One Minute with the Editor

They Went Down with Their Ships

IT'S midnight; the passengers are asleep; the great boat is plowing its even way through the water, when suddenly comes a crash! The engines pound a minute and then stop; the lights go out; from a hundred state rooms half-clad men and women rush on deck. The great ship lists and settles heavily—

And up in a little room, all by himself, a mere boys its, firm-lipped and steady, sending out his wireless calls for help.

The life of every man and woman on the boat depends upon that boy.

We're publishing an article next week about the wireless boys who have shown themselves to be heroes—the lads who stuck to their posts and went down with their ships.

There's a lot of inspiration in an article like that. It's by Willa Siebert Cather.

Curly-Locks

"CURLY-LOCKS" the company called him, because his hair curled and he was so fond of himself. He was a motion-picture star; and just for a joke they go the little leading lady to make him fall in love with her. He fell, all right.

It's our lead story next week, by Octavus Roy Cohen, a new writer. We shall have more stories by him: it will be a good plan for you to get to know him right away.

Some Actresses Really Do

IT'S a mistaken idea that all actresses live in gilded hotels. Some of them go home after the matinée, roll up their sleeves, and hump into the kitchen like the rest of us. We're publishing some pictures next week pf "Actresses Who Keep House."

And That Check for You

OUR pages of Interesting People, published last week, used up all the pictures you have sent so far. There are ordinary men and women right around you who have done something extraordinary enough to make them really "worth while folk." Send us their pictures and three or four hundred words about them. There'll be a check for you in the next mail if we can use the material.

We Never Get Too Many of This Kind

DEAR EDITOR: I suppose you get a great many letters, but I want you to know that our family likes your magazine better every week.

What Is the Smallest Amount of Stock I Can Buy?

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

THIS question, in varying forms, comes to me repeatedly. Evidently there are many people who want to make a beginning as stockholders, but they do not know how much they must have to make that beginning.

Theoretically there is no minimum. I have seen stock offered recently in glaring newspaper advertisements for two cents a share. It may be good, but all the presumptions are against it. I suppose a person could insist upon buying one share of that stock; but the absurdity of such a proceeding is evident.

In order to prevent forgeries and other irregularities, the leading stock exchanges have adopted stringent rules regarding the engraving of securities. These standards are also adopted by most of the legitimate corporations whose stocks and bonds are not dealt in on the exchanges. To meet these requirements it costs a corporation, on the average, perhaps fifteen cents to issue a single certificate of stock. Obviously, then, there would not be much profit for a corporation to sell a two-cent share of stock, pay a big commission to salesmen or for advertising, and have the mere work of engraving, transfer, etc., cost fifteen cents in addition.

Two-Cent Shares

CLEARLY no corporation wants to sell a single share of stock at two cents. Indeed, people who buy two-cents. Indeed, people who buy two-cent shares are probably urged to buy two-cent shares are probably urged to buy several thousand of them bunched in one certificate. And, even allowing for the fact that corporations that sell two-cent shares must issue ordinary printed instead of engraved certificates, there will still remain in the mind of any business man a suspicion that stock selling for a few cents a share can not even pay its way.

While there are probably numerous brilliant exceptions to this generalization, I am inclined to think that long experience indicated the necessity of approaching nay stock with considerable caution that has a face, or par, value of less than five dollars a share. In the same way, stocks that sell for much less than their par value are likewise to be approached carefully.

But, when we come to stocks of good standing and a par and market value that is not ridiculous, it will be found that nay number of shares from one upward are obtainable. Taking the New York Stock Exchange merely as a standard, it will be found that many brokers are just as willing to buy one share of stock as ten. They make the same charge—$1 or $1.25—for buying any number of shares from one to ten. Above ten shares the regular rate of commission is 12 1/2 cents per share, although the broker has a perfect right to charge more if he so desires.

You May Begin to Invest with $10

There is not reason why a man with $50 or $100 should not begin to buy sound, dividend-paying stocks. Indeed, purchases may begin at $10, but usually any one who is thinking of investing at all has as much as $50.

There are two desirable methods of buying stocks—either outright or one the partial-payment plan. Where outright purchases are make, the investor merely pays the broker the full market price of each share, with the commission added, and as soon as payment is make the broker has the stock transferred to the purchaser's name and sends him the actual certificates, after which the dividends are regularly sent to the purchaser. Where stocks are bought on the partial-payment plan, an initial instalment of from twenty to thirty per cent. of the market price is made, and a further monthly payment of from $2 to $5 a share. This method is rarely employed to buy a single share, but is an excellent way of buying five, ten, or more shares.

The partial-payment buyer does not receive actual physical possession of the stock until it has been paid for in full. But he does receive the dividends, which he can cash or leave on deposit to reduce his indebtedness to the broker. On this debit he pays six per cent. interest.

Have you an ambition to become a part owner in one of America's great transportation or industrial enterprises? It is easy enough to accomplish. You don't have to be a millionaire to make a start.

Next week Mr. Atwood will answer the question: "How Do I Know It Is Safe?"

What Shall I Do When I can't Sleep?

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

A QUESTION that evidently is causing uneasiness among many readers concerns sleeplessness. Sleeplessness is a result of one or more of any number of different causes.

Eating too much or not enough before going to bed; cold feet; bad air; retiring with too many of the day's problems unsolved; insomniaphobia, or fear of sleeplessness; too much light or too much noise in the sleeping apartment; being uncomfortably couched; nervousness, worry, and excessive mental activity; a blood supply supersaturated with toxic products; too much blood or not enough; eye-strain; or even grave physical defects, as heart trouble, high blood-pressure, deranged digestion, pain, kidney failure—almost any abnormality may cause insomnia.

It would be highly advisable to seek competent medical advice as to the cause of this complex and aggravating condition before attempting any method of treatment, for it can be permanently overcome only by removing or correcting the cause.

A few general rules, however, may be helpful.

First, while animals feast abundantly, and immediately afterward sleep soundly, the average human being has been civilized away from this fine trait. So, to insure sleeping, it may be sound judgment on our part to eschew the late supper, and always allow a sufficient length of time to elapse between eating and sleeping.

Yet one should not try to sleep if that "all gone" feeling is present, or if there is a superabundance of blood in the brain. A glass of hot malted milk or broth will "kill the craving." Or a light, easily digested lunch will draw the excess blood from the brain, and invite sleep.

If the feet are cold and clammy—or even on general principles—a hot foot-bath before turning in will soothe and quiet. In cold weather a pair of warm stockings may be worn with advantage.

Pure Air the Best Narcotic

NOTHING conduces to a pleasant slumber more effectively than a gentle current of pure air flowing through the sleeping chamber. Naturally, the bed should be protected form direct drafts, and there should be sufficient bedclothes to prevent any uncomfortable or sleep-dispelling sensations form cold, both in winter and in summer.

"Hard" reading or study, or nocturnal planning of the next day's activities, should be rigorously avoided.

Fear of sleeplessness should be pooh-poohed—two or three times. This is a splendid soporific; for courage repels the brooding demon of unrest, while fear invites his presence.

We can minimize noise by placing in our cars cotton plugs dipped in vaseline. And it would be money well spent to secure an easy, comfortable couch, devoid of protuberant knobs or projections.

Auto-Intoxication May Cause Sleeplessness

NERVOUSNESS resulting from auto-intoxication can best be overcome by regulating the diet—limiting the quantity of meats, eliminating tea, coffee, alcohol, ad also tobacco in excess, and by clearing the under-oxidized debris form the system.

We have learned a lot about auto-intoxication in recent years. Many sedentary workers suffer from it without knowing why they suffer. A careful "going over" by a physician, and equally careful adherence to the diet and regimen he will prescribe, will invariably benefit these cases.

If the insomniac is troubled with headaches, usually relieved by a night's rest, it is highly probable that some ocular condition exists. This should be submitted to an oculist for correction.

Almost anything that soothes and quiets is good—except drugs, which should never be used except under medical supervision, and then only as a means to "breaking in" on the habit of insomnia.

Treat insomnia with intelligence and discrimination, and it will repay you by disgustedly folding its wings and decamping to fresh fields of mischief.

Each week Dr. Bowers answers the most interesting question. Next week: "Is There Any Risk in Camping Out?"

Can a Millionaire's Son Make Good?

By BURTON J. HENDRICK

THE will of Alfred G. Vanderbilt, which has recently been filed, is an interesting document, not only from a financial but from a social point of view. It sheds great light upon that question which has troubled so many students of American life: the permanence of American fortunes; the possibility of building up an indestructible aristocracy based upon wealth—in a word, the vexed problem of that most interesting of American figures, the millionaire's son.

Alfred Vanderbilt disposes of a fortune generally estimated at $30,000,000. His oldest son receives a flat $5,000,000. Each of his other sons, the children of a second marriage, receive $7,500,000. These three children represent the elder line of the Vanderbilt family—the American family which still, in spite of recent developments, fires the popular imagination as embodying all the power and prestige of unlimited wealth.

"As rich as Vanderbilt" long ago became a popular proverb. Yet probably hundreds of Americans whose names are scarcely known possess fortunes much larger than do these latest Vanderbilt heirs.

Commodore Vanderbilt, the founder of the family, died in 1877, leaving a fortune of $100,000,000. Eight years afterward his son and heir, William Henry, died the richest man in the world, having exactly doubled his inheritance. In 1899 his son Cornelius died, leaving $72,000,000. Now his principal heir, Alfred G., leaves only $30,000,000. Compare, for a moment, the fortune of William Henry, the head of the family in 1885, with that of William Henry, the head of the family—head in the sense of being the oldest son of the elder branch—in 1915. The first William Henry was in possession of a fortune of $200,000,000; the present William Henry has a fortune of $5,000,000. Clearly here, in a figurative and financial sense, we have a case of "shirt-sleeves to shirt-sleeves in three generations."

Another recent happening indicates a collapse in that other American family whose wealth and power, as late as 1900, seemed founded on a rock. In March of this year George J. Gould surrendered control of the Missouri Pacific Railroad to a group of bankers representing the Harriman-Standard Oil interests.

When Jay Gould died, in 1892, he left his family absolutely in control of the Manhatten Elevated railroads in New York, the Western Union Telegraph Company, and the great Gould railroad sytem. The Interborough Company took over the Elevated roads in 1903; the Bell Telephone Company purchased the Western Union about five years ago; and now the Harriman-Standard Oil capitalists have captured the wonderful Gould railroad system. Thus it has taken only twenty-three years to reduce the Gould family to financial impotence.

In 1847 Moses Yale Beach, a distinguished journalist, published a brochure giving the names of the richest Americans in New York. It contains only two or three—Astor, Vanderbilt, Goelet—that to-day carry any suggestion of great wealth. Do such names as Aspinwall,

Grinnell, Beekman, Boorman, Harmony, Howland, and Hunt mean anything to the modern American school-boy? In their day, however, these men were great millionaires; they filled the popular imagination as completely as do Rockefeller, Carnegie, Frick, Armour, and Marshall Field to-day.

The Most Difficult Problem a Millionaire Has to Face

MILLIONAIRES have many difficult problems to face, and probably not one embarrasses them so much as what to do with their sons. They find no difficulty in wringing additional millions out of railroad stocks; the proper way of handling their successors, however, is a poser.

"Let a boy know that he is going to be rich when he grows up," said Russell Sage, "and in nine cases out of ten he will turn out worthless."

"No man should leave money to his children," said Cecil Rhodes. "It is a curse to them. What we should do for our children, if we would do them the best service we can, is to give them the best education we can procure for them, and turn them loose in the world without a sixpence for themselves. What happens when you leave them fortunes? They have no longer any spur to effort."

Many famous Americans have expressed similar ideas. When Henry Ford announced a plan of profit-sharing that inevitably meant a huge diminution of his profits, some one reminded him that he had a son, and asked what was likely to become of him. This son, replied Mr. Ford, would have to shift for himself, precisely as his father had; he did not propose to ruin his prospects at the start by leaving him an unwieldy fortune!

I remember several years ago reading a letter written by Andrew Carnegie to the editor of a great New York newspaper. This paper, printing a description of Mr. Carnegie's new Fifth Avenue house, had interjected the statement that the iron-master had given it to his daughter, then a little girl, as a Christmas present.

Mr. Carnegie expressed the pain that this published statement had caused him. His daughter, he wrote, had been brought up in the simplest gingham-apron manner; as far as it was possible, the fact that her father was an exceedingly rich man had been concealed from her. Mr. Carnegie could hardly think of anything so wicked as making a child a present of a million-dollar house! As a matter of fact, he said, his daughter would not inherit an immense fortune, since he proposed giving it all away before he died. Mr. Carnegie was already upon record as having said that the most injudicious use any man could make of his wealth was to give it to his family. "Moderate life provisions should be made for the wife and daughters, and very moderate allowances, if any, for the sons."

The history of American millionairedom reveals two methods of handling this difficult problem. Some rich men have pampered their children, placed practically no limitations upon their expenditures, made no attempt to train them for their approaching responsibilities, resting content to see them shine as "gentlemen" and force their way into social prominence purely by virtue of their wealth. Others, while not adopting the extreme ideas of Henry Ford and Andrew Carnegie, have sought to endow their children with something in the nature of a Spartan training.

It is hardly necessary to cite illustrations of the first method. The newspapers furnish abundant material of this kind. But are there no cases on the other side? Have any of our millionaire sons had a careful, parsimonious training? If so, has this bringing up justified itself?

That same Vanderbilt family furnishes several illustrations pro and con. Here we find the results of pampering, and the results of a training so severe that it amounted almost to parental neglect. Commodore Vanderbilt had no use for the luxurious excrescences of life. Knowledge of Latin and algebra, Gold Coast dormitories at Harvard, and expensive yachts formed, in his mind, none of the essentials of a young man's education. He respected only one trait in the rising generation, and that was work. He had thirteen children, and he did little to help any of them in the world. He treated his eleven daughters with almost shabby indifference. He showed no particular interest in his oldest son. Although the Commodore, in the latter's boyhood, was already a millionaire, William H. received only the rudiments of a common school education.

This second Vanderbilt did not impress people as a brilliant boy; he seemed rather slow-thinking and slow-acting. But he finally landed a job as a clerk in a banking house, which, after several years' hard, patient work, yielded him a salary of sixteen dollars a week. The Commodore gave him no allowance, and spoke disparagingly of him, usually describing him as a "chucklehead" and a "beetlehead," these terms evidently being early nineteenth-century equivalents for "bonehead."

Commodore Vanderbilt's Spartan Training

YOUNG Vanderbilt had the courage to marry on his sixteen dollars a week; but he did not have money enough to furnish a home, and he established his domestic hearth in a boarding-house on East Broadway. His rollicking millionaire father paid no attention to him, his wife, or his children. William, he used to inform his friends, was "bound to go to the dogs." Finally, however, the Commodore purchased for his son a farm on Staten Island, and placed him there to dig a living out of the soil.

"Billy's good for nothing," he said; "I'm going to try to make a farmer of him."

A few years later William asked for a loan of $5,000 with which to make certain improvements. The millionaire railroad magnate indignantly refused. "You don't amount to a row of pins anyway," he told him. "You won't be able to do anything but to bring disgrace upon yourself, your family, and everybody connected with you." Lest this be regarded as exaggeration, let me quote the words of William H. Vanderbilt himself, given as a witness in the famous Vanderbilt will suit:

"In 1856 I borrowed $6,000 from a neighbor," he testified. "I sent a man to see father, to get it from him. My father said: 'No, damn him, let him mortgage his farm.' About four months after that my father took me riding with him one day, told me that I had mortgaged my farm, and that I was a sucker. He told me that a fellow that did not

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live within his means would never get any of his money."

The Commodore kept his favorite son upon this solitary Staten Island farm for twenty-two years. Although no one but Cornelius Vanderbilt himself knew it, this period was really an apprenticeship in frugality and industry. Although the Commodore loved to call William H. to his face a "stupid blockhead," the object of this parental by-play was really not a fool at all. And the Commodore understood this better than other men. He had already selected William H. as his heir; this long, harsh training was an essential preparative. When the Staten Island farm began to yield profits of $10,000 a year, no one was quite so delighted at William's success as the Commodore.

One day a Staten Island railroad became bankrupt. The Commodore surreptitiously had his son made receiver. William handled the job with a financial skill worthy of his father. "There's something in the boy, after all!" the latter exclaimed gleefully. He called him from the farm and put him into the office of the Harlem Railroad. In a few years he was president. He now became his father's business intimate, and, in the latter's lifetime, the manager of all the Vanderbilt properties. Certainly, from Commodore Vanderbilt's own standpoint, the man justified his severe training. In seven years he increased his fortune from $100,000,000 to $200,000,000, and had added enormously to the Vanderbilt railroads.

William was a kinder, more affectionate man than his father; but his two sons, Cornelius and William Kissam, also had a plain bringing up. Both spent their early lives on the Staten Island farm, and both received little more than a common school education. Cornelius "went to work" as a clerk in the Shoe and Leather Bank, and supported himself on his salary. William K. spent his earlier days as a bookkeeper. Cornelius worked so hard at his railroads that he died, practically of exhaustion, at the early age of fifty-six. His brother, William K., who also had worked hard as a young man, took warning. "Both my father and brother died of apoplexy," he once said. "I don't propose to end that way." Cornelius, therefore, was the last of the working Vanderbilts. And, as already shown, the Vanderbilt fortune declined with the decline of industrious habits.

In his heroic death, however, Alfred G. Vanderbilt contributed one fine chapter to the family history. The whole family story contains nothing so splendid as his act, the other day, in giving his life preserver to a woman passenger on the Lusitania.

Other Millionaires' Sons

STUYVESANT FISH'S oldest son started his career as station agent on the Illinois Central Railroad at Salina, Kansas. Harriman made his oldest boy work hard at railroading during every summer vacation. He spent two months one summer with a surveying gang on the Union Pacific. Harriman's will clearly expresses his ideas on the wisdom of giving large fortunes to inexperienced young men. He left his children nothing at all, but gave his whole estate unconditionally to his wife. Another son, Averill, who was recently graduated from Yale, made a reputation there for manliness, industry, and simplicity of manners. Young Henry H. Rogers, as a result of a careful training in industrious and abstemious living, was able to take over all his father's business responsibilities.

Louis Hill's mother wished him to become a painter. But the boy was determined to follow in his father's footsteps and become a railroad man. "Then," said James J., "you must be a good one, and you must start at the bottom." Young Hill's first job was with a construction gang in North Dakota. Then he learned railroad mechanics as a laborer in the St. Paul shops. He also studied at first hand the operating department, and learned all the details of the passenger and freight business. In time be became the president of the Great Northern.

"Young John D." is another millionaire's son who has not frittered away his substance under the Broadway white lights. His interests, however, are not mainly business. "I'd rather lead a Sunday school than run an office," he once said. Cornelius Vanderbilt, who was "cut off with a million" because he married the girl of his heart, is the one member of the family in the fourth generation who has gone in for hard toil; and he has succeeded. Eben Jordan, of Boston, is the working head of the great department store founded by his father. August Belmont is the representative of the Rothschilds in this country, as his father was before him. Peter Cooper Hewitt, the grandson of the great millionaire Peter Cooper, has won world-wide fame as an inventor. Winthrop Ames, scion of the millionaire shovel-making and railroad-building Ames of Massachusetts, is doing excellent work in elevating the theater. Cameron Forbes, descended from the man who created the Burlington Railroad, made an excellent record as Governor of the Philippines.

Rudolph Spreckels, son of Claus Spreckels, the sugar millionaire, went to work at seventeen, soon engaged in business on his own account in opposition to his father, beat the old gentleman at his own game, and "retired" at twenty-six, a millionaire self-made. "I was never licked but once," said Claus Spreckels, "and that was by my own boy!" Rudolph Spreckels' work as a political reformer has since made his name one of the most honored in America.

Clearly, the son of a millionaire is not preordained to be a fool or a wastrel. The record, however, rather indorses the theory that for him, as well as for others not born to the financial purple, an early life of industry and reasonable abstemiousness favors success.

The Making of Madigan

By GEORGE WESTON

Illustrations by Rolf Armstrong

IN his fight for success Madigan had two advantages. As a boy he had been poor, clever, and industrious: a combination that can kick like a mule and fly like an eagle. And in the second place Madigan was the first man to make the United States government give him a first-rate letter of introduction to the solid citizens of New York, a letter of introduction that was not only as good as money, but was literally just the same as money.

Madigan was born at Milton, in that region where the eastern end of the corn belt melts into the western end of the factory zone. He started life with the normal number of parents, but was speedily reduced to one. Madigan, Sr., otherwise known as "Dynamite Bill," was blasting a rock one very fine morning when he made a miscalculation. So his wife became a widow, and both she and her son were obliged to scratch gravel.

Mrs. Madigan went out by the day and took in washing. Her son ran with a milk wagon in the morning, went to school at nine o'clock, and carried a paper route at night. This affected his social standing among his school-mates in a somewhat marked degree,—a social standing further involved by the fact that his trousers were patched.

IN spite of these handicaps, however, or perhaps because of them, Madigan was the star of his class. Like the girl in the fable who said, "If you're not pretty, you've got to be smart," Maddy seemed to think that if he couldn't achieve a sartorial triumph he would at least hit the bull's-eye in education. So, when Silas W. Bronson, president of the Milton National Bank, made claim upon the school for its brightest graduate, William M. Madigan, Jr., was the only one who filled the specifications.

Wherefore it happened that Mrs. Madigan thanked her Creator one night for granting the dream of her life. Willy had accepted a position in a bank—in a bank!—where dynamite was taboo and fortunes were made in a night!

It is true that the immediate salary was only five dollars a week. But Mrs. Madigan didn't dwell on that. She thought of the future.

Even in those days Madigan had an eye that said "I can," and a chin that added "I will"; for when a boy works on a milk wagon four hours before school opens, and carries a six-mile paper route after school closes, he gets a chest on him like a young barrel and learns how to whack at his work like a human war machine.

Within a week Madigan had become almost useful to Silas W. Bronson, who employed him as private clerk. Within a month he was almost indispensable. And within a year Silas W. had added another five dollars a week to his young clerk's salary to keep him from going to the Watchcase Company.

Silas W. was known as the meanest man in Milton. But from time to time he had other fits of madness, in which he raised Madigan's salary by fractional amounts, and doubled his work and responsibilities with a liberal hand.

On his twenty-sixth birthday Maddy was sitting on the front veranda with his mother (it was that cool hour after a hot summer day when the motor-cars come out for an airing) and she happened to wonder if she'd ever live to see the day when her Willy would have his own car, "as big as any of them."

Perhaps that was all Madigan needed; for he felt his heart jump within him like a race-horse touched by the spur. He went out to the woodshed, feeling too strong to sit still any longer, and there he took stock of himself. The inventory showed as follows:

A savings account of $1,215.

A weekly salary of $25.

A mother who firmly believed he would be president of a bank—some day.

A girl with cheerful blue eyes who had been waiting two years.

And a feeling of ambition that sometimes threatened to burst on him and spatter him all over Milton County and the territory adjacent thereto.

Having thus taken stock, Madigan closed the books, saying, "Somethings going to break." And seizing the ax he tackled the oak blocks, singing all six parts of the sextet at once.

THE next morning Colonel Mapes called at the bank to see old Silas W. The Colonel owned the Watchcase Company, Milton's biggest factory. Madigan was at his desk in the corner, answering that morning's mail.

"Silas," began the Colonel, "how are you off for money?"

"How much do you want?" growled Silas W.

"A lot!" replied the beaming Colonel, and he preened his beard in an optimist manner. "I've got a chance to land a ten year contract that would double our business. But to do that I shall have to buy those old houses and stores on the south of the factory, pull most of them down and double our present floor space."

"Big expense!"

"It'll cost two hundred thousand dollars by the time I'm through. But of course the factory will be worth that much more. I can lay my hands on nearly a

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hundred thousand by selling a batch of securities that I've got down in my box here. Can you lend me the other hundred thousand?"

"Money's tight. Let you know to-morrow.”

They talked a few minutes longer, growler and optimist, bass and tenor; but over in his corner Madigan heard no more. His mind was turned inward, marveling at his First Big Scheme.

WHEN the clock struck twelve Madigan strode out into the warm sunshine, eager for the interview before him.

Over to the watchcase factory he hurried, and running up the stairs two at a time he met Colonel Mapes just as the latter was coming out of his private office.

"Colonel!" he cried with joy in his voice. "The very man I want to see!" He led the older man gently back through the door. "Of course I heard what you began saying to Silas W. this morning," he began, "and I've got such a great little scheme that I simply can't keep it to myself any longer."

His smile was so contagious that the Colonel promptly caught it. "Well, Maddy, my boy, what is it?"

"If I can show you how to make a lot of money this next year, Colonel, and show you how to finance it too, will you divide the profits with me if you decide to go into it, and if I do my share of the work?"

The Colonel's smile grew more cautious, and he thought before he answered. "If you can show me how to make money that I wouldn't otherwise make,” he said at last, "and if it's good, clean money, I don't see why I shouldn't go shares on it. Do you?"

"Not on your life! We'll shake hands on that, Colonel. I'd rather trust this than a government bond," he laughed as he vigorously pump-handled the other's arm. "Now, sir! You want to double your factory. Well, I'm going to show you how to do it for nothing, and then have a lot left over!"

"Bless my soul!" cried the Colonel. "How can you do that?"

"You know where the Milton trolley turns up the river road. Well, if instead turning south it ran straight on, it would go through Miller's farm for half a mile until it reached the railroad and the river."

"Exactly."

Down there near the river, where Miller pastures his young stock, is the ideal place for your factory. The railway company would build you a sidetrack, and you wouldn't have any more trucking to do. There's all the water you need, and all the land you need. The trolley company would be tickled to death to put a track and run cars down to the factory. That would take care of your help. And instead of being shut in by old buildings and streets, Colonel, factories in the country—grass lawns all around the buildings, and flower beds, and gravel walks, and fountains. Everybody passing on the railroad would see it and remember it. Think of the indirect advertising it would give you, and think how much better off your help would be!"

"BUT, my dear boy, I already have this factory here!"

"Of course you have. And being a member of the Board of Trade you know the Western Mower Company is thinking of coming to Milton. Colonel, if you and I are good salesmen we can sell them your present site and factory for enough money to build a new factory on the Miller farm twice as big as this one is."

"Bless my soul!" cried the Colonel.

"But that's not the point," cried Madigan. "You've got about two hundred and sixty hands here, haven't you? If you double your capacity, say, you'll have five hundred. All right. We'll cut up the Miller farm into quarter-acre building lots. A fifty-foot lot anywhere here in Milton costs at least a thousand dollars. Well we'll sell a bigger lot for five hundred. And think what a beautiful place it is! Think of the view of the river! We'll put up a boathouse, and a casino, and a mothers' club, and a playing park for children, and in a year or two we'll have a city over there. We'll call it Mapesville, and your name will go down to future generations as long as there's any United States. There'll be a railway station first thing you know, and a post-office, and churches, and banks, and stores, and everything else there is. How's that for a scheme? A peach!"

"Bless my soul!" cried the Colonel, who couldn't leave his whiskers alone.

"Why, Colonel, the more you think about it, the better it is. Now let's get back where we started from. If we can sell your present site and factory to the Western Mower people and get enough

money out of them to buy the Miller farm and build a new factory out there as big as you want it,—if we can do this, will you do it?"

"In a minute," exclaimed the Colonel; "for I'd double my factory for nothing, even if we couldn't sell any building lots."

"We'll sell building lots, all right. You leave that to me. But first I must telephone Silas W.," said Madigan, reaching for the receiver.

"What's Silas W. got to do with it?" asked the Colonel uneasily. "Is he in on this?"

"Not on your life!" exclaimed Maddy.

"Nobody's in this but you and me. I'm resigning from the bank, that's all."

"But, Maddy, my boy, don't you think you'd better wait first until we see if the Western Mower people will buy?"

"No, sir!" cried Madigan. "I'm going to cut away from the bank job, and then they've got to buy!"

FIRST there was an innocent looking option on the Miller farm, then an agreement by the railroad to put in a sidetrack there if the Colonel would build a factory, then the trolley company agreed to extend its lines, and then the Western Mower Company bought the watchcase factory for eight thousand dollars more than the Colonel had hoped to get.

"Maddy," said the Colonel, "the next time you sell any property belonging to me, I sha'n't stay with you. The way you talked to them about this factory, I felt guilty of criminal negligence in selling it at any price. Now we'll organize the Mapesville Realty Company and close our option on the Miller farm."

Madigan had foreseen that the development of the scheme would take more ready money than the Colonel could command. So the nine best men in Milton were let in on the ground floor, each for a small but tidy block of stock. Even Silas W. couldn't say no, particularly as the State Trust Company was hot after the Colonel's account just then, and the Colonel's account was the most profitable in Milton.

Not only that, but Silas W. was elected a director at the first meeting of the Mapesville Realty Company, together with the other eight solid citizens. Of the three hundred and fifty acres of the Miller farm, fifty were transferred to the Colonel for factory and grounds.

And after Madigan had explained to the directors how the remaining three hundred acres were to be divided into streets and avenues, and all the rest of his scheme, they elected him general manager of the company at five thousand dollars a year.

One afternoon a few weeks later, General Manager Madigan stopped in front of a little gray house with dark blinds and sounded his automobile horn in a scandalous manner until out came the girl who had been waiting for two years, the girl with the cheerful blue eyes. She hopped into the car, and off it sprang like a thoroughbred feeling its oats.

"Last lot sold!" grinned Madigan.

"Oh, Will! No wonder you feel so!" And reaching over to the horn she held a tonal celebration on her own account, while General Manager Madigan sang all six parts from the sextet.

"Been figuring up my profits," he added as a fitting climax. "One hundred and thirteen thousand dollars for yours affectionately. How's that?"

She snuggled close in cheerful admiration, and his left arm went where his left arm belonged.

"Well, hunnums," he asked, "when are we going to be married now?"

"Jennie's coming home next May to take care of mother, and that'll give me time to get my sewing done and have everything ready. So—if—now—suppose—would next June be too early for you?"

Next June! Too early! Although it was nearly the death of Madigan, they finally agreed upon June. He took her home then, hunted up the Colonel, and told him too that the last lot had followed the illustrious example of the first.

"WE'LL hold a meeting right away, Colonel," he added, "and declare a dividend. I want to cash in and go to New York."

"Bless my soul!" cried the Colonel. "Going to paint the town?"

"Not on your life, Colonel! But listen to me! I don't know how long I'm going to stay this way; but I feel so full of ginger you can almost hear me fizz! If I met the devil around the corner, I could grab him by the horn and sell him a carload of clinkers before he got away. That's me, Colonel, right here and now! And while I feel this way I'm going to cash in on it. I'm going to New York next week, and I'm going to make a million dollars there in the next six months, and I'm going to make it fair, and square, and clean. You and I are good friends, Colonel, and always will be, and you know I'm not a bragger. But, honestly, the way I feel I could take this old world and swing it by the tail—just for its own good!"

"Maddy," said the Colonel solemnly, "I believe you could, my boy. You've got it in you. But this old world has had a lot of wrestling in its time. Be careful how you take a hold of the critter!"

On the Limited between Chicago and New York, Madigan fell in with a gloomy real estate owner from Manhattan; but his pessimism rolled off Maddy like water off a duck's back.

"A successful man is never gloomy," he told himself. "Why should he be? That's the trouble with this man! He's sour, and he sours others, even against himself. But he won't sour me!" And aloud he said,

"Who's the best man in New York for buying acreage and turning it into building lots?"

"Myron Miller's probably made more money than anybody else," sighed the man from Manhattan. "But Miller made it when the making was good. Everything's dead now."

"Know his address?"

"He's in the Realty Tower Building."

"Know how much he's worth?"

"He's rated at over ten millions. But of course you can't believe everybody's rating. If an agency man comes in your office, and you give him a cigar and a good jolly—"

BUT Maddy's mind was elsewhere.

"Ten million dollars!" he was thinking. "And what he has done I can do! What's more, I'm going to do it! Lord! I wish this Noah's Ark would get a move on! I want to get there and be at it!"

But he hadn't left Grand Central Station five minutes when he began to feel the effect of New York's utter indifference to a stranger. No one looked at him. No one seemed to care a hoot whether he was there or not. The hotel clerk gazed over his head. So did the head waiter and the hat boy. In the lobby strangers pushed by him as though he were simply non-existent, and the only man who gave him a human look of sociability presently suggested a game of poker at a "little club—a gentleman's club, you know—just around the corner."

All this might have depressed another

---

man; but it merely nettled Maddy. "These folks have made their friends and connections," he thought, "and they haven't much use for an outsider. So it's up to me to make friends and connections too. I'll go right out and see Miller."

He walked briskly along Broadway until he reached the Realty Tower, and there, on the twenty-fifth floor, a world-weary clerk took his card and disappeared into an inner room. Through the open door Maddy heard an indifferent voice:

"Madigan? Who's Madigan?"

The owner of that name strode along the hall until he came to that door, and there he wheeled right in. "How do you do, Mr. Miller?" he cried. "I'm Madigan! Madigan's the man who put Mapesville on the map, and I've just dropped in to tell you about it!"

MYRON MILLER frowned. His face and hair were a study in pink and silver, and the perfection of his clothes indicated a valet who was an artist in his line. Nevertheless the slight contraction of his brows was as unmistakable as a longshoreman's rage, and Madigan knew he was in for a struggle.

As a matter of fact, the King of New York Realty Operators showed his displeasure for three reasons. In the first place, he had lately acquired a fashionable wife and aristocratic tendencies; wherefore Madigan's unconventional appearance jarred him. Secondly, he had met so many glad-handed pirates with intricate designs for scuttling his checkbook that he was suspicious of every smile, of every pleasant word. And in the last place, two of his banks had just intimated that a reduction of his loan account was not only advisable, but imperative; and at that period of his history Miller was up to his frowning eyebrows in so many deals that ready money and the breath of life were hardly anything more than synonymous terms with him.

He listened to Madigan with the walleyed expression of a man who is thinking of something else.

"Yes, yes," he interrupted. "But—er—Mr. Radigan—I shall have to ask you to call again. You see, there are only so many hours in a day, and I happen to be particularly busy this week. What was your idea in calling, by the way?"

"I wanted to make your acquaintance," said Madigan with wide-open eyes.

"Yes, yes. But why?"

"Because it's my ambition to break into New York real estate."

"Can you sell lots, Mr.—er—er—"

"Madigan's my name. Yes, I can sell lots. You mean on a commission basis?"

"Naturally."

"I can sell lots on a commission basis as fast as you can, Mr. Miller. But also, like yourself, I can make money faster than that."

"There are many men who think the same," said Miller in a listless tone. He picked up his pen and dipped it in the ink. "There are millions of them right here in New York, for instance."

"But I've shown what I can do in Mapesville—"

"Unfortunately, Mapesville isn't New York."

Madigan's teeth shut tight. "I see," he nodded. "It's up to me to make a local reputation; isn't that it? Just now it's a case of 'Who's Madigan?' All right. I'll find a way to answer your question." He held out his hand. "Good-by, Mr. Miller," he cheerfully exclaimed. "You'll hear from me again before long. And when you do," he inwardly added, "it's going to be some noise!"

FOR a week Madigan looked around and sized up his task. It didn't take him long to discover just how small a chance a hundred thousand dollars in New York real estate had.

"All the same," he told himself, "I've got to make a reputation somehow. But how? How? HOW?" A short, sharp question, full of meat and muscle, which has knocked out many a weaker man than Madigan.

One day on the lower West Side, where he had gone to see the transatlantic liners, he found himself with no smaller change than a twenty-dollar bill. "No use getting on a car with that," he thought. "I'll change it in one of these stores."

He entered a large commission house, one of hundreds that make their headquarters in that neighborhood. Over the door was the sign "Simmons & Son. Est. 1857." Making his way between the barrels of produce he came at last to an office in the rear. "Mr. Simmons in?" he called.

A white-haired man rose.

"Sorry to trouble you, Mr. Simmons," smiled Maddy. "But will you change a twenty-dollar bill for a stranger? Thank you, sir. Not much danger of starving to death around here."

The old man came out of the cage, as fine a figure as ever stood in a background of turnips and onions, and interested (without knowing it) in Maddy's fresh color and his evident curiosity about the barrels.

"Young man," he said, "I'm going to show you some of the biggest alligator pears you ever saw in your life," and he led the way out to the sidewalk. The next store was on the corner. It was empty.

"A place like yours is a liberal education, Mr. Simmons," said Maddy at last. "I sha'n't forget it in a hurry, nor your kindness either. If you get any more stock in here, I suppose you'll be renting this corner store too."

"No; we've got room enough. You know, I've often thought this corner store would make a good place for a bank. The nearest bank is a dozen blocks away."

Right then and there Maddy conceived the Second Great Idea of his life.

"Mr. Simmons," he said, quickly turning and holding out his hand, "if I organize a national bank in this neighborhood, will you be one of its directors?"

"If you can get the right people in it," said the other, after a thoughtful pause, "why, yes—provided, of course, that everything else is satisfactory to me."

"We'll shake on that!" laughed Madigan exultingly. "It's a go, Mr. Simmons! It's a go!"

IN and out of the commission district weaved William M. Madigan, every line and every move of him full of health and confidence and sincerity.

"Mr. Brown? Pleased to meet you!" This was Maddy's form of greeting.

"You know Mr. Simmons of Simmons & Son? Of course. He happened to suggest the other day how handy it would be to have a bank in this neighborhood. So I'm organizing one,—the Abingdon National Bank, named after Abingdon Square. Mr. Brown, I'm here to ask you two questions. First: Wouldn't you like to be a stockholder in your present bank, and get your share of the profits and surplus? Second: Do you know any surer, easier way of making money than buying a few shares of bank stock at par, and watching it climb?

"I'll tell you right now, I'm not after money. I'm only after names—and, by Jove! they've got to be good names too! Mr. Brown, there are seventeen reasons why you should add your name to this subscription list—why you should write it down with this pen and blot it with this blotter—"

Up and down stairs went William M. Madigan, up to the top floors and down to the basements, getting a name here and a name there, securing subscriptions for one share, two shares, ten shares, every name making it easier to get the others, and every name meaning an additional depositor in the new bank. From Broadway to the Hudson River, and from Vesey Street to Fourteenth, he covered every business building, running back occasionally to the livest wires, and getting additional subscriptions or the names of other live wires.

"What better, cleaner business is there than a bank?" he argued with them. "Did you ever have a chance to get in on the ground floor of one before? Do you ever expect to have the chance again? The average value of bank shares in New York is in the neighborhood of four hundred dollars. You'll pay a hundred for yours: not only that, but the Abingdon National Bank will be your bank. You people down here will own it, body, boots, and breeches. Your money won't be tied up in Wall Street loans. It will be here, every cent of it, to help you men in your own legitimate business. Look at this list of subscriptions! Do you want anybody to have an edge on you? One share of stock will cost you only a hundred dollars, and you don't have to pay a cent till every share is subscribed for.

"But I tell you, Mr. Brown, time is getting short. We've turned the corner long ago, and we're speeding home now. This fountain pen is getting worn out; but I guess it's still got spunk enough for you to add your name to the list of owners of the Abingdon National Bank."

So spoke William M. Madigan, studying his arguments as a virtuoso studies a Beethoven score, changing his talk at every call. On Sundays he explored that part of the north shore of Long Island which was within commuting distance of Herald Square; for it hadn't taken him long to find out that many of the most profitable deals in acreage had been made in that section. And so it happened that one Sunday afternoon the passing motorists stared to see a young man striding along toward the Hillcove Station. He was traveling as though he meant to throw his legs away, and he was singing all six parts of the Lucia sextet.

A FORTNIGHT later the stockholders of the Abingdon National Bank held their first meeting. The charter was approved, the bylaws were passed, and nominations for officers were in order.

"Gentlemen," said Mr. Simmons, "you have all made the acquaintance of Mr. Madigan, and you all know whether he has impressed you well or otherwise. A few of us have even gone to the trouble of looking him up, and I myself visited his home town to see what the folks back there had to say about him. Well, I want to tell you he's all right." (Applause.) "For sixteen years he was assistant to the president of the Milton National Bank, and everybody there likes him and respects him. He left the bank last spring, and made over a hundred thousand dollars in real estate in less than six months. Then he came to New York to see what he could do here, and we've been the first to see him in action. I tell you he can get business, and he can attend to business, and that's the sort of man who can make this bank a success. I nominate William M. Madigan to be the first president of the bank he has created."

Then up rose William M. Madigan to a volley of applause. "Gentlemen," he said, "I thank you very much; but I can't take that office or any other. I came to New York to go into the real estate business, and I organized this bank to show I had some life in me. That's all. I appreciate your compliment very much; but I beg to be excused."

"If you want to go into the real estate business later, that's got nothing to do with the present," objected Simmons. "A lot of us have got our minds made up on this, and you'll upset our plans if you won't accept the office. Anyhow, will you fill the presidency till we can find somebody else? You know, gentlemen," he concluded, turning to the stockholders, "the office of president requires a man of banking experience and business ability, and that's a combination that isn't so precious easy to find."

"I second the nomination of Mr. Madigan!" cried a hearty voice.

Madigan was about to object again, when the Third Great Idea struck him. He had been planning to call on Myron Miller and say, "You wanted to know who Madigan was. Well, Madigan's the man who came to New York, a stranger, and in less than four months had organized the Abingdon National Bank." But suddenly to his mind appeared a much neater scheme than that. Instead of rising to object, he sat tight and snug, and a minute later he heard himself unanimously elected president of the Abingdon National Bank.

PRESIDENT MADIGAN was signing his first batch of twenty-dollar bank' note certificates, pausing occasionally to admire the general effect. At last there were only three left.

One of these he put in an envelop and addressed it to his mother—his mother, who had always known her boy would be president of a bank some day. And when Madigan wrote the word "Milton" he smiled. He was thinking of the boy who carried papers in Milton twenty years ago, and how some of the girls pretended not to see him when they met, because of the papers under his arm and the patches on his trousers.

"But she always noticed me!" grinned, Madigan, and he addressed the second twenty-dollar banknote to the girl who had waited two years.

The third one went into an envelop addressed to "Myron Miller," and then Madigan went out to make a long-promised call. "Mr. Miller in?" he asked the weary looking clerk.

"Card, please."

Maddy took Miller's envelop out of his pocket. "There's a note of introduction in that," he smiled. "Tell him my name is in the lower right-hand corner."

A minute later the clerk came back on the hop, skip, and jump. "You're to go right in."

But on the threshold of the private office Madigan stopped.

"Well, Mr. Miller," he said, "do you know who Madigan is now?"

Myron Miller sprang to his feet and approached his visitor with the glad right hand of fellowship. In his left was the twenty-dollar banknote of the Abingdon National Bank.

"I never saw a better note of introduction in my life!" cried Miller. "Come Mr. Live Wire, and give me a few shocks!"

FOR a time they talked of Maddy's two creations: Mapesville and the bank. Then the older man mentioned some of his experiences in developing Long Island real estate.

"How much money did you make out of the Northeast Bay property?" asked Madigan, suddenly tightening in his chair.

"Nearly three millions."

"And that was a hundred and ten acres. Do you know any reason why we couldn't make as much out of the Cornelius Beeman estate, just this side of Northeast Bay?"

"You couldn't buy the Beeman estate, for love or money," said the other quickly.

"No; because his wife liked it. Bu Mrs. Beeman went to California last month—to get a divorce, I'm afraid. Anyhow, Mr. Beeman sold me a ninety day option on his property—"

"No!"

"Yes! Mr. Miller, you see this list directors of the Abingdon National Bank? They trust me because they know I'm on the square. So do the stockholders' to the very last man! And, what's more they are going to keep right on trusting me as long as they live, because they'll always find me on the square. Now, sir! You and I are going to organize Miller-Madigan Company to develop Beeman property. I expect to do my share of the work, and I expect you do yours. I expect to find my half of the necessary capital, and I expect you to find your half. We'll give the real estate market such a tonic as it hasn't had for years, and when it's over—I expect to get my half of the profits, and I expect you to get yours. What do you say?"

"My dear boy, I'm on! After such a letter of introduction as this I'll give you anything you want in reason—before you take it away from me. And if we don't make a million apiece on this—why, you can have it all! Ready to start right in?"

"A week from to-day. I've got another matter to attend to first—the best investment a man ever made in this world!"

"Let me in on it, will you?" coaxed Miller.

"Let you in on it?" cried Madigan "I like that! I'm going home to be married!"

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

By BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

Illustration by Harvey T. Dunn

I SHOULD never have remembered to write to my father if Gore had not told me to do it, somewhere about Bombay. When I did write, I found I had nothing particular to say to him. I only told him that I was not coming back, and sent a civil message to Aunt Sarah. There was no use in filling up pages with explanations, even if I could have explained anything.

Gore himself, as I afterward heard, had telegraphed to my people from Marseilles—a characteristic message that must have astonished the recipients:

I don't know how other people feel about these things, but to me there has always been a fascination about certain parts of physical geography—latitudes, longitudes, tropics, Arctic and Antarctic circles, points of the compass, the equator. I should never have any respect for the man who was heard "to speak disrespectfully of the equator."

I said as much to Gore one night when we were running through a sea of hot, black oil, down toward the Java coast. I thought he would have laughed—but he did not. He only took another pull at the extraordinary Burma cheroot he was smoking—a thing as big as a ruler—and said:

"I know, boy. There is something in the words that goes to your head. You run down the Bay of Biscay into the thirties out of the forties, and you feel there's an adventure in that; and you say to yourself that the South is waiting just round the corner, and the word sounds to you like the name of a girl you love. And you see Africa. It's just a strip of sand and rocky hills, but it makes your heart jump, because Africa is—well, Africa. There are no words for these things; but men have shed their blood for them, and they'll go on shedding it.

"AND you get to the Line, and it seems glorious to you—just an imaginary division of the sea. The East—every one talks about the fascination of the East. You thought you knew all about that. But then there's another East, farther away, and that seems as delightful as finding a sovereign in a pocket you thought was empty. The forms of things on the map fascinate you like pictures. You can read an atlas for hours. When there's a dotted line anywhere, or a blank space, you want so much to go there that it makes your mind ache."

"I think you're a wizard, sir," I said, staring at him. For, indeed, he had spoken out my very inner mind.

"Not a wizard, young Paul, only a man who's been there too," said Gore.

There was something I liked in his face. You would never have thought he had it in him to swear at you violently in four languages when you let his papers get astray.

"Ah, but you—" I began.

"Same breed," said Gore, tucking the big cigar into the corner of his mouth. "We're all one family, young Paul. You and I and Stanley and Burton and Sven Hedin and all of them. Any one of us would give up our lives for a river, or make love to a mountain range. Or we'd serve seven years, and seven years after that, for Rachel in the shape of a tribe that nobody'd ever heard of. No sense in it, boy, so far as we're concerned. Means a couple of letters after your name when you're growing old, and a flock of geese a-cackling over your little bit of work and saying you never did it. Means fevers and dirt and general uncomfortableness, short commons and that sort of thing. Spear or an arrow into you once in a way. Get three quarters drowned now and again; get wrecked—beastly things, wrecks, except in boys' books. No comfort, no wife, no home. I'd tell you to stop while you can—only that was before you bashed in the head of my valet and came aboard. You'll never stop now. You're one of us, God help you."

"There's nothing in the world I'd rather be," I said.

After that night I think we both understood our fortunes were linked by a stronger bond than that of a salary and service. We were one breed.

BY this time he had told me where we were going, and I could have danced a hornpipe on the deck when I heard it. We were bound for New Guinea—not the comparatively settled and civilized area of British Papua, but the wild, unsettled northern coasts and the archipelagos of little-known islands that lay beyond—Kaiser Wilhelm Land, the Bismarcks; the Solomons. There was nothing in all our baggage that engaged my attention so much, after this, as the great, finely lettered atlas with its satisfying maps of every corner of the earth. I studied Borneo, Celebes, Halmahera, Banda, Amboyna, Ceram, the Aru Islands, all the outliers of New Guinea, the great island continent itself. I gloated over the famous names that lay thick along its coasts—Geelvink, Schouten, Tasman, Le Maire, D'Entrecasteaux—and mentally shook my fist at the vandalism of the hideous titles along the German section—such names as Potsdamhafen, Stephan-

Continued on page 16

The Secret Word

By JAMES HAY, Jr.

IN every embassy in Europe, and at our own capital, trained men work often late into the night laboriously deciphering messages that to the uninitiated appear as meaningless as the mutterings of an idiot. What are these secret codes in which the great powers communicate with one another? How are they constructed? What means are taken to safeguard them? What would happen if the code of one nation fell into the possession of another? These questions, interesting at any time, have a special interest to-day.

THE United States government employs probably more different kinds of codes than any other power. The State Department has one of its own. The War Department has one. And the Navy uses a separate and distinct system. The code-book or key of the Navy cipher is kept always in a canvas bag, which is lined with zinc and heavily weighted. The bag is in the personal custody of the commanding officer of the ship, who has orders never to let it get away from him, but to throw it overboard in the event of capture by an enemy. The advent of wireless telegraphy has made this precaution doubly necessary; for the solution of an enemy's cipher in time of war might easily turn the scales of victory.

The only naval code-book ever captured by an enemy was the one carried by the Chesapeake in the War of 1812. The commander of the Chesapeake, Captain Lawrence, was wounded early in the battle, and no one else knew where the code-book was kept. When the frigate surrendered the British found the code behind a sliding panel, and the book is now in the British Museum.

The cipher of the War Department is very simple in its nature, and by virtue of this simplicity, ease of operation, inscrutability, and rapidity with which a new key can be substituted, is said to hold first place among the military ciphers of the world. Army officers who have used other codes say that none of them compares to this one.

This cipher may, in a general way, be described as an ingenious method of distorting the order of words in a message and further obscuring the meaning by the systematic introduction of irrelevant words and meaningless names. The variety of distortions is great, and whenever a copy of the cipher is captured another cipher can be communicated in a very short time to all those who should have it.

WHILE nobody could tell you to-day the code used by any power in transmitting important and vital news and instructions, some of the more ordinary ciphers have been discovered. For instance, one of the simplest of all official ciphers is that used by the British foreign office for the transmission of comparatively unimportant messages; the cipher being too well known to risk detection when there is much at stake.

The letters of the alphabet are arranged in the form of a square:

      

1	2	3	4	5
a	b	c	d	e	1
f	g	h	i	j	2
k	l	m	n	o	3
p	q	r	s	t	4
u	v	w	x	y	5

Each letter is then represented by two numerals; thus A would be 11; D would be 41; R would be 34; and so on. The letter Z, which has to be omitted from the cipher because of the fact that there are twenty-six letters in the alphabet, is represented by 0; while the same symbol is used to separate words.

Thus, in "Rush arms to Zanzibar" the cipher would be:

3415443201134334405453001143042211134.

This cipher has the advantage of almost infinite variety, as by changing the arrangement of the numerals one may easily baffle a chance recipient of the message; while the person for whom the cipher is intended would have no trouble in reading it.

Great Britain has a system of secret signaling that reminds one of the inventions found in the "thriller" and the dime novel. In order to prevent any person but the owner from using the card of the King's Messenger—the well known Order of the Greyhound—that government makes use of a modification of the method perfected by Count de Vergennes, Minister for Foreign Affairs under Louis XVI.

A messenger's card, for example, may read:

WILLIAM HALSEY TRAVERS, K. M.

That is all that appears to the eye of the uninitiated. But in order to render it almost impossible for an impostor to use the card there are a number of details that must not be overlooked.

In the first place, the age of the person to whom the card was originally issued is expressed by the shape of the card. If circular, he is under 25; oval, between 25 and 30; octagonal, between 30 and 40; hexagonal, between 40 and 50; square, between 50 and 60; oblong, over 60.

Two lines beneath the name, apparently placed there for decorative purposes only, serve as a portrait parlant of the original bearer. If he is tall and lean, the lines are wavy and parallel; tall and stout, they converge; short and thin, straight parallel lines; short and thickset, straight converging lines; and so on.

The expression of the face is shown by a tiny bouquet in the corner of the card. A rose designates an open and amiable countenance; a tulip indicates that the bearer is pensive and heavy featured; a lily that he is fair; a thistle that he is dark; the presence or absence of a ribbon to bind the bouquet together will show whether the bearer is bearded or clean shaven.

By taking into consideration these and other similar trifles, the card of a King's Messenger is practically a personal identification of the rightful bearer, and can hardly be used by any but the one to whom it was originally issued.

OUR first record of the use of a secret code in the United States was when Silas Deane, the first secret agent of the State Department, was sent abroad by the first Continental Congress to sound France's attitude with respect to the Colonies and to purchase supplies for the use of the Revolutionary army. Deane made use of an invisible ink for his communications, and there is on file at the State Department now a letter written by him to John Jay in the early part of the Revolution.

On the upper part of a large sheet of paper is written in ordinary ink a letter to "John Jay, Esqr., Attorney at Law, New York City." This letter reads:

This epistle, written in a flowing hand, covers half of the sheet of paper. On the other half appears, in ink made visible by the application of proper chemicals, the following message, written small:

Congress responded by authorizing the purchase of the blankets, clothing, munitions of war, and the like, and these were shipped on armed vessels that afterward entered the United States service.

THE manner in which the French first gained possession of the provinces of Alsace and Lorraine through the use of a preconcerted cipher, apparently meaningless, is interesting in view of the war in Europe, as well as being an important historical instance of the value of cipher signals of all kinds.

In 1680, when Marquis de Louvois was French Minister of War under Louis XIV, he summoned before him a man of the name of De Chamilly and instructed him to go to Basel, Switzerland, and, on the fourth day thence, at two o'clock in the afternoon, to station himself on the bridge over the Rhine with pad, ink, and pen.

"Watch all that takes place," directed the Minister of War, "and make a memorandum of everything, no matter how trivial. Continue to do this for two hours. At four o'clock remount your horse and return here as quickly as possible. Bring your notes directly to me, no matter what time of the day or night you arrive."

De Chamilly obeyed. On the day appointed he stationed himself on the bridge and began to make notes of everything that transpired. Page after page he covered with his fine script. Three o'clock chimed from the cathedral tower. Exactly on the last stroke a tall man in yellow waistcoat and breeches sauntered across the bridge, stopping in the center to strike three hearty blows with his staff on the railing. This, together with the other details, went down in De Chamilly's book. When four o'clock sounded he leaped upon his horse and galloped off toward Paris, feeling rather ashamed that he had nothing more important to report.

The messenger returned to the French capital in the middle of the night; but he went at once to De Louvois, who glanced eagerly through his notes until he came to the mention of the yellow-breeched man. The Minister of War then rushed to the King's chamber, awoke Louis, and obtained his signature to a document already prepared. Four couriers were immediately despatched to Strasburg. Eight days later the town was entirely surrounded by French troops. It surrendered on September 30, 1681.

The three taps of the staff on the railing of the bridge were the preconcerted signals of the success of an intrigue between De Louvois and the magistrates of Strasburg, and the man who struck the blows was as ignorant of their meaning as was De Chamilly of the reason for his mission.

The seizure of Strasburg received formal recognition at the Peace of Ryswick in 1697, and France continued to hold the city and the surrounding country until it was wrested from her by the Germans after the Franco-Prussian War.

A simple and ingenious naval, cipher was invented by Captain Charles Morris for the use of the American Navy during the War of 1812, and has been utilized by the Navy Department, with modifications, ever since—even after the introduction of wireless telegraphy did away to a great extent with the use of signal flags. The principle is applicable alike to flag ciphers or numerical ciphers transmitted by telegraph or wireless.

Captain Morris, in a hand-written signal book bound by him in 1811, stated:

A circumstance may sometimes render it desirable to change the signification of the flags or the numbers expressed by them. The following method should therefore he adopted:

Let each day of the week be inserted in the signal book opposite a number. To each of these days affix a certain number, which is always to be communicated orally under charge of secrecy, that no enemy or improper person can become acquainted with it. The following list is an example.

       

Sunday (add)	3
Monday	5
Tuesday	7
Wednesday	8
Thursday	6
Friday	4
Saturday	2

Before commencing your communication insert the number corresponding to the day you wish to use. This will signify to the person who is to read the signal that he is to add the number corresponding to that day to all signals that may be made. The person sending the signal will subtract the same number from all signals. By this means an enemy's knowledge of your ordinary signals might really be converted to his disadvantage, instead of the benefit which he might promise himself from them.

The use of a similar idea, with the intention of misleading the enemy, is recorded in the history of the Russo-Japanese War. The Japanese, in compiling their secret cipher, constructed it in such a manner that a very slight change might exactly reverse the supposed meaning of the code messages. A copy of this "official" code, without the explanatory clause, was then allowed to fall into the hands of the Russians, who naturally interpreted a number of important messages mistakenly.

ONE of the best examples of an apparently innocuous cipher was that employed in the time of Cromwell, when Sir John Trevanion, a distinguished Cavalier, was made prisoner and locked up in Colchester Castle. Sentence of death been passed upon the royalist and he awaiting its fulfilment when his jailer entered and handed him a letter, with the assurance that its contents had been carefully examined before it was allowed to be delivered. By the light of the lamp that the jailer held for him Sir John read:

This letter having been composed according to a preconcerted cipher, every third letter after a punctuation mark was to be read. In this way Sir John made out:

Panel at east end of chapel slides.

That night the prisoner requested the privilege of spending a few moments in solitary prayer in the chapel. The favor was granted—and when the Roundheads came to take him back to his cell the chapel was empty!

Things You Might Have to Do If You Acted in Moving Pictures

Could Women Run the World Without Men?

Apparently no work is too strange [?] for them in the warring countries

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No Inspiration in Cooking for Americans

YOU never see him, and probably you don't know his name; but he is easily the most important person in any hotel. His salary is a matter kept strictly between himself and the manager, but it equals that of Broadway's most languished-for matinee idol, and has the added advantage of being steady all the year round. It is even steadier than that, for a manager does not change his chef once in twenty years if he can help it.

A good chef is not only an artist, a composer of poems in food, but he is the chief executive in the busy kingdom below stairs. He rules a small world of assistant chefs, cooks, helpers, bakers, butchers, and mere washers-up. He hires and dismisses. With his favor, humble cleaners of pots rise to the planking of steaks; without it, they sink miserably into oblivion.

Just as every conscientious housewife from Bangor to San Diego does at approximately the same hour, "first thing in the morning," the chef goes through his refrigerators. Ten o'clock sees him back at his desk, completely surrounded by order books. Requisitions are there from the pastry chef, the head baker, the vegetable cook, the head butcher, and the salad girl. All these he must check up to prevent leakage anywhere, compare them with the list of materials on hand, and add what is needed for the carrying out of the menus he has planned. At noon he hands over his gigantic order book to the steward, who does the buying. Thus in the average New York hotel it is the chef who every month disburses something like $15,000 for meat, $6,000 for poultry, $3,000 for vegetables, $2,500 for fruit, $3,500 for milk and cream, $2,000 for eggs.

Big Salaries, but Less Appreciation

IF one thinks only of the salary it is better to be a chef in America than on the Continent. But the Frenchmen in our vast modern kitchens often sigh for diners with more leisure and a finer appreciation of the culinary art. There is not the inspiration in creating for a public which hardly knows a baba from a madeleine on the pastry tray. Of late, too, elaborate decoration of dishes has practically gone out in this country.

Nevertheless, chefs' clubs exist, where notes are compared on the foibles of diners, and the creator of a new food sonata is given the tribute that every artist occasionally craves. Imagine how the improvisor of an epic like "Guinea-Hen Merry Widow" must feel to have his work dismissed with a cursory "Very good" above-stairs. Consider the recipe, how it reads:

"Cut off the wings and remove the skin of a fat, tender young guinea-hen; season with salt, paprika, and butter; saute the breast in butter; dress on a heart-shaped piece of toast garnished with slices of grilled Virginia ham; arrange near by clusters of asparagus heads and shredded sweet peppers warmed in butter, also one cooked crawfish with a nice mushroom on its head; serve a bowl of Bearnaise sauce on the side."

But the public does not realize, and the chef must look to his own artistic satisfaction and to the admiration of his hundred odd assistants for his well earned applause. In his own regions he reigns supreme—with just one exception. That exception is the pastry chef. His is a kingdom within a kingdom. Henri Bindschadler, the pastry chef of the Hotel Manhattan, is a Swiss, born with a sweet tooth and educated like a chemist. He sums up the sentiments of his highly specialized craft:

"To be a pastry chef, it is nothing, less than nothing. Yet, if the soup is no good, if the entrée is no good, if the meat is no good—the dinner may yet be saved. For the dessert, if that is perfect, the guest will go away content."

Eugene Sauvigny, chef in chief at the same house, loves the profession in which he has been engaged some thirty years. One may lose one's appetite from much tasting, one may grow pale from the indoor life; but one does not know ennui. Says Sauvigny:

"No two days are alike. No two days can be alike. There is no dish so simple that out of it can not be made a chef d'oeuvre. You have in America in summer the pic-nic. And of the pic-nic the piéce de résistance, it is the hard boiled egg, is it not? Good. I take your hard boiled egg; cut it lengthwise. I scoop out the yolk, and refill with a purée of chicken and fois gras mixed with whipped cream. I cover with a chaudfroid sauce. When cold, I decorate with truffles, sweet peppers, and gherkins. And then I serve it, so! on a bed of crisp lettuce. It is my Cold Eggs Valewska."

Awed, one asks the master which of all his rhapsodic dishes he prefers for himself. Given this sea of delicacies to choose from, what does he eat?

"For luncheon, a poached egg and a little spinach," says the artist. "For my dinner, who knows?—a chop perhaps, a baked potato, and some vegetables. For the stomach simple food is best."

"You Can Have This House if You Won't Move This Statue"

THAT is what Mrs. Bradford Shinkle of Covington, Kentucky, said to the Salvation Army. The house in question was valued at $200,000 and completely furnished. "Too completely furnished," was its reputation, for it contained a number of works of art similar to the one photographed, and "far too scantily attired," the neighbors said, "for even the warmest Kentucky dog-days."

Hence Mrs. Shinkle's proposition. She is the widow of Bradford Shinkle, the son of the late Amos Shinkle. The family had decided to give the residence to the Salvation Army, to be used as a woman's training school.

Brigadier Dunham was overcome when informed that it was the Salvation Army's for the taking. The widow repeated that none of the statuary should be removed, draped, or in any way tampered with.

Brigadier Dunham communicated the wonderful offer to headquarters, and Commander Eva Booth commissioned Colonel Margaret Bevill, secretary for the women's and children's departments, to go to Covington and censor the art collection. Mrs. Bevill visited the house, and after a careful examination she strongly recommended that it be accepted.

"There is nothing in the statuary that any pure-minded person could possibly object to," said Mrs. Bevill. "If any are so far gone as to permit such splendid trophies of the sculptor's art to lead them into perilous ways, they must be already lost to all that is decent and good," added Mrs. Bevill. So the Army decided not to look the gift house any further in the mouth.

They're Actually Saving a Drowning Person

When the Siren Shrieked

By FRANK X. FINNEGAN

Illustrations by Harry Townsend

FROM the spot on the river bank where the camp had been pitched the great gray wall of the penitentiary, with its ominous looking sentry boxes in the corner turrets, could be plainly seen.

Weaver had growled and grumbled about the camping place and the proximity of the gloomy old prison from the moment the site had been selected; but he was overruled three to one. Harrington, who had fished the river for five years and was the originator, mainstay, and amateur guide of the trip, declared the spot ideal from every viewpoint, and he was enthusiastically upheld by Hollis and Reynolds, who knew the feel of a lead pencil far more intimately than that of a fishing rod.

"That confounded prison gives me the creeps every time I look at it," Weaver said, as they sat around the fire on the second night.

"Don't look at it," Hollis cheerfully suggested. "That's the obvious way out of that trouble, Billy."

"I can't help it," Weaver rejoined, jabbing fiercely at his pipe bowl with a twig. The place seems to have a fascination for me. When you fellows went away this afternoon I thought I was going to sit here and do a whole lot of reading and give this lame hoof of mine a chance to rest up; but every few minutes I found my eyes wandering from the book over to that wall, and I'd sit there wondering about the fellows inside it and what they were doing and how they were feeling about it. It's fierce!"

"I wonder if any of them ever break out?" Hollis said musingly.

"Oh, once in a while," Harrington returned; "but they're nearly always caught within a day or two. I've lived ten years within thirty miles of this prison, and I've heard of but two attempts at escape in that time."

"Did they get both of 'em?" Hollis asked.

"I think so. I know they got one," Harrington returned. "He came so near to Putting it over that it almost seems a

shame he didn't make it. He was sent down into the prison sewer one day with six other convicts to clean it. You may be sure none of the guards went down in there to watch the gang, and this Dancey decided to make a break for it by crawling through a sixteen-inch pipe to the river.

"When the gang came up at six o'clock and was found to be one man shy the officials didn't know whether Dancey was off in the woods or stuck in the sewer halfway along.

"One of the rules of the penitentiary is that the big siren whistle shall be sounded when a prisoner escapes, and everybody for miles around is expected to be on the lookout for him. But the warden happened to be in bad with the prison commission just then, and he didn't want any hullabaloo about an escaped convict, especially as there was a chance that Dancey might be jammed in the sewer; so he didn't have the whistle sounded.

"They wasted an hour or so fooling around, and in the meantime Dancey was making his way through the woods toward Douglasville, about seven miles from here. There's a hunting club's shack on the river about a mile out of town; but the season hadn't opened, and nobody was around the place. Dancey broke in, got an old shooting jacket and a pair of khaki trousers out of a locker, took a cap off a peg where some one had hung it three months before, and was fixed. He chucked his prison outfit into the woods, strolled into Douglasville, and waited for a freight train."

"HOW did they get him?" Reynolds interrupted.

"Well, the way they got him shows on what small incidents big events often hang," Harrington said, lighting his pipe. "The freight train came along, and Dancey swung onto the caboose. The conductor happened to live in Douglasville. He opened the door a moment after Dancey got on, and thinking he might be a neighbor who wanted to ride a few miles invited him inside. Dancey stepped inside, and then things began to happen. The conductor not only lived in Douglasville, but he was a member of that hunting club, and he happened to own the cap Dancey was wearing. The next day Dancey was back in the chair shop, and four convicts were fitting iron bars across the mouth of the sewer at the river front."

"TOUGH luck," Hollis commented, starring at the glowing embers beneath the crackling logs. "He should have got away. He was entitled to it after making a try like that."

"Tough nothing!" answered Weaver. "What are you talking about? The man was a convicted criminal, serving a sentence after having had a fair trial. I never had any patience with this mawkish sympathy over convicts. If they hadn't broken the law, they wouldn't be where they are, and they're getting no more than they deserve, as a rule."

"Yes, that's all very well," Harrington said, "but somehow the disposition of nearly every man is to help an escaping convict to get away—he's a poor hunted wretch that's just managed to squeeze out of a hell on earth,—and it goes pretty hard with the average man to help put him back there."

Weaver sat up and glared around at the trio defiantly. "Well, it wouldn't with me!" he declared. "I wouldn't take any chances on my own safety, understand, but if I had a gun near me I'd hold it right on any convict that I saw trying to escape, until an officer got to him. Why, I'm amazed there can be any question in your minds about it!"

Harrington rose, knocked the ashes from his pipe, and kicked the loose embers of the fire into a glowing heap. "Well, let's call it a day," he said. "I'm afraid that lame foot of yours has soured your angelic disposition, Billy. I'm going to turn in."

Weaver was forced to play home guard at the camp again the next day, when a long tramp after partridges was on the program. The troublesome foot that had kept him close to the tents for two days served warning that roaming through the woods was still out of the question, and he faced the situation cheerfully, with a couple of books to console him.

When the others were gone he shifted the rustic seat Reynolds had fashioned from boughs and branches and settled himself to read in a comfortable spot under a big pine.

The breeze that presaged the coming of evening was faintly stirring in the woods behind him when Weaver heard a sound that brought his mind back from the Boulevard Michel and focused his attention on the bushes at his right. There was a movement there, a slight rustling and stirring that betokened the presence of something alive. He had placed a shotgun beside his chair in the faint hope that a partridge or a squirrel might blunder within range. Now he noiselessly laid down his book and picked up his gun, keeping a wary eye on the bushes.

It would probably be a partridge, he thought, as he brought the gun to bear on the spot and sat motionless, waiting. What a joke it would be on the trio of hunters who had walked miles in search of birds if he could only bring one down at the tent door!

The rustling of leaves and branches continued for a few seconds. Then the bushes parted, a gaunt, gray face surmounting a shapeless coat looked out at him, and a strangling, unhuman voice gasped:

"Don't shoot, Billy! It's Harry!"

WEAVER started to his feet, trembling with the shock of a surprise that sickened him to the soul. Under the prison pallor of the face before him he recognized his youthful brother, the one crooked branch of the family tree.

"Harry!" he whispered hoarsely. "My God, Harry! What are you doing in this fix? A criminal! A convict!"

The other darted forward the instant the gun was lowered. "Are you alone here?" he demanded, peering round at thetents. "I haven't time to tell you about it now: they'll be after me any minute. I just got out of that hell over there—you'll have to help me get away, Billy. You'll have to, do you hear? Never mind about what's over and done: let bygones be bygones. You'll have to get me some clothes instead of these cursed rags—that's what I was creeping up here through the bushes for. And then I saw you sitting here alone, and I knew it was all right."

His words poured over one another in a torrent. Weaver, slowly recovering from the first shock, looked at him fixedly. "What did you do that brought you behind the bars at last?" he demanded.

"Oh, never mind about that now, Billy," the fugitive pleaded, glancing over his shoulder. "There isn't time! They may miss me any minute and get after me. Don't be afraid," he went on, watching the hard light in his brother's eyes. "It wasn't murder. It was only a mining stock deal—and at that I wasn't guilty. The other fellow got away with all the coin and left me holding the bag."

Weaver suddenly caught a hint of the panic that was in his brother's tone and manner.

"Come into the tent," he said shortly. "You'd better be out of sight, anyhow."

The young fellow darted under the canvas like a gray streak, and Weaver followed him stumblingly. His mind was in a whirl. What to do? What to do?

"You've got something here I

---

can put on, haven't you?" the boy asked. "I've got to get out of these things first. And I'll never go back alive, Billy! If they get to me here, I'll shoot a couple of 'em with one of these guns before they finish me."

He was stripping off the prison garb as he spoke. On the cot beside him lay a pair of khaki trousers, and as he caught them up gleefully Weaver thought of the story of Dancey, with a fresh pang of shame and horror that it should so soon have come home to him. "These will do," the fugitive whispered. "Now get me some sort of coat."

"Wait a minute," his brother said slowly. "I want to know about this thing, Harry. Remember, I haven't seen you for five years, and I may never see you again. What was it brought you to this? What have you been doing?"

"I'LL have to cut it short, Billy," the youngster said. "Every minute counts with me before they find I'm gone. I came out West here when I left home, and did one thing and another to make a living. And I made it square, Billy.

"Well, I finally met a fellow named Findlay, who ran a brokerage business, a sort of bucket-shop. I used to go there to make little piking bets on stock, and we got pretty well acquainted. One day he offered me a job with him and I went in. After a while he got hold of a lot of mining stock, and we advertised and sold it.

"I got a salary and a commission on what I sold—you know the game. Well, the smash up came when a lot of them went to the prosecuting attorney and he found out the stock was no good. Findlay and I were indicted. He skipped out with all the money in sight. But they got me, all right. I didn't even have enough money to hire a lawyer. The jury found me guilty. I expected about three months in the county jail—and the Judge gave me seven years in the pen! Can you imagine that, Billy? Seven years! And Findlay got away!"

"That was a severe sentence, Harry."

"Seven years for being a clerk in a broker's office! That was two years ago. Every minute since that I wasn't asleep I've been thinking about getting away, and finally my chance came. The warden put me to work under the electrician a month or so ago. There's a big electric blower in the wall at the end of a corridor on the second floor that draws in fresh air for the cell house—and this fan, mind you, isn't surrounded by the wall. It faces the open air.

"Yesterday the fan broke down and they sent me with the electrician to fix it. We took it out of the wall, and from the platform we were working on I could look out at the trees and the river. It was like an open door, Billy, and I saw my chance. It was only twenty feet to the ground, and while the electrician left me alone a few minutes this morning I twisted some wire into a rope and wrapped it round my waist under my clothes.

"This afternoon he left me working on the broken armature while he went to get some tools. That was the chance I had been waiting two years for.

"As soon as he was down the stairs I got out my wire rope, fastened one end to the platform, threw out the other, and slid down. That's the whole story, Billy. And I ought to be moving."

AS Weaver listened all his theories for the protection of society seemed to crumble away.

He suddenly thrust out his hand to the crouching figure on the cot beside him. "You've had tough luck, old boy," he said; "but this is your chance to beat it, and we'll make the most of it."

"I knew you'd stick by me, Billy," the fugitive said brokenly as he clasped the proffered hand, "even though you don't know what it means to go through hell."

Weaver turned quickly to his trunk and tossed out a shooting coat and cap—and again the story of Dancey's escape recurred to him. "Put these on and move lively, Harry," he said. "The boys are out after partridges—they'll be coming back any minute now." From a corner of

the tent he threw a pair of high-laced hunting boots. "And get into those," he went on with growing excitement; "then you'll pass for a hunter anywhere."

He looked round the tent.

"Take this gun and a pocketful of shells," he said, thrusting the weapon on his brother as the latter rose after fastening the boots. "Here is my hunter's license: you can pass for me if you get into any argument. And here," he thrust his hand into his pocket, "is some money. Get to the railroad station as quick as you can. Hurry, Harry, for God's sake! Good luck, old boy! Write me when it's safe. I'll be home in a week."

HE had lighted a lantern and hung it on a tentpole before he heard the voices of the returning hunters, and his hello of greeting was drowned by the sudden, unearthly shriek of the siren whistle at the penitentiary. The escape had been discovered! The hunt was on! He went slowly forward to meet his friends.

"Well, you fellows must have got all the birds in the county," he began, and stopped short. There were four men in the group approaching the camp, and the fourth was thrust before the others a prisoner, his hands bound behind him and shotguns trained upon his back.

"Are you all right, Weaver?" Harrington called anxiously out of the gloom. "Thank God! We were afraid this fellow might have got you."

Weaver advanced a step or two, his limbs quaking beneath him. His brother looked at him abjectly and dropped his glance. "Why, I'm all right. What—what is it?" he quavered.

"We caught this fellow snooping around in the woods trying to keep out of sight, and Reynolds thought he recognized your clothes," Harrington said, shoving the captive forward viciously. "And when we found your hunting license in his pocket, we were afraid he might have murdered you when you were asleep. He's the convict that the whistle just sounded for, of course. What the deuce does it all mean, Weaver?"

"I haven't said a word," the youngster muttered, taking another step nearer his brother. "It's up to you. I'll go back if you say so."

Weaver pulled himself together.

"It's no use my trying to deny anything, boys," he said. "He's my brother. You're right: he's—he's the escaped convict."

Harrington lowered his gun. The others exchanged glances of bewilderment.

"Your brother, Billy?" Harrington echoed. "Why—well, that puts a different face on things, doesn't it?"

"Do you mean that, Joe?" Weaver asked eagerly. "Would you—would you really help us? The boy isn't a criminal, in one sense," he went on. "It was a mining stock deal,—an indictment for fraud and no money for defense. I didn't even know he was out here in this country, or I should have helped him. And now he's in trouble—"

"Here, we're wasting time!" Harrington interposed. "That siren has alarmed everybody in the community—they'll be on the trail in no time. He ought to get away to the railroad right away."

"Wouldn't he be safer here?" Weaver asked.

THEY had moved into the largest of the tents, where the trunks were stored.

"Steady!" Reynolds whispered. "Some body's coming through the woods."

Voices were heard a few yards distant, and the sound of footsteps in the brush. The convict started nervously and took a step toward the opening of the tent.

Harrington laid a hand on his shoulder.

"Not that!" he whispered. "Get over there and empty that trunk—do something to keep busy. Don't look around too often."

The lad caught the idea and moved to obey. As he did so the tension that had held the little group was broken, and the four men stepped away from one another.

"WELL, boys, supper is ready! Let's get busy!" Harrington exclaimed loudly, and amid the cheerful rattle of the dishes and utensils to which he and his companions applied themselves noisily two prison guards stepped into the circle of the lantern light outside the tent.

"Hello there, you fellows!" one of them called, thrusting his head in and staring around at the hunters. "Haven't seen anybody pass this way in the last hour or two, have you?"

They stopped to look at him in apparent surprise. Young Weaver, bending over the trunk from which he was removing fishing tackle and clothing, turned his face just a trifle toward the tent flap and listened—just enough to show curiosity. His brother's corduroy shooting coat more than concealed his slim figure in that dim light.

"Seen anybody? How do you mean?" Harrington returned. "I don't think there's any one hunting in these woods but us. We haven't seen them, at least."

"I don't mean hunters," the fellow snarled. "A convict escaped from the prison this evening. Didn't you hear the whistle blow?"

"Oh, yes. Is that what all the noise was about?" Hollis interposed. "I thought it was a fire somewhere. So a convict got away, eh?"

"Yes. We'll probaly get him before long," the guard returned. "We always do. Keep an eye out for him around in these woods, though. You fellows have all got guns—you might get him, and there's a fifty dollars' reward if you bring him in."

He and his grim looking companion backed out of the lamplight and felt their way to the trail again on a quest they knew was well nigh hopeless in the dark.

When the last sounds of their departure had been dead for some moments young Weaver rose tremblingly and turned to the men around the table. "That was mighty white of you fellows," he murmured. "I won't forget this as long as I live. If I get clear of this—"

HIS brother interrupted by clapping him on the shoulder. "That's all right, Harry," he said. "These men are my friends. Now you know what it is for a man to have friends. You've seen it work out under your own eyes. They didn't owe this good to me so much as they did to you. In fact, they had all promised it to you if the chance came their way."

The boy stared at him uncomprehendingly. "Promised to me?" he repeated.

"Yes. This is coals of fire for me, Harry," his brother returned. "I was the one of the party who was strong for capturing an escaped convict and putting hire back behind the bars. And now—and now—"

His voice faltered. Harrington saw that he was on the verge of tears in the stress of his emotion.

"That's all right, Billy," he said. "None of us took what you said seriously—and here's the best proof that you didn't yourself. You're right about the boy being safer here to-night. He'll turn in with us after a while, and in the morning you'd better see him to the railroad."

"That's the idea," Reynolds urged. "Cheer up, Bill. And, by the way, why not introduce your brother and we'll have supper."

Slowly Weaver put out a hand to each of the trio, and as they grasped hands the tears that had been welling up in his eyes suddenly, overflowed. He dashed them angrily away.

"Confound it! What do you think of this?" he exclaimed. "I'm just finding out what a blamed old fool I am, and here I'm crying like a woman! When I get, back to the city I'm going to have my head examined by a committee of alienist."

No One Dares Call Her a Coppette

IF you were six feet and four inches tall, and weighed two hundred and four pounds, and worked in a millinery shop, wouldn't you jump at the chance of being a special policewoman? You would if you lived in California, where the women are accustomed to doing unusual things.

And that is what Miss Blanche Payson did. She gently put away the hat she was showing when she heard of the opening, and went down to see the Chief of Police. He just looked at her and said: "You'll do—you were made for the job."

She Designed Her Uniform Herself

HE made her special policewoman on the Joy Zone, where the fun concessions are, at the Exposition in San Francisco. She has been "pounding" that beat ever since the opening of the great fair last February. And she has made good; she has done better work in her particular line than a man possibly could; her sex has been a help instead of a hindrance.

She designed her own uniform. It is a

long frockcoat of dark blue serge, and knickerbockers such as are worn by women with a riding costume, boots, and a natty cap. She is a real attraction on her beat, and she maintains order.

The rowdies that infest every place where people gather for fun are on the Zone too; but they have learned to respect the woman cop. No one has yet dared to call her a coppette. She's there to see that girls are not annoyed, and they are not. She has a woman's point of view of the masher. He gets no sympathy at her hands. He behaves or is thrown out.

The other afternoon, in one of the

dance-halls, she noticed a half drunken man who was annoying some girls. She ordered him to quit, but he didn't; then she took him by the collar and ushered him out. He picked himself up and glared at her, and said:

"There—see what comes of giving a woman a club. She uses it!"

Handling fresh guys is the unpleasant side of Miss Payson's work. The other side—the side that is essentially feminine—is caring for lost children. They often get lost on the Zone, but they have no fear of the policewoman; they rush to her and sob out their woes. Miss Payson likes children, and knows how to soothe them and amuse them until the distracted mother appears. She usually takes the child along with her on her beat, as the Zone has no official place for lost kiddies.

Women Ask Her for All Kinds of Advice

ANOTHER point that proves the wisdom of having a woman cop is that timid young women will go to a woman with their troubles, where they wouldn't to a man. And they flock to Miss Payson. They appeal to her for information about all sorts of things, mostly where to get a good lunch for a small price. She always directs them to the Young Women's Christian Association, which has headquarters on the Exposition grounds.

Then, the girls want to know about all sorts of attractions, mostly the Streets of Cairo. Not a day passes that some group of women doesn't ask her to go with them through the Streets of Cairo; they are afraid to go alone, but feel they must see the beautiful veiled women. But the policewoman doesn't take personally conducted parties through the Streets of Cairo, or through the underground passages in Chinatown, no matter how insistent their demands.

She Believes in Pedestrians' Rights

AND, besides all these duties, Miss Payson is a traffic cop. She has to see that the electric chairs do not exceed the speed limit, which one jesting soul said was one hundred yards an hour. If the chairs begin to go faster than a walk, Miss Payson halts them, and they are told to slow down and warned against the danger of bumping pedestrians. The Zone is one place where the rights of the pedestrian come first.

Miss Payson's job is pleasant and fairly profitable—more so than the essentially feminine one of selling millinery. She expects to become a regular policewoman after the Exposition is over, and is studying to take the civil service examination. San Francisco has four regular women police, and they are all doing splendid work.

Every day Miss Payson gets letters asking her if she is heart-whole. A fellow policeman expressed the average man's view when he said:

"Just think what she could do to a fellow if he came home with a drop too much!"

These Houses Drew Thousands of Spectators

A HOUSE-BUILDING race, with some forty workmen on each side, was the sporting event that kept thousands of people up all night recently in Binghamton, New York.

James J. and Edward S. Chapman, hotel promoters, started the ball spinning. They bought an old fashionable homestead, secured building permits, and started work on the foundation of a $5,000 eighteen-room hotel on Main Street, opposite the quarter-million-dollar mansion of Thomas B. Crary.

The State law requires that the consent of at least two thirds of the owners of residences within three hundred feet must be had before a hotel can be built. The Chapman purchase took in the only residence within the three-hundred-foot limit. But Mr. Crary owned lots adjoining the hotel property on the west within the limit, and, at six o'clock of the same day that the Chapmans had broken ground, plans had been drawn, lumber hauled, three electric arc lights installed, and the erection of a bungalow begun by the indignant millionaire.

The Two Gangs of Workmen Race All Night

THEN the Chapmans changed their plans from a hotel to a small café just large enough to hold a bar. The two gangs of workmen raced through the night, with thousands of spectators glued to the fence. The bungalow was finished at four o'clock in the morning, and before 6 A.M. Mr. and Mrs. John Merritt had moved in, were settled, had their breakfast eaten and the weekly wash on the line.

Crary had won the first round, because the cafe was not completed until nine

o'clock, and the bungalow prevented the Chapmans from securing the two-thirds consent necessary, there being now two residences within the limit.

Crary, however, announced that he would not stop there, and that two more bungalows would be completed by eight o'clock the next evening, and that the small shack housing the temporary sawmill would be turned into a bungalow,thus giving him four residences.

Whereupon the Chapmans at 11 A.M. began the transforming of the barn on their property into a cottage. Partitions and other changes necessary to make a barn into a residence were completed at one o'clock, and at one-thirty Mr. and Mrs. Thomas Monahan had moved in and were settled. At one-forty-five the Chapmans filed an application for a saloon license, together with consents from the converted homestead and 304 Main Street, the converted barn. They alleged that there was only one other residence within the three-hundred-foot limit—the cottage just completed by Mr. Crary.

The Courts Must Settle It

MR. CRARY'S lawyer then admitted that so far the Chapmans were victors, because the other three Crary bungalows would not be occupied until evening. So now a fight will be made in the courts to determine whether the converted barn is legally a residence, because at the time of the filing of the consent a portion of it was still used as a garage, and it did not contain the plumbing fixtures necessary for a residence.

Here is more of

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

Continued from page 7

sort, Friedrich Wilhelmshafen, Herbertsohe.

"It's like a beastly lot of suburban villas," I complained to Gore.

"What are you going to do about it?" asked Gore oddly.

"Do about it?" I asked.

In those days—and they are not so long ago—the Terrible Year threw no shadow upon the sunny fields where mankind played like a child beneath the slopes of a slowly waking volcano. Yet, there were some, here and there, who sensed the first dull tremors before the smoke and flame burst forth. Gore, I think, was one. I say "think," for there were recesses in his mind to which I was never admitted.

AND now I have come to a part that is very difficult to tell. I read poetry, but I do not write it. And as for speaking it—

Well, when we came into the harbor of Banda, the last of the Moluccas, that blue, early morning, with the sun sending uplong rays behind the rim of the volcano—

You see, Banda Harbor is just a volcano, a crater with walls of green forest, quite steep straight up, and a floor of deep water, very deep and very blue-green. And there are islands. Little ones, with palms—palms.

No, I can't describe the place. It is like something you saw in a colored picture when you were a little kid at school, and that you don't believe in when you grow up. Only it is true.

We came in early, as I have said, and a German author recited poetry at the Goonong Api as we dropped under its fiery cone; and a young doctor going to Kaiser Wilhelm Land said that the beautiful harbor was filled with the sea as a round, deep cup is filled with wine. I asked him if they drank wine out of cups in Berlin, and, if so, why; but he did not answer me. Personally, I should have said that the place was more like an immense circular skating-rink with canoes for the skaters. At any rate, it was wonderful, and the town was wonderful too. Gore let me have the morning off, and I made for the market without waiting for breakfast, bought a leaf full of hot curry and another of rice, and ate them as I went along through the sleepy stone streets to the nutmeg woods above.

I DO not know what took me to the nutmeg woods. The town was more interesting, with its great Dutch planter houses—palaces almost—built largely of fine marble, but dropping to pieces for lack of people to live in them.

The morning was hot with the marrow-melting heat of Malaysia. Even here, in the woods, where the slim, light nutmegs grew beneath the shadow of lofty kanaris, like delicate ladies sheltering beneath a canopy of green and gold, it was undeniably warm. Still, I went on and up. The sea was sparkling and creaming far away below, where one could see it through the openings in the forest, and the nutmeg flowers, carved ivory blossoms smelling of all the East, lay in drifts like faded snow, so that I could scatter them with my feet as I went. There were nutmegs everywhere, growing at the same time as the flowers. It pleased me oddly to see that, I remember, and to know that leaf and fruit and blossom went on for ever in these far-away, dreamy Islands of the Blest. And the fruit, like a nectarine to look at, with a jetty stone laced round in scarlet mace, was curiously fascinating—not very eatable, and yet one couldn't help eating it.

"It is first cousin to the lotus," I thought, as I set my teeth in a second. "If you ate enough of it, you would lie down here among these fallen flowers, with the scent of the spice in your brain, and stay there; you would doze away listening to the sound of the sea, and dreaming—dreaming. You'd hear those crested pigeons cooing, and the sound of the steamers coming in and going away, and you'd never mind them. I can understand—"

I was touched by a kind of fear—not of the nutmeg, but of what it represented: the perfumed dream, the clinging, poisonous peace, that wraps itself about the white man in the East beyond the East, leaving him, like Merlin in the hollow oak—

As dead,
And lost to life, and name, and love, and fame.

I threw the nutmeg fruit away, but I laughed as I threw it. For I knew that, whatever my faults might be, I was not one of the kind that "goes black."

I went on and up. It was pleasant to me to hear the tramp of my solid boots on the track; it seemed, in that land of gliding, barefoot shadows, to mark me out as one of the master race. Only those who have lived in tropical countries can understand the significance of the boot, I can fully believe. If the ancient Romans hadn't allowed themselves to slop about in sandals, they would still have been the masters of the world.

THINKING after this fashion, I became aware of another boot—a very light one, but unmistakably no bare foot, sounding on the track somewhere above me. The air was so still under the great kanaris that one could hear every smallest sound. This boot, or shoe, was a long way off; but there was something clean-cut and delicate about its fall that interested me.

"A girl," I said, as it drew nearer, coming down. "A white girl. No half-castery in that walk. Young, I should guess. Pretty, if her face matches the sort of foot she seems to have."

I stood at a turn of the track and waited. A crested pigeon, deep in the wood, crooned monotonously to itself, like something that has been sounding for ever and ever, and never means to stop.

The step came round the corner. It was a girl. She was walking rather quickly. She wore a pale green dress, like leaves, instead of the all but universal tropical white. I remember I noticed that particularly, also the leaves in her hair—worn, I think, instead of a hat, to protect her from sunstroke, but looking, nevertheless, like an oread's woodland crown. I saw, as she came nearer, that her face, under the leaves, was like—what was it like? Something that I had seen lately, something that was sweet and intoxicating. Why, it was like the blossoms of the nutmeg tree, carved ivory, pale and warm; and the eyes were the color of the nutmeg's fruit—deep-hidden, rich black stone. There was no color at all in the cheeks, but the lips were red—it may have been my fancy, yet I think not—with the very redness of the crimson mace that lay scattered among the ivory flowers on the ground.

Those dark eyes were eyes of the sun-lands, and the languor of the tropic world showed itself in the delicately poised head and undulating movements of the girl. Yet the fineness of her features, and especially the cameo cutting of nose and upper lip, proclaimed the blood pure European—especially to me. It was not for nothing that I had been the pupil of a famous anthropologist during many weeks of travel. I did not need to look at the oread's finger-nails in order to know that there was no dark drop in her veins, despite the black eyes and the ivory-pale skin.

The half or quarter caste girl of gentle breeding, who swarms in Malaysian seas, charming, pretty, well educated, yet cursed with the curse of mixed blood, that is as sure as murder to "out" some day— this girl had not, and has never had, any attraction for me. But the lady in green was a lady, one of my own race and blood, and I was interested in her. She seemed entirely unconscious of me. She passed by me with the light, quick step that I had noticed (where did the languor come in? yet it was undoubtedly there) and melted away among the kanaris, like—

A green thought in a green shade.

After she had gone by, a very slight, sweet perfume hung in the air for a moment or two. Most women in Eastern lands have an unpleasant liking for strong scent. I had noticed it, and had come to detest any odor that was manufactured and bottled. But I did not dislike this; it was a fresh, live perfume, not dead nor made.

WHAT I did not know then about this scent of hers, I will tell now. She had a passion for tropic flowers—mostly for those resembling herself, though I do not think this was a conscious selection. She loved frangipani, stephanotis, tuberose, trumpet-flower, magnolia, and all the rich white flowers, wax-like and marble-like and alabaster-like, that are common in hot countries. Her passion for them was such that she always had them about her, sometimes in her hair and on her dress, more often concealed beneath her muslins and laces, next her own white skin, surrounding her with the delicate, mysterious suggestion of flower-petals and fragrance that I had noticed, and that was so peculiarly her own.

I stood by the turn of the road for a little while after she had gone by. I smoked a cigarette, and wondered who this oread with the woodland crown might be. I wondered where she lived. I wondered who was in love with her. I wondered why she had gone up the hill, and why she had come down. I wondered if she ever wore a hat. There seemed no end to the wonder that flowed up like an outbreaking spring in my mind.

I got down to the ship again, I don't quite remember when or how. I must have been thinking a good deal on the way, but I could not have told then, and can not tell now, what I was thinking about. I nearly missed the steamer because I lingered about the gangway till the sailors were pulling it up, and had to jump in the end. Gore saw that I had nearly been left behind, but he made no comment. What you had nearly done, good or bad, never interested him. Clean-cut results were the only sort of thing that he had any use for.

THE ship was a German one, a tidy little boat that did the long trip from Singapore to German New Guinea and New Britain once in three months or so, carrying government officers, planters, and traders to the colony. We had been on her only a day or two before Banda, and I had not taken any special notice of the passengers, being too much interested in the strange Moluccan ports where we were calling. Brit after Banda, our last port of call on the way to Kaiser Wilhelm Land, our boat, the Afzelia, became suddenly so German that we two Englishmen began to feel alittle "out of it." The magistrates and customs people and postal officials, and captains of native forces, and managers of plantations and stores, began to march up and down the narrow decks with their chests swelled out, whistling soldierly airs. The Kaiser's health was drunk after dinner, and opinions were freely bandied about the Dutch colonies through which we had been passing—not to the advantage of Queen Wilhelmina's empire.

"As soon as we get these places we shall reform them," I heard a tall, smart-looking fellow named Hahn say to a stocky South German trader. They were marching together up and down the decks under the shadow of Ceram, a wonderful world of high, saber-toothed peaks and rolling tablelands, hung above a sea of bluish silver.

"Yes—yes," answered Wolff, the trader, nodding his round, cropped head. "So we shall."

"That Ceram," went on Hahn; "is worth something; and when the natives have been well kicked there will be no more fool's play of rebellion. Also we shall back to life the trade of that dead island, Banda, immediately bring. Also Amboyna. Java we shall—"

"Guard!" interrupted Wolff. "That young Englishman knows German."

"What does that make?" inquired Hahn, swinging his arms as he walked, and looking proudly over the sea. "In this part of the world, it is not the English who are the masters."

"No," I said, putting my head out of the saloon entrance; "only everywhere else. We don't mind your having a bite of our leavings."

Hahn turned scarlet from crown to chin; the very scalp under his golden bristles of hair glowed pink.

"If you were a German," he said, restraining himself with some difficulty, "I should know how to answer that." He spoke in good English.

"Answer it any way thou likest," I replied in German, using the familiar "du."

"Damn you, then, I will!" was his (English) reply.

He pulled a dogskin glove out of his pocket (where I seriously believe he kept it for just such emergencies), and was about to throw it in my face, when a head, bald, fair, middle-aged, with peculiar gray-green eyes, quietly projected itself from a neighboring port-hole and remarked: "Quiet!"

IT had an extraordinary effect upon Hahn. He dropped his arm, looked at me sulkily, and was about to turn away. Oddly enough, I felt sorry for him. I rather liked him, on the whole. He wanted a row; that was all in his favor—so did I want a row. And whoever the gentleman with the commanding eye might be, he didn't command me.

So I straightened out the situation in my own way. The glove was still in the young German's hand. I nipped it from between his fingers, flicked him on the nose with it, and handed it back with a bow. He turned pinker than ever, and looked at the bodiless head with what almost seemed an expression of entreaty. The head was sternly shaken.

As for me, I had my back turned to the port, so I quietly winked at Hahn, and said, as I passed him by:

"The first place we stop."

Then I went to my cabin, and lit the biggest and blackest of cigars that I had bought in Sumatra. I felt that I owed it to myself.

"Going to be fun," I said, and swung my feet joyously to and fro over the edge of my bunk.

I was not long left to enjoy myself. Gore sent for me and gave me a lot of stuff to copy out in the saloon—our only working-place at the time. I took the papers, and set myself down at a side table with my typewriter, cursing his scientific zeal. I wanted to look at Ceram until we were out of sight. A piratical island of the real old fierce Malay type, where the natives were still actively engaged in hunting one another's heads, seemed to me a good deal more interesting than some dusty facts about culture drifts and modification by environment.

We steamed on through a quiet sea, warm, pleasant winds pouring through the open doorways of the saloon. Wolff and Hahn had disappeared; I knew as well as if I had seen them that they were sitting in some private cabin, drinking beer out of large glass-handled mugs, and discussing the duel that the elderly gentleman had seemed so anxious to prevent. A duel! Something about my diaphragm was giving delighted little jumps as I worked. This was worth coming abroad for.

I FINISHED the stuff—it was a typed extract from a scientific paper that Vincent Gore had told me to do—and carried it to his cabin. Gore read the whole extract through till the end. Then he opened a drawer, took out a red pencil neatly underlined one passage, and

---

handed the paper back to me without a word.

I looked at the marked paragraph. It ran as follows:

"Nevertheless, considering the history of these islands, one is compelled to allow the successive waves of immigration, arriving from India, China, and the continent of Africa, have in so far modified the original duel—"

It was my turn to grow red. I felt myself flushing pinker than even Hahn had done.

"May one ask," said Gore, in a singularly gentle and agreeable voice, "what duels are doing in this particular gallery? I never heard it was a custom of the races under question; but if you have made any new discovery—"

"Paying me a salary doesn't entitle you the electric fan, and under cover of its to make fun of me, sir," I cut in breathing rather hard.

"No, young devil," said Gore, still in that pleasant voice; "but it does entitle me to notice if you mean to leave."

"I don't mean to—" I began.

"Oh, yes, you do," said Gore. "By the shortest route—home. Now, will you please tell me what you mean by cooking up duels when you are engaged in my service?"

HIS pleasant manner had suddenly flown out of the window, and the last sentence was spoken in a tone that would—I suppose—have scared some people. It was also decorated—considerably. Gore was a remarkable hand at decorated language on occasion.

I said nothing at all. I looked at him.

"You know I can give information to the authorities, and stop it," said Gore.

I said nothing.

"You know I can dismiss you at the first Port."

I thought it time to speak.

"You can do all those things," I said. "But you won't, Vincent Gore, because you're not the sort of man, whatever you may say, to stop a fight. Also because I can jolly well guess you've fought duels yourself."

Gore leaned back in his seat and gave vent to one of his appalling shouts of laughter. A scared small steward peeped in at the door, asked feebly if the Herr wanted anything, and scurried away without waiting for an answer.

"Well aimed!" he said. "Sit down and tell me about it."

And I knew that I had won. I may mention here that the "sir" was dropped from that day onward between us.

I told him. He made no comment for a moment, and then asked:

"They are evidently trying to force the challenge from you, so as to deprive you of the choice of weapons. How are you with a pistol?"

"Well, if you want to know, I'm just beautiful," I replied. "I've been a decent shot since ten, and a lovely one since I was twenty."

"Let him do the challenging; he will if you sit tight," observed Gore.

"That's all right; the old gentleman with the face won't stop him," I said. "We understand each other. Hahn is a white man. I wish I could punch his head instead. I'd enjoy it more, somehow."

I WENT out again into the warm wind and the sun, pondering on many things. It seemed to me I had acquired a good deal of food for thought that day already, although it was not yet eleven o'clock.

I was to acquire more. Half an hour afterward, I met my employer coming round a corner with an expression of abject terror on his face.

Sudden death was the smallest thing I thought of. Such ideas as an outbreak of typhoon plague on the ship, a coming that was bound to wreck us, fire among explosives in the hold, rushed through my mind, it is true, but only to be discarded on the instant. Nothing of that sort would have disturbed Red Bob's equanimity. Then what, in the name of all calamity and disaster, had disturbed it?

My heart, as he came nearer, began to thump like the screw of the steamer. Surely unheard-of things were happening to-day! I saw that Red Bob was gnawing the end of his mustache, and that his eyes looked like the eyes of a cat that is just going to jump out of your arms through the window. I should not have been surprised to see him make a spring over the rail

"What—" I began rather breathlessly.

"God save us, Corbet!" said the great explorer, almost trembling. "The damned ship is full of damned women!"

"Come into my cabin," was the first thing that occurred to me to say, for I realy thought him mad.

He preceded me into the little blue-and-white room, and sat down abruptly, mopping his forehead and looking at me with an expression of dismay. I switch on the electric fan, and under cover its steady buzz, which insured us against being overheard from the next cabin, asked him:

"Has anything happened?"

GORE was recovering somewhat. He answered peevishly:

"I told you what had happened. The ship is crawling with them. At least, there are three, and that's as good—or as bad—as thirty."

"I never knew you were—at least, on the Empress—"

"Give me a drink," interrupted Red Bob.

I poured him a glass of tepid water; he drank it, and went on:

"On the Empress, and after, the women, what there were of them, were married, if you'll remember."

I did. The only women passengers from Liverpool to Singapore had been a few wives going to join their husbands. And later, on the way to Batavia and Macassar, there were no women at all, except a few half castes.

"Don't you like unmarried women?" I asked, still feeling puzzled.

Red Bob poured out and drank another glass.

"I do not—I do not!" he said. "Two of these are married, I believe—a Frau Baumgartner and a Frau Schultz—going to join their husbands in Simpsonhafen. But the third! Young Corbet, for God's and your employer's sake, go and flirt with the whole lot till we get there. I believe you're quite capable of it!"

"I don't mind," I said, struggling with a frantic desire to laugh; "but I haven't much leisure time."

"You shall have all you want," declared Gore, leaning back in his seat and watching the blue curtains sway out and in through the yellow circle of the port. "I feel better now. It was the lean one did it. She scared the seven senses out of me, up there on the boat-deck just now."

"Would you mind telling me what she did?" I asked.

I would've given the world to be able to explode, like an overcharged soda-water bottle.

"She didn't do anything. She sat and babbled. She saw a hole in my sock where I'd just torn it on a nail, and she put her head on one side and said: 'Oh, Mr. Vincent Gore, what a sad life you must lead, without a woman's hand to attend to these things for you!"

I was speechless.

He went on:

"And then she said, 'Is there nothing I could do for you?' 'Madam,' I said, 'you could—' But she stopped me, and said with another sniggle, 'I'm not a madam; I'm miss—I'm a girl!' A girl, and she as old as I am! 'Well, madam, or miss, as you like," I said, "you could leave me alone; I want to read.'"

"You didn't!" I interrupted.

"I did," said Gore, with a terrified look.

It was too much. I collapsed on my berth, and shrieked, rolling over and over in an agony of mirth.

"I never thought you were afraid of anything," I choked, wiping the tears out of my eyes.

"You thought dashed wrong," replied Gore. "That sort of woman has been the tragedy of my life. Corbet,"—he sat up straight, and his blue eyes dilated into the lakes of fire that had won him his name,—"Corbet, some day a woman like that'll get me, and I won't even have the pluck to hang myself."

"Oh, rats!" I said disrespectfully, rocking to and fro in the anguish of my enjoyment. "A woman can't make a man marry her. Anyhow, I never was afraid of anything that wore a skirt, in all my life."

"Honest injun?" asked Red Bob, fixing his eyes on me.

"Honest!" I said.

"Shake!" remarked Bob gravely, holding out his hand. "You're a braver man than I am."

"Well, I know what your heel of Achilles is now," I said, getting up and going to the glass.

"What are you after?" asked Gore.

I pulled down my tie and buttoned up my coat.

"Going to talk to the lady," I said.

I was curious to see the woman who had scared Red Bob.

To be continued next week

The Bird that Kicks Like a Mule

THE rarest and most valuable birds in the New York Zoological Garden are the strange pair of secretary-birds quatered in the ostrich house. "Secretary-birds" they are called because of the crest of long dark plumes that rises from the back of their heads, giving them the appearance of a clerk with a bunch of quill feathers behind his ear. It's an aristocratic name; but the thing that makes the secretary-bird valuable is not his looks. The natives of South Africa love him because he can kick like a mule.

A Fight Between Snake and Bird

TOSS into his cage a snake, no matter how vicious, and the fight begins immediately. The bird cautiously approaches the snake, with wings widespread to escape the sudden lunges by flight if necessary. Once, twice, three times, perhaps, the snake lunges. The bird darts back, waiting his chance. At last it comes, and one of those long, hard legs shoots out like the hoof of a mule, landing squarely on the snake's head. It reels, and falls back stunned, to be knocked out completely by a second blow. And then its victor proceeds to swallow it whole.

In South Africa the birds are regarded as a great protection. They are affectionate mates, and always travel together. When pursued they spread their wings and make off over the ground with the speed of a running horse. This is the first pair to be quartered in our climate. If Saint Patrick had been blessed with half a dozen secretary-birds, his clean-up in Ireland would've been much easier.

What We Did to a Fisherman's Hut

IF you know what you want, and go after it hard enough, you will usually get it. At least, that has been our experience.

We wanted a house on Long Island. We knew the kind of house we wanted, and how much we had to spend. The amount we had didn't at all correspond with our vision; but we knew we were going to have that house just the same.

We Find What We Are Looking for

THE first picture shows our "find"—a fisherman's hut, It could be bought for "next to nothing," and clearly was worth no more. The owner, who lived far away, considered it a blot on the landscape and was glad to let it go.

It was badly situated, so we purchased a lot farther up the stream, and began to transform our discovery into our dream. The second picture shows the result.

You would hardly think the evolution possible, would you?

The only point of resemblance is the longer slope on one side of the roof. That provided the "motif," so to speak, for the plan of lengthening the slope still farther to shelter the Colonial doorway and provide abutment for the extension.

To balance this wing, its counterpart was added at the other end of the house, to provide for a roomy veranda, and over it a delightful writing-room, with dormer windows facing the sunrise.

Instead of a bare six rooms we now have eleven, plus three bath-rooms and a lower hall lavatory. Luxury indeed!

Anybody Can Do It

AND the cost? Not quite within the original estimate, of course, but near enough to be comfortable. We have the house that we set out to get—the house of our dreams. And any other two people can have their house also, if they have the dream and determination enough. Our experience has proved that.

They Are Teaching Their Fathers a Thing or Two

"RAG dolls" and "germinators" have replaced agricultural text-books in the Cook County (Illinois) schools.

Instead of learning corn-field philosophy out of a book, farmer boys are going to cultivate their own acres on their fathers' farms.

Not only that, but they are teaching their fathers a thing or two, and in the County of Cook five grains of corn may grow this year where only one grain of corn has been in the habit of growing.

This new movement originated with County Superintendent of Schools Edward J. Tobin, who summoned six of his teachers and outlined the plan.

Simply stated, it was to teach farming on farms instead of in schools. The six teachers went into strict training for the new course.

Permission was obtained from the district directors to take two hours of each school day for the course in practical farming.

About a fifth of the corn planted by Cook County farmers in the past has failed to "come up" because the seed corn was defective. The first effort of the schools was to choose seed corn that would "come up." For this purpose the pupils were introduced to the "rag doll," a simple little device made of cloth for testing seed corn to see whether it will germinate or not.

The germinator box works on the same principle, hut has a greater capacity than the rag doll.

The next thing to do was to get the corn. The farmers were interested by now, and they brought whole wagonloads to be tested. Barns were hired, brooding houses, and village halls—any place where there was room enough for the work. School-houses were out of the question for this.

Girls Enthusiastic, Too

PUPILS take readily to the new scheme; they welcome the daily trips, by wagon or on foot, from the school-houses to the farms, and the girls are just as enthusiastic as the boys.

The rural schools of the county have been divided into six sections, and at the head of each is an expert, having the title of school and rural life director. The salary is $2,000 a year, and the director is on duty all the year, the summer vacation being his busiest season.

The father of each pupil has been asked to allot an acre of good land to his son or daughter.

All the work of ordering, planting, and cultivating this land is done by the pupil; under the direction of the school and rural life director. It is an essential part of the program that the young farmer shall have the money from the sale of the product.

In this way, not only will a boy receive a start in scientific agriculture and an immediate opportunity to put his school lessons into practice, but, in more than one instance, a hard-headed and conservative farmer will be likely to receive a valuable lesson in up-to-date methods.

The idea back of the whole movement is to teach the students that useful achievement is the end and object of education.

At the end of the school year an open air festival is to be held in each division, to which the children and their parents will be invited. There will be music, drills, spelling bees, a dinner in the woods, folk-dancing, and everything that makes country life attractive. The plan was tried out last year with great success.

It must be remembered that the directors are on the job all summer, ready to help the young farmers in the cultivation of their acreage club crops, and to de everything that can be done to make the community a pleasant and profitable place for people to live in.

Hitching an Automobile to a House-boat

IF you should hitch a crack automobile to the paddle-wheels of a house-boat, would the combination be a web-footed roadster or a pneumatic-tired river packet?

While opinions may differ on this question, there is only one sentiment regarding the scheme by those who have seen it tried out.

It is great!

The idea originated a year or two ago with a Chicago man who has both an ardent automobilist and a devotee of house-boating.

He Couldn't Ride in Both at Once, So He Combined Them

THE trouble was that when he went out in his car, he had to leave his house-boat behind, and when the traveling by water there was no way of taking the automobile along. That is, he thought there was no way until he happened to notice, one day, that the aft deck of the house-boat was a very spacious one.

The result was that, the next time he went on a trip by water, the automobile reposed snugly on the rear deck of the boat.

Thereafter, at every point where the boat was moored, the automobile was run ashore for a trip through the surrounding country; and after his little sight-seeing trip the owner would motor back to his comfortable boat to spend the night.

How to Make an Automobile Pay Its Way

BEING something of an inventor, the owner next conceived the idea of making the automobile earn its passage. His plan was to make the car run the house-boat.

This he accomplished by fitting spurred sprocket-wheels to the hubs of the car's rear wheels, and keying similar but larger ones to the paddle-wheels of the boat, and connecting them by means of link chain belts.

Then, when the automobile was jacked up so that its rear wheels were clear of the deck, and when the engine was started, the boat moved merrily along at a rate of six miles an hour, which is considerable faster than most house-boats go.

A Bungalow Afloat

TO provide it with a steering apparatus the craft was fitted out with two rudders; but in case of necessity the paddle-wheels can be adjusted to steer the boat.

This is accomplished by disconnecting the emergency brake from one driving wheel and the foot-brake from the other. In this way one of the paddles can be revolved while the opposite one remains stationary. Thus, if the port paddle is revolved while the starboard is held still, the bow of the house-boat is shoved around to starboard, and vice versa.

This very modern house-boats measures seventy-five feet over all, it has a width of seventeen feet, and it weighs thirty-six tons.

It is really a luxurious floating bungalow of six rooms, with all the conveniences of a modern steam-heated apartment: hot and cold water, gas, ice-box, bath-room, laundry, sun-parlor, and roof-garden.

The Biggest Skull

IN the Army Medical Museum at Washington is a gigantic skull, said to be the largest in existence. It isn't a real skull, however, but simply a papier-mâché representation of one, greatly exaggerated for the purpose of anatomical study, begin four feet hight. As the human skull is about one seventh the size of the body, a man big enough to have a cranium of this size would have to be twenty-eight feet tall.

Boys who intend to become army doctors spend a good deal of time with this great model, learning the names of the various bones. Using it precludes the use of large magnifying-glass on a real skull.

A New Way to Train Your Nerves

CLIFF-CLIMBING has become tame sport for the students of the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy. Sighing for a new method of testing the condition of the nerves, the physical instructor, W. Ward Beam, a hit upon a decided novelty—crossing a river on a rope bridge.

The idea possessed one charm: the outfit was cheap and easily portable, for it consisted of two stout ropes and noting more. One rope, according to the plan broached tot eh eager students and co-eds by the physical instructor, was to serve as a support for the foot, the other to balance the one who essayed to cross a river on this precarious foothold.

According to Mr. Beam, the object of the rope-walking is simply to harden the nerves of the students. We lack nerve, he says, chiefly because we never do anything to cultivate strength in that direction.

This novel form of gymnastics is now a part of the college curriculum, and the women students are as expert at it as the men.