's a pleasure to know that you're all convalescents. I envy you! They—er—put me to bed early. I must run along."

He included them all in the deliberate bow of one who must be wary of undue exertion. Miss Crosby observed, however, that his step quickened as he crossed the threshold.

At nine o'clock, as the quartet returned from a walk through the grounds, they caught a glimpse of Stuart and Mrs. Gordon, their heads close together, in a dark corner of the veranda.

THE next morning Stuart successfully dodged a bridge game and sent a box of violets to Mrs. Gordon, imploring her to brighten the world for him by appearing at once. He became bitter at learning that she was having a massage and would not be down until after lunch. Verily the world was against him. To add to his unhappiness the superintendent, after studying his case for two days, assured him that all he needed was exercise and fresh air to set him up again. His heart was perfectly normal: the trouble was all in his stomach.

This was discouraging, as was also the cool fashion in which the unfeeling physician told him to discontinue the medicine he had brought with him. If he would walk ten miles a day, he could eat tripe and cabbage and be a happy man. Stuart hated cheerful doctors. He had known a number, and they were all bad diagnosticians. If it hadn't been for Mrs. Gordon's propinquity, he would have packed his trunk and left at once.

SUDDENLY, as he gazed gloomily out upon the sunny hills, his name was spoken in hopeful tones, and he turned fretfully, to find Miss Crosby and her three convalescents ranged before him, clad in blue sailor suits that enhanced their youthfulness. Even Miss Crosby seemed much younger than on the previous evening.

"Please, Mr. Lybrand," said Miss Walling, who lisped charmingly, "will you go walking with us?"

"We're teasing you to come!" added Miss Sanderson.

"We shall sit in our rooms and cry if you won't!" Miss Harkness contributed.

They clasped their hands beseechingly. It seemed that a walk with him was the one thing in all the world that would fill their day with delight.

"Really now, this is mighty nice of you," he began; "but—"

"We sha'n't go far—really we sha'n't," they chorused.

"Of course we don't want to be a bother," said Miss Crosby in the tone of one prepared for disappointment.

"Oh, please don't think it's that!"

On the whole he was pleased, and his face showed his pleasure. It might be hours before Mrs. Gordon showed herself, and next to her these girls were undeniably the most attractive specimens of the human race on the premises.

"I hesitate only because it seems cruel for a tottering wreck like me to attach himself to—er— Besides I have a treatment at eleven. Every other thing having failed, they're going to try a new electric machine on me—a last hope!"

What the doctor had said was that he might try the new electrical-device if he liked; that it wouldn't do him any harm, but that he needn't expect any magical results from it. However, Mrs. Gordon had recommended it, and it would be rank disloyalty for him to neglect it. But it is not easy to deny the request of four such girls as no other sanatorium had ever offered,—friendly girls, whose eyes danced with life and fun.

HE went for his hat, stick, and overcoat, and before he knew it he had walked a mile. First one and then another of his new acquaintances walked beside him. He found that he had known Ethel Sanderson's brother in college, and that fact brought them instantly to a friendly basis. Mabel Walling was the daughter of a well known New York surgeon. Geraldine Harkness interested him in an account of a camping trip she had taken the previous year through the Maine woods. He was in a glow from his unwanted exercise, and the bronze-eyed Ethel was carrying his overcoat when he realized that he had covered two miles and knew the first names of the trio. This would not do! He stopped suddenly with a sigh, and clapped his hand to his heart.

"Are you ill?" they cried solicitously.

"Oh no, nothing," he said, swallowing; "that is, nothing unusual."

He sat on the stone wall beside the road, and they gathered about him in a protecting semicircle. It was a new and stimulating experience to be ministered to by four such radiant young beings.

"My heart's jumping like a rabbit," Ethel confessed. "But of course a heart always works harder when you're walking."

Geraldine suggested that they all count their heartbeats, write the figures on the wall, and strike an average. This proved to be seventy-nine, with Stuart's report of eighty-two thrown in.

"Wouldn't it be funny—" Ethel began.

"What would be funny?" chimed the others.

"Oh, I was just thinking that somebody could make a grand story of this. Suppose a lot of girls were in love with Mr. Lybrand,—or anyone,—and wrote their pulses down like this, and he chose the one whose heart thumped the fastest as the one he cared most about."

"That's mean of you," said Geraldine indignantly, "and almost underbred, when you know you were three beats higher than the rest of us!"

A competition for his affections based on his stimulating effect upon their respective pulses evoked the greatest merry ment, and he laughed himself into reckless humor. He jumped down, and they made another mile in a glow of good spirits, Miss Crosby walking beside him with the fine stride of a woman used to tramping. He caught her scrutinizing him closely from time to time. Once when the trio sprang away for a run she asked whether they hadn't better turn back. He scorned the idea indignantly. The three raced back to say that they had negotiated for milk and bread and butter at a farmhouse. He was ashamed of his weakness in drinking two glasses of milk and eating three slices of buttered bread, assuring them that such a thing had never happened before.

THEY reached the sanatorium at one o'clock, just in time for luncheon.

"It would be fine," said Geraldine, "if Mr. Lybrand would move to our table."

Miss Crosby added her own plea than he should make the change. His place, already assigned, was beside Mrs. Gordon; but as she rarely came down for meals she could hardly take offense if he moved. Not only was the change effected but when they went in he found that they had arranged for a table for five for the rest of their stay. It was flattering to be the object of so much attention. He liked it, and liked their good-comradeship and light-hearted raillery.

During luncheon he thought Miss Crosby, who faced him, watched him narrowly, and as they left the room she suggested that he ought to take a nap.

"There's nothing like it to set one up after a long walk. I imagine that you did rather more than you're used to."

Her manner, pleasantly authoritative,

---

with a touch of sympathy, encouraged a hope that she might understand him. He thanked her, thanked them all cordially, and went to his room and slept two hours.

DRESSING hastily, he went down, to meet the rebuking eyes of Mrs. Gordon, who had made herself unusually lovely for their afternoon together. He was very contrite over his neglect. He had taken a walk, and it had greatly fatigued him, he explained. The stupid secretary had introduced him to some schoolgirls, and they had dragged him off in spite of himself.

"They were duly chaperoned by an older woman," he added guiltily.

To dismiss Miss Crosby as an older woman was slightly disingenuous; but Mrs. Gordon was not thinking of ages.

"Oh," she exclaimed softly, "please don't think—" she bit her lip and looked away.

"Think what?" he asked tremulously.

"Oh—that I wouldn't trust you," she said, and net his gaze with a thrilling glance.

She had given him an opening of which he might have taken advantage the next instant; but as they were staring soulfully into each other's eyes Ethel came out, and after bestowing a nod and smile upon him found a seat nearby and became absorbed in a magazine.

There was no reason whatever why she shouldn't make herself at home wherever she pleased; but her presence clearly annoyed Mrs. Gordon. Ethel of the bronze-brown eyes was deep in her reading, and her back was turned, and yet by a nice calculation Mrs. Gordon decided that the girl was within earshot. She suggested that they move to the north end of the veranda, remarking for Ethel's benefit that it was cooler there. As they approached the spot she had in mind, there, established in a hammock, lay Miss Crosby, with a portfolio in her lap, busily writing. She raised her eyes absently and nodded to Stuart.

Mrs. Gordon's chin lifted perceptibly. She complained in an injured tone that he seemed to have been making a good many friends, and led him out upon the lawn. She was very weak and could not walk far, she said, and indicated a bench under an elm at the edge of the deserted tennis court as a desirable goal.

Stuart brought cushions, and they were comfortably settling themselves when Miss Harkness and Miss Walling strolled out, with their rackets tucked under their arms, and engaged spiritedly in highly sophisticated tennis. They had greeted Stuart with the smile of familiar acquaintance, a fact not lost upon Mrs. Gordon, and to add to her vexation Stuart did not disguise his pleasure in their expertness, even to the point of crying out a brava at brilliant plays.

"The ground is damp," said Mrs. Gordon when this became unbearable. "I shall catch my death of cold if I stay here."

Stuart was perfectly satisfied with the place, and saw no reason for leaving. And besides it was absurd to move again just because the courts were occupied, and thus publish the fact that they were seeking seclusion. Appearances counted for a great deal with Stuart.

They climbed the steps again, passing close to the seemingly unconscious Ethel. Miss Crosby still plied her fountain pen in the hammock. Mrs. Gordon pleaded a headache, and Stuart received only the most grudging smile as the elevator bore her from sight.

WHEN he turned round Miss Crosby was dropping her letters into the office box. He detained her for a moment for the pleasure of hearing her voice, which had struck him as particularly agreeable, and her laugh was as delightful as her voice. She did not ask him whether he had experienced any ill effects from his walk, or refer to his health in any way. This grieved him slightly; but her fine eyes were not unsympathetic. He resolved to tell her at the earliest moment of all he had been obliged to suffer.

At five o'clock he walked reluctantly to the gymnasium, where the hard- hearted superintendent had suggested that he pull weights and swing clubs for half an hour daily.

On the threshold he paused aghast. Miss Crosby and her three charges, the sole occupants of the long room, were variously occupied in performing the most astonishing and bewildering feats. Miss Crosby herself was nimbly climbing a rope; Mabel and Geraldine were executing cartwheels with the greatest zest. Ethel of the bronze-brown eyes, perched on a horizontal bar, noted his entrance immediately, and piped a cheery welcome.

Being a well brought up young man, he was embarrassed, and felt that he must fly immediately from these agile presences, these whirling goddesses in middies and bloomers. Miss Crosby descended with the ease of a practised hand and begged him not to mind them, but to go

on with his exercises. To stand like a ninny and pull weights or swing clubs before these gay young acrobats did not appeal to him.

"If you want to use the rope—said Miss Crosby, as though rope climbing was easily within the range of his powers.

"No; thanks very much," he stammered. "The doctor suggested weight pulling and the clubs; but—"

"Come along then!" she cried with decision.

She trotted toward the rack and chose a pair of the lightest clubs and bade him take off his coat. The others continued their gyrations. He would have preferred to watch them, nervous though their mad performances made him; but Miss Crosby had assumed a brisk, preceptorial air.

"Don't crack your head!" she admonished, seizing a pair of clubs for herself and standing before him. Not in years had he swung a club; but the trick of it came back to him.

"Don't make hard work of it. That's better. That's very good indeed!"

Miss Crosby's own grace and ease as she instructed him in several more complicated movements so fascinated him that he hanged his head cruelly; but he set his teeth and bore it.

THEY next attacked the weights, and he was sawing away manfully when the door opened and Mrs. Gordon, evidently in quest of someone, swept the room with a horrified glance and withdrew. The door banged explosively. Concurrently with the roar three young voices broke out in what seemed to be a lost fragment of a college cheer. Stuart caught his preceptress biting her lip as she turned severely upon the three culprits, who were demurely perched upon the horizontal bar, with their arms encircling one another. As his back had been turned to the door Stuart was unaware of the cause of this jubilant outburst.

"That's enough," said Miss Crosby. "But you must keep it up. A little every day—that's the rule."

He meekly suffered her to hold his coat for him. She was an astonishing person; wonder and admiration filled his soul.

"How long—how long does it take to learn to climb a rope?" he asked faintly.

"Oh, that's simple enough once you get ready for it. You can do it easily just as soon as you've brought yourself up a trifle," she replied carelessly.

"It's wonderful—wonderful!" he said in an awed whisper.

Ethel, the most irrepressible of the trio, took it upon herself at this point to scream and drop from the bar; but before his consternation could find utterance she lighted on her feet, turned a handspring, and was calmly thrusting her loosened hair into place.

He left them, followed by a volley of appeals that he return the next day to continue his instruction. As he disappeared they caught bands, and, dancing before Miss Crosby, chanted:

"She's a 'fraid-cat! She's a 'fraid-cat!"

And these words seemed, in some obscure manner, to refer to Mrs. Gordon.

TWO weeks passed quickly. Mrs. Gordon, having failed by coldness and indifference to win Stuart away from Miss Crosby and the indomitable trio, came out of hiding and was much in evidence. And yet when she was alone with Stuart for a moment one of the quartet at least was sure to appear, either by chance or intent upon some plausible errand. Even when they set off for a stroll these young women were sure to turn up, singly or in pairs. This unaccountable espionage brought to Mrs. Gordon's face an anxious, harried look.

Stuart, on the other hand, having been beguiled upon many tramps, with gymnasium instruction thrown in, was eating three meals a day, sleeping soundly, and rising every morning with zest for the day's adventures. He justified his neglect of Mrs. Gordon on the score of the doctor's recommendation of a more active life for him.

He had now reached a point when a languid saunter through the adjacent village did not satisfy him—and this was Mrs. Gordon's idea of a walk. Nor did her melancholy expressions of sympathy with him as a dying man yield their old pleasure, now that he had known the joy of the quartet's applause at his signs of returning hardihood.

He joined the Crosby party one morning for a walk into a region they had not yet explored. Finding the road impassable, they had recourse to a railroad track which brought them upon a long trestle flung across a deep defile. As they were gaily walking the rails a locomotive shrieked a quarter of a mile away, and at Miss Crosby's sharp command they turned instantly and scampered over the ties. A good five hundred yards lay between them and safety, and they settled down for a lively sprint, with the engineer tooting his whistle to encourage them.

The three younger women were making a lark of the race, and quickly outdistanced Stuart and Miss Crosby. His feet slipped on the rough footing, and the roar of the train frightened him.

"Don't be alarmed," Miss Crosby admonished, accommodating her pace to his. "It's only a freight, and we can make it easily."

He finished in a panic, and reaching the solid roadbed jumped from the track and rolled down the bank. He shut his eyes as the train roared past, and when he opened them guardedly the three girls were kneeling beside him anxiously, while Miss Crosby had torn open his waistcoat, and then—oh, marvelous, unbelievable thing!—placed her head against his heart. He felt its beat under the pressure of her face. This lasted for centuries, he thought; then she rose quickly, peered down into his face, laughed, and struck her hands together smartly.

"Fine! Splendid! Perfect!" she exclaimed.

He sat up and stared as the three irrepressibles began executing a war dance expressive of their relief.

When their boisterous joy had worn itself out Miss Crosby remarked quietly, "Please pardon me. I really thought you had fainted. We were foolish to have tried the trestle—it was my fault. If we'd gone a little farther, something unpleasant might have happened."

ON the return the younger girls kept him in gay humor; but Miss Crosby walked ahead, studiously avoiding him.

Her cheek had rested against his heart: he could not forget it! The scent of her hair taunted him. Innumerable doctors, the most distinguished specialists on both sides of the Atlantic, had applied their heads to the same spot; but this had been very, very different. He was glad he had not fainted and missed that moment with its delightful, intangible sensations. The world was a very different place from the world of an hour ago. He marked her fine carriage as she led the way, her bare head erect, and listened with new interest to her musical laugh when the trio flung a jest at her. And he knew nothing about her! The sense of his ignorance was heavy upon him. They were all set down on the sanatorium register as from New York, and her name he had learned was Isabel. This was precious little to know about a girl who had—oh, incredible thing!—listened to the beating of his heart and held her lovely dark head there while it thumped fully a hundred beats.

MRS. GORDON, rendered desperate by many frustrations of well laid plans, had left a note in the office thanking him for a peace offering of roses. There had been intimations in their recent hurried interviews of her increasing unhappiness; but she hoped he would have a moment—just a moment (underscored heavily)—for her that evening.

He had treated her shabbily. He realized that, and had every honorable intention of making amends.

But as he came out from dinner Geraldine confided to him that tomorrow was Miss Crosby's birthday, and wouldn't he like to walk to the village with her and the other girls to buy a small gift? In the face of all the joy they had given him,

Continued on page 17

How I Saw Men Behave Under Fire

By ARTHUR GLEASON

WHEN this article appears more men will be falling on the field of battle dead and wounded than at any other moment in the world's history. There has never been devised such a test of courage as that of modern artillery fire.

The moaning of the shell, the roar of its explosion, the crumbling of the house a few yards away, the brick dust and dirt shooting up in smoke like the plume of a geyser, the pieces of hot metal pattering on cobbles and on the walls of houses,—these assail the senses as no hand-to-hand clash of the ancient world ever did. Machine guns, shell fire, and shrapnel are accurate and all-inclusive. They sweep a tract clear. I have seen villages of Flanders where no house was left untouched. I have seen fields like a pockmarked face, pitted by high explosives on every rod of their acreage. It is a close-woven net of death that the guns throw out over an entire area. Few can pass in under and then be fortunate enough to slip through that mesh.

One afternoon I saw a little group of men go into Dixmude when the town was being shelled to the ground. They were Red Cross workers. They went in to get some wounded, who lay in the center of the fire, in the cellar of the Hotel de Ville. Those few minutes under an unceasing fire of shells put a flashlight into the consciousness of the little group at work on the wounded.

One Who Lost His Nerve

ONE famous war correspondent, with the ribbons of a half-dozen decorations from other wars fluttering on his chest, stood helpless by the ambulance He lost the color from his face. He trembled. He said, "It is time to go. Why don't we get out of this?" He was unable to give a hand to the wounded.

Dr. Hector Munro became a dreamer. His blue eyes filmed over, as if he were in a trance. The shattering glass, the dead bodies, and the recurring roar of the shells that were very close, some of them striking the Hotel de Ville where he worked,—all this outer horror was very far away from him. He carried out the wounded, strapped them into the motor, went back to the dead and dying. He worked like an automaton, efficiently, without waste motion.

Lieutenant Robert de Broqueville, son of the Prime Minister of Belgium, was a man in a glory. He was as happy and excited as a boy at a baseball game. Danger touched him with joy. He charged in and out of the cellar where the wounded were huddled, lifted, ran out with his loads, called to us cheerily, and finally ran down a street that was in ruins, because some wounded men were reported yonder. He did not reappear for some hours. He came with his wounded.

Our Gallant Boy Driver

SMITH, the London boy driver, whose salary is two pounds a week, was as calm and silent as he is at mealtime. He carried stretchers, arranged blankets, buckled straps, and ran his car with the same slightly bored expression on his face.

"There comes one," he said as a slow, spent obus sailed by him and buried itself in the yellow brick of the Hotel de Ville. In his spare moments he hunted for fragments of shell, and pocketed them for souvenirs of the afternoon. His search was as slow and careful as that of a child picking up shells of another sort on the seashore. I shall not forget his stooping figure as he reached around for keepsakes among the litter of the Grand Place, or his level voice as he shoved in a stretcher and asked me "All right in there?" He drove with such care when the man inside was in pain from the motion! He had no thought of himself. It would have surprised him to learn that his strength was good to be with. He is the bravest man I met, among many brave.

There was another youthful driver, a lad of seventeen years. He had been reared delicately. He was fat and immature. Most of his vitality had gone to growth. We had crossed the Channel together, and he had asked me many curious questions of what it was like to be under fire. This day in Dixmude was his initiation. It was oversudden and violent; but he stood his ground because of the English in him.

"This is a real fight, isn't it?" he said.

I assured him that it was.

"This is pretty hot, isn't it?" he asked a moment after.

I told him that it was damned hot.

All this was immensely comforting to him; for it meant the inner torment was justified. Any sane person under fire has a desire to run away, and this boy wanted to be told that it was worth while to stick around. He stayed, and brought out a carload of wounded. He was sick at his stomach for many hours after he got back to safety, and then developed an attack of grippe. The point of it is not that he was ill later on, but that he held himself together while there was work to be done.

Did Not Duck the Shells

I SAW Smith at work on another day. He is slight of build, and looks like one of the city's weaklings, who would break under strain; high shoulders and angular hitch in his walk, a man who talks in monosyllables.

"Go into Dixmude to the house beyond the Caeskerke Station, and bring the wounded," the Corporal ordered him.

Smith cranked up his engine, and traveled down the road to Dixmude. He drove to the inn where the Sengalese were stationed. It was the intermittent target of German shells. The front of it was blackened with explosives. The panes of glass were shattered out of the windows. The high car with its brown canvas covering was a fair mark in the clear morning light. Cool and expert, he turned his car, and brought it to a standstill in the middle of the road. A battery of four German guns sent four small obus just over his car. They struck the wall of the deserted house opposite. The black men standing outside the inn flattened themselves against the wall. A couple of them ran inside. Two wounded men, each of them with an arm wound, ran to the ambulance and climbed inside.

Fifty feet away, from the yard of the inn, a strange figure came slowly. It was a Sengalese with his foot shot away. He came on his hands and knees. Again the battery of four guns fired, and the whistle of the shots was audible for a second of time before they cut overhead into the house opposite. Smith did not duck his head. He stood by his car waiting for the trailing black man to come. There are lots of men who would have gone out of that accurate fire with the two wounded men.

It was a dreary wait for the third man scratching along over the ground. Two more shells came past, and the negro arrived at the step. Smith lifted him in and brought the three back to safety.

Some Brave German Officers

OF battle gallantry I saw several instances. At a skirmish at Melle between Germans and Belgians I saw a German hussar ride out of a wood one thousand yards beyond his own lines. I happened to be standing in the road where he emerged. He came out of the trees as silently as an Indian. He was entirely cool, unhurried; only his eyes were alert.

If the Belgians were still in possession of the road, they would shoot him down. But his men would hear the volley, and would not advance. If the Belgians had retired, then his men could come on safely. He was taking all the chances, in order to save an ambuscade of his men. But there wasn't a tremor in him. The Belgians had retired: so he smiled at us, and rode farther down the road, to gain as much ground as possible.

My wife and I were in the village of Zele when a band of twenty Uhlans rode in. The three officers had their pistols drawn. Their faces were set and stern. Their men were laughing. One of them talked with us about New York. A few hundred yards beyond them, just over the railroad tracks on the road to Ghent, there was a reel brick house sheltering a dozen Belgian soldiers. Behind a cover of bushes there were fifty more. At the turn of the road, a quarter-mile away, there were many hundred Belgians, and at the, corner a machine gun.

It was the job of the Uhlans to learn if the village itself was a cover for troops. If it was they would be wiped out; but their main body of troops would remain back and not be ambuscaded. It was even chances that the Belgians down the road would rake them down with rifle and machine gun. The Uhlans inspected the village, andthen sent word for their troops to enter. It is for pieces of utter daring like this that the Iron Cross is given. The death rate of Uhlans is high.

Dying, He Smoked Cigarettes

RADCLYFFE DUGMORE, the English naturalist, and I were present at a skirmish in Aalst, where the Belgians had made a barricade across a narrow street. They used a market-garden cart, sods of earth, and bags of fish. As the shrapnel pattered around them I saw one and another laugh, arid then, as I caught his eye, spit, as if he were spitting out a piece of the bullet. That humorous defiance is rather characteristic of the seasoned soldier.

I saw a Belgian physician, Dr. Van de [?] Ghinst, when a shell fell and exploded a hundred feet in front of him. He stopped an instant to let the air clear, and then walked on past the place. "That is nothing at all," he said. "They come all the time." They did, where he worked.

That is the active phase of courage. There is another, the long-suffering courage that endures grimly. That too we have seen. We have brought in three thousand wounded men. I had an English boy, who had his bicep muscle shot away in the battle of Ypres. He had lain for thirty hours, with only a rude first dressing of antiseptic and bandage. All the color had gone out of his face. He fainted twice on my shoulder. He did not groan nor complain. Once, in a hoarse whisper, he asked for water.

Mrs. Knocker and I brought up from Dover to London a Belgian soldier who was dying. Not a moan came out of him. I lighted his cigarettes for him, and he always smiled his gratitude. Many time I have prepared smokes for men with the arm gone. There is always a humorous smile from the wounded man at his own helplessness. He regards the attention as a rather good joke on himself.

At Nieuport one evening a boy ran toward me sobbing, and holding up on high his right arm. The index finger had been shot away clean to the butt. His face was wet and shiny in the lanternlight with the tears of a child. We told him it was nothing. "C'est rien." We told him that other men were wounded more grievously. He calmed himself at once. He had got himself out of perspective for the moment.

Courage of the Wounded

WHEN the fighting broke out in sudden angry spurts our cars were loaded with bleeding soldiers. On busy days we carried an average of thirty men. These men were brought to the base hospital in our motor ambulances from the trenches barricade, wood, house, dressing station, and roadside. They would have lain wounded for a length of time varying from one hour to twelve hours. Some of them died on the trip in. One of our drivers, fresh from London, on his first trip put in three grievously wounded men at the front, and took out three dead men at the hospital. Many of our passengers suffered much pain.

I remember a Belgian officer with a shattered arm. Every swerve of the ambulance was a hurt to him.

"Oh, go slower, if you please!" he would say. "I beg you, Sir, to stop a moment!"

Never once on the ten-mile drive did he forget to speak with courtesy, in spite of his fever and pain.

We brought in a man whose face had been tapped by a shell, so that the veins had to be bound. He lay unmurmuring. Only he kept picking at the bandages, because of the itching of the wounds. I sat on his arms, or he would have plucked away the bandages and bled to death.

I saw eleven civilians, men, women, and children, in the hospital at Wetteren. They each had bayonet wounds in their bodies. They lay without groaning. One of them wept as he told me how they had been marched in front of troops. When they fell on their faces to escape the rifle fire the soldiers had prodded them with bayonets to make them stand again. I went to each of the eleven. One was girl of twelve years, with light hair. Her back was laid open to the bone. One was a woman, white-haired and wrinkled, perhaps eighty years old. She had bayonet thrust through her left thigh. They all seemed patient as they lay there. We all, a little group of men, came out crying and swearing.

Who Was Marie Dupont?

By ADELE LUEHRMANN

CHAPTER IV (Continued)

OH, don't you dance, Mr. Gavock?" Miss Lowther asked, settling herself and arranging her flowers effectively.

"My dear young lady! Dance at my age?"

Her blue eyes widened as with huge surprise. "But you're not old!"

He knew it was blatant flattery and nothing else, but for the life of him he couldn't help liking it. He smiled, half at her, half at his own acknowledged weakness.

"You must learn," she said.

"Please tempt me!"

She smiled, her eyes narrowed, straight into his eyes. "Did you like my dancing?"

"I was charmed," he said.

"I'm so glad!" she murmured fervently. "I've worked so hard—oh, terribly hard! And I'm so ambitious. I want to do something quite wonderful some day, something different. I want—" She broke off, and releasing her hold on her roses clasped her hands on her breast and leaned toward him. "I want to be the greatest dancer in the world!"

"Well, well! That's rather a big order, isn't it?" he asked.

"Is it?" She seemed to consider. Then she sighed. "Perhaps it is," she admitted with a slow shrug; "but I am as I am! I can't want anything less than the best. I'm that way in everything,—books, pictures, people—men." At the final word her eyes dropped to her flowers. "To a man who realized my ideal I would give anything—everything!"

Gavock frowned in quick distaste. Really she was too obvious. He could not resist remarking dryly, "But if you are to be the greatest dancer in the world, you can't afford to give either time or thought to mere men."

She sighed prettily, and raised her roses close to her face. Only a veiled half-glance reached him. "That's woman's eternal struggle, isn't it,—the struggle between art and—and love?" When he said nothing she suddenly changed her manner. Dropping her flowers into her lap again, she looked up at him, smiling frankly. "Of course I was speaking of my great ambition, my life aim; but after all life is made up of little things, and each day brings its own small wishes and desires. For instance, tonight my immediate ambition is to have supper with a man so rich that I sha'n't have to look at the right-hand column of the menu before I look at the left."

Gavock laughed out heartily. She was charming when she was like that, natural and girlish. "Dear, dear!" he said. "You are a mercenary young person!"

"Am I?" She turned her glance away, and her mouth suddenly hardened. "I'm a very hungry one," she said.

Her tone was so serious that, startled, Gavock shot a sharp look at her. She stared before her, no hint of jesting in her face. He felt utterly at a loss how to take her, and she seemed indisposed to help him. Presently he spoke, feeling that the words were being literally dragged out of him.

"Will you honor me by taking supper with me?"

"Oh, I didn't mean that!" she cried, turning wide blue eyes upon him in shocked protest. "Please don't think I was hinting for an invitation! Of course I'd love to accept if—if you really want me."

She gave him a wistful glance and looked away. She was acting again, he perceived. He was conscious of a sudden distaste, almost disgust of her.

"Then that's settled," he said simply.

THE music starting at that instant for the following number on the program cut short the conversation. The next moment Gavock had forgotten his companion; for Amarinth and his dancing partner had appeared on the stage, sweeping in on the full swing of the melody.

Gavock leaned forward in his seat, every muscle tense. Around him he was sensitively aware of a startled rustling, then a gasping silence. The girl was indeed a vision of arresting loveliness. If in the dressing room, surrounded by other types of youthful beauty, she had shone supreme, here, with Amarinth's black-clothed form as a foil, behind the glare of the footlights, and with all the exaggeration that the stage itself lends, Marie Dupont seemed an exotic creature in her flamelike gown, a strange presence with a radiance that dazzled and allured.

Gavock's eyes followed her face as it offered itself to his view from an ever changing angle; now the pure profile, again only the curve of a cheek and black crown of hair, and again, above the rim of Amarinth's shoulder, the full face.

It was for the full face that he now began to watch eagerly. He had been so sure that another sight of it would recall to his mind the time and place that he had seen it first! But the memory still eluded him; though he had a sense of its being nearer than before. One more look at the eyes, and he'd have it! That was his feeling; but again and again the chance came and brought him nothing.

Forgetful of his surroundings, he vented his disappointment in a sharp exclamation of impatience. The girl at his side turned to him quickly. He felt the movement, and involuntarily glanced at her.

"Don't you like it?" he heard her say. But he did not at once seize her meaning: in his absorption in the dancer he had not noticed the dance. As he stupidly stared in momentary bewilderment his attention was caught by the sharp contrast between the face before him and the one his eyes had just left. Here was hard, cold perfection, there small faults of outline were suffused and lost in the glow of an ardent spirit.

When the sense of Miss Lowther's question reached him he parried, "Do you?"

She smiled back narrowly. "I asked first."

"What do you call the dance?"

"The program calls it 'Fantaisie de la Russie.' Madame Adrienne arranged it. It's a combination of various figures from Russian ballets. Of course Mr. Amarinth is little more than a lay figure: it is virtually a solo for Miss Dupont."

SHE was right about that, Gavock presently decided. The part his young friend played was chiefly that of target for the pas seals of his charming partner. Some of these were executed with his arm supporting her, others as she whirled about him, others with him standing on one side as a mere spectator.

To do nothing before an audience is not easy, and Gavock observed with satisfaction that Guy accomplished it gracefully. Indeed, he seemed unconscious of himself, wholly absorbed in the movements of his partner, alert in his emptiest moments for her return to his embrace.

"He's mad about her," Miss Lowther remarked, as if divining Gavock's thought. "Do you like her dancing?"

"It's very good, isn't it?" Gavock replied. "To me it seems amazingly good."

"You are right, Mr. Gavock, it is—amazing!"

The word was spoken with such significant emphasis that Gavock turned a startled look

Here and There with Millionaires

---

of inquiry on the speaker. What did she mean? What did she know?

"It's amazing," Miss Lowther explained, "because Miss Dupont says that she had never had dancing lessons before she joined Madame Adrienne's class this winter. Now I don't believe that."

Gavock had detected the note of jealousy in his companion's tone. But the arresting note in her speech was the hint at mystery, secrecy. Did she know anything?

"But why should she not tell the truth—"

HIS question was cut short by a sudden burst of applause. Then suddenly the applause stopped. An expectant hush fell on the room.

Gavock glanced up at the musicians, wondering why they did not play. Their instruments were in position, their eyes were on their leader. She stood at the balcony rail, her bow hand resting on it, clasping her bow, her violin against her shoulder, ready. She was looking down at the dancer below, the muscles of her face taut, her eyes narrow in the intensity of her gaze.

From side to side the dancer swayed; again and again. Suddenly she began to move slowly to the right, making a strange, sweeping movement with her arms.

The Russian girl straightened herself with a start, her bow flew to her instrument, and she drew it. Behind her other bow arms moved. The result was a shrieking discord. Irma Niklova wheeled furiously. Her bow cut the air in a savage gesture of arrest. Then she turned back, drew her bow across her violin, and played alone.

Now again the dancer paused, her arms swept slowly forward and grew tense, then with a swift movement she strained them backward as though pushing something from her. Her head sank back upon her shoulders, stretching abnormally the long line from chin to bosom. Thus she began to advance as in a stately march; but by some movements of hidden muscles the brilliant draperies of her gown were kept swirling about her like wind-driven flames.

From Irma Niklova's violin haunting dissonances made up a strain that was like a dirge, wild and barbaric.

Gavock looked at Guy Amarinth. He had withdrawn somewhat to the back of the stage, where he stood forgotten and forgetful, apparently, of himself and everything save the form of the dancing girl on which his eyes were bent.

Now the stately forward advance was halted. Marie Dupont raised her head, her chin shot forward, her arms swept round upon a circle and sank crossed upon her breast. Her eyes stared out, wide and expressionless, her teeth showed in a mirthless smile. She began to execute some rapid sideward steps; her knees bent almost to a sitting posture; her feet darted out alternately from beneath her skirts.

RUSSIAN!" One heard the hissing of the word as it passed from lip to lip. Something at last appeared familiar. There was a rustle through the audience as of relaxed tension.

Another change. The dancer rose again to her full height. Her lips closed to a thin line, her eyes narrowed to a black slit. And she began a dizzying whirl, to right, then left, in ever increasing rapidity.

The violin of the Russian followed every movement, clinging like a shadow. In the balcony the player seemed no longer to watch the dance. She was like the reflection that moved by the other's volition. Her bow swerved and trembled, faster, wilder, louder, leaping along the scale in intervals that were weird and harrowing to Western nerves. From the audience came a sound that was louder, more poignant, than a rustle. It was as though involuntarily many moved, squirming. But no sound came from any lips.

Then with the sharp explosive noise of snapping sinew the music stopped. A violin string had broken.

A woman in the audience cried out hysterically, there was a discordant shiver from the violin. Irma Niklova thrust the useless instrument upon the musician nearest her and seized his own. But she was too late. The dancer had stopped.

Marie Dupont swayed dizzily, and several people started from their seats; but Amarinth had reached her side, and she moved into his arms in dancing position. He stumbled awkwardly into step with her, and together they glided across the stage. Watching intently, Gavock saw her look up toward the music gallery from which only silence came. He too looked up there.

As once before, the white face of the Russian girl stared down uncertainly; but only for a moment. Abruptly she began to play, and at her signal the men about her swept into the melody, which Gavock recognized as the same that the applause had interrupted.

"What was it? What happened?" he asked Miss Lowther.

"I don't know," she answered with a puzzled frown. "I never saw that part before, the part she did alone, after they clapped. She and Niklova must have rehearsed it privately and Adrienne kept it for a surprise." Her lips tightened. "You must have seen much dancing in Paris. Do you think that was the work of a novice?"

Then a young man claimed Miss Lowther, and she left Gavock with a gay reminder of their supper engagement.

Left alone, he stared a moment at the curtained entrance at the back of the stage. The face of Marie Dupont seemed to float there, mocking him, as earlier in the day it had floated just beyond his reach. If only for a moment he could lose his sense of surroundings, he might pierce the veil that dangled just before his eyes, shutting out the scene of which that lovely face had made a part. It was so near that a word, a look, at any moment—

MR. GAVOCK! Do come here!" It was the voice of Mrs. Estell calling.

He saw her in a group nearby. A few steps brought him to her side.

"What is the name of that little dance place in Paris—over in Montmartre? You go up a narrow street where a cab can't go, then down some steps. Poor Dick took me there on our wedding trip to see a dancer everybody was raving about. She did that wheeling business Marie Dupont did tonight, and had a flame-colored gown that gave the same sort of effect."

"It must have been the Drowned Cat," said Tommy Nave.

"It wasn't. I know it wasn't, because I teased Dick to take me there, and he wouldn't. It was some kind of a bird—the Red Canary or the Green Swan or—"

"The Purple Pigeon!" The words were Gavock's. They were almost a shout; yet it seemed to him that someone else had spoken them.

"That's it! The Purple Pigeon!" Mrs. Estell cried. "I'm so glad you remembered. I couldn't, and it was simply driving me mad!"

"You're driving me mad!" said Tommy Nave. "Listen to that music! And we're missing it!"

He swept her away, and Gavock stood alone again, looking after the rapidly departing crowds.

"Le Pigeon Pourpre!"

The veil was rent. He had his desire. He stared vacantly, seeing the vision in his mind that the name evoked. A shudder ran over him. Why, the thing was incredible! And yet—

CHAPTER V

IN the dressing room Irma Niklova was replacing the broken string on her violin. Beside her sat Madame Adrienne.

"Well, my child, and what do you say now of this Miss Dupont?"

Irma's thin shoulders rose and fell in a weary shrug. "The first day, Madame, you said to me, 'She is a dancer,' and I answered you, 'Evidently.' Is it not so?"

Madame Adrienne nodded.

"Eh bien! Today I know no more than then. I say this only: Here is something we do not understand, something we do not know."

"When she says she has not danced before she lies," said Madame.

"Evidently."

"And tonight—your word of honor is it that you have not rehearsed together? That part that she has never done—"

The girl's fingers paused in their work, and she looked up. "Dear Madame, you are my friend, my one friend. Without the work you give me to do I should starve—I and the brother who is my life. Why should I deceive you?"

"But you played the music—you followed at once. It could not have been better. How was that possible?"

"Madame, listen! My father played first violin in the orchestra of the Petersburg opera. That you know. A violin was in my hand when I could not yet walk or talk. Already at seven I played for the rehearsal of the ballet. A thousand times have I played the music of 'Kaneshka.' It was from 'Kaneshka' that you made the dance for Miss Dupont, was it not?"

"You are right."

"You never danced in Petersburg, you have told me, Madame: only in Moscow and Paris. Of those cities I do not know. But in Petersburg the ensemble from which you took the steps for Miss Dupont's dance was followed always by the grand solo. A thousand times have I seen it, a thousand times played it."

Madame Adrienne nodded. "The grand solo—it was that she danced. It was not I who taught her that—I! The thought did not come to me of such a thing. The grand solo from 'Kaneshka'—mon Dieu! For that one begins to dance as you begin to play, my child,—in the cradle."

"When I saw what she was doing it was my fingers that followed, not my head. I could play it in my grave."

"Who is the girl?" Madame demanded. "Marie Dupont! A French name; but she says she is English. She lives in America with Americans, and she dances like a Russian."

"It is as I have said, Madame. Here is something we do not understand, something we do not know."

"Marie Dupont!" Madame repeated the name again thoughtfully. "It tells nothing."

"Nothing!" agreed Irma Niklova.

"It is as if in English one should say, 'Mary Smith.'"

CHAPTER VI

THEY'VE begun to dance! We're missing it!"

Marie Dupont sprang up and faced Guy Amarinth expectantly. They were alone in one of the Esplanade's small reception , whither he had led her for a cool, quiet moment as soon as the applause that followed their dance had finally stopped.

He did not move as she stood looking down at him.

"It's a waltz, and we're missing it," she repeated.

"Well, it's mine, and I want to miss it. Sit down—please!" He drew her back to the seat beside him. "You're tired, anyway."

"Tired? I could dance forever!" She flung her arms out exultingly.

He gave a short laugh. "I thought you were going to when you left me there twiddling my thumbs. Really, I thought you might have told me you were going to spring that new part."

"New part! Why will you say that?" she exclaimed. "There was no new part. It was all exactly as we had rehearsed it— exactly!"

He shook his head. "No, I had never rehearsed the part you danced after Miss Niklova stopped the orchestra and played alone. Why, I'd never even seen it."

"Of course you had. Why will you keep saying that? You've simply forgotten it, that's all. Miss Niklova told me she was going to play alone because the orchestra got the time all wrong. That was the only change."

"Oh, all right," he conceded. "I must have dreamed it, I guess. I'm always dreaming about you anyway. Wish I could make you dream a little about me, Marie."

She started up again, and again he held her back.

"I'm not going to let you run away this time. You've got to listen to me tonight! I can't go on like this. I want my answer. Do you love, me or don't you?" His tone was determined; but his eyes watched her face anxiously.

She answered reluctantly, her gaze on his hand which covered her own. "I don't know."

"But you must know! Why, you—let me kiss you once!"

"It isn't fair to remind me of that. You promised to forget it."

He laughed shortly. "How could I forget it when it was the one bit of hope you've ever given me? I was half mad with happiness that night—and the next day. The next day—what do you suppose I did?"

She looked up wonderingly. He gazed back, grimly silent.

"What did you do?" she asked at last.

"Oh, nothing much: just got a marriage license."

"Guy!"

"Well, I said I was crazy! For weeks you'd been holding me off—"

"I didn't promise anything," she interrupted in a low voice.

"No; but you'd said once that you didn't believe you would ever marry unless you were to do it on the spur of the moment, unless the man just happened to strike you at the psychological instant."

"I didn't mean that literally,—you might have known I didn't!" she protested. "And yet—I don't know—perhaps I did."

She turned away from him, and her dark eyes narrowed thoughtfully. He waited.

"To go away—alone with the man you love—just the two of you—and be married with no fuss and feathers, no mob of people that you don't care for and that don't care for you—to be married quietly—no one to know until—afterward!"

She paused, and there was again silence between them. Suddenly, as though the undercurrents of their moods had met, his arm slipped round her, and she yielded to its pressure. Her head dropped to his shoulder, and lips reached for lips.

IT was a long kiss. A swell of distant melody, far-away voices that laughed stole into the silence of the little room, unnoted.

"Marry me tonight!" he whispered.

"Tonight?"

"Why not? We'll go away now, just you and I, as you said, without any fuss or any people. I've got the license."

"Here?"

"No; at my rooms. Listen! We can slip away—it's early." He looked at his watch "Just eleven. We'll get a taxi, stop at my rooms a moment, then find a minister—"

"What minister?"

"Anyone—yours.

"He'd ask questions."

"Well, there's the one that married Ned Jessup and Grace Eustis. He doesn't know us, and he's near. We can do it and be back in half an hour."

He watched her eagerly. She did not meet his glance. She bit her lip nervously.

"I wonder what Aunt Alicia would say—and Hugh?"

"They wouldn't care," he urged. "They know me. They wouldn't object if we told them, would they?"

"No."

"Marie, if you love me, you'll do it!"

"I do love you!" she said, turning troubled eyes to his.

"Then you will?"

He caught her in his arms again and tried to draw her face to his; but she pressed her hands against his shoulders, keeping herself at arm's length.

"Do you really love me?" she asked.

"Yes."

"More than anything else in the world?"

"Yes."

"I wonder if you really do?"

"Don't wonder, Dear: believe it!" His voice was very tender, very earnest.

A minute more she searched his face. It

Continued on page 18

She Makes Blue Ribbon Bread

MRS. J. R. KIERNAN of New York carried off the blue ribbon in the bread-making contest recently held by the Housewives' League. For fineness of grain combined with lightness, for sweetness of flavor, and for regularity of shape, the proof of a well moderated oven, her loaves were easily first.

Yet the prize winner isn't above admitting that there is an element of uncertainty in this, as in other creative enterprises. The visitor to her shining kitchen carries away an impression of delightful recklessness. Her "cups" of milk and sugar spill themselves over in quite an irresponsible way, and it seems as if her bread rises with corresponding abandon.

The prize winner is just an everyday home maker, she tells you, and the winning loaves were made quite matter-of-factly for the family table. But word came of the contest at the league, of which Mrs. Kiernan is an enthusiastic member; so she sent them down.

Her Bread Has Personal Charm

WHAT attracted the laywoman to the table where the loaves reposed in state was their extraordinary personal charm. They were round, for one thing. Mrs. Kiernan kneads her dough into two balls, and puts them to bed for the night side by side in a warm, well covered tin (you must have all your ingredients and utensils the same temperature in bread making, you know), and they come out in the morning Siamese twins of crisp, fragrant, brown lightness.

The winner of the muffin prize, Miss May Spinney, is a person of responsibility; for she cooks for Katherine B. Davis, Commissioner of Corrections. It is reassuring to hear that; for even a commissioner's health and spirits depend very much on the fuel she receives three times a day. Queen Alexandra said good-by to her chef when he left for the front with tears and a gold cigarette case. Dr. Davis is both fortunate and wise in having a cook who will never leave her to go into the business of killing.

Says Mrs. Julian Heath, president of the Housewives' League, "The contest did far more than merely produce perfect loaves of bread. It opened up a whole new field of inquiry and knowledge. Good bread means good flour. So the women learned about flour, its manufacture, and where it comes from. The careful, thoughtful making of a single loaf of bread means a deeper interest in agriculture, economics, and finally sociology and even politics."

Death in the Ice Crevasses

SIR DOUGLAS MAWSON lived to tell the tale. For two years he and his brave party pushed their way across frozen areas into the unexplored regions that lie south of Australia. They found new lands, and added much to the geographical and scientific knowledge of the region, all of which is set forth in Sir Douglas' new book, "The Home of the Blessed" (J. B. Lippincott Co.).

But the knowledge was not gained without great cost. Two of the party were left in the ice regions; one of them, Lieutenant Ninnis, at the bottom of an ice crevasse. How deep that crevasse may be no man knows; for no sound came out of it to tell of the destruction of Ninnis and his dogs. It opened silently, and in one single instant man and sledge had disappeared together. Sir Douglas describes the disappearance of Ninnis, who was traveling directly behind him.

"I next looked back in reply to the anxious gaze of Dr. Mertz, who had halted in his tracks in an attitude suggesting that something was amiss. Nothing met my eye but a single sledge track running back into the distance. I was alone! Where were Ninnis and his dogs and sledge?

"Leaving my sledge, I hastened back along the track, thinking that possibly a rise in the ground curtailed the view. There was no such good fortune, however; for soon I was horrified to meet a gaping hole in the surface about eleven feet in diameter. The lid of the crevasse had broken in! Two sledge tracks led up to it on the far side: only one continued beyond. How was it that I had escaped? The only explanation appeared to lie in the fact that Ninnis had walked by the side of his sledge; whereas just before reaching the crevasse I had jumped on mine. The weight of a man's body bearing on the area of his foot is a formidable load, and no doubt Ninnis thus broke through the arch of the roof.

Hopeless Search for Ninnis

FRANTICALLY waving to Mertz to bring up my sledge, upon which was some Alpine rope, I leaned over and shouted into the dark depths below. No sound came back except the moaning of a dog caught on a shelf just visible 150 feet down. The poor animal had a broken back, and was attempting to sit up with the front part of its body, while the hinder portion lay limp. Another dog was by its side, apparently quite dead. We took turns about leaning over the edge on a rope, calling into the darkness, in the hope that our companion might be still alive. For three hours we called unceasingly; but no answering sound came back."

So died Lieutenant Ninnis, one of the army of heroes who have counted life as a little thing to give in exchange for any increase in the knowledge of truth.

A Convict for Life; but—

EXACTLY how much money Louis Victor Eytinge is making each year no one but Eytinge knows. He is serving a life term for murder in prison at Florence, Arizona.

Before his present sentence began he was a forger. It was not until the prison gate had closed behind him forever that he earned an honest dollar.

They told him in the prison that he was dying of consumption. Unless the lean prison fare could be supplemented by rich milk and eggs there seemed little hope for him. Milk and eggs cost money, and forgery, the only trade he knew, was useless in a penitentiary.

One day he noticed some of his fellow prisoners making hatbands and belts of horsehair, to be sold through the bars to visitors. This gave him an idea. He wrote to curio dealers, offering to sell them souvenirs; and they replied, agreeing to handle the goods. His letters had that instinctive touch that marks the born advertising writer. Some of those to whom he wrote recognized the gift, and were quick to urge him to develop it. Within a year Eytinge was doing work for more than one large firm,—re-writing their mail-order letters and catalogues, and spreading out gradually into the various forms of advertising writing.

Interest in Eytinge grew, and his own interest, half deadened by long repression, awoke to new life. He is counted now one of the unusually successful mail-order experts of the West.

Have You a Broad Back or a Narrow Back?

JOEL E. GOLDTHWAITE, a professor in the Harvard Medical School, says that, roughly speaking, all people may be divided into these two types. Furthermore, he avers that the types are indicative of character.

Calculating, non-nervous persons, gifted with the organizing kind of mind, usually have broad backs. Those with narrow backs are mentally quicker, more alert, and more sensitive and imaginative. They are seers of visions. Pioneers have narrow backs.

There is the same sort of difference in horses, by which the heavy draft animal is distinguished from the relatively light "expresser," accustomed to do its work on the trot.

Recognition of the two types in human beings, and of the fact that they are adapted to different kinds of work, is already manifested in the labor market. It is not uncommon for contractors employing large numbers of laborers to call for so many "broad backs" and so many "narrow backs."

The "broad back" is capable of performing hard, heavy work day after day without undue strain. The "narrow back" is more useful for climbing telegraph poles, running surveying lines, and other forms of labor demanding agility and alertness.

The narrow-backed child cannot endure without injury an amount of fatigue that is hardly felt by the more heavily built, broad-backed youngster. And if overfatigue be long continued, it brings deterioration, mental as well as physical.

That the "narrow back" requires more gentle and careful handling than the "broad back" is already recognized at Wellesley, where slender girls are encouraged to take the course in five years instead of four. Thus they get the benefit of all that the college can offer without suffering strain.

Growing children are plastic creatures, capable of being molded into good or bad physical shape. To treat the two types as if they were alike is as unreasonable as it would be to hitch a dray horse and light carriage horse together and expect them to do satisfactory work.

Strangely enough, according to Professor Goldthwaite, each of the two types has its own characteristic diseases. Thus broad-backed people are specially liable to Bright's disease, diabetes, and arteriosclerosis; while narrow-backed persons more commonly suffer from tuberculosis, nervous ailments, and infectious maladies.

Mark Twain's Portrait on a Cow

HERE is a story pertaining to natural history that might be considered in the same line with the jumping frog of Calaveras, and is guaranteed to be entirely true.

There is now being exhibited throughout the country a cow that bears a striking silhouette of the late Mark Twain. What is perhaps a still more remarkable coincidence is the fact that the cow was born about the time that the distinguished author died in 1910. The white patch in which the silhouette appears is the shape of the map of the United States.

To Cure Leprosy He Became a Leper

NO monument will be erected to him, few persons outside the close confines of official circles will ever hear his name, but Sir George Turner, who recently died, was one of the world's heroes. He was braver than the men who face death in battle; for he voluntarily chose a living death. He spent his life in studying leprosy, and he paid the penalty. He died a leper.

He had been in the British colonial service in Africa since 1895, where his first service was the discovery of a special treatment of cattle by inoculation for a disease known as rinderpest, which had cost the government thousands of dollars annually. At the outbreak of the Boer War he volunteered, and after its close he became greatly interested in a leper hospital near Pretoria, containing fifty Dutch and forty native patients. Night and morning he visited the patients, his Saturdays and Sundays were given over wholly to them, and he acquired thus a detailed knowledge of the disease almost unequaled by any other authority.

But he was soon to begin to pay the cost. Dining one day with a prominent Norwegian from a section of Norway known to have many lepers, he asked his guest whether he had ever seen any. The Norwegian declared rather emphatically that he had never spoken to or seen a leper.

"That you can never say again," replied the doctor; "for you are speaking to one now."

The disease had fastened its clutches upon him. For a number of years it progressed without reaching the contagious state, and during that period his son remained with him; but his friends, even though they professed to fear nothing, seldom visited him. "The leper leads a lonely life," he once said; "but there comes a time to most of us when concealment is no longer possible, when, with faces disfigured, or with hands from which one or more fingers are missing, we are no longer pleasant company to be with. Then we prefer to be lonely."

He did not succeed in finding a cure for the disease; but he laid a foundation of scientific observation on which other men may build. In 1913 his seclusion was terrupted long enough for him to receive the message that his King had conferred knighthood upon him. It was a fittings tribute to a brave man from the head of the nation that he had served so well.

It is not as Sir George Turner, however, that he will be longest remembered, but as Dr. Turner, the scientist who laid his life as a sacrifice on the altar of science, and whose letter to the British Medical Journal, signed simply "A Leper," is the standard authority on this dread disease.

105 Years Old Still Preaching

N0 one has ever figured how many or how few live to be one hundred and five; but it is safe to conjecture that out of the millions of children that were born in 1810 not more than twenty-five still survive.

One of these twenty-five (if twenty-five there be) is Mrs. Mary Douglass Goddard of Brunswick, Maine, a "preaching elder" of the Society of Friends, whose activities in behalf of the faithful still continue. Mrs. Goddard, or "Aunt Mary," as she is known to Quakers everywhere, as a "preaching elder" has worked among her people for almost three-quarters of a century. Hers has been a typical Quaker life, quiet, strong, spiritual, abounding in good deeds.

"I'm Losing My Memory—"

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

A SUBSCRIBER who is disturbed because he is losing his memory for names and faces asks me to write on "amnesia" or loss of memory. He sends me three newspaper clippings which may be paraphrased as follows:

An athletic young man, blond, six feet tall, is a patient in the Volunteer Hospital, a victim of amnesia. For six days the youth, who appears to be between eighteen and twenty years old, vainly tried to recollect something or somebody connected with his life prior to midnight of May 18. Every known test has been applied, but without result, so far as the restoration of memory is concerned.

An old woman who spoke with a German accent approached Patrolman Dawson at Broadway and 58th street late yesterday afternoon, and said that her name was Mrs. Caroline Reiman, that she was sixty-nine years old, and had forgotten where she lived. She was taken to the Polyclinic Hospital, where it was said she was suffering from melancholia and exposure.

Charles Hoyer, at Bellevue Hospital, identified as his daughter Lillian E. Hoyer, the young woman who was found wandering on Fifth avenue near 10th street, clad only in her nightdress and stockings. The girl, who is twenty years old, has been suffering from nervous trouble of late.

These cases are so common now as to excite hardly more than passing interest or curiosity. Yet their origin is founded in some of the most significant and complex features of psychopathology,—that relation of the ego to morbid states of the mind or body.

Now when, because of nervous exhaustion, shock, grief, accident, sickness, fit, fright, or other cause, the mind fails to associate sensations with former experiences, we have the very serious condition known as amnesia. Familiar faces, remembered haunts, and the most common incidents of life fail to be corelated. Our minds, or rather our memories, have become completely blank, and fail to respond to stimuli.

Indeed, some amnesiacs accept suggestions, either from their own consciousness, or from that of others, and adopt a different personality, living in this personality as though an entirely distinct ego temporarily inhabited their bodies.

Scores of classical instances of this peculiar aberration are recorded, in which ministers became shopkeepers or roistering sailors, school teachers became seamstresses or restaurant waitresses, only to be ultimately shocked into their original state of mind, retaining afterward no recollection of what they did, or even where they lived while amnesic.

We all experience partial amnesia at times, as for instance when we fail to remember where we put our glasses, or what the fish we so persistently lied about really weighed. This "absent-mindedness" is only a less definite form of that state which develops absent-consciousness.

The cure of amnesia usually is simple. Rest will restore the exhausted brain and nerve cells; time will heal the grief; mind and body will recuperate from accident, shock, or illness.

The gravest amnesia occurs as an initial symptom of epilepsy. But even here the tendency, if recognized in its beginnings, may usually be overcome by the adoption of a wise and solicitous régime.

None who, like my correspondent, find themselves subject to occasional mental lapses need worry if they act wisely and in time. It is sound sense and good judgment to submit every case of amnesia to careful medical attention, with a view to overcoming the thing that causes the mind-blank, and thereby preventing its recurrence. If this is done in the very beginning, such news items as I have quoted will become happily less frequent.

This finishes The Heart Cure at Banning Farms

Continued from page 7

to say nothing of their patient efforts to teach him how to turn handsprings without falling all over the gymnasium, it seemed brutal to refuse. Half an hour was all that would be required, and they set off immediately.

They wound up their raid on the village with a visit to a drugstore, where they gathered about a table and absorbed sundaes with youthful delight. Stuart shuffled his feet anxiously. The day had been an exciting one, and he had still to make peace with Mrs. Gordon, who would hardly forgive him for failing to keep an appointment to which he had pledged himself in writing.

HAVING got rid of the girls, he hurried to the veranda, and sighed with relief as he saw a lone figure in its darkest corner. Deep shadows enfolded her; but her hand lay on the arm of the big rocker.

"You will forgive me—it really isn't my fault that I'm late. You know—you ought to know!" he began huskily.

His hand touched hers. The latter turned under his pressure; her fingers lay on his wrist carelessly, soothingly. He was touched by her solicitude for his welfare; but it was characteristic: it was like his ideal of her.

"Mrs. Gordon, you do understand—"

He bent over her, seeking her face in the dusk, and caught a glimpse of a dark head instead of the expected blond one.

"I beg your pardon!" he gasped.

"Certainly; it doesn't matter," said Miss Crosby coldly. Then she rose hastily and faced him.

"I didn't know—I really didn't know it was you!" he pleaded inanely.

Of course you didn't," she said. "And I'm ashamed of myself!"

"Ashamed—ashamed of what?"

"Oh, the girls dared me to do it!" she said angrily. "They thought—they thought someone would be waiting for you, and they dared me to try—"

She seemed at the point of tears, and this was not at all like the Miss Crosby he had known.

"Don't go—please don't go!" he implored, planting himself before her.

"No, I'm going in. If I stay, I shall have to confess ever so many worse things I've done; and I haven't—I really can't—'

"You needn't tell me anything if only you will stay. Please—"

"Oh, it's about that woman—Mrs. Gordon. You must have seen that we've all been trying to keep you away from her. I hate myself for doing it; but we—the girls and I— oh, we thought it would be such fun, and you see it isn't a bit—and I knew all the time that something disagreeable would come of it! And I told the girls that if you tried to hold my hand, that—that—I'd take your pulse̬and—and I did it!" Laughter struggled against her tears, and for a moment won. "And your heart rhythm was perfectly normal!"

It was unrhythmical now. He wanted to ask her ten thousand questions; but they refused to take form in words. She thrust her handkerchief into her coat pocket and stood very tall before him.

"You may as well know," she said quite calmly, "that I am a physician, medical director of the Arnold Physical Culture School. The three girls are students there. They have been ill just as I told you, and were coming here for a fortnight;s rest; but—I'll never, never tell you all of it!"

She flashed by him and disappeared.

The quartet had already breakfasted and gone for their usual tramp when he came down the next morning. They were avoiding him, and the knowledge plunged him into the profoundest blues. He made fruitless inquiries to learn which road they had taken, and was about to go to his room to sulk when Mrs. Gordon came out of the elevator dressed for a journey, and walked briskly to the cashier's desk, where she was paying her bill.

"Not going—not—"

"Oh, good morning, Mr. Lybrand! Yes, I'm just leaving. I meant to tell you last night; but—" The violet eyes tried and convicted him and passed sentence unsparingly. "Really, you know, this air is overstimulating, and the doctor here is a brute. He hasn't the slightest feeling! I'm awfully sorry I missed you last night; but I had to pack—I hate packing!"

She was going, but her flags flying. HE followed her to the waiting machine, torn with mingled feelings of regret and relief.

"I shall miss you. It is cruel of you to leave me this way!" he cried with an effort at a last rally.

"Oh," she said sweetly, "I dare say the vaudeville troupe will console you!"

THEY were perched on a wall that crossed an upland pasture when he found them. As he neared the goal three figures dropped out of sight, and an instant later sprinted madly toward the road.

He sat down beside her, pulled up his cuff, and offered his wrist. She folded her arms and gazed off at the hills without looking at him.

"I am your patient, Dr. Crosby. I refuse to be neglected," he urged. "If I should die from that run down the hill, the responsibility would be yours."

"Mr. Lybrand," she remarked impassively, "those girls are looking at us. Won't you please put down your hand?"

"But see how it's shaking! I've always been afraid of paralysis agitans or something like that. And besides I'm really suffering. My case is desperate," then, suddenly earnest, he whispered, "I love you—I love you!"

"If that's all that worries you, you can be cured very easily," she replied in the most matter-of-fact tone conceivable.

"Then why let me suffer?" he cried.

"Don't be ridiculous! My coming here was all part of a conspiracy. It's a shameful confession, but it's the truth. We're all leaving in the morning, and I shall probably never see you again; but I'd like—we'd all like—to have you think as well of us as—"

"Don't you be absurd! I couldn't think of you singly or collectively anyway but gracefully. You've given me the happiest days I've ever known; you've even made me forget myself—a real triumph. I can tell you! You've done more for me than that!" he exclaimed as a vision of Mrs. Gordon crossed his mind.

"I'm going to telegraph my mother to come here at once. I want her to know how much I owe you—howm ych I want to go on owing you all the rest of my days!"

She shook her head impatiently. "You needn't telegraph your mother. That—"

"I'd like to know why not! I want to go on owing you all the rest of my days!

"I'd like to know why not! I want you to see hr astonishment at my cure—her satisfaction in the new man you've made of me.

"That's quite unnecessary, Mr. Lybrand," she said slowly; "for I telegraphed her myself this morning when I heard that Mrs. Gordon was leaving. Oh." she moaned, "do I have to tell you everything? It was your mother that sent me here!" She faced him with a look that invited his fullest scorn as he stated in bewilderment.

Then he laughed aloud, and his arm stole round her. "If my mother did this, how easy it makes everything!" he said.

As he kissed her three agile young being in sailor suits appeared like figures in a pantomime on the crest of a hill beyond them, and with hands joined began a mad, whirling dance.

"This isn't fair," said Isabel as she spied them and jumped down from the wall. "They're all in love with you!"

Houses Shot form Guns

THE idea of shooting a house, not "to pieces," but "together," may sound absurd; but that is exactly what may be expected of the cement gun, an invention designed to do away with the whitewash and calcimine brush, the cement and plaster towel, and a few other things of a similar nature. It is the latest method of applying coating of cement, lime, gypsum, and other plastic materials to structures in need of repair, and of putting up the original walls of such structures entire, if need be.

The cement gun consists essentially of a hopper into which the dry cement and sand or other materials are placed, a hose connected to the bottom of the hopper, through which the dry mixture is forced by air pressure, and a nozzle at the other end of the hose, to which another hose supplying water is attached for hydrating the cement, The hydration takes place when the materials are all in motion, and, leaving the nozzle, the mixture is "shot" upon the surfaces or into interspaces.

There would seem to be an almost unlimited field for the practical use of the cement gun. Foundation work and waterproofing below grade should be well adapted

to this process. As a means of coating steel to prevent rust and corrosion it should prove superior to the ordinary method of painting; for a cement coating will wear much better than one of paint.

The pipe line of the New York aqueduct from the Catskill Mountains was lined with a two-inch coating of cement and sand in this manner. The inside diameter of the pipe is eight feet eleven inches, so that a man can easily walk through it and do the spraying.

Tree surgery is another thing that seems destined to undergo a revolution , if all that is claimed for the cement gun proves practical. There are hundreds of torn, cracked, and decaying trees in the private yards, streets, and public parks of every city that could have their years of usefulness and ornament doubled if they were given proper attention. With the cement fun this work can be done so quickly and cheaply that its use should be general.

In the case of fences and other similar structures, and the interior and exterior walls of entire buildings, a special design of framework is required. This consists of a wire mesh of the required size, with a wooden backing. The cement is shot upon this, and after it has hardened the wooden backing is removed, leaving what is practically a reinforced cement wall. Such walls are claimed to be as fire-proof as they can be made by any known method.

Here ends this instalment of Who Was Marie Dupont?

Continued from page 12

seemed to satisfy her. "I do believe you," she said. "And I'll marry you tonight!"

"Darling!"

She let him have his kiss now. Then he said:

"Listen! You wait here. I'll get your wraps, and we'll slip away without being seen."

A MINUTE later he and she were in a cab, speeding northward.

Arrived at Amarinth's apartment, she waited in the cab while he went up. When he returned and the cab was again moving onward he took a small box from his pocket and opened it. It contained two rings. One was set with a single splendid stone, the other was a gold band.

"These are for you, Dear," he said. "They were my mother's."

As he slipped the ring with the jewel on her finder she shivered.

"You're cold!" he said, and drew her furs closer about her throat. He kissed her. "Next time you will be my wife!" he whispered.

Her face white and tense, she sat beside him in the minister's study while the clergyman, whom they had found busy over his books, went upstairs to summon his wife as a witness. Once his arm stole round her protectingly, and a tremor ran through her.

"Don't look so unhappy, Dear," he whispered. If you'd rather go back—"

She started up. "Yes, yes, let's go back!"

He caught her to him. "No," he said. "No! You gave me your promise. If you love me, you'll keep it! Do you love me? That's all I want to know.

"Yes," she breathed, her eyes raised squarely to his.

"Then we'll stay!"

The sound of steps descending the stairs came to them. He released her. The minister entered presently with his wife, who had made a hasty toilet and now smiled sleepily at them. The chauffeur was summoned from his cab as a second witness, and the ceremony was performed.

The minister's wife kissed the bride gently. The minister shook her hand and wished her happiness. The door closed behind them, then the cab door slammed. The chauffeur slipped to his seat. The car started.

GUY AMARINTH lifted his wife's hand and pressed his lips to the finger that now wore two rings.

"Your hand is like ice!" he exclaimed.

"I'm cold."

He held her close. "Was I a brute to make you see it through? I was so afraid of losing you! I was afraid you'd never give me another chance.

There was a short silence. Then he whispered:

Let's not go back to the dance."

"But I must! I must tell Aunt Alicia. I must tell her at once!"

"Of course," he agreed after a moment, "Shall we tell everybody?"

"Oh, no, not tonight! I want Hugh to hear it first. I'm so afraid he'll be—be hurt at—at the way we did it."

"No, he won;t Amarinth assured her easily. "He'll understand. He's awfully human, Hugh Senior is: seems to remember how he himself felt when he was young."

"Why shouldn't he? He's young himself yet,—only thirty-eight."

"He goes about with the old men anyway. You never see him with a girl."

"No," she conceded after a short silence, "he doesn't care for girls. In the five years that I've lived in the same house with him I've never known him to call on a girl."

"And you say he's not old!"

"He isn't. It's just that he's always working."

"That's all right—I'll fix him. Oh, here we are!"

Guy sprang out and helped her to alight. He took a bill from his pocket and handed it to the chauffeur. "Just keep still for a few days, will you? We don't want the papers to get it until the announcements are out."

"I understand, Sir—thank you, Sir." the man replied promptly. "Good luck to your, Sir." He touched his cap. "Good luck to you, Miss—Madam."

"Thanks," said Guy.

"Thank you," Marie answered, turning to smile.

THE music swelled out from the ballroom to meet them as they stepped from the elevator and made their way to the small reception room that they had left scarcely half an hour before. Guy took Marie's wraps, left them at the dressing room, deposited his own, and then rejoined her.

As they rounded a corner filled with spectators Guy felt a touch on his arm. It was Gavock.

"My dear boy, I insist that you present me to Miss Dupont at once. I want to express to her my admiration for her charming performance this evening."

The words were delivered with the speaker's most courtly deference; but for all the lightness of word and manner his eyes intently watched the girl's face. Did he merely fancy it, or had she turned pale?

"I'm glad you liked our dance," she answered.

"Liked it? My dear young lady, it was superb! Where, if I may ask, did you learn to dance like that?"

"Madame Adrienne taught me; but—she said I have a natural gift."

The small tribute to herself was quoted with such a charming air of deprecation that Gavock was puzzled, and he permitted himself a moment of direct scrutiny. She was undoubtedly pale, and the contraction of the pupils of the eyes meant nervous tension. His glance dropped to her hands, which she held before her, the right clasped over the left so tightly that the knuckles showed white. He was puzzled. Was it a plea for silence, that lame attempt to explain her extraordinary expertness as a dancer? He looked again at her face. Certainly there was no pleading there. Instead she stared fixedly at him, her brows furrowed. He waited.

"Haven't we met before somewhere, Mr.—Mr.—

"Gavock," Amarinth supplied.

"Gavock?" she seemed to be testing the sound for a familiar ring.

MET before?" Gavock, taken aback, was sparring for time. So she was going to force him to take his stand then and there! She meant to know the worst at once! He could not but admire her daring. "Why, I hope so," he said lightly; "but I fear not."

"But your face is so familiar! I'm sure that—"

"Dame Nature has just so many combinations, you know, and has to repeat herself occasionally," Gavock intervened with a glint of warning in his glance. Couldn't she let well enough alone? he thought.

She seemed not to hear nor to notice. Her study of his face grew more intent. Then suddenly her own face lightened. She smiled, flushed, and a low laugh gurgled in her throat. "I remember now," she said. "You're the man who bumped into me on Fifth avenue this afternoon."

To be continued next week

Little Things You Ought to Know

IN these lampless times it may be useful to know that luminous paint, for use on keyholes or door handles, can be made by mixing a small quantity of calcium sulphid with ordinary white paint.

If the wind removes your felt hat, and something else cracks it, the crack can be removed by steaming it, placing a damp cloth over the place, and ironing with a hot iron. A rounded piece of wood must bee held inside to receive the pressure of the iron.

Grease marks on wall paper will disappear if a paste made of fuller's earth and water be applied, left till dry, and then brushed off.

Broken windows are unsightly, and the jagged edges dangerous. Cover the hard putty with soft soap, leave it for a few hours, and it will then be easily removed, and the glass as well.

Disfiguring marks on hatbands from perspiration, the natural oil in the hair, or applied oil, will not appear if inside the hat lining there is placed a narrow piece of thin blotting paper.

Chloroforming a Ship

AN American patent has been granted for a method of submarine warfare which provides for anesthetizing the crew of an enemy's ship. The plan is to steer the submarine close alongside the ship and to shoot the end of a projectile into the hull, while the rear end maintains a tubular connection with the submarine. An anesthetic is then pumped from the submarine into the hull of the attacked vessel.

Husks of the Prodigal Son

IT appears that the "husks" (siliquœ, in Latin), which were fed to swine in the East and to which the Prodigal Sonw as finally reduced, were nothing more nor less than the large, podlike fruit of the carob tree, whose botanical name is Ceratonia siliqua. This plant pertains to the Pea family, and the husks are sometimes nearly a foot in length.

These husks contain very hard seeds, resembling beans, which may be eaten with relish; although one would soon tire of them as a sole article of diet. Occasionally these husks are to be found in England and this countr7 in confectioners' shops, where they are known as "Saint John's bread."

In the East in the old days the plant was regarded with disfavor: not becuase it was thought to be unpalatable, but because of its association with swine. Together with the acorns of a species of oak called Quercus agilops, it served as the principal food of pigs and hogs.

Titled Americans

NOTHING in our Constitution or laws prevents an American Citizen, not holding federal office, from accepting a title of nobility from a foreign government and still retaining his American citizenship.

There have been good Americans who possessed foreign titles. Lord Stirling, who held the rank of Major General in the armies of Washington, was one. A number of Americans in recent times have had the titles of Count and Marquis conferred upon them by the Pope, and no legal question has arisen, and no resentment been aroused among their non-Catholic neighbors.

The fathers of the nation had, of course, no use for titles, and they provided in the Constitution that no title should be conferred by the government, and that no person holding the office under the government should accept a foreign title. An attempt was made in 1810 to extend the latter part of this restriction to include all Americans. Eleven of the seventeen States favored the proposed amendment was lost and speedily forgotten.

Just Jokes

Which Side for Both?

OFFICER: "Why have you only one spur on?"

PRIVATE: "If I get one side of the horse to move, I get the other, don't I?"

The Wrong Car

THERE is the old story of the man who boarded three cars, only to discover that none of them was the car he wanted. Boarding a fourth in a high state of irritation, he waxed a trifle profane in his conversation with the conductor. A severely pious looking old man sitting near the door overhead, and remarked a little sharply:

"My friend, did you know that you are on the road to hell?"

"Well, if I'm not on the wrong car again!" was the retort of the unabashed passenger.

Forepaugh's First Horse

AL. RINGLING, eldest of the famous brothers of circus ownership, had the Forepaugh-Sells Circus on tour, and was in the tall-timbered territory. Following his daily custom, he left the lot and went for a walk around town just after the parade.

In the crowd in the public square he noticed a small boy crying and leading a [?] an, long-haired, and bedraggled, over- [?] own pony. Mr, Ringling found out that [?] wanted to sell the pony to get enough money to take his fold to the show. So he [?] hased the animal for five dollars and [?] it taken to the horse tent.

The next day when the sideshow opened there was a new feature. The pony, a little more bedraggled and with mane long and disheveled , was mounted on a platform surrounded by plush-colored ropes caught at the corners with highly polished brass poles.

Over it hung a sign reading, "THE FIRST HORSE EVER OWNED BY ADAM FOREPAUGH," and through the wondering crowd that viewed the little horse circulated a boy selling its latest photographs.

Stopping a Panic

GEORGE GROSSMITH was once singing the Lord Chancellor's song in "Iolanthe," which has for its refrain, "Said I to myself, said I," when something caught fire at the back of the stage. Grossmith himself wasn't aware of the occurrence: but he suddenly saw the audience jump from their seats, and turn their backs on him.

At the same moment the stage manager shouted from the wings to Grossmith, "Don't stop signing! Go on, go on!"

Grossmith immediately grasped the situation, and sang fortissimo some words that came to him on the spur of the moment:

"I assure my friends who are ready to choke
That the fire they fear is nothing but smoke:
It is only a sort of Gilbertian joke.
Says I to myself, says I!"

This gag, which at any other [ have been extremely reprehensi [?] bertain opera, calmed the pa [?] audience resumed their seats. [?] ?]