The First Man to Come Back

By CLEVELAND MOFFETT

SEVEN expeditions have set out to explore the poisoned arrow country in the heart of South America: six have never been heard from again. The seventh was Captain Besley's. The trip cost him $50,000 and indescribable suffering; but he came through.

ON the eastern slope of the Andes there is a wild and dreaded region, the poisoned arrow country, which has recently been traversed for the first time by an English expedition, headed by Captain James Campbell Besley. This region lies between two great rivers, the Rio Huallaga and the Rio Ucayale, rushing tributaries of the Amazon, which pour their mighty floods through dense South American forests. Here dwell tribes of fierce Indians, whose hatred for white men is like that of the wildcat or the rattlesnake. They fight with poisoned arrows so deadly that a scratch of the tainted barb means death; at least, no antidote has yet been found for the concentrated vegetable poisons in which the darts are dipped.

To pass through this region, therefore, means almost certain death. Caspar Whitney, in his book, "The Flowing Roads," speaks of it as the barrier beyond which white men may not pass, and of six expeditions that have entered here in recent years (two were form Chicago and four from various parts of South America) not one returned to tell the story. Captain Besley's was the seventh expedition.

Who is Captain Besley? He is an Englishman of fortune, a great traveler, a fine polo player, and a man who knows wild animals and wild men from having hunted them and faced them all over the world. In the Boer War he was one of Kitchener's fighting scouts. He stands six feet two, he is lithe and quick in his movements, and his hair is white as snow.

In 1912, having tired of other things, Besley decided that he would have a try at this poisoned arrow country. There was exploration work to be done for the Peruvian government; there were the sources of the Amazon to be better located; there were two Americans, O'Higgin and Selfan (members of one of the lost expeditions), to be searched for, dead or alive; there were the rubber atrocities reported by Sir Roger Casement to be investigated; there were strange diseases of the natives to be studies; and altogether the thing seemed rather worth while, so the Captain organized his expedition and started. And he came through. The trip cost him $50,000 and indescribable suffering; but he came through.

The Dogs Saved Them

THERE were days and nights when the expedition, six white men and a dozen native porters (more or less loyal), lived with the poisoned arrow peril hanging over them, and the deeper they penetrated into the forest the more closely their silent enemies drew about them.

"If it hadn't been for our dogs," said Captain Besley, "they would have got us sure, every man of us; but our dogs knew their business. There were eleven of them, all trained, Airedales, hounds, and Belgian police dogs, and a wonderful Scotch collie named Napoleon that I had clipped lose against the terrific heat. Poor Napoleon!

"Those dogs knew that the Indians were tracking us to kill us, and whenever a band would come near they would sniff and jump high in the air to warn us of the danger, and then we would get busy with shovels and axes and machetes and build a barricade. Sometimes, under favorable conditions, our Indians could smell the enemy, and once we heard their tomtoms in the distance."

"How many of the enemy were following you?"

"I don't know. We hardly ever saw them: only glimpses of heads or arms behind the trees. In one fight there were about seventy against us. It wasn't so very funny, the singing of their darts and arrows and the chunk, chunk, chunk as

they buried themselves in the logs. The darts (from blow guns) were like knitting needles about a foot long and made of wood hardened in the fire and very sharp. The arrows, shot from bows, were eight or ten feet long, and had feathers running round the shaft like the rifling in a gun barrel to make them fly true."

"And the tips were poisoned—darts and arrows?"

"Yes."

"Did they hit any of your party?"

His face darkened. "In our big fight we lost poor Jerry Anderson, our natural historian. They struck him in the chest, and Dr. H. G. Henderson—he was making a study of tropical diseases—they shot twice in the arm. And they got Napoleon."

"You couldn't do anything for them?"

"I did all I could, permanganate and morphine; but it was no use. The doctor lived four days and Anderson eight. They were fine, brave Englishmen. Those Indians paid for it; but it was too late."

Nearly Killed by a Condor

AMONG other dangers faced by Captain Besley was one of a most unexpected sort. He was nearly killed by an infuriated male condor, one of the huge birds that soar over vast solitudes of the snowbound Andes. Besley had often heard from the natives that condors are dangerous creatures if interfered with in their mating or breeding season; but he thought little of these tales. He was accustomed to greater perils, and had forgotten all about condors, having seen none of them for months, when one day in the mountains of Peru, near the Bolivian border, they caught sight of a great nest in a hole of a ruined Inca wall.

There was a hen condor sitting on her eggs, and immediately signaled to Jack Holbrook to get the picture. The wall was about eighty yards away across a deep ravine, and while the camera man adjusted his telephoto lens the explorer stood watching, rifle in hand, so interested in the mother bird that he never noticed a black speck in the sky like a distant aëroplane, that came nearer and nearer. It was the male condor, his wings spreading sixteen feet, that was sweeping downward from the blue heavens to the rescue of his mate.

There was no sound, no cry; but suddenly the great bird struck the man with the tip of its wing, and the man went over like a child's toy. Then, with talons that could lift a sheep, the condor struck at his fallen enemy. The Captain was helpless. His rifle had been knocked form his hands, and he was dazed by the swift attack. He lay on his back and kicked at the bird with heavy boots. The guardian of the silent heights came at him meaning to kill—there was no doubt about that. Besley saw its wicked brownish-black eyes, its raw red head, its white-feathered collar, bristling in rage, and he wished for his rifle.

Holbrook dared not shoot for fear of hitting his comrade, and the only thing that saved Besley was a moment of respite when the condor, after a vicious blow from Besley's boot heel, swept upward to gain strength for a new attack, whereupon the photographer raised his rifle and fired, just as the bird, screeching its hate, shot downward to finish its victim.

This happened in an untraveled wilderness near the head waters of the Amazon, 11,000 feet above the sea.

This Photographer No Quitter

THE expedition had a thrilling experience in descending the Rio Huallaga. For thirty-six days they floated down this perilous river on a huge raft, built to stand the suction of a treacherous whirlpools at the foot of furious rapids that make the Huallaga dreaded by the most expert native boatsmen. It was Holbrook's ambition to take motion pictures of these rapids as they shot through them, although Besley declared the thing impossible.

"You're crazy, Jack!" said the Captain. "We'll go through there at fifty miles an hour. The bogadores (paddle men) will be lashed to the logs, and—why, your camera would be smashed to pieces and you'd be swept overboard."

It was evidently impossible, but Holbrook proceeded to do it. He scooped out hole in the buoyant balsa logs for his tripod legs to rest in, and lashed the camera fast with lianas so strongly that it stood at the back of the raft like a tree. And when they entered the raging waters, when the whole sixty-foot structure was spun about like a top in the whirlpool and was smashed through jaws of jagged rock and hurled ahead a mile in a minute through blinding spray, still somehow Jack Holbrook ground out his film. And when an immense wave crushed over them and tore one of the bogadores away from his lashings, so that he was saved only by a miracle (and by Captain Besley's skill) still Holbrook stuck to his camera and ground away.

The result was one of the most remarkable motion pictures ever taken of a murderous river in the height of its fury.

Adventures with Snakes

THERE was constant danger from snakes, not only in the jungles, where huge serpents squirmed along the river banks and hung from teh branches of trees, but at great mountain heights among the Inea ruins, where they came upon very small and venomous adders. One day the Captain witnessed a fight between a hoglike tapir weighing 400 pounds and a boa constrictor. It took the snake exactly two minutes to crush the tapir to death in its powerful folds; whereupon the Englishman, needing hog meat for his Indians, finished the boa with his rifle.

"Were any of your party bitten by venomous snakes?" I asked Captain Besley.

"Yes," he said, four of my men were bitten; but we had our little medicine chest and managed to save them. It was a case of strap the tourniquet tight above the wound and then quick with a hypodermic of permanganate of potash."

Are You Keeping a Record of Your Baby?

GIVE me a child until he is seven years old," said Cardinal Newman, "and I care not who has him afterward." That was a new idea in the world. The old idea used to be that the years between one and seven were relatively unimportant ones, fit only to be thrown away in play. Real education, it was supposed, could not begin before the sixth year, or the fifth, at the earliest. Now it is known that important characteristics of men and women are fixed in their earliest years.

"I begin training my children from the third day of their lives," said a successful mother recently, "and one of the greatest helps in my business of being an intelligent mother is the monthly record of my baby made with the camera."

Keep a record of your baby: begin now. The pictures above are from the photographic life history of the young son of a well known photographer. The record of this baby started from the day of his birth.

Aside from the actual value of such a record as an aid to better understanding between parent and child, it will have extraordinary interest in after years as showing how closely the likes and dislikes, the strength and weakness, of manhood were foreshadowed in the prophetic incidents of those first few years.

She Gives Them Real Faces

CUDDLESOMENESS, unbreakableness, and comeliness without insipidity," says Miss Kate Jordan, doll designer, "but the greatest of these is cuddlesomeness."

For this reason all of Miss Jordan's dolls have soft, plump bodies and composition heads. They are the sort you can just tuck under your arm and take to bed if they have been good. If they have been just the least bit naughty, you can punish them without its hurting you any more than it does them.

The latest arrival in Miss Jordan's doll family is Lewis Carroll's Alice, "child of the pure unclouded brow and eyes of wonder." She will be the first of the character dolls to be made outside of Germany. The wonder is that so many of us have been able to grow up without a real tangible "Alice in Wonderland." But she has come walking out of the book at last, and is quite ready to take us to tea with the March Hare and the Mad Hatter, to play croquet with the Queen or anything else we'd rather.

Miss Jordan is now working on what she calls "artist proof" dolls. Each doll is to have her face made by the artist herself, and each one will be truly just a little different from the rest.

In making her doll children Miss Jordan never copies life exactly, although she has a host of young friends who love to pose for her. Sometimes, to be sure, she borrows the big eyes or the small nose of one; but then she goes ahead and makes the rest up out of her head.

Five Stories Above the Pavement

DAREDEVIL JOHNNY REYNOLDS dropped into New York from Philadelphia not long ago and gave the photographer who took this picture an exciting job.

You may have heard of Johnny Reynolds. His particular form of diversion is to climb up the outside of a skyscraper, digging his fingernails and toes into the crevices, while a crowd stands open-mouthed below. To pose for this particular photograph Johnny Reynolds climbed to the fifth floor of a New York office building and out on a cornice only two feet wide. There he placed two ordinary kitchen chairs with a common broom across them, balanced a third chair on its two rear legs atop the other two, and calmly balanced himself on top of all. He climbed down just in time to escape the eye of a passing policeman. Had he tarried a moment longer it might have cost him $10 or thirty days' seclusion, it being against the law in the Empire State for a man to risk his neck in public just for the fun of it.

His Tail Is Ten Feet Long

THE ten feet four inches of tail shown in the accompanying photograph belong to one of the most aristocratic birds in the world.

Over 300 years ago a Japanese Shogun started breeding ornamental roosters to march in his parades, and the birds with the longest tails were selected out of each generation. The result was that the roosters soon had such long tails that they had to be tied up in ribbons to prevent them from being stepped on in the parades.

The Japanese government has continued the breeding of these fancy chickens. Each bird has a special valet, with the sole duty of caring for his showy charge and keeping him in the very best condition. Some of these birds have tails sixteen feet long, but ten feet four inches is long enough to make the American fancier gasp. The birds were shipped to the Exposition at San Francisco under a $25,000 bond.

These birds are the most curious reminders of the old glory of the Japanese Shoguns. In the middle of the last century the office was abolished, and it looks as though very soon there will be little left of the old Japan of pagodas and pudgy idols—especially if many more expositions require the presence of the ten-foot tailed roosters.

The Safest Place in This Country

NOTHING explodes in the New York Museum of Safety except old theories. Nothing falls down on your head from above, nothing trips you up, no cinders get in your eye. It is one of the three safest places in the country, the other two being similar Museums of Safety recently established in Boston and San Francisco.

Somebody once described a Baby's Happy Hunting Ground. All the toys there had patent stoppers so that they couldn't roll away, and all the sharp table corners were padded so that he couldn't bump his head.

It's like that at the Museum on West 24th street, New York City. You can't meet with an accident there, and it is the intention of the directors that eventually it shall be impossible for anybody to meet with a mishap at home or abroad, at play or at work.

How to Live and Be Safe

ONE of the theories we are daily exploding," says Dr. W. H. Tolman, director, "is the 'assumption of risk' theory. Some occupations may perhaps be more hazardous than others; but to take it for granted that human life or health must inevitably be sacrificed to the production of matches or pottery or subways or candy or coal or anything else is as absurd as it is wrong."

By way of proving this, the big showrooms of the museum are full of exhibits of life- and health-saving devices and practical suggestions for avoiding danger of every kind. There is machinery of every type, from dough mixers to elevators, and all equipped with hoods and shields and guards that will eliminate danger to the operators, also the public. The museum very much believes in signs: not only the old reliable "Stop, Look, and Listen" variety, but self-explanatory signs where, for instance, a picture of sparks flying bears witness to the presence of a live wire that is intelligible to the illiterate workman. Then there are samples of non-slip floor coverings and gate-closing elevators and eye-strain-saving lighting fixtures. It wouldn't be particularly inexact to say that there are vest pocket fire-escapes.

The museum is a clearing house for safety. Inventors come there with every conceivable kind of life-preserving device; owners of big factories, mills, and mines come to find out what new methods their competitors are using for conserving the health of their workmen—and incidentally of decreasing the annual financial item of hospital and funeral expenses. Workingmen and -women drop in at the noon hour for the moving pictures and lectures that show simple ways of avoiding illness and how to purchase the most nourishment for ten cents. Fifty per cent. of ordinary accidents are preventable, and human life is the greatest asset of the nation, reiterates the museum's director.

A letter just received by Dr. Tolman from his friend, the director of a similar museum in Berlin, says: "Because of the war the museum is now closed. My assistant, Ernst, was killed by a shell when leading his company onward. His death is a terrible loss to me. Ernst was a fine technical engineer. If the great intelligence and technical skill represented in the twenty-six international Museums of Safety could be brought together for conferences looking toward a cessation of hostilities, it would go a long way toward the establishment of peace. For just as surely as militarism is the art of taking life, the Safety Museum exemplifies the art of saving it."

He Considers Deafness an Advantage

ONE summer evening as I sat in the reading room of the Mansion House at Dover, New Jersey, a kindly faced, white-haired man walked down the room and seated himself in the chair next to mine. His self-effacing manner arrested my attention, and I turned toward him, making some trivial remark.

It was met by absolute silence; but

from the unruffled look on my companion's face I knew that it had not been heard, and I repeated it. This time some gesture or motion on my part caught his eye; for he said: "You'll have to speak louder if you want me to hear. I am deaf."

I spoke louder. He made some sort of acknowledgment and lapsed again into silence. As I had opened the conversation I felt impelled to go on, and in a moment of ill advised judgment ventured the remark that deafness was a real misfortune.

"Misfortune?" came the answer, sharp and pointed. "No misfortune at all. I consider it one of the greatest of blessings. It lifts me out of and relieves me from a whole lot of idle chatter that I have no desire to hear, and gives me that much more time for concentrated thought on the problems I am interested in."

"And has this concentration enabled you to solve some of these problems?" I asked, more out of sympathy than anything else.

"Oh, a few: not nearly so many as I should like. But of course I am only human, and no man ever does so much as he hopes or thinks he ought to do."

That was all. As I passed the clerk's desk I asked, "Who is that old chap?"

"That, sir, is Thomas A. Edison."

It was one day in the 90's that I saw the late Marshall P. Wilder sitting in a secluded nook in the lobby of the Adams House in Boston.

As I approached him he said:

"I've been sitting here for an hour," "just watching the ebb and flow of the human tide, some mighty well set up, fine-looking men and women among the rest, but I haven't seen one person I have envied."

Two great men—one deaf, and the other a hopeless cripple! Yet the deaf man is the greatest servant of his generation, and the cripple brought laughter to millions of tired men and women. There's a big thrill in lives like those.

In the Room Across From His

By FLORENCE RYERSON

IN the very heart of Boston, at the intersection of two of its crookedest streets, stands Mrs. Jackson's boarding house. It is so situated that from the attic windows you can see down both streets at once, which is something that can happen only in Boston. Otherwise there is nothing to distinguish it from the countless other boarding houses ouses that flank it upon each hand. The inhabitants of Mrs. Jackson's rooms on the "second" and "third" are expected to take their meals at her table; but the inhabitants of the "attics" must fend for themselves. There are two "attics," and in the oldest and draftiest lived Letitia Smith, Ph.D.

It was high noon, a chilly, bleak sort of noon; but, by reason of the odors that floated up the attic stairs, unmistakably the lunch hour. Letitia Smith was still in bed. The rain beat upon the skylight with dreary persistence, and the draft that crept through the walls, where the building paper did not reach, blew the curtains to and fro; but Letitia, wrapped in a sort of chrysalis of red wrapper and white blanket, was writing busily upon a pad of paper. Every now and then she paused and curled the ends of her thick braids round her middle finger, and wrinkled her forehead in a frown. Composition was not a simple matter with Letitia.

The room, besides being an attic, was poorly furnished. In fact it was not furnished at all, unless a cot and a stepladder may be called furnishing. It was a distinctly poverty-stricken room.

Admit that you have guessed it all,—attic room, wind blowing through chinks, neglected genius, penniless and hungry, staying in bed for warmth, and sniffing the odors from the meal that is going on below. You are wrong four times out of five. Letitia was a genius; but she was far from neglected. No one who blossoms forth monthly in the pages of Parkinson's Magazine can be called neglected. Her only trouble at the moment was that she couldn't write articles fast enough to suit the ravenous appetite of the editor of that popular periodical. Neither was she penniless. With her salary as head of the psychology department in the university, and the generous checks from Parkinson's, she had a most respectable balance at the bank, a balance that was dedicated to two years of study in Oxford.

The odor of hot lunch from below raised no feeling within her other than annoyance; for she was still warm from a dinner cooked in the chafing dish, which was hidden behind a discreet green curtain that draped the other end of the room. And finally she was staying in bed because at the moment she felt lazy, and for no other reason whatever.

Five days a week she dissected the human mind before the classes at the university, and since it meant standing upon her feet for a considerable period each day, she hailed a rainy Saturday as an excellent opportunity for staying in bed and catching up with her writing. She was working upon a series of articles on practical psychology, and they had been so successful that the first six were already being issued in book form. No, she would scarcely come under the head of neglected genius.

Letitia's only real difficulty was that her obvious youngness and prettiness made it impossible for her college classes to take her quite seriously, even when she screwed back her hair and wore horn-rimmed spectacles. This was a continuous source of annoyance to her; for Letitia was wholly and entirely serious herself. To her well trained mind the world was a problem that must be analyzed and catalogued as rapidly as possible. She had a habit of looking upon life as though it were one great psychological experiment. Letitia was not emotional: that part of her nature seemed to have been omitted. If Cupid himself had appeared before her, she would probably have taken him as an infant phenomenon, and have gone about analyzing his mental processes with unruffled composure.

The only thing left to explain is the attic room, and that is very simple. Letitia was a health crank, and she had looked everywhere before she found a room that fulfilled her requirements for fresh air. When Mrs. Jackson, fat and breathless, toiled up three flights of stairs and showed this garret room she saw at once the fresh-air possibilities of the skylight and engaged it on the spot.

AS she lay in bed this noon she looked about her with a little thrill of pride. When she got her writing out of the way and unpacked the boxes of household goods that the green curtain was concealing it would be quite charming. Her prayer rug could go here, and the mahogany table with the rose droplight over by the window.

She was filled with the pleasures of anticipation when someone tripped in the hallway outside and fell heavily against her door with a muffled expletive. The door, as Fate would have it, was not properly latched, and it flew open, precipitating a young man into the center of the room. Letitia dropped her papers and rolled herself even more thoroughly in her chrysalis of red wrapper. The young man rose from his knees, where the violence of his fall had thrown him, and backed hurriedly out; red with embarrassment. His cheeks were still hot as he let himself into the room across the hall and slammed the door.

Letitia gathered up her papers and started back to work. It had been embarrassing, of course; but no one was to blame unless it was she herself for not latching her door more carefully. And, after all, she reflected, it would not be necessary for her to speak to the man across the way if they met in the hall. He was obviously a gentleman, and would not expect it. So far as she was concerned the incident was closed. She went back to her writing with calm composure.

MEANWHILE the artistic instinct was working in the man across the hall. The artistic instinct was indirectly responsible for most of his troubles; but since he depended upon it for his livelihood he was scarcely in a position to dictate.

The young man's name was Charles Henry Graves, and under the romantic nom de plume of Claude Clewes he had caused more people to shed tears than any other man in Boston. This was not due to any particular ill will on his part. He wrote "sob stories" for a thriving journal, and nightly the city grew red-eyed over his tales. Under the guise of the sentimental and sympathetic Claude he haunted the city, gathering material for stories with which to dampen the evening subway.

In appearance Charles Henry did not resemble the soulful Claude. He was big and broad, and addicted to green ties and tan shoes. Moreover, he was rarely without a cheerful grin.

Usually his "sob stuff" was manufactured out of whole cloth; but occasionally he ran across a case that was all ready cut out, so to speak. No matter what he might be doing at the moment, his subconscious mind was manufacturing sobs, and he frequently saw tears glistening where no tears were visible to the naked eye.

HIS subconscious mind was at work now as he mechanically opened a package and took out a small steak and some onions. He was thinking of the girl across the hall, at first with embarrassment, and then with a sort of professional curiosity. She was really pretty: it was strange he had not seen her before. As a matter of fact he had seen her several times in the street; but Letitia in good-sense shoes, with her hair drawn back from her scholarly brow, and Letitia in a fuzzy red wrapper, with her hair in two braids, were not to be identified as the same person. A picture of her room rose in his mind. Bare, without even a rug upon the floor, the curtains swaying in the draft—and suddenly he had it. Here, at his very door, was a sob story! He hastily put down the onion he was slicing and went in search of the landlady.

He and Mrs. Jackson were old friends. She was proud of having a gentleman who "wrote things" under her roof. It gave her a feeling of intimacy with the literati: Moreover, Charles Henry always paid his rent. As always, Charles Henry found her willing to talk, and gradually he led the conversation around to the girl upstairs. He gathered that she was not in high favor.

Yes, she was a nice girl, though uppish. No, Mrs. Jackson had not talked with her: she didn't care for them as were too proud to talk. Not that she had anything to be proud of; for her clothes were as plain as plain. Yes, she worked somewhere, she didn't say at what, and Mrs. Jackson for one wasn't going to pry into other people's affairs when she wasn't wanted; but she knew the girl wrote, because she got some letters from a magazine. Mrs. Jackson had counted two since she came, last Monday.

No, she didn't take meals with the boarders: she had a stove in her room and cooked there. Mrs. Jackson let the attics do as they liked, as Mr. Graves knew; but when it came to leaving the skylight open in the worst kind of weather, Mrs. Jackson thought some people, naming no names, were crazy. She began dusting the sofa with a disdainful sniff, and Charles Henry returned to his room three steps at a time, swept the steak off his table, and sat down to the typewriter.

TO his practised eye it was as plain as day. Poor working girl, underpaid, half starved, with a spark of divine fire,

---

sitting in bed for warmth, and working at her pitiful little—stories, he wrote first, then crossed it out and substituted poems. The money she should have spent on nourishing food went for stamps to send her stories—no, poems—to unappreciative editors. Too proud to tell even the sympathetic landlady her troubles, she stayed alone, half starved, but always with the divine fire glowing within her. Sometimes at night she left the skylight of her garret room open, and against the velvet blackness of the sky saw the eternal stars glow, white, cold, and as distant as the people of the world about her.

Charles Henry came to an abrupt stop. He felt this bit of sentiment made an excellent ending, and, being an artist, he never went farther than the end. He gathered up the loose sheets and read them through with a sort of satisfied mournfulness. It was good stuff, he decided. The introduction, his stumbling through an unlatched door (in the story he did not land in any such undignified position as his knees, you may be sure), the slender, big-eyed little girl who lay upon her narrow pallet,—it made an excellent yarn, and he started for the office, his hat on the back of his head, to get it to press in time for the next day's edition.

THE office he found in confusion. Space had been reserved in the last edition for a write-up of a famous celebrity who subsequently refused to be written. The editor greeted Charles Henry with enthusiasm.

"Say," he called, "any extra Clewes stuff we can run tonight?"

Charles Henry handed over his write-up and departed slumward to investigate a case of wife beating that promised to yield a harvest of tears.

Later the editor, glancing over the proof, nibbled at Charles Henry's sob stuff, at first with a grin, then with a slowly sobering countenance, and finally with distinct moisture in his eyes. He was just rereading it when Charles Henry sauntered in. The wife desertion had proved barren, and he was back at the office in hope of gleaning material from the staff. The editor spotted him across the room.

"Graves!" he roared, to hide his emotion. "Where'd you get this stuff? It's damn good!"

Charles Henry smiled modestly. "Oh, that!" he said. "Why, she's a poor little thing that lives in the room across from mine."

The editor raised his eyebrows. "You don't mean it's straight?" incredulously.

Charles Henry nodded. "Yes," he said, "I guess she's the real thing, poor kid. I stumbled into her room this morning, and she was sitting all wrapped up in a red blanket writing on a pad, and there wasn't a stick of furniture in the room."

The editor brought his fist down on the paper. "It's a shame!" he said. "We ought to be able to help the kid. She writes poetry, you say?"

"I—I'm not sure," said Charles Henry a little guiltily. For the first time he was beginning to realize that he had taken things rather for granted. "She writes something, and I put poetry because it—it went better."

The editor nodded. "Why not bring her down?" he said. "We might try her out, anyway. Miss Gale's swamped with both club notes and the 'Home and Fire' side' sheet. The kid could help her until we see whether she can write or not. Bring her down tomorrow."

CHARLES HENRY departed homeward, at first a little doubtful, but later, as his imagination began to work, gloriously. He would knock on her door, explain that he was with one of the papers and they needed a new woman reporter—would she care to take the position? Not a word about her obvious poverty, no mention of his part in the offer; but she would know of course that he had guessed it all, and would appreciate his delicacy. He could see her standing there, gazing upon him, her preserver, with wide brown eyes, unable to believe that her chance had come. Her hair would be fluffed about her face in little curls, she would hold out her hand and say—

He had reached the bottom of the attic steps by this time, and Letitia was standing at the top, her eyes snapping behind their horn-rimmed spectacles, her hair drawn back in a prim knot. In her hand she held a copy of the evening paper. She pointed it at him much as though it were a pistol. When she spoke her voice was crisp and to the point.

"Did you write this drivel?" she demanded.

THAT morning, after dismissing the young man from her mind, Letitia had dressed with her usual neatness, and then, her article finished, begun the delightful task of arranging her Lares and Penates. At half past three she breathed a sigh of relief and looked about her with joy. Four Japanese prints made a good showing against the gray building-paper walls, and the rose of her prayer rug blended with the shade of her droplight. She felt once more at home. It was time to take her walk, and she screwed her heavy hair into a neat but becoming knob, laced her good-sense shoes, put on her raincoat, and went forth to face the weather.

Mrs. Jackson was in the hall, and answered her greeting with a distinctly scornful sniff. Letitia went out into the rain, feeling that she must get better acquainted with Mrs. Jackson. She was really a type, and would be an addition to her book.

On her way back to the house Letitia mechanically bought an evening paper at a stand. It was too wet to glance at it now; so she folded it neatly for future reading. Assuredly she would study Mrs. Jackson. There must be thousands of her kind in the city. She mounted the front steps of the boarding house and opened the door.

Mrs. Jackson was in the parlor. She was clutching an evening paper to her expansive bosom and her eyes were red with weeping. When she saw Letitia her tears broke out afresh. She ran toward her, both arms out.

"You poor dear thing!" she said breathlessly. "I never guessed, I didn't—an' you that proud you wouldn't tell me, poor lamb! But after this I'm going to be your friend, an' if it's a bite to eat, or anything of that kind you want, Clara Jackson's the one to come to."

Letitia stood and stared at her. "I—I don't think I understand," she said, bewildered.

Mrs. Jackson went on without a break. "An' little did I think when Mr. Graves come to me and asked about you this morning (a nice young man, Mr. Graves, an' always pays his rent regular," she added from sheer force of habit)—"little did I think he was planning to write you up like this. Of course as soon as I seen the paper I recognized as how it was you, an' after this, rain or shine, Clara Jackson's not the one to say you no—if you do leave your skylight open."

Letitia interrupted her in sheer amazement. "What—what paper are you talking about?" she asked, grasping at a straw in the flood of speech.

Mrs. Jackson regarded her with astonishment. "Why, you got it in your hand," she said. "Haven't you read it?"

Letitia shook her head dumbly, and the landlady thrust a paper into her hand. She glanced across the Heart Interest page to where Mrs. Jackson's fat forefinger indicated the caption, "Stars Her Only Friends." She started to read it, puzzled; but at the first paragraph her cheeks flamed red.

"I think I shall go to my room," she said coldly, and started up the stairs, Mrs. Jackson's voice following her as she mounted.

ONCE in her room, she read the column furiously. Someone was trying to make a fool of her! She felt humiliated to be referred to as a "little girl" and a "neglected genius" who was cold and hungry. In her indignation she forgot that none but the author and the landlady would connect her with the absurd article, and felt that she was being held up to the ridicule of all Boston. She threw the paper upon the bed and began walking up and down the room with angry strides. There was a rap at the door, and on the other side she found Mrs. Jackson with a tray of food.

"I brought you a little beef tea, Deary," said the landlady, "an' a bit of bread and butter. It'll keep up your strength until supper."

Letitia stepped out into the hall, holding the handle of the door behind her. "There has been a mistake," she said coldly. "I'm not in need of beef tea."

Mrs. Jackson patted her arm comfortingly, while she balanced the tray with her other hand. "Yes, Deary," she said, "I know you wouldn't ask for help, an I respect you for it. But you needn't be shy with me."

Letitia became suddenly conscious of a desire to seize the tray and hurl it out of the window, following it with the landlady herself. The realization of this astonished her. She had never, in all her well regulated existence, had a similar yearning. For an instant she stood, from sheer force of habit analyzing her mental processes, and docketing them for future reference.

Then Mrs. Jackson's voice broke through her preoccupation. "Sit down and eat it, like a lamb," said the landlady. "There's lots more where it came from."

Letitia suddenly flung open the door behind her, disclosing the full glory of prayer rug, droplight, and mahogany. "Does that look as though I were starving?" she demanded.

Mrs. Jackson surveyed the room with one comprehensive glance, then sank upon the nearest chair to readjust her disordered mind. Finally she spoke. "And you—you ain't starving?" she asked, something like disappointment trembling in her voice.

"No," said Letitia grimly, "I'm not starving, and I'm not penniless, and above all I don't write poetry. As to lying awake to count the stars, I've not reached that particular stage of idiocy as yet; though if this sort of thing keeps up, I may be driven to it." She looked at Mrs. Jackson where she sat, the beef tea dribbling upon the floor in a little stream from the tray on her knees. "Are you satisfied?" she asked.

Mrs. Jackson rose. "I must have made a mistake," she said heavily. "But what with Mr. Graves asking about the girl across from him this morning I thought it must be you needin' help."

Letitia escorted her to the door, somewhat mollified. "If anyone is in need of help," she said, "I should say it was Mr. Graves. He seems to be feeble minded."

Mrs. Jackson shook her head sadly as she turned to descend the stair. "An' him such a nice young man, an' payin' his rent so reg'lar!" she said as she disappeared kitchenward.

LETITIA turned to a reconsideration of the article, and had just worked herself up to a high pitch of indignation when she heard the step of Charles Henry Graves ascending the stair. Seizing the paper, she was prepared to greet him when he came into view.

"Did you write this drivel?" she asked cuttingly.

Charles Henry was taken by surprise. Moreover, being several steps above him, Letitia had the place of vantage from a strategic standpoint.

"Do—do you mean—" he stammered.

"I mean this 'Claude Clewes' idiocy," she cut in, holding the paper as though it were redhot and flapping the damning evidence before him.

"Didn't you like it?" he asked doubtfully.

"Like it!" said Letitia. "Like it!" and her wrath rendered her speechless.

Charles Henry became apologetic. "I'm sorry," he said. "I—I wanted to help."

Letitia looked at him, astonished. "You don't mean to say you thought it was true—this stuff you wrote!"

Charles Henry sat down suddenly on the bottom step. As sometimes happened, the artistic temperament had suddenly deserted him, and left him feeling that he had made a fool of himself. He tried weakly to explain.

"I don't suppose I thought so at first," he admitted; "but after I'd got it written down it seemed true enough."

Letitia stared at him. He was the first specimen of the kind that had come under her observation.

"Do you mean that you can persuade yourself into thinking something has happened by just writing it?" she asked incredulously.

Charles Henry nodded. "Something like that," he admitted. "Of course there's always a foundation; but by the time I've added to it and made a sob story—"

"A what?" said Letitia.

"A sob story," repeated Charles Henry.

Letitia pointed the paper at him. "So you mean to say you dared make a 'sob story' out of me?"

Charles Henry shook his head. "It wasn't you really," he said. "It was the girl I thought you were. Of course I can see now," he added politely, "that you aren't the helpless person I thought. You're much older than I imagined," he added absently. Already the artistic instinct was stirring within him, and he was thinking of something.

Letitia should have been pleased, for one of her principal grudges against the article had been that humiliating "little girl"; but she wasn't. She drew herself up stiffly and looked down at him where he sat on the bottom stop.

"I am a professor in the university," she said, "and I am, needless to say, neither cold nor hungry." She retired haughtily into her room; but as an afterthought she turned and added, "Moreover, I write scientific articles, not poetry." Then she closed the door firmly and finally with a vicious little click which inferred that the interview was at an end.

CHARLES HENRY sat on the bottom step and considered the outside of her door for a short space; then he absently climbed the stairs and let himself into his own room, where he sank into a chair and thoughtfully consumed a pipeful of tobacco, after which he knocked the ashes out on the window sill and betook himself to his typewriter. Charles Henry was writing a sob story.

Through the intervening space of hallway and two doors Letitia heard the click of the typewriter, and smiled maliciously. She was in the midst of an article for Parkinson's, an article upon the psychology of the modern journalist. After a time the typewriter ceased to click, and Charles Henry, pulling the last, sheet from the machine, settled back to pass judgment upon his performance.

He agreed with himself that it was good, very good; in fact it was away above his usual average. It was neither a story nor a sketch, but something between the two,—the heart secrets of a woman who was two people, a slender, shrinking, poetical girl who tried to hide her real soul behind a cold and repelling exterior. Somehow he managed to picture a shy, wistful little creature, hidden within a crust of good-sense shoes and horn-rimmed spectacles.

Of course it wasn't true, he told himself savagely. She probably hadn't a feeling in the world, and her youngness and prettiness were the false part of her, not the shoes and spectacles. However, it made a good story, too good for a mere newspaper. He really ought to try it on a magazine. He'd change it enough so that the girl couldn't object; but with a bit more plot it ought to sell. At this point his eye fell upon the neglected steak, and a little later the fragrance of fried onions floated across to Letitia, deep in her scientific treatise, and Letitia hated onions.

SO far she had sternly held herself in leash, and had striven to deal gently with the foibles of the modern journalist; but the onions were the finishing touch, and she dug her pencil into the paper with renewed energy. The modern journalist was a poor and shriveled thing when she had finished with his mental processes. She bared his soul to a jeering

---

public, and let it watch the wheels go.

Later two flat envelops left Boston for New York. Both were addressed to the editor of Parkinson's Magazine; but one was transcribed in the precise hand of one of Boston's most promising young psychologists, while the other was scrawled with the abandon of a confirmed journalist.

THE writing of his contribution to modern literature had taken so much out of Charles Henry that by the time he reached the office in the morning yesterday's story had almost escaped his mind. It was recalled by the editor.

"Where's the kid?" he shouted as soon as Charles Henry hove in sight.

"The kid?" inquired Charles Henry absently.

"The youngster you were going to bring down this morning," said the editor patiently.

Charles Henry started. "Oh," he said, embarrassed, "she didn't seem to want to come."

"Did you say we wanted to help her?" inquired the editor.

"Yes," said Charles Henry, "I told her, in a way; but she didn't seem to want to be helped," he added truthfully.

The editor snorted. "She's got to be helped!" he said. He waved a sheaf of letters under Charles Henry's nose. "Do you know what those are? Those are letters from people who want to adopt her. They came in the first mail this morning. This," he selected a letter from the pile, "is from an old lady who wants a companion, and this is from a well known author who would be delighted to take her as amanuensis. This is from a philanthropist who offers her a college education.

Charles Henry looked longingly at the door. He felt that he could not explain matters without making things even worse than they were. He replied with misleading truthfulness, "She's very proud," he said "I think the article hurt her feelings."

The editor regarded Charles Henry suspiciously. "Look here, Graves!" he said. "Is there any girl?"

Charles Henry came at once to the rescue of his brain child. "Do you doubt my word?" he asked with haughty pathos.

The editor looked at him thoughtfully. "No," he said slowly, "not exactly; but you have a way of convincing yourself."

Charles Henry picked up his hat. "Very well," he said pathetically. "Then I only imagined it! Good morning," and he was making his escape when the editor recalled him.

"Here," he said, "you'd better take these. She's got a right to see them, anyway," and he forced the bundle of letters into Charles Henry's unwilling hands.

THAT night Letitia was correcting examination papers with careful impartiality when a knock sounded upon her door. She answered it, expecting to find the landlady, and saw instead Charles Henry Graves with a bundle of letters in his hands.

"I beg your pardon," he said. "I beg your pardon, but—but might I speak to you a minute?"

Letitia looked at him doubtfully. "Why, yes, if you wish," she answered. "Won't you come in?"

Charles Henry stepped into the room and stood looking around in a sort of a daze. Letitia sat down on a chair and waited. He had probably come to offer his apologies, and she was prepared to accept them with becoming hauteur. Suddenly he spoke.

"I was right," he said. "You do like pretty things."

Letitia froze at once. "Is that what you wished to say to me?" she asked coldly.

Charles Henry came to himself with a start. "No," he said, "it's this," and he held out the bundle of papers.

Letitia read the top letter silently, then she looked up. "What do you wish me to do?" she asked. "Be a companion to this estimable lady?"

Charles Henry shook his head. "No," he said. "But I thought you might know someone who needed help. I'm up an awful stump. All those people are yearning to help the girl I wrote about—and there isn't any girl! I think you might help!"

Letitia regarded the letter thoughtfully.

There was something distinctly appealing about Charles Henry when he was in a scrape. "What would you suggest doing?" she inquired curiously.

Charles Henry grew red. "I—I don't know what you'll think of it," he said, "but it seemed to me that we might write 'em and tell 'em that the girl's dead—that is, if you don't mind," he added hastily.

Letitia shook her head. "I don't see what difference it would make to me," she said. So they set to work with cheerful energy to inform the old lady in need of a companion, the author in search of an amanuensis, and the philanthropic millionaire that the young star-gazer was no more.

At the end of an hour Letitia sank back in chair and pushed her hair from her eyes. "There!" she said. "At any rate, she's settled!" and though she did not realize it at the time, aided by Charles Henry the adept, she was accomplishing her first lie.

EXCEPT for two checks from Parkinson's, the next few months were uneventful. Charles Henry received his with glee, disposed of the money with his customary despatch, and then promptly forgot the whole matter. Parkinson's makes up several months ahead; so there was no publication of his story to remind him.

Letitia received hers with her usual composure, and punctually turned it into her Oxford fund. Something kept her from mentioning it to Charles Henry, who was unusually busy these months wringing sobs from a growingly satiated public. Running competition with the European war was getting on his nerves. Letitia sensed this, and sympathized, even while she did not approve.

"Why don't you get into something worth while?" she asked Charles Henry.

"Such as—" he inquired savagely, and Letitia was silent.

No one, by the widest stretch of the imagination, could picture Charles Henry in business. By a heroic effort and a careful sticking to the literal he had managed to win her reluctant approval; but she watched for backsliding with an eagle eye. It came most unexpectedly, and Charles Henry was really not to blame.

In the first place, he was in one of his literary trances, and therefore was not responsible. He was returning home after a busy day in the office when a newsboy fell into the gutter. To the casual eye he was the usual sort of newsboy, if anything a little dirtier than the average, and he fell into the gutter because he was scuffling with another newsboy. When he rose from his seat in the slush he said several things that would not look well in print, and a middle-aged woman in a threadbare black suit passed him hurriedly, a look of disgust upon her face. Not much, surely, but enough for Charles Henry!

As he walked along the brick sidewalk the incident began to grow in his mind. The newsboy lost his dirt and profanity and developed a dying mother at home. The woman went through a sort of mental metamorphosis and came out a lady of leisure, bedecked with diamonds and weighted with furs, who pushed the little newsboy from her path into the gutter. At this point Charles Henry was crossing the street in front of Mrs. Jackson's, and so rapt was he in the progress of his brainchild that an automobile that swept round the sharp corner caught him entirely unawares.

They picked him up with a dislocated hip and a broken arm, babbling incoherently about a starving newsboy, and the papers, always on the lookout for a good story, wrote him up as having endangered his life to save a child. When at last he came to himself in the attic room at Mrs. Jackson's he was already a bit of hero, and, although he denied the story and assured the doctor that there had been no newsboy within hailing distance, the whole thing was put down to modesty and the story continued to grow.

Was it any fault of Charles Henry's that Letitia, viewing the whole performance from her attic window, had noted the newsboyless condition of the streets, and put the whole matter down to his discredit?

Charles Henry, noting her lack of interest in his recovery, at first was hurt, and later covered the sting with a poultice of pride. Very well, if she did not wish to come and see him, she need not!

CHARLES HENRY ate his supper slowly, for the sake of killing time, and pushed away the tray with his well hand. Then he picked up Parkinson's Magazine, which had just arrived, and began to read his story with distinct approval. It sounded even better in print than before. He lay back in the chair with closed eyes, and pictured his future. He would stop wasting his talents upon newspaper work, and would devote his time to magazine stories. To have broken into Parkinson's was a triumph, and he would live up to it. He picked up the magazine and ruffled the pages preparatory to rereading his own composition.

Suddenly he noted an article by Letitia Smith. He felt a little surprise that she should be here too in Parkinson's. Somehow it belittled his own achievement. But he started to read her article with a serene mind.

After a long time he laid down the magazine and stared into space with hurt, tragic eyes. Stripped of his sentiment, he saw himself as he really was. In fact, being the sort of person who never does things by halves, he saw himself several degrees worse than he really was. He felt that he was only a cheap sentimentalist, that he would never amount to anything, that his stories, in which he had taken such pride, were only the gaudy trappings of a shallow brain. Letitia, with the odor of fried onions in her nostrils, had not spared him.

For a long time he stared into space; then (lay it to the story if you like, or lay it to the two weeks of enforced solitude without even his writing to comfort him) Charles Henry laid his head on the table and his shoulders shook with the force of his suppressed sobs.

LETITIA, across the hall, heard the suspicious noises coming from behind his door and raised her head from the bed where she had thrown herself. Letitia's eyes were red with weeping, and her handkerchief was reduced to a damp wad. Parkinson's Magazine, open at a story by one who was introduced as a "new author of promise," was lying beside her. The pages of the story were besprinkled with tears. Letitia had learned several things about herself she had not known before; and the road to self-knowledge is a thorny path, strewn with stones.

Letitia flung herself from the bed and stood up in the center of the room. Something was stirring within her that she did not recognize. She forgot that she was enveloped in a fuzzy red wrapper and that her hair was in two fuzzy brown braids over her shoulders. The only thing she knew was that Charles Henry, in the room across the hall, was suffering. She walked resolutely to the door and knocked.

Charles Henry heard the knock, and lifted his head from the table, trying in-

Continued on page 17

Successful Husbands and Wives

Who Was Marie Dupont?

By ADELE LUEHRMANN

CHAPTER XI (Continued)

AT the office Gavock was told that it would be necessary to get additional cash to cover his check, but that he would have to wait only a few minutes, as the bank was very near. Mail? Yes, there was a letter.

Then he read:

There was no address. Gavock beckoned the clerk. "When did this come?"

The letter had been left an hour before, he thought, and the man had said he would wait.

"Wait where?"

Inquiries ensued; but no one appeared to recall anything more definite.

Gavock frowned impatiently. "Have him paged—Mr. Andrus," he directed. "I'll wait here." He dropped into a deep leather chair commanding a view of the desk.

John Andrus of all people! An amazing thing to have him pop up like that. Why, it had been years since he had heard of him—since any of his former acquaintances had, indeed! The man had suddenly and unaccountably dropped out of sight. And it had been hinted too that he had been somehow involved in that mysterious murder—

Gavock's jaw fell in sudden stupefaction. Back to the surface of his memory impressions long submerged darted up and linked themselves with fresher images, and the union stunned and bewildered him. It was Andrus—yes, certainly it was he—who painted that portrait of Alix Floria which caused such a scandal that it was removed from the Salon on the second day of the exhibition. And it was just afterward that she was killed and Andrus disappeared. Where had he been all these years?

A BOY in livery announced that the messenger had returned from the bank. As Gavock stood at the desk a moment later slipping the bills into an envelop he chanced to glance round, and to his surprise found that he was being watched by the alert black eyes of Miss Lowther's friend with the Vandyke beard. Though the stranger turned away instantly, Gavock thought it likely that he had seen the receiving and counting of the money, and that he might connect it with the girl who was waiting in the lounge. There was nothing to do therefore but to wait until the man had taken himself off; which indeed he appeared to be in the act of doing, for he moved away with a light, swinging stride toward the street entrance.

"Have you located Mr. Andrus, whom you were paging?" Gavock inquired of the hotel clerk. "No? He left word that he would wait. Please find out who received his message."

This appeared to be a baffling mystery until someone thought he recolleted that the note had been sent in from the delivery entrance—the bearer had had a package.

Andrus had not come himself, but sent the picture, Gavock reflected, and no doubt his messenger would have some further word from him. Directing that the man should be taken to his rooms, where he would presently join him, he crossed the lobby toward the lounge and made his way to the recess behind the palms where Miss Lowther had told him she would be.

The corner was empty.

As he wheeled about he found himself face to face with Miss Lowther's black-beared acquaintance. Not having heard anyone approach, the encounter disconcerted him, and he stepped back involuntarily.

A barely perceptible sneer curled the lip of the stranger, then he swerved aside and walked off.

CHAPTER XII

I WAS detained downstairs," Gavock said courteously to the shabby figure he found beside his door. "Sorry. Come in."

Andrus entered and waited silently.

"You've brought a picture from Mr. Andrus, I believe?" said Gavock, turning back from closing the door and looking at his visitor.

Andrus returned the look in silence, then he said huskily, "Don't you know me, Mr. Gavock?"

Gavock gave him a sharp stare. "Andrus!" he cried in shocked amazement. "I didn't know you—for the moment. I—wasn't expecting to see you—I thought you'd sent someone." He thrust out his hand impulsively.

Andrus looked down at it a moment, then raised his right arm and held it out, showing the empty cuff.

"My God!" Gavock gasped. "Your right hand! Man, how did that happen?"

"An accident—seven years ago."

"Seven years! Why—then that was why you disappeared?"

John Andrus nodded. "What was left for me—a painter who could not paint?" he said dully.

"Good God!" Gavock muttered. "And no one knew? I never heard a word. An accident, you said? What? How?"

"I—I would rather not talk about it," Andrus answered, shuddering.

"Sit down—you look ill."

He drew out a chair, and his visitor sank into it heavily.

"I'm in for typhoid, I'm afraid. There's an epidemic of it where I live. That's why I'm here. I've been doing ads and such things with the left hand, just enough to live, the rest of the time trying to teach it what the other knew—" He broke off with a hopeless shrug. "I've no money put by for an illness; but I've got a picture—the last one I did over there. I want to sell it. He looked up with piteous questioning in his fevered eyes.

"Of course, of course," Gavock assured him instantly.

"Saw a doctor this morning—told me what I was in for. I'm all right—going to the hospital as soon as I arrange about things. But look at the picture."

GAVOCK unwrapped the parcel, and as the covering slipped off and revealed the canvas he exclaimed in surprise.

"Alix Floria! Not the portrait, though?"

"Yes; I never did but the one." After a moment he added in a lower tone, "I painted it out."

Gavock shot him a look of interrogation.

"The necklace, I mean."

"Ah, yes, I remember. I didn't see the picture then. It was shown only for a short time, I believe,."

"One day. I withdrew it."

"You?"

"Did you think they'd ordered it out? You don't know them. They'd have been only too glad of the scandal to draw a crowd. I took it away myself." He gave a harsh laugh. "I thought the damned thing was paste."

Gavock looked at him. A dozen questions crowded to his lips; but the haggard bitterness of Andrus' face checked them. He turned back to the picture, instinctively seeking enlightenment there. Something he got instantly,—the extraordinary likeness of the painted face to Miss Dupont's. The resemblance that had haunted him had been real and not fancied.

Twice he had seen Alix Floria dance; then he had gone no more to the Purple Pigeon. The second experience had sickened him,—that titled barbarian from the Caucasus gloating drunkenly from his box above the stage—

As memory suddenly evoked the offensive scene something in it caught Gavock's attention and caused him to bend a startled gaze on the canvas. The girl's dress! It was the one she had worn that second time he had seen her—and was it not very like the dress Miss Dupont had worn? His eyes groped vaguely among the intricacies of the painted costume. Assuredly in color, line, and complete effect this was the gown he had seen in Paris and again last night. Was that a chance resemblance too? No; nor was the other chance. Between Marie Dupont and Alix Floria there was certainly a connection, direct, close.

He jerked his head around to Andrus, determined now to question him; but again the artist's face halted the words. The man looked wretchedly ill, and should have medical care at once; but he made it plain that he wished no interference with the plans he had himself formed for such care, and the very magnitude of his misfortune somehow made it impossible to intrude either help or sympathy. The most

Gavock could do, it seemed, was to pay for the portrait and let him go.

"I'll take the picture, of course—delighted to get it!" he said heartily. "But I know you don't want to sell it. Why not let me help you—just over this illness—a loan—"

But Andrus cut him off with an abrupt refusal.

"As you like, then," Gavock agreed. "What is the price?"

"Five hundred will see me through—or out," Andrus said dully.

Gavock winced at the stolid coldness of the reply. "The picture's worth more," he began; but again Andrus interrupted.

"That's all I'm asking," he said in a tone that closed the argument.

Accordingly Gavock counted out for him half the contents of the envelop containing the money he had got for Miss Lowther.

"Good God, man!" he broke out. "I can't let you go off like this, not knowing where you're going. You're ill, I can see it. You can hardly stand! Wherever you're going, I'm going with you," he finished with sudden determination.

Andrus threw up his head with a frightened protest. "No, no—I don't want you—I mean, I'm all right. I have friends—I'm going to them—there's nothing you can do. Now I have the money, I'll be all right."

Gavock frowned in uncertainty. Andrus' distress at his solicitude was plainly genuine. That the poor devil wanted to be alone in his misery was obvious. And he was not the sort you could force yourself upon, even for his own good. Besides, now that he was roused he seemed stronger than he had appeared before. Still, he looked ill—dreadfully ill. Something—anything—might happen before he reached his friends.

"I'm all right, Mr. Gavock—I know just what I have to do—my head's all right, and I'll take a cab home—I'll be all right," he insisted.

"Yes, take a cab," Gavock urged, catching at the idea as a sort of compromise. "Take a motorcab. Get home as fast as you can. And get a doctor!"

His companion, assented with a nod; but he remained motionless, his eyes fastened on the portrait.

"And you can feel at ease about—what you asked," Gavock added as the other's request recurred to him. "I shall not mention our meeting."

"Thank you," Andrus murmured absently without moving.

For a while there was silence between them. Andrus appeared to be lost in thought, unconscious of his surroundings. Gavock watched him curiously. The human drama—too often a tragedy—never failed to hold his interest, and this variation of it had not come to his attention before. What was the man thinking of? Shattered ambitions, vanished dreams, what not?

Abruptly Gavock's speculations linked themselves with the questions that had shortly before clamored for utterance. He was letting a chance go by, perhaps forever, to solve a problem that was likely to prove more than a passing disturbance in his intercourse with Guy Amarinth. The boy had not been satisfied by his assurance—given in all sincerity—that he had been mistaken in fancying that he and Miss Dupont had met in Europe; that had been evident from his manner. His manner too had revealed the depth of his infatuation for the girl. Gavock felt sure that the incident of his afternoon encounter with Miss Dupont was not closed between himself and Guy. The youth would be coming with questions that Gavock—he now acutely realized—would not in the least know how to answer.

THEN Gavock asked, gazing at the canvas: "Did you know her well, Andrus?" "What is your theory about her death?"

Andrus turned his head and stared. "Theory?" he echoed. "What do you mean? She was murdered."

"That wasn't proved, was it? The man got off."

"He was guilty!"

The words were uttered with a calm finality that made Gavock hesitate again before continuing. "I was not in Paris at the time of the trial. I followed it from the newspaper accounts, and some of those I missed; but I gathered that the evidence was all circumstantial, that there was reasonable doubt of the man's guilt."

"No one who knew him doubted it."

"But weren't there witnesses who testified that they saw her afterward—alive?"

"Her dead body answered those lies."

"Lies! You think they were just lies?"

"What else could they have been? The body was there—she was dead."

But Gavock persisted. "There was doubt that it was hers, I thought. The head was—"

Andrus cut off the sentence with an exclamation of distress. His face was distorted a moment; then he mastered his discomposure and said evenly: "The trial was a farce, Mr. Gavock. There was meddling from high places. Lies were sworn to and the truth suppressed. All they wanted was to keep out any mention of—the necklace and the man who owned it."

"The Rumanian Prince?"

"Yes."

Gavock waited, hoping further information would come unsought. He had heard that it was the mad pursuit of the dancer by the young nobleman that had led to her death at the hands of a humbler lover; though a less conspicuous admirer was made to figure publicly as the object of jealousy: an easy matter in the case of a girl of unknown origin and history, even the beginnings of her meteoric career veiled and obscure.

But it was evident that he did not wish to continue the conversation, and in the face of his disinclination Gavock found it hard to push his inquiry. His reluctance, however, yielded to the reflection that if he didn't get from Andrus the absolute certainty of Alix Floria's death, he was not likely to get it at all. He pressed on to this purpose by suddenly avowing it frankly.

I WISH you'd tell me, Andrus, why you are so sure that the body found in Floria's rooms was hers. The reason I ask is that I have since seen a woman who so resembled her that I thought it was actually she."

Andrus had reached the door and opened it. "She was not an unusual type," he said. "And you didn't really know her, did you?"

"I saw her several times and observed her closely. And this girl I speak of was about the age she would have been. I shouldn't have given it a thought if I hadn't remembered that there were people who said they saw Floria alive after the body was found in her rooms. What I want to know is how you can be so sure about the body, considering that the head—"

"Her maid identified it," Andrus interrupted.

"That's what you go on, then?"

"That and the clothes. Isn't it enough?"

"It wasn't enough to convince the jury. It was the doubt of that which led them to bring a verdict of acquittal, as I remember. I hate to press you, Andrus, but the truth is that this woman I speak of is engaged to marry a friend of mine, and—well, you understand. If you have any other proof that the body was Floria's, I should take it as a personal favor if you would tell me what it is."

"I have the proof of my own eyes."

"What do you mean by that?"

"I saw the body."

"Oh, you were familiar with it, then? She had posed for you—for the figure?"

"Yes."

As he spoke Andrus' gray, drawn skin reddened to the rim of his blond hair. "Don't misunderstand me," he said sharply. "She was not a model—for anyone else. She was my wife."

With that he pulled the door shut behind him, and Gavock was left to stare his astonishment at space.

The thing he had just heard seemed incredible. No hint of the marriage had ever reached him. It must have been a secret one, and Andrus had told it now only to protect from a slurring thought the name of the woman he had loved.

Well, at any rate, Gavock had gained what he had sought. The identification of Floria's body by one who had known every line and curve of it as only an artist's trained eye could know them was to his mind conclusive. And it was proof that Alix Floria was dead.

CHAPTER XIII

I'LL see you at once, Amarinth. Will you go in, please?" Hugh Senior waved toward the inner room, and Guy obeyed the gesture silently.

When the door was closed Guy told him of his conversation and that the necklace had been claimed.

A taxicab conveyed them to Rice & Lozier's with its best speed. The anxious face of Lozier loomed at the door.

"This is Mr. Senior, from whom I had the necklace," Guy said to the jeweler as they entered.

Lozier bowed. He would have offered profuse apologies for his indiscretion in displaying the ornament; but Hugh interrupted with a question:

"Where are these men?"

"They are in my office," was the answer.

"And where is the necklace?"

"In a case at the back there, being watched. We are taking no chances with it, I assure you."

The strangers were found seated at a table in a tastefully furnished private office. The jeweler introduced the Americans to the Rumanian Consul, who in turn presented his compatriot as Count Egon Szemere of Bukharest.

"Which of you gentlemen claims to be the owner of the necklace?" the Consul asked, directly formalities were over.

"Neither of us," Hugh answered. "Mr. Amarinth brought the jewels here to be appraised at my request; but neither he nor I claim to own them. As you, however, have entered such a claim, I suppose I may infer that you are prepared to prove it?"

"We are. And we are also prepared to take such legal steps as may be necessary to regain possession."

The Consul's manner was brusque, almost offensive. But his companion interposed courteously:

"I am sure, my dear Consul, that we have only to prove our claim to these gentlemen to make further action unnecessary."

"Thank you," said Hugh, inclining his head slightly; whereupon Count Szemere responded with a ceremonious bow.

The two then measured each other briefly but sharply, and the conclusion of each was that the other was to be trusted.

"You will oblige me, my dear Consul, by presenting your credentials," Count Szemere said, and the Consul, thus reduced to a subordinate rôle, dug into a pocket for the required papers.

Hugh Senior looked them through, and restored them with a nod of acceptance.

"My passport," said the Count, offering another paper.

"Your word is sufficient, Count Szemere," Hugh returned with a movement of polite refusal.

The Count bowed again deeply. "Then may I hope that your wishes will meet mine when I suggest that we dispense with legal formality in the exchange of—shall I say information? The matter is one of extreme delicacy, and a discussion between gentlemen befits it better than process of law. I will ask the Consul to withdraw if you will make a similar request of Mr.—" He glanced at Lozier, whose name he had apparently not learned.

"Mr. Lozier will oblige us, I'm sure," Hugh said, adding as the Count's glance moved on to Guy: "Mr. Amarinth is as closely concerned in the affair as I am. Suppose we three adjourn to my office and talk things over there? We can take the necklace or leave it, as you prefer."

"Which do you prefer?" Count Egon inquired.

"I think Mr. Lozier's vault is the best place for it. Your interests are safeguarded by the fact that the Consul has entered a formal claim and Mr. Lozier can't surrender it without a release from him. By the way, Mr. Lozier, did your expert look the thing over?"

"Not in detail, Mr. Senior, owing to the circumstances that have arisen; but he pronounces it without doubt a genuine antique of great intrinsic value."

When they were seated in the privacy of Hugh's office, Count Szemere was the first to speak.

"Since neither of you gentlemen claims to own the necklace, is it permitted to inquire for whom you are acting?"

"Only for ourselves," Hugh replied. "The necklace came into my possession some years ago through an accident, and have kept it, not knowing its value. I shall willingly surrender it to you the minute I am convinced of your right to it."

"I claim no personal right: I act for another," said the Count.

Szemere's black eyes gleamed with expectancy as they darted from one to the other of his companions. His former ceremonious demeanor had dropped from him like a shell; he leaned forward eagerly, and in the stillness one heard him breathe. Suddenly he, spoke again, looking at Hugh:

"You have also the cross?"

"The cross?"

"To the necklace a cross was attached. It has been broken off—that sees itself."

"Yes, I noticed that the necklace seemed to have had a pendant; but it had none when it came into my possession. It was a cross, you say?"

"A cross of the Rumanian church—a Greek cross, you would call it. It was very valuable, as valuable of itself as the necklace entire."

"I never saw it."

"But you will tell me where, when, and how the necklace came to you?"

"I cannot promise that," Hugh answered. "I have said that when I am convinced that you have a right to the necklace I will give it to you. It is for you to prove that right."

"But you give me only the necklace!" Count Szemere made a gesture of tragic despair. "The cross—where is that? Surely you will help me that I find it!"

Hugh thought a moment. "I will do what I can," he said. "If when I have heard your story I feel that I have information that will be of service to you, you shall have it—that is, with Mr. Amarinth's consent. He is, as I have said before, as closely concerned in this matter as I."

The Count turned his keen glance on Amarinth, and the latter reddened under it. At the telltale flush the Rumanian cried out, "Ah, your secret concerns a lady!"

"Yes," Hugh replied after a brief hesitation.

"And your young friend is her lover! Yes, yes. Do not blush for it. I understand—I too love." He sprang up and held out his hand to Guy. "Come, let us join hands as men of honor and as lovers. I help you, perhaps, and you help me. You are not happy—that sees itself. You are troubled—I do not ask why. Well, I too am unhappy. Attend! For six years and more I have not looked upon the face of my beloved. In this your country I am an exile, serving my country far from all I love, as punishment—punishment because that the loss of the jewels of Kemesvar was put to my fault." He had seized Guy's hand, yielded awkwardly, and now he continued, "Come, is it agreed?"

"We can promise you nothing, Count Szemere," Hugh interposed. "When we have heard your story we shall do what we can to aid you."

Count Szemere bowed low to Hugh. "You are right. I honor you that thus you guard a woman's secret. The secret I guard touches my own honor and that of a noble house. Behold, I trust you! I now speak to you everything, without reserve!"

To be continued next week.

The Census Man Discovered Him

CESARE STEA, a young sculptor of no mean achievement, was discovered by a census taker.

The boy happened to be at home in the daytime on one occasion four years ago, because he was out of a job. He had been helping his mother cook the midday spaghetti, and, having finished, he was fooling with some clay in a corner of the kitchen.

Enter the census taker, and, besides taking the census, he took a decided interest in the extraordinary likenesses of men and beasts that seemed to grow like magic under the lad's nervous, slender fingers.

The upshot was that Stea was introduced to Victor Salvatore, a fellow sculptor and countryman, in whose studio he has worked ever since. In the evenings Stea has studied hard at the Beaux Arts and the Academy of Design.

Doing Serious Work at Twenty

HIS panel, "The Tutor," adorns the space over the doorway of the Palace of Education at the Panama-Pacific Exposition. It took the prize in the competition held by the Beaux Arts School.

Stea is now twenty years old. His sculptured conception of "War," recently on exhibition at the Reinhardt Galleries, has the typical characteristics of all his work,—simplicity and a kind of strong certainty. A powerful figure of a man, that would be heroic if it were not brutal, is striding across space, sweeping ahead of him an inarticulate mass of blurred smaller figures, whose futile struggles have no effect upon his relentless progress.

"My idea about war," says Stea in his careful English, "is that back of it is the idea and the power of one or perhaps several big men. Besides them in the world there are countless other people who have not power, who simply live their lives from day to day, taking what comes and doing their best. In war such men take their power and with it drive all these little men ahead of them in a sort of wedge. For the big men it is a gamble. Perhaps if they drive hard enough and long enough they will win more power. But there is no victory nor even gamble for these others, the little men. They can be sure of but one thing,—destruction."

They Hear with Their Eyes

OF the 1,200 pupils attending the Parker Practice School, one of Chicago's largest public schools, there are more than a hundred children, ranging in age from five to fifteen years, who have never heard the sound of a human voice. Yet they have been taught to speak almost as well as hearing children, and their skill in reading the lips of a speaker is little short of miraculous.

To Miss Mary McCowen, founder of the McCowen Oral School for Young Deaf Children, is chiefly due the credit tor these amazing results. For more than fifteen years Miss McCowen carried on pioneer work for the deaf in Chicago, and it was through her efforts that speech classes were organized in the public schools.

If you should visit the Parker Practice School any morning you might go from room to room and not discover for some time that there was anything peculiar in the manner of instructing the classes. It is the concentration with which the children watch their teacher that first betrays their physical handicap. All the knowledge they receive must come through the sense of sight, and so their eyes are ever on the alert to catch the smallest movement of their teacher's lips.

Gestures Never Used

THE teacher always talks easily and naturally to the children, just as if they could hear, no other form of communication than spoken language ever being employed. This is necessary, if the children are to be trained to think and express themselves in spoken language as naturally and unconsciously as hearing children. If they were allowed to depend on gestures they would not so readily acquire the the fixed habit of watching the lips. The child is first taught simple vowel and consonant sounds. When individual sounds have been mastered they are combined to form words. The method in every case is for the teacher to hold the child's hand upon throat and chest while she utters a sound. His hand is then applied to his own throat and chest until he has produced similar vibrations.

The power to distinguish differences of vibration by touch is a very important thing; for it is the child's chief guide in modifying his own voice later,—in raising it if it is too deep, or lowering it if it is too shrill. Exercises bearing upon this are conducted with musical instruments such as the guitar and piano, and then applied to the vibrations as felt in the chest, head, and throat.

The teacher first strikes a low note, and the child, watching, feels the vibrations. Then she strikes a high note and calls his attention to the difference. Next she places his hand upon her throat while she sings low and high notes alternately, and in time he acquires the ability to recognize the difference in tone by touch.

The making of aspirate sounds, requiring the forcible exhalation of breath, such as P, is explained by using a feather or lighted candle. The expulsion of breath blows the feather away or causes the flame of the candle to flicker.

Speech reading, which is the ability to understand spoken language by watching the speech movements of the speaker's face, goes side by side with the teaching of speech. From the first hour the child is taught to watch his teacher's lips and to attach a meaning to all their movements, and he learns to interpret spoken language with his eyes as the hearing child does with his ears, without knowing the how or why of it.

To one who watches the work the transformation that takes place in a little deaf child after a few months of teaching by the oral method is simply amazing. The change from nervous and moody discontent into a state of radiant happiness and peace of mind, is like beholding the evolution of winter into spring.

Where Not to Stand in a Thunder Storm

OHIO reports thirty-five thunder storms last year, and fifty-two deaths resulting therefrom. From an investigation into attendant circumstances the following suggestions are sent out by the State Agricultural College as worthy of attention during electrical storms:

In connection with this latter caution it should be noted that eighty per cent. of the cattle killed by lightning were struck when standing near wire fences. It is possible to insure protection from this danger by running wires into the ground from the fence every three or four rods.

Get a Lightning-Rod

ANOTHER fact disclosed is that a building properly rodded is not so likely to be struck. Of the 654 fires in one year resulting from lightning only one of the burned buildings was properly rodded, or had any rods at all. This evidence is further supported by the report of an insurance company which mentions $5,000,000 risks on fire insurance and not a single loss from buildings properly rodded.

Scientists distinguish two kinds of electrical discharges. One type occurs when there is but a single cloud layer, and the discharge is between this cloud and the atmosphere of the earth. The other type is found when there are two cloud layers and the discharge is between them. The single-layer discharge is almost invariably carried off successfully by rods; but the double layer is not so readily conducted. Rods may be attached directly to the sides of buildings without insulation; but the ends must reach down to moist earth in order to act properly.

This Truck Is a Wireless Station

Letting Ripley Write the Tags

By SEWELL FORD

YOU'D most think I'd have sense enough to sidestep such things by this time, wouldn't you? But if you're anything of a mixer, it's hard to keep from bein' rung in, specially in a live-wire suburb like we got here at Rockhurst-on-the-Sound.

It was the Yacht Club again. Not that I'm any more salt or tarry than ever. I don't own even a rowboat or a pair of oar locks. Most of us don't, in fact. But in Rockhurst all you got to do to qualify for the Yacht Club is be able to pay the dues. Then you can invest two-fifty in a blue cap with the pennant worked on the front, and swell around through the rockin'-chair fleet on the front porch with the best of 'em.

Course we always try to pick a Commodore that has some sort of a craft afloat; although one season the party who sported the three stars on his cap only held stock in a ferry comp'ny. So my bein' put on the house committee wa'n't such a joke as you might think.

Anyway, when the regatta committee begins preparin' for the spring openin' (Commission Day, they call it), they just naturally loads me up with all the odd jobs nobody else wants.

SO Saturday afternoon I puts on my official cap and runs down there. I'd straightened the contractor out as to where the reviewin' boxes was to be located, inspected the landin' floats, told the steward where to stow the band, dodged the skirt delegation that was decoratin' the assembly hall, and was makin' a thorough tour of the rest of the house, when I stumbles onto this scene of pathos in the ladies' writin' room.

First off I started to back out quiet; but when I notice that she's doin' the sob act right on some new cretonne window seat cushions that I'd O. K.'d the bill for not two days before I decides that it's up to me to interfere.

"Excuse me," says I, "but them colors ain't guaranteed not to run."

Gave her more or less of a jolt, that did. She unkinks herself sudden, dabs a foolish little handkerchief at a pair of big, leaky eyes, and sits there starin' at me startled, with her shoulders still heavin'.

"Oh, it's you, is it, Miss Deena?" says I. "Well, the idea!"

For, honest, the last one in our young crowd that I'd expect to find indulgin' in a solitaire weep is this same little Deena Baskin. Why, as a rule she's as perky and cheerful as a chipmunk on a top branch; with a soft, gurgly, ripplin' giggle that it just does you good to listen to.

Course I'd never had much speech with Deena; but I'd seen her so often I felt like I knew her real well. A cute little wisp of a thing she is, but with plenty of zip and go to her, if I'm any judge. And here she is all by herself, cryin' reckless on the club cushions.

"I'll bring in some of them leather-covered ones from the smokin' room, if you got to do it," I goes on.

"Oh, Mr. McCabe," says she, "don't tell, will you?"

"Not unless you've spotted 'em all up," says I. "You certainly had the sprinkler turned on for fair!" and I camps down chatty beside her on the window seat.

I—I suppose you've heard all about it?" says she.

"Never a word," says I.

"But you will," says she. "They're simply buzzing with it in there!" and she nods towards the assembly hall.

"Say," says I, "that Boomer-Day person ain't been—"

"Yes, she has," breaks in Deena. "Told me it was a mistake, my being put on the ladies' committee, and that there would be enough without me. She—she said it right before them all. And she's a disagreeable, spiteful, fat old woman!"

"For a vivid word picture of Mrs. Boomer-Day," says I, "I'll admit that's fairly accurate."

"Oh, thank you, Mr. McCabe!" says Deena, beamin' grateful at me through a pair of big, misty eyes. "I—I'm glad everyone doesn't feel the way she does toward me. You don't anyway, do you?"

"Whatever the row is all about, Miss Deena," says I, "I'm on your side."

"Even when you hear what they're saying about Dad?" she insists.

"I've heard," says I, "and, take it from me, your stock runs just as high as ever."

"Oh!" says she. "That helps, hearing that. And now—now they can take their old committees and—and everything else! I'm going home."

"To continue the weeps?" says I.

She tosses up her chin brave. "No," says she. "To forget them all. I've been silly enough as it is."

"That's the talk!" says I, and stands watchin' her flit graceful through a side door out into the spring sunshine, where she belonged.

POOR kid! She was payin' her war tax all in a lump; for if it hadn't been for this seven-sided ruction abroad her daddy would have kept right on bein' a respectable stock broker, like most of his neighbors, her little romance with Perry Bloomer wouldn't have been spiked, and all would have been lovely.

But the big war had caught Duff Baskin the way it caught so many others, with everything pyramided on a market that simply laid down and quit without hardly a warnin' gasp. I must say he didn't beef so hard about it as most of 'em did. He just waited long enough to see that it was no use keepin' open any more, then he shut up his offices and disappeared, nobody seemed to know exactly where.

There wa'n't any "For Sale" sign hung out on the big, hip-roofed Baskin house, though. The limousine was put up, the chauffeur and a few maids laid off; but little Mrs. Baskin and Deena seemed to be gettin' along all right otherwise. Not bein' chummy with Duff or knowin' any of his close friends very well, that was all I'd heard. He wa'n't exactly my style, Baskin,—one of the big, flashy-dressed, loud-talkin' kind, who was fond of makin' a splurge. For a time there he was mighty thick with the Boomer-Days, and that was when Stepson Perry and little Deena got so well acquainted. When this rumor about how he was makin' a livin' got to circulatin' around Rockhurst, though, Mrs. Boomer-Day begun throwin' catfits. Course I got all the details at home.

"What do you think?" says Sadie. "They say that Duffield Baskin has turned bookmaker!"

"They say a lot of things," says I, "and if you listen to all of 'em—"

"But someone saw him at the race track down in Havana," she goes on. "And I hear that's what he used to be before he got to be a broker,—just a bookmaker."

"Well, that was good trainin' for it, wa'n't it?" says I. "And, if you ask me, between runnin' a shop where suckers can put up their money on margins, and makin' a book on the ponies, I don't see much—"

"Now don't be absurd, Shorty," says Sadie.

YOU see, she'd been talkin' it over with Mrs. Purdy-Pell and the rest of 'em. And, there was no gettin' around it, Rockhurst society couldn't stand for bookmakin'—not for a minute! That was the decision, flat. For, believe me, when we do draw the line here in Rockhurst, we stretch it tight! Have to, they say; for ain't we some grand little bunch of near-uppercrusters? So my faint remarks about one style of gamblin' bein' just as good as another are promptly howled down.

Maybe if Duff Baskin had been a fav'rite of mine, I'd have debated the subject stronger; but as he wa'n't I let the matter slide. When it come to takin' it out on little Deena, though, I got good and sore. At dinner that night I reports this new development.

"That's your Mrs. Boomer-Day for you!" says I. "Jumpin' on little Deena right before the whole crowd!"

"Too bad!" says Sadie. "But the girl should have had better sense. She should have known how people felt."

"Ah, say!" I breaks in. "She ain't makin' a book, is she?"

But it's no use. While Sadie never had been strong for Duff Baskin anyway, now that he'd put over such a raw one as this she couldn't see why the whole fam'ly shouldn't be barred from society. Course she's sorry for Deena. She'd been some int'rested in helpin' along that match between her and young Boomer too.

"Just think, though, Shorty!" says she. "A race track gambler! Why, everyone in town is talking about it!"

I expect they was too. I soon discovers that I'm a lonesome minority, which gives me the comfortin' feelin' that it's all due to my low breedin' and my unburied past. Right and left I was squelched; but I kept on statin' my opinion.

THAT'S how I come to open up to this Ripley gent, goin' down on the eight naught-three Monday mornin'. He's a gassy, nervy advertisin' agent, Ripley, that's sort of on the outside fringe here in Rockhurst, but don't seem to know it, or don't care if he does. One of your brassy, independent kind, that butts in where he wants to, and stays out when he pleases.

I had to blow off steam to someone, and as he happens to drift into the same seat with me I sketches out the situation for him, windin' up with the Deena incident.

"All because some busybody reported how he'd run across Baskin at the Havana race track," says I.

"Yes, I know," says Ripley. "That somebody was me. Baskin wasn't makin' any bones of it either. Hailed me as I came down the line, and jollied me into putting up twenty on an old skate that never even showed for a place. Told roe it was his old game too, that he's gone back to rather than go hungry. But Mrs. Boomer-Day! Say, say, what's she get on him to get crusty over?"

"Why," says I, "she is Mrs. Boomer-Day!"

"But before she married Day," goes on Ripley, "she was Mrs. Doc Boomer—Boomer's Bitters, you know."

"Honest?" I gasps.

"Didn't I place their ads?" says he. "Sure

---

I did. Why, I've sent out tons of their electrotype stuff. Course you don't see it displayed so much in the city dailies now, not since it's been exposed so often. Dope and alcohol, that's all there is to Boomer's Bitters, and I suppose it has made more dope fiends and home drunkards than any other patent medicine junk on the market. Still sells in the country districts, though—sells big. And if it wasn't for Bitters dividends, you can bet Archie Day wouldn't be living the way he does. She picked him up out of the office, you know, when old Doc Boomer passed on. Sales manager, Archie was, and now he poses as a retired banker or something, doesn't he? Say, Mrs. Boomer-Day is a fine one to blue-pencil Rockhurst's social list!"

I got to feelin' real friendly towards Ripley after that. Seems there was more to him than I'd mistrusted.

"Yes," says I, "I've always suspicioned maybe she pinched her coat of arms out of the back of the encyclopedia. Still, there's plenty of others feel the same way as she does towards the Baskins; the Mackleys, for instance."

Ripley chuckles. "They do, eh?" says he. "Well, they have a right to, I suppose. They're real patricians,—porous-plaster patricians."

"I don't get you," says I.

"Cabot's Peerless Plasters," says he. "An uncle of Mackley's, Peter J. Cabot was, who left him a controlling interest in the corporation. He's reinvested, though—railroad stock. I imagine he wasn't proud of the porous-plaster tag. But that's where he got his bundle."

"You don't mean it!" says I. "The Mackleys? Why, I had an idea there wa'n't any break between them and William the Conqueror. And they're the Parties that's turnin' their thumbs down on a kid girl, eh? Say, I wish I could spring you in a genealogy lecture on Rockhurst society!"

"Maybe I might better that," says Ripley. "Ideas are my line. Let me chew it over."

WELL, he produced. I'll admit, too, I kind of shied at the proposition when he first mapped it out; for if his dope was correct about some of our best people; puttin' this scheme of his across was gem to raise some holler. I suggests that I expect to go on livin' in Rockhurst for some time yet.

"That's all right," says he. "I don't. Leave it to me. All you do is let the contract for so much. See?"

I couldn't resist. They'd insisted on my goin' on this fool committee, and they'd shoved all the hard work my way. Well, if I made any breaks, or let someone slip something over on me, whose fault would it be?

"Go to it," says I. "And while you're about it put it to 'em strong."

"Trust me," says Ripley.

Even at that I had to hedge a little. I hinted to some of the directors how we, had a chance to break even on buildin' the reviewin' boxes by workin' in a little advertisin' stunt, but that I didn't just know whether it would be right or not.

"Sure it will," says they. "We need the money."

You see, we'd planned a sort of horse-show act for our big day by auctionin' off the boxes among the plute members, so fleet could have choice places to see the fleet evolutions from, and be more or less conspicuous and exclusive. And they fell for it hard. The Mackleys paid over a hundred for their box, and Mrs. Boomer-Day wa'n't far behind.

Three o'clock was the time set for the openin' salute, and by two-thirty the waterfront of the Yacht Club was a gay and festive scene,—all of us sporty gents blue in white flannel trousers and blue coats, the ladies lookin' almost as handsome, and the boxes filled with the Rower and chivalry of our fair suburb. Flossy-lookin' boxes they was too, even if I do say it, all trimmed with buntin' and banners. Some of us committee members was just viewin' 'em and handin' our- selves a few bouquets, when up rushes Ripley lookin' peeved.

"See here!" says he. "What kind of an easy mark do you fellows think I am, anyway?"

"Eh?" says I. "What's wrong?"

"Why," says he, "I pay you good money for display space on your box fronts, and then you go cover all my hand-painted ads with cotton bunting. I'll stop payment on that check!"

Course we all protests vigorous, and someone suggests that if the ads has been draped they can easy be undraped.

"Tear off that bunting, " says the chairman. "Here, Steward! Take all that stuff off the front of those boxes."

SO it was sort of an unveilin', as you might say, which attracts more attention than if the ads had been shown all the while. I don't stroll out with' the others to read 'em. Bein' modest, I stands back where I can watch the effect on the crowd. Took some little time before the thing begun to filter through their heads; but pretty soon you could hear snickers and see little groups get together and begin explainin' the joke to each other. There was much finger pointin' and neck stretchin'.

Course the folks in the boxes wa'n't in on it at all. They sat there chattin' away calm and superior, until fin'lly Mrs. Boomer-Day gets uneasy. She was watchin' a bunch that was lookin' her way and gigglin' hearty. First she, flushes red, and in a minute or so she gets real wrathy. That only adds too the fun. The word is passed around, people are called from the verandas, and the merriment becomes gen'ral.

No wonder! Painted in big yellow letters just under where she's sittin' is this advice:

USE BOOMER'S BITTERS
Good for that tired feeling

Along the front of the Mackleys' box was a big ad of Cabot's Peerless Plasters, and so on. Pills, headache powders, and chewin' gum all was placed appropriate, with the fam'lies behind 'em that belonged there. And those in the crowd that didn't know the facts before was bein' informed rapid. Ripley he was out front attendin' to that.

You should have seen Mrs. Boomer-Day's face, though, when she fin'lly leans over the box rail and discovers what it's all about. Talk about turnin' purple in the gills! She was grape color from her wishbone up. I expect she'd like to have tongue lashed somebody about then; but a grinnin', snickerin' crowd was more'n she cared to tackle. So she herds her guests together and does a haughty exit. One by one the other box people get wise, and most of 'em follows her lead. Only Markley he tackles the chairman of the entertainment committee and wants to fight.

And, say, instead of interferin' with the show, this little play of Ripley's only seems to add to the pleasure of the day; for when the motorboat races are slow in startin', or the events ain't specially excitin', folks would turn and look at them decorated box fronts and chuckle good humored. And by five o'clock I there wa'n't a person present who couldn't tell you offhand which one of our leadin' fam'lies was a pill patrician and which got its blue blood from plug tobacco.

DEENA? Oh, I'most forgot. Durin' the excitement of the day she and young Perry slipped off up to Stamford, Conn., and was married. We got the news that night just after Purdy-Pell had dropped in to say that he'd heard in town how Duff Baskin was comin' back to take his seat on 'Change and up brokerage business again. So, leavin' out them that was overadvertised, everybody was more or less happy.

"But I don't see," says Sadie, "how that Mr. Ripley could do such a thing without someone knowing in advance."

"That's just it," says I. "And, between you and me, I'll bet somebody did know."

"Shorty" says she, glancin' at me suspicious. "Look me in the eye!"

"Ah, gwan!" says I. "Which eye?"

Getting a Job by Machinery

WHAT might be termed an automatic employment bureau has been devised by a Los Angeles inventor and tried out with success in that city. Its purpose is to furnish an inexpensive means of bringing employer and employment seeker together, a service for which the average agency charges a rather high fee.

The device consists of a case containing a number of metal compartments, each of which is faced with a small pane of glass so that a card can be displayed behind it. Each card carries upon its face a summary of the position offered, the duties, the wages, and other conditions,—everything except the name and address of the person offering a position. This essential detail is secured by the payment of a twenty-five-cent piece dropped in a slot beside the compartment, the coin unlocking it and permitting the removal of the card. The employer's address is found written upon its back, and the pasteboard is retained by the person seeking employment.

The idea is that a man can look over the positions described until he finds one that appears suitable, and then for a small price can get the exclusive right to apply for the work. If he does not qualify, the agency controlling the device will refund the money, and the card will be replaced.

This method avoids the crowd of applicants that often follow the insertion of an advertisement in a "Help Wanted" column, and gives both employer and employee a better chance to come to an understanding.

He Paints at the Bottom of the Sea

ZARH H. PRITCHARD, a California artist, devotes his life to painting pictures under water. He holds that it is impossible to catch the colors and what might be called the atmosphere of submarine scenery, by any method of observation from the surface. Even when the disturbing effect of the broken surface of the water is eliminated by using a glass-bottomed boat or tube, everything appears unnatural and distorted to the beholder.

Mr. Pritchard goes down to the bottom of the ocean wearing diver's goggles, and makes sketches with waterproof crayons on waterproof paper. The paintings are then completed in his studio. The goggles are bits of cow horn, cut and shaped to fit the eyes. They allow a small space of air between the eyes and the water, so that one can see perfectly.

He Sketches Holding His Breath

AFTER seemingly endless experimenting Mr. Pritchard discovered a way to make waterproof paper by soaking extra heavy drawing paper in cocoanut oil and draining off the surplus. This, after drying, proved to be a good working surface. The paper is fastened to a sheet of plate glass, which serves as a drawing board, by means of surgeon's tape, so that the water will not ooze under the paper and wrinkle it.

After putting on his diving dress and goggles, Mr. Pritchard takes a good breath and lowers himself down in the water, using a heavy lump of coral attached to his belt by means of a hook to keep him down. Arrived at the bottom, he sketches from thirty to forty-five seconds, then unfastens the piece of coral and ascends for breath. The coral is then drawn up by means of a rope for another descent. In this way he is able to complete his sketch after a number of descents.

Waterfalls Under the Sea

UNDER the water there are rivers, lakes, and waterfalls, just as there are above water. The gleaming sand, swept down by the action of the tides, furnishes this illusion.

One of Mr. Pritchard's paintings of coral rocks gives the impression of a

raging torrent forcing its way between cliffs and dashing its spray up the sides of the rocks. The most beautiful and bewildering sight of all, the artist says, is a school of fish darting by in a maze of reflected light, making the water quiver and scintillate.

Immense Submerged Mountains

MR. PRITCHARD'S finest work has been done at Tahiti, one of the South Sea Islands, where the most wonderful coral formations are found; but he has secured excellent subjects off Santa Barbara.

According to the artist, the coloring beneath the ocean is all in the lowest keys, merging from deep indigo and purple into the lighter, delicate tints of pale greens, grays, and yellows. Every point, every sharp edge, shimmers like silver in the upper regions. Rocks and cliffs in the dim light assume an appearance of inconceivable size. On land we see the foundations of every object, no matter how large or small its bulk; but when one looks down into the depths of the huge coral formations they seem to be resting upon deep, blue air.

This Is the World's Fastest Dog Team

JOHN JOHNSON, winner of the All-Alaska Sweepstakes races, 1910 and 1914, has arrived in California with his famous sixteen Siberian wolf dogs. By means of a moving panorama and a treadmill he will produce an imitation of the 1914 race at the Exposition.

The record of this team is the fastest ever made, Johnson making the trip from Nome to Candle Creek and return (a distance of 412 miles), through a blinding blizzard, in seventy-four hours and fourteen minutes, nine hours ahead of Scotty Allen, the next fastest man.

Kolma, the right-hand leader, is probably the best known dog in the North. He is twelve years old, and his strength and endurance surpass that of his younger mates. His master places the credit for the wonderful success of his team to the marvelous, intelligence of this dog.

The Worst Wreck I Ever Saw

DOPE fiends, as the world sneeringly terms those unfortunates given to the excessive use of narcotics or stimulants, are regarded as lacking in both manliness and moral stamina; yet the worst railroad wreck I ever saw developed a real hero in the person of a morphine addict.

The transcontinental sleeper in which I was a passenger was going through the deserts of Utah. I had just finished shaving, when there was a terrific crash, and the car began to roll over and over down the high railway embankment. When it stopped I managed to crawl through a broken window. The porter of the car in which I was traveling emerged through the shattered window behind me. I told him I was a doctor, that among my effects he would find an instrument ease and a small hypodermic pocket set, and he returned to get them for me.

Knowing that the greatest need for my services would be in the vicinity of the engines,—for it was a head-on collision,—I went as fast as possible to this locality. Near the locomotives I came across the body of one of the engineers, whose leg was almost severed, the blood from a torn artery spurting high in the air. With the towel still in my hand with which I had been drying my face at the time of the accident I made a tourniquet, and, jerking a rib from the bleached bones of a coyote's carcass lying near, tightened it until the red flow was stanched.

To the gathering passengers I announced that I was a physician, and would take charge of the injured as they brought them to me. An operating table was improvised from the door of the baggage car, seats, and trunks, and as the wounded arrived I gave whatever first aid was possible. The excited but unhurt hysterical women were calmed by being ordered to make bandages from sheets commandeered from the sleepers. In all I attended about 100 passengers. To add to my troubles, two babies were born.

The small supply of morphine in my pocket hypodermic case was soon exhausted, and as the sufferings of the victims became greater, I realized the great necessity for more. Every doctor is familiar with the characteristic and peculiar pallor of the opium user. I had recalled seeing one of these unfortunates on the train, and guessed that he would have a supply of this narcotic with him. Leaving my temporary operating table, I went among the passengers in search of this man, and finally found him, badly bruised, lying beside one of the demolished cars. I asked him to give me what morphine he had. He cheerfully complied, handing me all in his possession, two bottles.

What that drug meant to the many injured on that hot, treeless desert no one but a physician can ever understand.

My first act, after seeing that the badly injured were given attention, was to get some morphine and hunt for the dope fiend. I found him—dead. The shock of the collision, his run-down condition, and the fact that he had been deprived of the stimulating effects of the drug had killed him.

—W. E. Aughinbaugh, M.D.

What Shall I Do with My First $1,000?

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

JOHN D. ROCKEFELLER has told how he began work at a salary of less than $17 a month. He slaved on for three or four years and saved $800, although his annual salary at no time exceeded $700. Finally he heard of an Englishman with $2,000 who wanted a partner with an equal sum.

"I had saved up $800," says John D.; but where to get the rest was a problem. I talked the matter over with my father, who told me he had always intended to give $1,000 to each of his children when they reached twenty-one. He said that if I wished to receive my share at once, instead of waiting, he would advance it to me, and I could pay interest upon the sum until I was twenty-one.

"'But, John,' he added, the rate is 10%.'"

Everybody says that the first $1,000 is the hardest to save. We all know that. But we all know likewise that a lot of people do save that much, or perhaps they inherit it. What shall they do with it?

Don't Lend Your Money to a Friend

TO begin with, I don't believe in a young man putting his first nice, round sum at a friend's disposal. Don't lend money to friends, except purely for friendship's sake. The man with only $1,000 saved up and a small income should not take risks. He cannot afford to. Of course this bit of unoriginal advice does not apply to professional money-lenders, to large investors, or to captains of industry. Such men are ready to meet big or little losses, their final profits depending upon the average safety of their investments, not upon the success of any one. They play a sure thing, the law of averages.

But when I say don't take any risk I Most emphatically do not mean that a man in active business should not add his first substantial savings to his working capital. That is exactly what he should do. If all the men who fool away their money by playing with the stock market only had sense enough to put it into their own businesses, they would pay themselves larger dividends than even the most successful speculators. Of course, if stock speculators were as careful in their market operations as they are when they put money in their own businesses, there would be very few losers on the Exchange.

Buy a Bond, Then Borrow

JAMES B. FORGAN, the dean of Chicago bankers, has suggested that salaried men, who have no business of their own to invest in, should buy a good bond with their first $1,000, then borrow at a bank as much as they feel they can save the next year, using the bond as collateral, invest the loan in another good bond, and repay the loan in monthly instalments fall due on payday. This scheme has good points; but it is better adapted to the needs of the man who has saved $3,000 or $4,000, because the man with only $1,000 might fall ill or get married very young, and need his savings badly. Forcing oneself to save by going into debt is commendable; but never go into debt so far that you have no free, loose money.

Assuming that $1,000 is all a half young of man has saved, I should say that half of it might be placed in a conservative $500 bond to pay from 4 1/4% to 5 1/2%, or five shares of five different, non-speculative, dividend-paying, preferred stocks, and the other half kept in a bank account subject to check. This is on the assumption that the man is not in business for himself and does not intend to start out on his own hook. He had better purchase bonds or stocks that are fairly well known, because he can borrow upon them in case of necessity far more easily than on little known securities of small companies. The first nest egg should always be placed in the safest possible place, the second is entitled to carry with it a trifle more risk, with the chance of larger profit. But I believe that if the very first $1,000 is lost in ill advised investment or speculation, the chance of saving another equal sum is immeasurably lessened.

Here is the rest of

In the Room Across from His

Continued from page 7

effectually to mop his eyes with his well arm. Letitia was standing at the door.

"I heard you moaning," she said, "and I thought perhaps you were in pain."

A passion for truth suddenly filled Charles Henry's soul. "No," he said, "I wasn't moaning, and I wasn't in pain. I've just been reading that," indicating Parkinson's Magazine, "and you're right. I'm nothing but a bundle of sentiment, without even common sense to hold me together. I see everything through colored spectacles, and I can't tell the truth, to save me. I wasn't moaning just now. I was doing the baby act, because I'm not even man enough to keep my troubles to myself."

Letitia suddenly stepped into the room. "Wait!" she said, breathless. "Wait! I was wrong. I didn't know it then; but I was. You're the one who's right." She suddenly picked up Parkinson's and flung it to the floor beneath her feet. "Do you suppose I really meant that stuff?" she asked scornfully. "Why, you're the right one! You saw the truth where I was only looking on the surface. You knew things about me that I didn't even know myself. I thought I liked to be plain and screw my hair back and wear spectacles, when it was only because people thought I ought." Suddenly her cheeks grew very pink. "Do you know what I was doing when I heard you in here?"

"No," said Charles Henry. "What?"

Letitia lowered her voice to impart a great and terrible secret. "I—I was going to curl my hair!" she said. And Charles Henry, reaching with his well arm, grabbed one of her braids.

"If you dare!" he threatened. "If you dare! I want you just as you are, spectacles and all!"

And Letitia Smith, Ph.D., dissolved in tears upon his well shoulder.

It was some time after this that she made a startling discovery. Gradually she became aware that her subconscious mind was standing aloof, watching the whole performance, and, with well trained regularity, docketing her emotions for future reference. A little shamefaced, she turned upon Charles Henry.

"What—what are you thinking about?" she asked. And out of the midst of a great abstraction he answered her absently.

"I was thinking what a bully story this would make," said Charles Henry.

The Cop with the Pigeons

WHERE Detroit's Farmer street cuts Gratiot avenue, car lines converge at awkward angles, and crowds from two of the largest department stores in the city mingle with trucks that travel between the wholesale and upper business districts. Both the thoroughfares are narrow, and the handling of the immense traffic that traverses that intersection during busy hours is a vexing problem.

Howard C. Laible, six feet, over two hundred, under thirty, stands between the car tracks and keeps pedestrians from dangerous proximity to street-cars, automobiles, and horses. It is a man's job, and a good man's job: that is why his captain put Laible at Farmer and Gratiot.

Pigeons Dodge Automobiles

WELL ordered though conditions are at this crossing, the policeman who is responsible for them is not known to Detroiters as an efficient traffic officer. He is to them "the cop with the pigeons"; for, besides keeping things moving systematically, Laible has made companions of the big flock of pigeons that nest under the eaves of the public library building, just off his corner, and at almost any hour of the day they are about his feet, picking up the grain he carries in his pockets and throws to them.

An unusual combination,—this big officer with his smile and his poise, which make for his splendid command of a difficult situation, and yet with time to win the friendship of birds so that they come to him and feed, heedless of the heavy wheels and clattering hoofs that miss them by inches. At times a score or more are about him, and when traffic comes with a rush they do not flap upward, but cluster close about the feet of the man in uniform and wait until a letup again allows them to waddle out after the grain he has scattered.

Laible began coaxing the pigeons to him many months ago. They were shy, especially during the rush hours, and patience was required to induce them to alight among the vehicles. Now they descend at any time, and if no grain is in sight they strut and stare and quirk their heads in mute insistence upon their provender, until Laible's hand goes to a hip pocket and comes out with the food that has come to be as much a part of his equipment as his badge.

Good Copy for Reporters

PEOPLE who drive past the corner daily have come to look for the birds, and go around them when possible, rather than to force a scurrying for the policeman's feet. People go out of their way to stand and watch the circling pigeons come down into the crowded clatter of business. Editorial writers of Detroit newspapers draw, good pictures of the cop with the pigeons—and then draw a moral.

And over in police headquarters—upstairs, where they know all things—you are told that Laible is a right fine officer, who gave up the silver buttons of the fire department to come on the force five years ago, and has made for himself an enviable record as a servant of the public. "He has the poise, you know," they'll say. "People respect him naturally, and he never has any trouble. He's the best type of officer you'll find anywhere."

Another angle: This policeman is a philatelist, and whenever stamp collectors forgather in Detroit he is always looked to as one of the stand-bys for arrangements. He can handle plans for that complex class of men and women who spend years and fortunes gathering postage stamps just as well as he can handle his traffic—or his pigeons. And among the stamp-wise he is considered to be one of the inner circle.

Why Not Clean Your Own Watch?

SOMETIMES a watchmaker charges from a dollar to three dollars for cleaning a watch or clock—and sometimes he does very little to the timepiece in question. To be actually hand cleaned every piece must be taken apart and fixed separately.

A useful discovery was made along this line, and the watch repairers are trying to keep it to themselves. Instead of going to the great trouble of separating the parts, the only thing that is done nowadays by a great many workers is simply to soak the works in gasolene. The gasolene dissolves the grease, which has caught the dust and made the works gummy, and probably cleans the whole thing even better than was formerly done. However, as the process takes only a few minutes of moving the works backward and forward in a glass of gasolene, three dollars could not be conscientiously charged if the public knew about it. Also the public would clean its own watches and clocks.

A great many alarm clocks, and cheap watches particularly, which are not worth three dollars, can now be put in fine condition by simple immersion in common gasolene and a few motions to and fro in the fluid. The chief thing to look for in case one desires to rejuvenate an old alarm clock is to see whether or not the main-spring is broken. Of course, if that be broken, cleaning will do no good ; but most watches and clocks are retired because they either stop on the job or do not keep good time.

Dirty works are mostly responsible for this condition. After cleaning with gasolene, wind the timepiece up, and if it does not start off by itself push the little balance wheel forward so that it will vibrate by means of the very small spring, and it ought to run all right.

He Got the Wireless Cranks Together

AT seven-thirty, Eastern time, every evening 250 wireless "cranks" (which means amateur wireless operators) sit at their keys listening intently to the messages that the ether waves bring. Step into the home of one of them in Boston with a message for a friend in San Francisco, and it will be sent for you. There will be no charge: it will go as a matter of amateur courtesy. And on its way from coast to coast it will be picked up and relayed by perhaps a hundred diferent amateurs, each one speeding it forward to the limit of his own radio power.

Maxim's Plan

IT was young Hiram B. Maxim, son of Sir Hiram Maxim, the great inventor, who conceived the idea of bringing the amateurs together. The restrictions that the law places upon the amateur are very rigid. He must not have more than one kilowatt of power, lest his messages cross and conflict with the important communications of the government. Therefore the sending power of any amateur was exceedingly limited. Young Maxim's plan changed all that. He conceived the idea that if all the amateurs agreed to work together at some particular hour of the day, a message could be relayed from one to another, so that great distances would be covered without the necessity for any increase in sending power.

Out of this plan grew the National Radio Relay League, which now consists of two hundred and fifty members.

No money transactions of any kind are allowed by the league, and no messages are received from non-members that would compete with the business of commercial wireless companies.

"Can I Stop Snoring?"

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M. D.

Each week Dr. Bowers will answer the most interesting question received. Next week: "Why Do I Come Back Tired from My Vacation?"

TWOSCORE of readers plead for a cure for snoring—for a "relative." Here is the answer:

Man is the only animal in the world that sleeps flat on his back with his mouth wide open. Hence the snore; for, if we stop to think but a moment, the mechanics of snoring are readily understood.

When the head is held upright, and the respiratory passages are normally alined, snoring is impossible. When the head tilts forward there is a relaxation of some of the respiratory muscles, notably the soft palate. This membrane divides the air currents, so to speak, and under the stimulus of inspiration and expiration this flaps free in the breeze—which relaxation is triumphantly proclaimed in a reverberating solo.

The cure for snoring is to breathe always through the nose. This is, perhaps, not so easy as it may sound; for, as in hay fever, in which condition almost there is some abnormality int eh nasal passages, the habit of snoring may depend primarily upon adenoids, enlarged turbinated bones, a twisted septum, or even an overfilled and spongy mucous membrane lining in the nose.

So, first of all, the advice of a nose and throat specialist should be sought, and if there are any nasal obstructions these should be removed.

If, after the nose is cleared, mouth breathing still persists, a piece of isinglass court plaster may be placed over the lips before retiring, and the mouth thereby kept closed. In fact, it might be wise for all who have a tendency to sleep with the mouth open to adopt this simple expedition as a routine measure.

Next, the height of the pillow—for every adult should sleep with a pillow in order to maintain normal alinement of the respiratory organs and tube—should be regulated; neither too high, for this will tilt the head forward, producing relaxation, nor too low, which stretches the muscles and causes a compensatory sagging of the lower jaw.

A German specialist even advises the wearing at night of a sort of yoke, which supports the chin and prevents it from "snugging down" on the collarbone. Equally good results may follow the wearing of a bandage passed under the chin and pinned tight over the top of the head.

Next, the snorer must be discouraged from sleeping on his back. A heavy cloth bandage or towel, bound round the waist and tied at the back in a large, fat knot, will effectually prevent this; for the offender will have either to sleep on his side or not at all.

If even the most hardened sinner can be induced to follow this line of treatment consistently, his cure is almost certain.