Buying Baby Bonds

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

"WILL you be kind enough to furnish me with a list of safe bonds for $100?" is a common request. Or "Where can I buy $100 bonds?" is even more frequently asked.

Few people realize how easy it is to purchase safe investments small—ridiculously small—sums. When the highest type of bonds are to he had in $100 units on easy payments, there is really no excuse for the purchase of "fly-by-night" stocks: an expression which I will not stop to define, but which pretty nearly every reader understands. A recent compilation showed that thirty of the large railroads, twenty-five great nationally known manufacturing concerns, and seventy of the larger corporations supplying light, heat, and power, issue their bonds in sums as low as $100. To this list should he added at least one State and a number of the largest cities.

It is probably a matter of only a short time before all corporations will feel obliged to put out bonds in $100 pieces. The small investor is not to be overlooked. Even the haughty British government, in its last great loan, sought the help of those with hut a few pounds to contribute toward their country's defense.

Not only is it possible to purchase these small bonds, but by dealing with a reliable firm one may begin with small payments,—in one case as low as $3, in another with $10,—and gradually acquire full possession, in say a year's time, by making monthly payments. It costs no more to buy in small payments than to buy outright. The interest on the bond itself takes care of the interest you have to pay the broker, he of course buying the bond outright and holding it for you until you have paid in full, at which time it is delivered to you.

There are several brokers in New York who make a specialty of buying and selling $100 bonds. But there are many other brokers and bankers who, while not specializing in this field, are only too glad to engage in it whenever clients apply for small investments. Often it isn't, necessary to seek New York City dealers. In Chicago there are many reliable brokers, and even trust companies, that have small bonds for sale. One of the strongest trust companies in Chicago, an institution with a national reputation, not only aims to have $100 bonds always on hand, but actually lends the money to depositors to buy them with.

For Would-be Investors

I ADVISE would-be investors who can not afford to lose anything, and who are satisfied with from 4% to 6% to inquire of bankers in the nearest large city what bonds are obtainable in small denominations. Often a flourishing business of this nature is carried on without attracting much attention outside of the immediate locality. The securities offered are frequently of a local nature, and for that very reason are inclined to be sound and desirable, because the bankers who handle them know all about them.

Besides New York and Chicago, San Francisco and Baltimore have put out little bonds. Mississippi and the Province of Alberta are also in this class. Among the big, well known corporations listed on the New York Exchange whose $100 bonds are easy to buy are the Montana Power, Virginian Railway, Southern Pacific. (San Francisco Terminal), Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul, Bethlehem Steel, Central Leather, Liggett & Myers Tobacco, and P. Lorillard Tobacco. Several of these bonds pay more than and are entirely safe.

Next week Mr. Atwood will answer the question: "Should I Invest in Insurance?

How Much Water Should I Drink in a Day?

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

WHAT advantage is there in water drinking, and how much should one drink each day?

When we stop to consider that from 60 to 66 per cent. of "us" is water, and that the only way to maintain that ratio—absolutely indispensable for the preservation of life, health, and happiness—is to drink water, the advantages of water drinking are obvious. In fact, the drink habit is a most effective life-saver.

One reason that kidney disease, rheumatism, torpid liver, constipation, and sundry other diseases and ailments are increasingly prevalent is because we are shy on our drinking. On an average, we consume less than one fifth the amount that normally we should. To indulge in water sparingly is a vice. To riot and revel in it, and to flush the system to the point of super-saturation with it, are life-giving and health-giving virtues.

The function of water is to provide a solution in which our body-cells may float and move and have their being; for it enters the chemical composition of every tissue—even the hair, nails, and bones. It forms the chief ingredient of all the body fluids, and maintains their proper degree of dilution. It furnishes the vehicle for excretion through two important channels—the skin and the kidneys—and assists materially in facilitating the removal of "end products" through the other two—the lungs and bowels. Therefore it is the most important means whereby the debris and clinkers clogging the human mechanism are eliminated.

Water keeps all the various inner surfaces of the body (such as the mucous and serous membranes) moist, preventing friction, and also the exceedingly uncomfortable condition that would result from their "drying out." It provides the blood and the lymph with a medium by which food may be carried to all the tissues in even the most remote parts of the body. It also serves to distribute the body heat, and by the process of absorption and evaporation through the pores it regulates the temperature.

For at Beautiful Complexion

WATER is the most economical medicine ever discovered, but it should be drunk freely and fearlessly in order to secure the best results. About three pints daily, or six "good" glasses, is a fair allowance for a normal adult. However, if beautiful, clear complexion is desired water should be taken in larger quantities—say, up to twelve glasses each day, for several weeks at least. Then the six-glass regime may be resumed.

In the various obstinate, disagreeable or dangerous conditions caused by sluggish, torpid liver or inactive kidneys, this latter quantity should invariably be taken. In rheumatism, a glassful may with great benefit, be indulged it once an hour. To make the dose more effective a pinch of salt may he added to each glass.

Why Not Become Water Addicts

Ice water, by the way, should be tabooed, especially at meal-time, as it tends to suspend the action of pepsin. Also ice water inhibits the activity of the nerves of the stomach, and lowers blood supply that is so necessary to [?] digestion.

The reason we do not appreciate water at something approximating its full value is because of its abundance and cheapness. If it were sold in quart bottles at a good stiff price per bottle, we might all be water addicts. And that might be the very best thing that could befall us.

For no one can be 100 per cent. efficient with his system clogged, his blood loaded with impurities, and his emunctories stagnated from tissue rust. In the interest of health, happiness, and longevity, it is extremely important to drink daily half a dozen or more glasses of this health-giving beverage.

Each week Dr. Bowers answers the most interesting question. Next week: "How Can I Side-Step Seasickness?"

One Minute with the Editor

Little Lessons in Preparedness

"Why not disarm ourselves," say some of our peace friends, "and when invaders come we will treat them so nicely that they will be ashamed to attack us."

Well, once it people tried that very thing—the ancient Peruvians, who had developed the highest civilization known on this continent up to that time. We quote from the "Conquest of Peru": "Arbors were formed of luxuriant and wide-spreading branches, interwoven with fragrant flowers, and shrubs that diffused a delicious perfume. A banquet was provided [for the invaders] teeming with viands prepared in the style of Peruvian cookery, and with fruits and vegetables luscious to the taste."

Certainly the stoniest-hearted invader ought to have turned around and gone home, ashamed of himself, after such royal treatment. But what happened? Turn over a few pages and see: "The slaughter was incessant, for there was nothing to check it. That there should have been no resistance will not appear strange when we consider the fact that the wretched victims were without arms."

All those in favor of disarmament now will please say "I." The "Nos" have it.

People You Don't Want to Meet

WE got to thinking the other day what a lot of people there are in the world whom one would rather not meet. The idea interested us so much that we gathered the pictures of some of them together. You'll find them in the middle of the magazine next week: see if you feel about these people as we do.

Edwin Balmer

EDWIN BALMER, whose stories are popular with magazine readers, is a new writer for us. He writes our next leading story—of a young engineer who married a society girl and took her into the mountains where he was cutting a railroad through.

Send No More Babies

A FEW weeks ago, in a moment of aberration, we printed in this corner a picture of a baby in a wash-tub as an illustration of what we mean by an "interesting picture." Since then our daily mail has almost doubled. We have received pictures of babies in chafing-dishes, babies in fireless cookers, babies clothed, half clothed, and unclothed. Some time before long we will publish a whole page of these pictures. But meantime, for the letter-carrier's sake, send no more. The competition is closed.

What I Saw in an English War Factory

By BOUCK WHITE

ONE Sunday afternoon recently I found myself in a town in the north of France which is the seal of an English supply base. A half holiday had been granted to the working corps, and the drowsy corporal's guard at the door of the warehouse was in a happy mood. Some cigarettes, there-fore, to the chap at the gate, and a friendly approach, permitted me to enter.

I was astounded at the array of objects that met my sight as I walked through that wide shed. I had expected to see guns, mitrailleuses, cartridges, shells, clothing, food, wagons, and tents. All these were there. But modern warfare is a business of digging; and this requires shovels. Here they were in the warehouse—a mountain of them, of all conceivable shapes and sizes, even to the tiny ones used in excavating a dug-out for underground sleeping-chambers in the trenches.

Then, there were thousands of pick-axes, and immense quantities of barbed wire. For the battle-line that stretches from Switzerland to the sea is one continuous barbed-wire fence, with hundreds of additional miles because of its tortuous tangle and zigzag. There were also thou-sands and thousands of wire-clippers for cutting through the enemy's barbed wire.

The Englishman's Eternal Bath-Tub

SOME of the articles in this storehouse seemed almost fantastic; for example, the stack of tin bath-tubs, next to the crockery department.. The idea of Englishmen toting their eternal bath-tubs even on to the battlefield seemed ludicrous. But there is hard-headedness back of that provision of bathing facilities. To the mud-bespattered men who have spent a week in the trenches, a hot bath is not only sanitary, but is medicine to the soul. In a bin not far from the tin bath-tubs were the hair-clippers; for barbers' tools are also a part of present-day war equipment.

"What in the name of reason are these things?" I asked my guide, as we passed a bin filled with queer little things that looked for all the world like pop-guns.

"Those? Oh, those are painless horse-killers."

"Painless what?" I gasped.

With the record for cruel and pain-inflicting devices which this present war is establishing, "painless horse-killers" came as a shock to my mental processes. But there they were, with full directions as to use. Something of this sort is most necessary, for a crippled horse in a trench full of wounded men would be more dangerous than the shrapnel of the enemy.

Foot-Warmers for Sleep

FOOT-WARMERS would seem a negligible item in an army outfit; yet there they were. They are made of porcelain, elongated, and with a neck and mouth lifting up at one end, resembling a duck in its nest. Trench warfare is a nerve-degenerator such as seldom was seen in the artillery duels of the past. Therefore, when the men come in from the trenches, exhausted, with signs, perhaps, of the hysteria that is one of the characteristics of this war, they need food and cleanliness, but more than anything else sleep. For the worst cases, absolute rest in bed is prescribed. A foot-warmer coaxes the blood from the brain-centers, and soothes the tissues of a body chilled by cold nights underground.

The British commissariat did not forget to provide water-filters. They were ranged along one end of the shed, ready to be despatched to the front. They are made for rough service and lots of it. Each filter is on wheels, and is not very different in appearance from the hand-engines of the old-time fire company. A pump worked by many hands forces the water through the filtering chamber.

The way in which modern science and invention are being utilized in the present war is a constant revelation to the outsider. The other day I was visiting an engineering expert connected with the French army—an American, by the way. His latest task has been to equip the army at the front with a mechanical bridge-builder. The old method of building pontoon bridges was adequate in the days of small armies. With the present scale of military operations, however, and with the need for swiftness and range of mobility, the railway has become a prime factor; and a railroad train can not cross rivers on pontoons.

So this American engineer has introduced into the French army the automatic pile-driver. It is a huge and many-handed machine. Grappling a log with one arm, it swings it around in front, holds it firm, and then with its trip-hammer sinks it into the bed of the river, at the same time reaching back another arm for a second log. When these two logs are firmly in place, girders are run out upon them, and the pile-driver advances for a new out-reach into the current of the water.

In this way, a railroad bridge can be extemporized even under fire and an armored train sent across. This could not have been done by slow hand processes; for the artillery of the foe would have demolished every day the work done each night. But, with a bridge completed in one night, a train equipped with heavy artillery can be sent over and advanced far enough to protect with its fire the bridge over which it has come.

Collapsible Houses

TO return to the military warehouse: One entire corner of the shed was filled with collapsible houses. Near by was a pile of tether-stakes, each stake equipped with a ring and an eel-rope, for tethering a horse in the open at night. But a tether-stake has to be driven into the ground—therefore a heap of wooden mauls close by. Another interesting group comprised the water-carts, strong and durable, but very narrow, in order to allow of passage through tight places.

There were also cook-stoves on wheels, water-proof floor blankets for use iii the tents, and folding lanterns, each of the latter in a flat, compact case, which shields the glass from breakage.

Perhaps it was an incident that occurred early in the war that led to the inclusion of these lanterns in the British commissariat. In the battle of the Marne, General von Kluck, commanding the German left wing, had his headquarters in a village not far from Paris. It. is reported that one night, at a critical moment of that critical battle, he was holding a council of war, when suddenly the electric lights that illuminated the house went out, due to an accident to the power plant. The sudden darkness threw their affairs into confusion. The chaos at headquarters communicated itself to the taut nerves of the army, and a demoralization ensued which seriously lowered the morale and disorganized the retreat. I thought of this, and complimented the English foresight that provided against such an emergency.

What surprised me most in the warehouse was the stack of chimney-cleaners. If there is one article that suggests the purposes of peace, it is the chimney-sweep's long broom. Yet there they were.

A moment of reflection, however, will explain their presence there. Soldiers are oft times billeted upon the civil population. Indeed, every British officer in France has an authorization from the French government permitting him to quarter his troops in any private house or barn in France. Now, the chimneys of France, while beautiful to look at, are often lacking in utility. Sometimes the smoke goes up the chimney, and some-times not. Any army preparing for a pro-longed campaign on the Continent does wisely to provide chimney-brooms.

Indeed, in that warehouse in the north of France I was impressed with the adequacy with which Great Britain is preparing for her military advance. For the victories in modern warfare are won not in the front-line trenches so much as in the base that supplies those front-line trenches.

Can Your Four-year-old Girl Do This?

LITTLE Beatrice Whitelam is a water-baby who lives in Philadelphia. She swam almost as soon as she could walk, and recently came smilingly through a test of a 320-yard swim over a surveyed dead watercourse in the incredible time of thirteen minutes and three seconds.

This vigorous young mermaid is four and a half years old, less than three feet in height, and weighs only thirty-three pounds; yet she swims the breast, back, and side strokes in perfect form, and is able to exhibit faultlessly several dives.

One or two other youngsters have made reputations as splendid swimmers within the last year or two. Catherine Brown, who is only five years old, gave an exhibition of swimming and diving in Madison Square Garden, New York, last year. She was promptly arrested for giving an exhibition in public, but the charge was not sustained. The judge remarked caustically that any little girl who could swim as she could ought to give exhibitions that might spur other parents to teach their children to be little ducks at so early an age.

She Wanted the Woman's Championship

ANNABEL HUDSON, of Washington, D. C., four and a half years old, lately swam in a race for the championship of the capital. The course was three quarters of a mile in the tidal basin at the Municipal Bath beach, and the youngster stayed with the leaders for the first half of the distance. Then her father, fearing that she might overdo, plucked her out of the water. Annabel burst into tears and said she could have won the woman's championship. Her father let her off with the promise that she might go in and win it when she was ten years old.

First Aid in a Vanity-Case

BUSINESSLIKE vanity-bags like the one shown in the illustrations are now carried by thousands of English-women. They are used as first-aid outfits for those injured in accidents or by air raids. Already much suffering has been relieved, and possibly some deaths prevented, by these emergency kits. It seems quite likely that soon they may be generally adopted throughout the war zone.

These emergency outfits are very complete, and include scissors, safety-pins, cotton-wool, a celluloid soap-box, a small bottle of smelling-salts, a phial of anti-septic wash, a box of ointment, a bottle of sweet oil (to be used as a dressing for burns), and a stock of hypocarbonate solution for the respirator—which latter device, by the way, is extremely impractical for amateur use.

In an immense number of accidents among travelers and autoists in America—occurring frequently in places remote from hospitals or doctors—it would be literally a God-send to find something like these evoluted vanity-bags in evidence. For then those precious first minutes, usually wasted in waiting for the surgeon, would be saved—and human lives would be saved with them.

What the Bag Should Contain

SUCH bags could be made even more practical than the one shown in the illustrations. They might include scissors, for cutting away the clothing over a wound; a few bichloride tablets for preparing anti-septic solutions; a small roll of sterile gauze, to be used for dry dressing; a foot or more of adhesive strap; safety-pins, for fastening bandages; and possibly a light tourniquet, for checking hemorrhage until such time as the severed blood-vessel can be twisted or ligated.

A two-ounce bottle of equal parts of olive oil and milk of magnesia, used as a local application over a burned surface, would be an immense improvement over the plain sweet oil or ointment carried in the English vanity-bags. Also, a dram phial of aromatic spirits of ammonia will give much more definite results than the somewhat cumbersome "smelling-salts," which an honest-to-goodness doctor would depend upon only in the "megrims," or where there was nothing particularly serious the matter.

Some English surgeons have recommended that pearls of amyl nitrate be included in this emergency bag. While it can not be denied that amyl nitrate—when crushed upon a handkerchief and inhaled—is most efficacious in restoring consciousness in fainting or in syncope, its use in the hands of amateurs would be dangerous. In certain forms of heart trouble, for instance, it may even cause death. There are too many safe and harmless remedies and measures—such as loosening tight clothing, slapping the face or chest with cold wet towels, friction applied over the pulses, strong coffee, etc.—that may effectively be employed without running useless risks.

This Pig Improved the Telephone

A HALF GROWN pig on a party telephone line in Nebraska paved the way for a brand-new invention and undying fame for A. G. Howard of York County. The invention is a telltale that notifies all users of a party line as to which has taken off his receiver.

On long winter nights the telephone is the vaudeville stage of the Nebraska prairies. Every farmer along the trail takes down his receiver, and the party begins. Sometimes even whole families, with the aid of many ear-pieces, "listen in." At ten o'clock every morning the farmers' wives have their innings at gossip. Imagine, in the midst of either pleasurable or a purely business conversation, how exasperating would be the interruption of a half grown pig's squeals.

It would merely mean that the prairie cut-up was holding an innocent porker within range of the transmitter and pinching the ear of the dumb brute. Every one on the line would then hang up his receiver, for the squeals were louder than any plain talk.

How He Caught Them

TO catch the offender on a ten-party wire is almost an impossibility unless some device is attached to a telephone instrument to notify all subscribers whenever a particular farmer is using the line. Howard was a trouble shooter in York County. It was his job to find out all the little aches and pains of the system and remedy them.

Every Subscriber Has a Tune

THE worst difficulty was the small-boy nuisance, and he has stopped it. Quiet detective work found the right offender, and then it was discovered that there was one in almost every home. Automobile horns, babies, pigs, and even calves,—anything with an indistinguishable voice—was used. But since the installation of the Howard device no youth dares abuse the telephone privileges of his home. Every time a receiver is removed, a little tune is played which announces the entrance of that subscriber on the line. Everybody knows who it is.

Along the lines that run through York County, John Smith, in spite of himself, plays "Yankee Doodle" every time he takes his telephone in hand. Arthur Simpson plays "Coming Through the Rye," Bill Edwards plays "The Star-Spangled Banner," and so on through the list along that wind-swept road. No anonymous pig breaks into the sale of a splendid old Percheron from Farmer Brown to Farmer Stebbins; no obstreperous calf disturbs Mrs. Henry as she gossips with Mrs. Martin. Peace has been declared, and A. G. Howard has a raise in position and pay.

I Hold My House with Claws

By KATE JORDAN

Illustrations by G. E. Wolfe

THE light was dying in the empty school-room where she who had been the teacher sat alone. The corners were solid black; the silence had become as substance. A real intruder—a gray passer-by from the gray streets—seemed to have come in to sorrow with her.

She had put on her outdoor things. The framed portrait of her mother—the one thing that would not go into the sale of the furnishings for the rent—lay upon her knees. She had been ready to go for an hour, and it was time to go. The janitress, waiting to take possession of the key, must have become impatient; for she had her husband's six o'clock supper to cook. Yet the teacher stayed on, her dull gaze traveling from one to another of the kindergarten chairs standing in their accustomed circle.

She was thinking of her past, present, and future. It was a stock-taking of brain and body assets for the fight to live which must be begun all over again.

She discovered that she was not suffering as she had expected; that, indeed, she was not suffering at all. A few years before, in such a dire moment, she would have been as full of panic as a distraught animal flying before its butchers. Now, when she was just so much older, more lacking in friends, the blinding headaches that had tortured her from childhood coming more frequently—now, when there was a more exacting demand every day for specialized labor, she could sit, at twenty-six, a bankrupt in her collapsed school, indifferent to what other calamities might be waiting for her.

She wondered faintly what was the reason. Her aching muscles, her empty eyes, seen like a ghost's in the mirror, gave her the reply. She was tired to the uttermost limit of fatigue. She had suffered until she was beyond further suffering. She had ceased to care what might happen to her. And behold—she had ceased to be afraid!

This indifference to life became a magnetic hand that led her in a friendly way to look into Death's face. She looked and looked, and found it kind. A feeling of peace came over her. She drooped in the twilight, questioning, weighing. To cease to be? To anticipate by a fraction of time the destination that all were traveling toward? A morbidly sweet thought! She tasted it, tested it, drew it into her heart, while she searched at the same time for the faintest shrinking. When, instead, she felt excitement, buoyancy, she drank more deeply of the dark intoxication. Peace at the thought of death changed to longing for it. She had been religiously trained to view self-murder as a sin, as cowardly. Somehow these commands had lost their force. She felt a quiet, unreckoning decision to rely upon the Understanding that has pity and mercy as its greatest attributes. No need to think of other battling years, like so many gone. They were not to be! She was to die!

THE small Canadian city was in the grip of zero frost. As she went home, her empty hands, within her old squirrel muff, were clutched as if she held a gift. She did not look to right or left. The streets, ravished by icy gales, were as lonely as a prairie. There was nothing to see. No one was thinking of her. No one was waiting for her. No one would miss her.

These facts did not hang upon her to-night with their accustomed weight. A resolve that had followed her decision to die was warming her. On this last mile of life she would satisfy an old, heretofore hopeless hunger. She would take a holiday. Although to pay her debts she had sold out her school furnishings, she still owned one hundred dollars. It had been non-existent for ordinary use, while she struggled to live; for it was held by a beneficent society as a guard against illness, or as a life insurance policy. She would draw it out.

The thought ran through her—with this sum in her hand she would go away to one of the summer spots she had so often sickened with yearning to see. She would go from the bitter cold, the roaring, cutting winds, to the wonder and the glory of some island sparkling in turquoise seas. She would die there, without expense, a stranger, and the shade of a palm would cover her. But first, for a little while, she would really live,—be idle, warm, peaceful, and fill her thirsting senses with the beauty of the world.

When she left her boarding-house a few days later, taking only a small trunk, the old Scotswoman with whom she had lived for years held her hand kindly.

"I'm glad you were able to save enough out of the sale to take this holiday, Miss Cothren. You need it. You'll come back from Bermuda with rosy cheeks."

Miss Cothren fondled the veined, harsh hand, her eyes drenched with farewell. "I wish every one were as kind as you, Mrs. Murdock! Good-by! If—and things will happen, you know!—anything goes wrong with me, I want you to keep what I've left for yourself,—my books, even my mother's portrait."

"Don't say such things, Miss Cothren," the old woman chided, and patted her shoulder. "Never fear; you'll come back."

"Good-by," said Miss Cothren.

SO there was water so blue? No, not blue: bright translucent purple? The stories of its color had not been fiction! Miss Cothren was standing in the bow of the boat, her arms crossed on the rail, her drowsy, intoxicated eyes fastened on the crystalline sea, while the ship danced on.

It was the morning of the second day out. The ship was full. The passengers were perhaps a little less interesting than a collection of people coming together by chance from various environments usually are. The life of the ship was not marked by anything distinctive. But to Dora Cothren this first happiness after long meagerness had made an electric change in her. Everything interested her. There was pleasure in merely watching a sailor coiling a rope; in helping the steward findher steamer rug; listening to the thready, music-box strains in the chilly "social parlor"; watching boys running, babies stumbling; speculating about a convalescent who lay shawl-wrapped in the sun. It was joy to read, to watch the sea, to hear the silvery bells give the hour. There was romance merely in sitting at the table with a lot of strangers.

WHILE she was part of the scene, she was yet utterly separated from it. A big, kindly pity for the human vanity that makes the nothing of importance pervaded her. Conventions that were stone walls to these others were as paper to her. The shutters that each put up before his soul she viewed as puny, ignoble, and she defiantly peeped through them. She opened conversation with the convalescent, she played with the children, and when she saw tears in the stewardess's eyes, she made her sit down and confide her sorrow. She understood well the reason for this larger vision, this comprehending but detached attention. She was different from the people about her. The desire to live was their most passionate instinct. She had let go of life, had waved it farewell, was pledged to death.

It was this "difference" that made her do an astounding thing when she turned from her reverie above the water's bewildering color. A moan had drifted near her. He too was dreaming, but with the look of one whose mind was plunging like a boat without ballast from one point to another in effort to elude an enemy. Dora had noticed him as she came aboard. He was possibly thirty-five; but stress and bitterness had ravaged his face. As she turned from the sea she saw his shielded eyes,—contemptuous, desperate. Under the peak of his steamer cap they flared lonesomely. She leaned on her elbow and studied him in the supreme, leisurely way of one privileged. She heard him mutter something. "Did you speak to me?' she asked. That she should address him evidently

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"I—well—" he began faintly, and confusedly touched his cap.

"You said—something," Dora said as if they were friends.

She saw him rouse himself. "I'm afraid I've an unfortunate habit of uttering exclamations when I think." He moved back a step. "I'm sorry I disturbed you."

He would have gone; but Dora spoke again. "The sea is beautiful, isn't it?"

"Glorious."

"Such a sea as I've often dreamed of, but never saw till now."

He drifted back to the railing, looked at her politely, and asked the habitual question, "This is your first visit to Bermuda?"

"My first—and last."

"One can't say that," he said. "It's sure to draw you hack."

Dora smiled. The man looked at her then with real interest. She had the sort of face that a first glance passes over, that the third or fourth finds winning. Those pallid women with very dark eyes and sad, petulant, pink mouths were always mysterious. To this was added a graven look of patience. But her smile! He thought it as final as the last note of "taps."

THEIR talk was interrupted here by the gong for luncheon, and in the afternoon they did not meet. Several times that day Dora saw the man at a distance. She tried to read him. He avoided companionship, and was nearly always alone. They two had more in common with each other than with the people about them. She felt this because of his bitter and wild look as he would sit smoking, sunk in silence. The look was a reflection of the existence she had left behind in the Canadian school-room, when she had fought against failure — when she had cared. That he was suffering and cased was patent to her.

She went on deck very early the next morning, the last day on board. And what a day it was—of intense azure and peacock tints; heaped-up clouds of snow and silver; roistering breezes; tongued, azure waves that flung off cascades of spray as hair is flung back in wild laughter. Dora seized life for a moment iu an ecstatic clutch, drew it to her lips, kissed it. Then, with a big pang, she let it slip from her, and subdued her heart.

"The wonder of it!" she found herself exclaiming, hands curved above her eyes. "Oh, the glory—that must go!"

As her arms sank she saw the stranger coming slowly toward her, looking at her with faint curiosity. When she smiled a good morning he lifted his cap and paused.

"I thought I'd begin the day earlier than any other passenger," Dora said; "but I have to share honors with you."

"No, you can keep them all. I'm not beginning. I'm contiuuing the night in the sun." His weary, burning, wide-open eyes said the rest.

"You didn't sleep?" she said. After a pause, she added, "I can see you're troubled about something."

This came so candidly, its quality of primal humanity so flawless, that the man looked at her with incredulous earnestness, and a faint light showed in his face.

"Please talk!" she said, without moving. "Tell me! Why not? We're two human beings—our paths have crossed momentarily—perhaps we have something to say to each other."

He had the look of a man listening greedily to what hurt him. He studied her before answering: "Like this day—triumphant, quivering with energy—you awaken sadness by contrast. To be as happy as you are, a white, sane life stretchiug before you—oh, do you realize how fortunate you are?"

At his last words the puzzling, meditative smile that had halted him before went over her face, and made him cold.

"I wish I could help you!" There was a full, sweet note iu the words. "I should like to remember that I had helped you."

A long silence followed. The man's face was hidden from Dora. He was looking at the sea.

"I wonder?" he said at last, and then, half turning, he spoke through lips almost. shut. "You're going to Bermuda for pleasure. I'm going in the hope of seeing the one man who can help me save something from the wreck I've made of my life. I had success—great success. Through negligence almost criminal I ruined myself and others. People who acted on my promises lost fortunes, small legacies, some their last cent. There are wrecked homes at my door, broken hearts, suicides. Does it matter that I can plead non-intention, that I have given away practically every dollar to help undo the misery? This is the load I drag in my thoughts. Well—there is this one mighty man, a financial engine. With his help, if he stands by me, I can by degrees get back to some foothold. If he will not—and it's quite likely he won't—"

He did not know that his own smile was exactly like hers that had seemed to him as final as the last note of "taps."

"If he won't?" Dora asked.

An almost imperceptible shrug twitched his shoulders. "No matter!"

There was no mistaking the intention in the very distinct but indifferent words. Besides, she saw in his eyes the conjectural stare of one whose hand is upon the door that shuts out the secret.

He replied to the knowledge in her gaze with a note of defiance. "I have no wife, no child, no close ties. A few will be pained, but none harmed, by my act. Still, of course to you such a decision is monstrous. You can't understaud how a living being can cahuly aud resolutely determine to put an end to feeling. Can you?"

His words affected her in a way that was grotesque. Consternation had crept over her, a faint, shivering sickness.

"You are the most vitally alive person I've ever met!" the man went on, with longing in his sad tone. "I can see how the smallest things delight you. Life is just joy to you! For me it's—done!"

She heard her unsteady voice speak the oddest words: "Is it possible for one to know when life is over?"

"Yes. The ultimate moment has its own conviction."

"Does the ultimate moment bring clairvoyance, so that the future can be seen?"

"It makes you feel there is no future."

"Feel—yes. But one can't know that."

He shrugged. "The chances are not worth taking."

Her heart seemed to pucker. Her voice had grown steady; but it was prodding.

"Oh, don't say that! Don't—please! Life is so mysterious, wonderful, so sacred, an invisible flame of the spirit that cau not be explaiued or reasoued about! Oh, don't say you would put out that flame!"

"That's poetry. What about the fight, the sordid fight for existence?"

"This is your first real overthrow. Why shouldn't you scramble up and hit back? What would you say of such hopelessness about the little things in the course of one day? Think of your lifetime as if it were one longer day, and you will see what I mean." She unconsciously seized his sleeve, as if pulling him back from danger. "You are not ill, except in spirit. You can make yourself fit to live, even if this man you speak of won't help you."

"I'm on my last few hundreds," he retorted impatiently. "You can't do anything when you haven't money."

"You can if you try in some humble way. Begin again! Then, who knows what chance may be given to you? But if your chance comes, and you are dead—"

She paused on the broken phrase. A hesitating look deepened in her eyes. Her fingers dropped from his arm. Her face had grown white. She looked exactly like one remembering something that threw her into consternation. He saw her lips move in an attempt to speak, as with drooping head and a heavy step she went through a door and out of his sight.

He supposed that pity for him had unnerved her. Instead Dora had completely forgotten him. She was in her state-room, sitting on the carpet-backed camp stool, staring into space in utter amaze.

DURING her first week in Hamilton she reasoned herself back into philosophical support of the resolve that had brought her to Bermuda; but with a difference. She saved hard, not spending a penny except what went for food and lodging, and those were in a cheap boarding-house. On starting she had counted that with economy she could live for about two weeks; now she aimed to live for twice that long.

Her fellow voyager, after that early morning talk, had kept away from confidences; but he told her his name, Robert Locke, and gave her the name of his hotel. She promised to send him the address of her boarding-house, and after a few days she did so.

But for her last talk with him, in which she had so amazingly held a brief for life, she would have forgotten him. Her own words to him, however, kept coming back to face her, as if they were small things, puzzled and astray, trying to find a home with her who had created them: "But if your chance comes, and you are dead—" This was especially insistent. Its recurrence made her angry. She argued with herself that pitying another had made her momentarily forget her own desperate case, so that, from habit, she had indulged in the sophistical hopefulness that trickles so easily from the lips of the coutented to the unsuccessful and distracted. Mr. Locke bad been right,—an ultimate moment could arrive for the vanquished, and be recoguized as such. She had planned for it. She was not afraid of it. She was very near it now.

Locke came to see her. This was at the end of the first week. It was merely to say that tbe man he had sought had gone on to Jamaica, and that he was following him that morning on one of the small boats that went out from Bermuda.

"Will you be here, Miss Cothren, when I get back—in about a month or five weeks?"

Dora laughed thoughtfully, and looked down. She had been reading under a cedar in the small, foot-worn garden of the boarding-house. "Didn't I mention that I meant not to leave at all?"

"Oh, you are going to settle here? Then I'll see you when I return. Would you be interested to hear how I fare?" he asked with a pathetic wistfulness.

She did not reply directly to the question. "I hope you will succeed, Mr. Locke—I hope it from my heart."

"I want to tell you now that I often think of what you said to me. I'm a little superstitious, and while your encouragement was not novel—just what happy people usually feel on the subject of self-destruction—it did seem timely in a curious way, as if you'd been a messenger, sent to me to say it. I suppose this seems very fanciful to you'?"

"It would be odd if I had been chosen as a messenger to say that to you," she said, and she sat looking at things of which he knew nothing. "Yet—who knows?—perhaps I was—perhaps I was."

"Well," he said, rising to go, "I have your good wishes? It has done me a lot of good to know you!"

Dora gave him her hand. He had a strange feeling that she was near to saying something—and yet, that it was something on which her lips were tightly shut.

"I'll look for you here when I come back," he said.

"Good-by," she murmured with a wistful smile.

SHE rose to dress on her last morning, a blank, light-headed sensation filling her. It was really her last! She had not arrived at it without a struggle.

In a shamefaced way she had tried to find work,—as cashier in a hotel, governess, or saleswoman in a shop. There was not an empty niche for her in any of these places. After two weeks at the boarding-house she had decided on a still more economical arrangement. She was wasting money in paying for three meals that she did not need. Explaining that she wanted to diet, she paid only for the room and her breakfast. Her other meals were odd bits of anything, bought anywhere,—just enough to keep her from suffering. At last she would make lunch or dinner of an orange or a pieee of bread. For four days now she had subsisted on breakfast only. She had also added to her actual money by secretly selling for a small sum everything she could possibly do without.

When she dressed on this morning in her linen clothes and sailor hat she put on every possession she had. Her old trunk, locked, was empty. Her time was up at the boarding-house. Her room was wanted. She had not a penny left. She sank weakly into her corner by the breakfast table for her last meal.

As she swallowed the weak but hot coffee in rapturous gulps, her gaunt, bright eyes gazed too intensely at the other boarders. They had lately avoided her. She had seemed "queer,"—some days talking with over-emphasized friendliness to every one; other days taciturn; latterly not eating; roaming over the country alone; coming back almost hidden under a stack of wild flowers filling her room with them, even sleeping with her face buried in them, the maid had said. Yes, she was "odd." They were glad she was leaving. And, while Dora could divine this from them, she found herself wondering what each would say—when they knew.

She roamed the country that day as never before. Light-headed from hunger,

Page 7

It was late in the afternoon when she awakened. The hour to which she had been traveling all these weeks was here. Like a weary factory worker rising at the summons of the day's whistle, she stumbled up and made her way to a plateau of beach close by. The place was at its loveliest. When she had climbed over stone: and waded through the incoming tide to coral boulder that jutted up some twenty yards from the shore, and looked about her, she seemed the center of an opal.

On the hills she had left were the cabins of negro workmen. These were of snow-white coral, with the bougainvillea blossoms trailing over them like stains of maroon-colored wine. The sky was mottled orange, lilac, peach color. The sea was of graduating shades of cornflower and peacock blue; the beach a stretch of rose-pink coral dust. Flying fish that seemed made of light blue enamel, with wings of silver, fluttered up into the golden stillness, or descended in a rain of shimmering arrows into the sea. The beauty was unbelievable. With passionate sadness she drank it in.

AFTER a long time she rose to her feet. The light had become pallid, the evening hush penetrating and solemn; the west was stained now with the purples and the damasks of dying roses. She held out her arms, without knowing that she did so. Neither did she know that an imploring question had begun to widen her eyes. It was then, with the diminishing glory dizzying her and the water's rush around the rock into the sunken beach filling her ears, that a tenant of her mind spoke, terrifying her: "You are not going to die! I, who am within you, say so. Do you know me? I am Love of Life. Death can not enter where I am!"

She crouched, shaking. "This is the end!" she blurted, her bands out, the fingers rigid, hooked.

"It is not!" the angry voice declared.

"I could not live now, if I wished."

"You do wish it."

"Why? Oh, why?"

"What about the inquiries for work you've made here during these weeks?" "Yes, I wanted to live then. There was no work for me!" she sobbed, but without tears. "That was the last sentence."

"You remember the 'chance' you spoke of to the stranger on the boat? That's worth waiting for," the voice insisted.

"No!" she said in anguish. Her eyes gaped. She was listening to the waters rushing with greater vigor round the rock into the ditch of sand, where she knew they were forming a deep lake to get her off. "It's too late!"

"Look about you!" The voice had become a shriek that urged. "Remember the Canadian school-room, the gray street, the leaden sky. You left them and came here—"

"To die!" she groaned defiantly.

"You believed that then. But, coming here, you've changed. You are going on!"

"No!" But the wild question persisted in her look. "Let me alone. I've come here to die!"

"You will not. Try as you may, you can not. That moment never wears but one look. It comes only when despair is perfect; only to the unexpectant who are, in a sense, already dead. You are not one of these. The eternal hope of change, the lure of the next moment, of the unseen good perhaps about to turn the next corner, all that keeps sad mortals marching, watching, is in your heart still. I am Love of Life. I am making you listen to the tide. I am shrieking to you that the water may not yet be too deep for you to wade through it to the land. You can not silence nor slip past me. I am a tenant who can not be evicted when I hold to my house with claws!"

She had slowly turned. Her frantic eyes were measuring the green-blue mass swirling to a thick roar that told of depth. She stumbled up, lurching, and began to crawl down the boulder. Her face was gray, her skin cold and wet; her weak fingers, seeking a hold on the rock scratched it, and in turn were torn.

"Hurry—hurry!" the raging voice said. She stood in the lowest niche of the rock, and gazed in terror at the lashing pool. "I am afraid!" she whispered, her clutched hands seeming to hold something precious against her heart. "It will drown me!" Love of Life gave a clown's laugh. "And you thought you came here to drown yourself! Now you see? Strike out—strike out! You haven't a moment to waste!"

Dora's mouth fell open abjectly. Her blood, cold from fear, grew warm from shame.

"I am a cheat!" she whimpered. "O God, I want to live! Christ—save me! To live—to live!"

Before the next rush of the tide whose distant growl was beginning, Dora had stepped into the pool. The struggle before her was a fearful one. She could not swim. She stumbled for a footing, the water almost to her shoulders. A huge wave behind her curved up like a green scoop, reached her, rushed venomously against and under her. She went down upon her knees, lost her breath. She came up, and was sucked back almost to the rock by the ferocious recession of the water. She went on, gaining a little, the waves dancing about her neck. She became giddy, the panorama heaved, and she was raked with the shudders of nausea.

Another wave came and beat her down. She scrambled up, blinded, choking, making feeble sounds for help. The waves grew in force as they rocked abouter chin, close, close to her mouth, which was agonizingly strained above them. Her footing became more and more unsteady. The dry land was still thirty yards away. In that stark need that keeps the brain clear she balanced her chances, and felt that she would never reach it. Yet over every inch of the leaping, swashing, frightening space between her and the shore she battled for her life as if she fought a wolf.

IT was May. The Bermuda season was over. On a very hot day, and in the hottest part of the afternoon, a woman walked along Front Street, in a fatigue that was pain. She had the sunny street of shops almost entirely to herself. She wore a waist and skirt of black cotton; a bare straw hat was tied down under her chin. It was the attire seen generally among the poorest class of workers, both negro and white, but with this difference: lisle thread gloves hung like strings in her red hand.

In the shadow made by a stretch of awning outside a mercer's shop she paused. She had been commissioued to get some dozen yards of crash for toweling. This must be the place. She pushed open the screen door, and found herself iu such shadow after the sun that it took her sight. For a moment she was aware only of the shop's close smell of cotton goods, and of a voice saying her name but in eonsternation: "Miss Cothren! Miss Cothren!"

She sank against a pillar of heavy rolls of linen, and her look searched for the voice. Robert Locke was behind the counter, his arms spread, as he leaned upon it. He wore a gray linen coat, pencils protruding from its pocket. He had an alert, businesslike look, an awakened air. He was gazing at Dora as if he could not credit his eyesight.

She had only one thought,—to get out of the place. But as she moved waveringly toward the door, her face shame-struck, he flung himself over the counter, and drew her decisively to one of the line of revolving stools.

"Sit down! You must!"

DORA sat hopelessly. She lowered her face. Her hands, gripping her stringy gloves, were pressed deeply into her lap. Locke began to speak rapidly. She heard, through a confusion of mind, that he had come back to Bermuda in despair. The man he had followed to Jamaica had left before he could reach him. Whether he could count upon his loyalty and help was still a question. He had reached Bermuda almost two months before, and with only twenty dollars in his possession.

"I took your advice and—began again. I came here. I'm living on almost nothing, and saving hard."

When he told her how he had tried to find her at the boarding-house, he stopped gropingly. She was a mystery that it hurt him to see. The pretty, joyous, and oddly original woman he had known on the boat had changed to this woman in a servant's clothes, her face stricken, her hands bruised and burnt.

"You've had some curious—some great trouble?" he ventured. "Can't I help you? You helped me once."

She tried to rise, stammering: "I'll—sometime—I'll tell you sometime, Mr. Locke."

"You'll tell me now. We have the place to ourselves, and will for another hour. The Bermudian who owns the shop sleeps in the heat till after four." He brought her a big fan, and sat down beside her. "Start it any way you like. But—what's happened to you?"

The halting monotone of Dora's voice was the only thing heard for a time in the soothing grayness and silence. She began her story with the bankruptcy of her school the previous January, and ended it with her climbing from the water to the safe, dry land, and fainting there, two months before.

"That's how I began again," she said, and wiped her spent face.

He was dumb. That she, who had given him hope, had really been more hopeless, more doomed to death than himself, was an incongruity that pierced.

"I was taken in by a kind mulatto family, and cared for for more than a week," she said, resuming her story in the same dull tone. "I told them the flat truth about myself. I had nothing but the wet clothes they found me in." She smiled. "Not even a hat—that, at least, went out to sea! Work I had to have, no matter what, and without loss of time." He saw her turn her hands and look at them in a patient, wondering way. "I took what I could get."

"And you are wretched!" he said.

Dora shrugged, smiled, and for the first time looked at him straightly. "I have what I fought for—life! Why should I complain?" She folded her arms and sat back against the counter, her eyes flaming, philosophical, defeated, and amused all in the one glance. "Oh, there is no doubt of my wanting to live, Mr. Locke! I have the vice of living. But I had to try to die to find it out!"

SHE would have sprung up sharply; but he placed himself before her, gently pressed her back, and looked down at her.

"Ah—and so did I try to die!" It was a whisper. "I couldn't do it. What you'd said about the 'chance still to come' held my hands."

Her clouded eyes brightened.

"I couldn't get away from it," he said breathlessly, adding with wistful love as he drank in the grave loveliness of her lifted gaze: "It was you. I knew it afterward. I couldn't get away from—you. You were my chance. You were my hope!"

Dora's arms slid across the counter. Half-laughing and half-weeping, she bent her face to them.

"Can you care at all?" the man pleaded.

She looked up, her head flung back with a touch of defiance, her beauty peeping from the wrack of the storm. She did not speak. Her flaming eyes were enough, —their hunger and their joy,—and he lifted her to rest against his heart.

She felt its strong, fervid beat, "Life—life—life!" it said. "This life too is yours!"

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

By BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

Illustration by Harvey T. Dunn

IT was, of course, hardly to be expected that I should take Vincent Gore's counsels about Isola too literally.

When a girl goes out of her way to give you warning of a plot against you—when she almost faints because she sees you in a boat with your head tied up—when she revives because you do not appear to be very badly hurt after all, and conies up on deck in the quiet hour of the afternoon with the obvious intention of hearing all about everything—you would be an insensible brute if you did not instantly find a chair, place it near hers, and proceed at once to offer up your thanks, your excuses, and your earnest assurances.

I was not an insensible brute. I did all of these things, and found that they were not ill received. It was almost the first time I had really had the chance of a satisfactory talk with the lady of the island, and I was resolved not to waste my opportunity. After all, the voyage was a short one. In four or five days we should reach Simpsonhaven, and then who knew if I should ever see this English flower of the East again?

English she undoubtedly was. Her accent was that of the cultured classes at home; her simple, frank demeanor was the demeanor of the young English girl of good family and upbringing. And yet, she was tropic of the tropics, too. To nothing reared among the fogs and snows of Britain could that starry sweetness, that white magnolia bloom, have belonged.

It was fascinating to see how the different influences of England and of Italy, working together in the languorous world of the Spice Islands, had shaped the person and the mind of this girl. She was her mother in soul, her father and her home in body. I guessed that Isola's mother had been by far the stronger character of the two; that her Neapolitan father had brought little more to the match than his facile Italian beauty. She had known how to love, it seemed—Margaret Ravenna, dead and gone. Did Isola Ravenna, alive, know too?

SHE was wearing her mother's wedding-ring, I saw, on the third finger of her right hand—a fancy that I never cared about in girls; still, it showed a pretty feeling.

Well! I suppose every one who has ever loved—which is to say every one who has passed through life alive and not dead—must have experienced the embarrassment, the difficulty, that comes from talking with some one whose personality so obsesses you that you can not hear her words for thinking of her. I missed quite a good deal of what Isola Bella said in answer to my tale of the duel; but I picked up the threads just in time at the last: "...And I was almost sure he would guess who told you, because—you must have noticed it—he watches me all the time."

It became absolutely necessary to ask questions here.

"Watches you! Who? What cheek!"

"Herr Richter; I was telling you about him," said the girl.

I felt as one feels who steps at night upon a top stair that is not there. Something that was missing jarred me—jarred me badly. Why did she not laugh, as a girl should laugh when a man forgets her words for her? Why did she not coquet, ever so little?

She spoke very quietly, as a woman thrice her age might have spoken; and she looked at the slight, firm hands in her lap, and at the memorial wedding-ring on her right hand, rather than at me.

"I don't think you heard. He is a friend of Mr. Schultz's."

"Oh," I said, without much interest.

When Isola Bella was within twenty inches of me, I was not inclined to trouble about German Fraus and their husbands, and the problems affecting either.

"He is a relation, I believe," went on Isola. "He is even rather like him—much fatter, and rather younger; but one sees it. Well, he watches me; it is almost insulting. I believe,"—she looked nervously about, her,—"if you could see everywhere, you would find he was watching me now."

"OH, nonsense!" I assured her, getting up nevertheless to take a walk round the deck-house and come back. "There's not a soul. We are on the sunny side of the ship, and it's three o'clock. Nothing but you or I or a salamander could stand the heat. They're all sleeping."

Isola's eyes were fixed on the pale blue curtain of an open port in the deck-house.

"I thought I saw it move," she said.

I looked, but could see no movement.

"Anyhow," I said, "we can't he heard. I want to talk to you about yourself.

Continued on page 17

They'll Get You if You Don't Watch Out

SEVEN young Nova Scotians dropped into Tacoma with two thousand dollars in the bottom of a trunk that belonged to all of them. The next morning, when they awoke, the trunk was still there, but the two thousand dollars was gone. And that two thousand dollars was to carry them back to Nova Scotia, where six girls were waiting to marry them.

There were seven young men, but only six girls. Captain D. O. Smith of the Tacoma force discovered that when the young men presented themselves to him, bewailing their loss. Moreover, he discovered that Davis, the young man who had left no girl behind, was the one who wailed loudest. The Captain "framed" it to have one of the seven take Davis to a cafe and there propose that they two borrow money and slip away from the rest.

Davis was easily persuaded: his willingness to get away from Tacoma was very evident. The two went down to the depot together—straight into the arms of Captain Smith.

The two thousand dollars was found rolled up inside of Davis's blankets. And, back in Nova Scotia, a village parson received thirty dollars of it—six marriages at five dollars each.

LAST fall the entire city of Buffalo was in a state of excitement over the exploits of the Ether Burglar. This gentleman scorned the crude methods of his professional colleagues—scientific methods for him.

It was his plan, before entering a bedroom, to shoot enough ether through the key-hole to stupefy the occupants. Then he entered deliberately, as a gentleman burglar should, and had plenty of time in which to make a thorough job.

It might have gone all right with the Ether Burglar had he not allowed himself to become mixed up in a love affair. But William E. Burns, chief of Buffalo's detective force, discovered the girl in the case, and the girl gave up the truth about the Ether Burglar.

He is safely tucked away now in Auburn Penitentiary.

Detective Burns has more than five thousand arrests to his credit. But, like Sergeant Cuff in Wilkie Collins' "Moonstone," he much prefers to talk about his garden.

JOHN SHEA, of the St. Louis force, is known to crooks the world over as "the man with the camera eye." About every week he gets a chance to prove that he really deserves the title.

For instance:

A series of hotel thefts had baffled the St. Louis officials. Guest-rooms in prominent hotels had been entered and money amounting to several thousand dollars had been stolen. All sorts of traps were laid, but to no purpose.

Then, one evening, Shea was leaning over the desk of the Jefferson Hotel, chatting with the proprietor, when a well dressed man, carrying two grips, walked up and registered with a flourishing signature.

Shea gasped.

"That's Joe Novak, the hotel thief," he whispered to the proprietor. "He's shaved off his beard, but it's Joe, all right."

"Be mighty careful," said the proprietor. "A false accusation might let us in for heavy damages."

But Shea knew his man. He slipped into his room and dropped on to the astounded Novak, who insisted that he was an innocent lace manufacturer from Buffalo.

The picture in the Rogues' Gallery was produced, however, and proved again that Shea's camera eye was worthy of its name.

IN Washington, D. C., a certain Thomas Taylor, alias Backus, is spending seven years of enforced vacation because he one day made a careless movement of his right hand in the presence of Lieutenant Frank J. Wilkinson of Detroit.

Lieutenant Wilkinson is known to the force as the "armored cruiser," because so many shells have been fired into him without apparently doing any damage at all.

Taylor had a pleasant means of livelihood. It was his custom to drop into a hotel and say to the clerk: "Let me have the B mail, please,"—meaning all the letters in the box marked B.

The unsuspecting clerk would pass them over. Taylor would run through them casually, abstracting any that looked as if they might contain money, and opening them under the clerk's very eyes. Whatever checks he found, he would put into an envelop and address to—say—John Jessup, at a Cleveland hotel. Then he would go there, register as Jessup, ask for his mail, take out the checks, and cash them.

It was a very successful business, and flourished for many years, in spite of the vigilance of the hotel men. But one day Taylor happened to stop squarely in front of Lieutenant Wilkinson on one of Detroit's business streets. He lighted a cigar, and something in the way he did it brought back to Wilkinson's card-catalogue mind in an instant the memory of a previous meeting.

Ten minutes later they were riding downtown together in a long, covered wagon owned by the city of Detroit.

INSPECTOR THOMAS H. LYNCH of Boston has traveled more than a hundred thousand miles in the past eight years, tracing desperate criminals throughout most of the cities of this continent and Europe. He is known to policemen all over the world. In 1911 three yeggmen opened a safe in Boston with a delicate little instrument known as a "can-opener," and extracted twenty thousand dollars.

They escaped to Europe, and the trail led through the slums of half a dozen Continental cities.

Inspector Lynch followed doggedly, however, and brought them back finally—minus the twenty thousand dollars, but with evidence enough to provide a long sentence in the State Penitentiary.

Not on the Pay-Roll

Page 11

One Woman Among a Hundred Men

MADAME BRESSLER BAILLY, the harpist in the orchestra of the Metropolitan Opera House, is the only woman in a black sea of men musicians. For that reason she sees the great drama that is enacted every day at the opera rehearsals from a unique point of view. Arturo Toscanini, the director, is naturally the chief figure in the drama.

"He is a terrific task-master, Signor Toscanisi," said Madame Bailly; but he is not the ogre the outside world believes him to be. I know of only one thing that makes him terrible, and that is when a singer appears at dress rehearsal in street clothes.

"In fact, Toscanini's rehearsals are remarkable for the smoothness with which they go off. The first rehearsal of the ensemble is often a greater and more finished work of art than a regular performance.

Toscanini's Method of Rehearsal

"FIRST of all, each musician and singer learns his part separately. Then the orchestra practises for many days, in an upstairs room in the opera house, until the orchestral music of the opera becomes a finished and perfect thing. The soloists and the chorus work in the same way. Then, when every piece of machinery has been made to fit perfectly, the opera is staged for the first time.

"With his wonderful intense nervous energy he is like a white flame," went on Madame Bailly, "a flame that compels the concentration of each individual in the throng of singers, musicians, and stage directors. He himself often plays the accompaniment on the piano, singing in unison with the performers. Sometimes he will act through a whole scene for the stars, as they say Belasco does for his actors."

Madame Bailly says the fact that she is a woman makes no difference in her work with the orchestra. "To Toscanini I am not a woman: I am a musician."

Madame Bailly has played at the Metropolitan for a year. She is a gentle, grave young Frenchwoman, who began to study the harp at the age of ten in Boulogne. After two years she attended the Conservatoire de Nantes; and there, when only fourteen, the youngest of many competitors, she won as a prize her favorite harp.

Last winter she lived with her mother and four-year-old daughter in a little apartment near the opera house.

In the spring she went to France to spend the summer. There was no hesitancy about risking the voyage, although the Lusitania had been blown up only the day before.

Her Husband and Brothers Are at the Front

"WHAT is our risk compared to the dangers of others?" she said, and told of her husband and brothers, who were fighting at the front—she did not know where. "Since Christmas we have had no word," she said simply.

The young harpist believes that feminine feeling and feminine delicacy of touch are needed to reveal the poetry and romance of the harp.

"Men have not the finesse," she said, gesturing with her sensitive white hands, "It may sound incongruous," she added, smiling, "especially from one who plays the harp, the most tender, romantic, and womanly of instruments; but I am very much of a feminist."

Make Your House in Miniature

LAURA C. HILLS, the Boston miniature-painter, is making her own house in miniature on the table here. It's the house she has wanted to live in ever since she was little—Colonial in architecture, and stained a soft gray, with white doorways and casements. It has a deep overhanging roof, and a quaint little entrance porch at one side.

The interior of this "model" house is comfortable and airy, and boasts all kinds of labor-saving devices. The wall spaces and the fireplace nooks are specially designed to suit the artist's furniture.

While contractors and carpenters and masons are busy reproducing the house of Miss Hills' dream, she will transfer her attention to the garden, where box-bordered beds will bloom with the flowers that our grandmothers loved.

He Did It with Manicure Scissors

JESUS CASTRO is a Toltec Indian whose heart is very closely bound up with Mexico and her troubles; but some day, when his country no longer needs him, he means to come North and devote his time to art and music.

Castro was captured by a friend in El Paso, Texas, long enough for this picture of him to be made.

The delicate hunting designs above were done by Castro in a minute or two, with nothing but white paper, manicure scissors, and his clever fingers.

The originals of these two cuttings were less than three inches long, and the two little papers were pasted on a piece of cardboard for reproduction. They are as delicate as line drawings from the pen of an artist of the Middle Ages.

Given a pair of tiny scissors, Castro can reproduce battle scenes or farm-yards—anything that he has seen once—and make the figures live, as full of action as is a photograph of leaping horses.

Yet the Indian considers the making of these cut-outs but a pastime for an idle moment. He is an artist through and through, looking forward eagerly to the day when he will have the opportunity really to develop his talents.

I Married a Rich Wife

PLAINLY, honestly, I am going to tell my story. I married a rich wife. I have had the things most men covet; I am envied by many of the men who know me best. But the other night I joined a group of college classmates,—men who did not marry money, who have made their careers rather than been made by fortune,—and for the first time I saw myself as I really am and saw what I might have been.

Don't envy the man who marries a rich wife!

I was graduated from a small New England college, went to the Harvard Law School, became an editor of the Law Review, and followed the men of my group to the big city. I set out to make a career at the New York bar.

Those first years in a law office occupying half a floor in the then newest skyscraper taught me this: You can't succeed as a lawyer in New York without real legal skill; but if you combine with legal skill the skill of a social climber, you'll go up fast or than the fellow who is only a good lawyer.

Forthwith I began to push outward my narrow social horizon, wearing the best clothes I could afford, paying dinner calls promptly, and never staying quite as long as I often wanted to stay; for I must not risk boring any hostess to whose house I wanted to be asked again.

My policy was justified. The partner who launched me among the rich saw to the rapid lengthening of my visiting list.

After two years of campaigning I could tick off a slender score of clients whom I thought of as "mine." I mean that, although they were in fact clients of Haworth, White, Van Doren & Loudermilk, their business had come to the firm largely through my efforts. Others, whose affairs were not important, were turned over to me by the partners.

I recall very well the thrill I felt when Van Doren led into my little room a placid old gentleman and introduced him to me as Mr. Reed. I recognized him at once as "the" Reed, head of a solid old wholesale business, rich and rated Al socially.

I made the most of Mr. Reed, as it was intended I should, giving him expert and smiling service in the small affairs of contracts and collections. Presently I was dining with his family. His was a long-established family, a little old-fashioned, I thought. There was a son, studying art in Paris; Mrs. Reed moved quietly and industriously among her friends of the old aristocracy; and there was the energetic Marian.

I Face a Problem Honestly

I KNEW that I could not afford to fall in love with Marian; I was too young, not far enough advanced in my profession. She was the actual head of her family, had been since coming out, and always would be. Yet in her dominance was such sweetness, such jolly take-it-for-grantedness that everybody would agree with her, that I lost sight of my guiding social maxims: "Go everywhere; dine at as many houses as you can; but don't get tied up with any rich crowd."

My wise maxims and reasoned determination went to the winds. I was twenty-six and Marian twenty-four. She was much courted—of course; but here is the stark truth : Marian preferred to do the courting herself.

I'm writing this, you understand, with more than twenty years of married experience behind me.

What a promised land Marian showed me! She was pretty, knew everybody, and liked society; and she was already rich in her own right, her fortune being the legacy of a rich aunt. Later she would get half her mother's fortune and half of what her father would leave.

Don't forget, however, that we were honestly in love.

Besides Marian there was only one thing in the world I wanted, and I was on the way to it—success in my profession. Could I have both? The time came to answer that question.

"What is there against it?" I would ask myself angrily, fighting off an insistent whispering voice that seemed to be repeating my discarded maxims of self-guidance. "Nothing, really, except an old and foolish tradition that a poor and struggling young man must not marry a rich girl.

"What's in its favor? Everything! We're in love with each other; Marian is interested in my career, and her money will be a help—Marian is the last person in the world to want me to give up anything vital to my career. There is no argument, no sound argument against it!" And I finally settled the question by going and proposing to Marian.

"Oh, Paul," she cried, "I shall never he able to tell you why I am so happy!"

But it was a secret I soon shared. She had been afraid I would never propose, and she wasn't sure that she could have mustered courage to ask me!

Our engagement was a happy one. Marian promptly lined up her relatives, her friends,—everybody that mattered,—and made them see me as a brilliant young prodigy with an assured future, first in the law and then in politics. Mr. Reed was pleased because Marian had chosen a worker.

He gave us a small house near Madison Avenue, and Marian turned it over to her brother, who had come home for the wedding, to decorate and furnish. I took a six months' leave of my firm to travel in leisure and comfort with Marian.

Marian Manages the Wedding Trip

ABOUT the expenses of the wedding trip Marian and I had our initial difference. I had saved enough to finance the tour we planned, and could start house-keeping with the firm's wedding-present check for a thousand. But Marian had her own idea. Holding my face in her hands, she said smilingly: "My darling, if you will only listen! I've thought about our wedding trip ever so long. I've decided to let you pay half—see, darling, just like this. You give me a check for three thousand; we won't spend a cent more than six. When our letter of credit is gone we'll come home. You've worked like a slave—and now you're to have a long, real rest. I'11 be manager of this tour, if you like!"

We had a bully six months.

When we got home, I told Marian my earnings must suffice for house expenses. She laughed and asked me what I thought she was going to do with her income—which was nearly twice as great as mine. I mentioned dress, horses and carriage, charities. She came to sit on the arm of my chair.

"Paul darling," she said, as she put her arms about me, "will you please remember it's my money I'm talking about? If I want to spend some of it to make the dearest thing in the world to me happier and more comfortable, I'll just do it!"

I gave up trying to make her see—what even to me was then hardly more than the shadow of peril—that to live beyond my income was to invite disaster for me.

I expected that we'd keep house with a cook and one maid, I to manage the furnace. It was the way many of my married classmates lived happily in the suburbs. I could have supported our establishment on such a basis. Instead, I found two maids, a butler, a cook, and a second man, all perfectly trained.

"Of course, darling," :Marian said to me sweetly, "I expect you to support our home—just as far as you can. Let's figure it out now. Suppose you give me two hundred a month. That will leave you a hundred and twenty-five, won't it?" I nodded. "Well, that's little enough! But you can pay your tailor and club charges out of it, can't you?" Again I nodded. "You darling husband, some day you'll get more in one fee than my whole year's income—don't I know it! But just now I can help a little, can't I? I do so want to! Mayn't I, Paul?"

I acquiesced.

With the home problem settled, Marian opened our social campaign. My wife wasn't brilliant, but she had been well trained for this game. Wealth and family and inclination for it converged in her; so we got on.

My firm liked my work, and Van Doren treated me like a favorite son; I was headed for a junior partnership at an age when most men of my talent were thinking of nothing better than a managing clerkship.

My First Big Job

THEN came my first really big job—also the first deflection front the high goal of my ambition. I was not quite thirty.

My father-in-law's business was solid, prosperous, with long-rooted connections among the retailers of his line (I'll call it, hardware). It was run on old-fashioned principles—small capital, a large surplus, personal loyalty among the staff, and a little more than strict fairness of dealing with customers.

It was a business badly wanted by the newly forming trust.

Mr. Reed, however, refused to join the combination and ignored its promoters. Far from ignoring Mr. Reed, the promoters undertook to bring him into line by methods now perfectly familiar. They went after his loyal customers with the bait of prices lowered beyond the point of profit. They persisted in their offers until the old man had good reason for worrying.

I knew that my father-in-law wanted me to go in with him, but he hesitated to ask me to give up my work in the law firm. Marian, however, did not hesitate. She drew for me a picture of her father's increasing harassment, and then she said: "I wish you would help him for a time, Paul. Stay with him long enough, at least, to make him see that he can't fight those men in the open. Dad's getting old, and he mustn't be whipped. It would kill him!"

I promised to help.

With the understanding that I was to come back, I left my law firm to take a hand in the Reed business. It seemed obvious that we should have to go into the combination. My task was to win Mr. Reed to my way of thinking, and then to battle with the other lawyers and the promoters for acceptable terms. It was a job to test my mettle.

At that time young lawyers were building the foundations of big reputations on work for business combinations. More or less clearly, I saw my opportunity; and, with the weight of Reed & Co. behind me, I perfected a model combination—real assets of the consolidated businesses nicely balanced by a bond issue, good will represented by preferred stock, and the hoped-for extra earning power of the trust liberally capitalized in common stock.

On the Stock Exchange, Consolidated Hardware was welcomed by the speculators, who made a lively market for its shares. Mr. Reed's allotment of stock brought him in as much cash as his bonds were worth.

I was thirty-one—and tired. I had made some money out of the stock interest given me for my work; and I was ready to fall in with Marian's plan to take her parents on a cruise around the world. When I returned I meant to be fit and ready for my expected junior partnership in Haworth, White, Van Doren & Loudermilk.

On that trip the baby was born. The heir! He drew us very close in a happy, selfish family group.

It was then, too, that I learned something of the real pleasures of luxurious idleness—tennis in mid-winter at Nice, the winter sports of Switzerland, and big-game hunting (made easy, yet exciting) in India and British East Africa.

"By George," I thought, "there's more to life than grinding at a desk!"

Back in New York, I was called upon to make a choice. The president of the hardware consolidation wanted me to become an officer and counsel at a salary nearly twice as big as my modest share of the law firm's earnings would be. He was insistent and flattering, in marked contrast to the partners, who had no motive or desire to exaggerate my importance. As I talked the matter over with Marian, it seemed to become clear that I should accept the trust's offer.

"See what you've already done, Paul!" she reminded me. "You will be head of the business before you're through; and surely there's more money in it than in law."

I had to agree to that. What of my great ambition, however? Marian was a little impatient. She could comprehend the power of wealth and social position, but her vision of me as a successor of Choate and Seward had become dimmed. She wanted me to get ahead; and progress was measured by money. She spoke of the salary offered by the trust: "With that and your investments, you'll actually have a better income than mine, Paul."

I accepted the trust's offer.

I wanted to make good, and it was not lack of enthusiasm that prevented me from making my job important; it was merely that there wasn't anything big to be done. I stayed on because some-thing always seemed on the point of developing.

I Find Myself Shelved

INSTEAD of getting out promptly and rejoining my old firm, I decided not only to make Consolidated Hardware live up to the long-term contract with me, but to compel the directors to recognize my weight. It was a hopeless fight. They knew exactly why they had got me into the trust—to bring the Reed money in as an ally in a larger scheme. But I would not do that, for I judged it to be unsound; so I was paid—and shelved.

Mrs. Reed died, and Marian received a substantial addition to her fortune from her mother's estate. We left the little house near Madison Avenue and went to live with Mr. Reed in what the newspapers called "the Reed mansion." Here our scheme of living expanded tremendously, and our corporal's guard of servants increased to a regiment. The change did not excite or alarm me at all. I continued to contribute half of my income to the general expense fund, but now it sufficed to meet only a small portion of the bills. Marian no longer troubled to consult me about money. I knew that the family income was not being spent, however lavish our scale of living appeared.

I was yielding to the slackening influence of mere luxury. Valet service, certain vintages of champagne, exemption from the rush of streetcar and elevated railway travel—these things came to matter. I bought a car of my own and learned to drive it.

This process of breaking down my will fiber and strengthening the rule of Marian and her money was, of course, gradual. There were no sharp turns and sudden jolts to wake me up to the truth. My acquaintance in Wall Street grew so profitable, for instance, that by the time I agreed to give up my job with the trust my income from careful speculation

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A capitalist under forty. Not so bad for a fellow who started with nothing! I was forgetting the boosts I had received, and the prop of the Reed fortune upon which I leaned.

I passed forty with hair a little thin on top and gray over the ears; my waist-line bulged; there was too high a color in my face. I liked my life. Marian and I were good friends, although she had ceased to look on me as a vital personality, either in the world of business or in the scheme of things social which she handled with competence. Our children were growing up under the care of tutors, masters, and the numerous tribe of sycophants who for pay remove burdens from socially weighted shoulders. The boy would soon he ready for college.

It was while wondering whether or not Marian would allow Junior to go to the little college from which I had been graduated that I received the brief letter that led me to write this confession. It was from a man in my class, asking me to meet certain alumni at dinner in the University Club. We were asked to consult with the newest member of the college board of trustees, who was also a member of my class.

In another frame of mind I should have sent regrets and forgotten the letter, for I had lost touch with the old college crowd. But, in view of the decision before Junior, I welcomed an opportunity to find out from Wilkes and Stearns and the others how the college was prospering.

I Meet My College Classmates

A CAREFULLY picked crowd were gathered there that night—sixteen men out of the many alumni in New York. I remembered them all—tall, short, thin, stout, smooth-faced, and mustached. At dinner I sat beside Wilkes, the newest trustee of the college. Beyond him sat Dr. Stearns, who had gathered the crowd.

After the coffee had been brought Stearns raised his voice and spoke to the tableful: "I suppose most of you fellows know why I asked you here to pow-wow with Rod Wilkes. To any who don't I may say that Rod is scouting for a new college president. Prexy Henderson retires in six months, and every alumnus who wants to see the glory of the old college not only sustained but increased has got to make his voice and influence felt at this time. Now, Rod, you say something!"

From his seat beside me, Wilkes swept the fifteen men with a quizzical smile. He was a successful engineer-manager of mining properties, one of the rare book-taught kind that can also win men and see the economic side of a scientific proposition. Before he spoke of his search, he allowed himself a minute of personal raillery—sizing up, in a word or a sentence, the men and their careers.

My eyes followed his around the table, and I saw the clean-cut faces of my college fellows light up as Wilkes paid his tributes, in half-jesting, affectionate words, to their achievements. As Wilkes jollied through the list, I was surprised to learn that the Frost who sat two seats down on the right was the same Frost who was making sanitary history in Porto Rico; that Elwell, a pink-faced mountain of firm flesh incased in evening clothes of 1899 pattern, was vice-president and chief engineer of a corporation whose stock I knew to he worth $500 a share.

They represented a dozen professions and businesses—and not a strutter among them.

Wilkes interrupted his summary of their fame to say: "It's hard to think you fellows amount to anything—I can't help seeing you all as college kids! I reckon that's reciprocal, too."

He laughed, and in a moment his eyes came to rest on me.

"And Paul, here—"

He grinned; was he going to call me Choate's successor at the bar? Not that. He finished: "—could buy the lot of us!"

I thought there was a shade of derision in his words.

Abruptly Wilkes became serious. Clearly and swiftly he gave us his impressions of the men who were being considered for the college presidency. Questions and suggestions were fired at him, to be answered precisely or disposed of briefly.

I Wake Up

THE men were smoking and sipping—ice water! No drinks had been served. I felt logy; but the rest seemed as keen as if they had just come from the links and a rub-down. Very soon the talk became confusing to me; I was bored.

"You're not in active practice, are you, Paul?"

The question was plumped at me suddenly, by the man at my left. Rod Wilkes heard Fletcher's question, and answered for me: "Why work at the law when you can make Wall Street give up its secrets? Paul don't have to he's the capitalist of this crowd."

Then I saw why I had been asked to the dinner. I saw the truth suddenly—and the vision sickened me! Measured by these miscellaneously garbed men, I was of no importance except as a parasite of money. Wilkes went on: "I imagine, when it comes to raising that two million, we can lean pretty hard on Paul, here!"

It was the cue to other men, who directed questions and comments at me designed to bring out the attitude of Mr. Reed, of Marian, of her brother, of various rich friends, toward my college.

No questions about my work, my career. To them I was the soft, overfed, fastidiously dressed agent of a great fortune which might be tapped to help the old college. Just that! I saw the truth in the eager faces of those successful, water-drinking fellows, and my sickness began to blind me. It wasn't yet ten when I whispered to Stearns that I had an imperative engagement, shook hands with Rod Wilkes, got my hat and coat, and went out.

But It's Too Late

I TRAMPED across the Park and up the Drive, on toward where the fine old estates overlook the river. My head was a whirl of unspeakable regrets and futile speculations.

Why had I sunk so deep in the eider-down? Couldn't I pull out of it, beat back to the old path of plain living and clean, strenuous, straight thinking? I hadn't meant to get off the road! Just how and why had I lost sight of that high goal that had seemed so fine?

I ground my teeth together and tramped on—until my thin shoes began to hurt my feet.

"Damn the things!" I growled, realizing that the pinching shoes were spoiling a fit of fine frenzy. Gradually the physical torture drove every thing else out of my mind. I limped to the subway terminus at Van Cortlandt Park, found a taxi, and ordered the driver to take me to the Country Club.

In the dead stillness of two o'clock in the morning, I paid the taxicab driver, roused the club steward, had a hot bath, a long drink, and tumbled into bed after leaving orders not to he roused until noon. The steward telephoned to our butler in town, and when I woke my valet was in my room with clothes from home.

I'm done for. I know that I shall never get free of the soft shackles of wealth. This knowledge hurts—I want all of you young and ambitious fellows to believe me when I say that it hurts like the very devil. I want to make this confession, to tell this story of my married life, while my hurt is fresh. I want to say again, with the greatest earnestness I can command: Don't envy the fellow that marries a rich wife!

Teaching Them that Vegetables Don't Grow in Cans

"I HAVE talked with hundreds of children who believed that all vegetables come canned, or, at least, are made somewhere in a factory. The idea that fruits and vegetables are the products of the earth is inconceivable to them. They have never seen anything grow.

"All children are instinctively nature lovers, as we who deal with children soon discover; but these children have never had any chance to know the wonders of nature. And I don't mean children of the slums, either. I mean the children who grow up in expensive apartments."

Start a Garden in Your Apartment

SO says Dr. Myron T. Scudder, who has about thirty youngsters from three to five years old in the kindergarten of his school.

Of course, Dr. Scudder is right, you say; but what is one going to do about it? You can't have a garden in a city apartment, can you?

Yes, you can, says Dr. Scudder. That's exactly his idea—a garden inside the home instead of outside—a little garden, say five feet square and three inches deep, with a miniature wax house at one end. Put that into a corner of your apartment, says Dr. Scudder, and your city child will soon find out where vegetables come from.

It will make him happier than a hundred dollars' worth of toys, and teach him all sorts of useful lessons in health and hygiene besides.

Dr. Scudder's miniature gardens are made of cheap wooden boxes, filled with rich earth. No other equipment is needed except a can of modeling wax and some bits of broken china, glass, etc. These, are for the house—and therein lies another subtle advantage of Dr. Scudder's plan.

For no child of three years can model a respectable-looking house alone. It takes help from the parent. Every successful miniature house and garden means that some successful mother has spent a good many hours playing in that dirt box with her successful youngster.

Various kinds of flowers grow successfully in these "apartment gardens"—candytuft, nasturtiums, mignonette, and even morning-glories. But the products that are most important are invisible.

They consist in a better knowledge of nature on the part of the child, hours of happiness for both child and mother, and a closer tie between the two.

The time will come, doubtless, when most apartments will be built with miniature gardens. In the meantime, anybody may have one who is willing to knock a rough box together and fill it with dirt.

For the fine thing about good, rich dirt is that it never gets homesick: it settles down as contentedly and does business just as effectively in a little city apartment as it ever did in a broad country field.

What Becomes of an Editor's Mail

EVERY man has an idea that he could do some one particular job better than the men whose business it is to do it. Speaking for ourselves, whenever we are on a train that is losing time, we feel morally certain that if we were in the engine-cab we could make her go faster than the engineer does.

That's our peculiar conviction. Most people's peculiar conviction is that they could run a newspaper or a magazine better than the regular editors. Several million of them express this opinion in letters every year. What becomes of all these letters?

Some of them—the unsigned ones that are written to Mr. Frank Doubleday, the New York editor—end up in this waste-basket.

Mr. Doubleday used to have a waste-basket half as large in his office.

"I suppose that waste-basket," he said to a friend one day, "has saved me a hundred thousand dollars in worthless schemes that found a final resting-place there."

A few days later the enormous waste-basket shown here arrived, with the terse inscription: "Why not save two hundred thousand dollars?"

This is said to be the largest waste-basket in America.

When Ella May Came By

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by Frank Snapp

BELIEVE me, this job of bein' private sec. all day and doublin' as assistant Cupid after hours may be entertainin' and all that, but it ain't any drowsy detail. Don't leave you much time for restin' your heels high or framin' up peace programs. Course, the fact that Vise is in with me on this affair between Mr. Robert and Miss Hampton is a help. I ain't overlookin' that.

And after our mix-up yachtin' cruise, when we lost a mast and Bernard Shaw overboard the same day, it looked like we'd got everything all straightened out. Why not? Mr. Robert seems to have decided that his lady love wa'n't such a confirmed high-brow as he'd suspected, and he was doin' the steady comp'ny ant constant and enthusiastic, just the way he does everything he tackles, from yachtracin' to puttin' a crimp in an independent. In fact, he wa'n't doin' much else.

"Where's Robert?" demands Old Hickory, marchin' out of his private office and glarin' at the closed roll-top.

"I expect he's takin' the afternoon off," says I, maybe grinnin' a bit.

"Huh!" says the boss. "The second this week! I thought that fool regatta was over."

"Yes, sir, it is," says I. "Besides, he didn't enter."

"Oh!" says Mr. Ellins. "Then it isn't a case of a sixty-footer?"

"The one he's tryin' to manage now is about five foot six," says I.

"Eh?" says Old Hickory, workin' his eyebrows. "That Miss Hampton again?"

I nods.

"Torchy," he goes on, "of course I've no particular right to be informed, being only his father,but—er—about how much longer should you say that affair would run before it comes to some sort of climax? In other words, how is he getting on?"

"The last I knew," says I, "he was comin' strong. Course, he made a couple of false starts there at the send-off, but now he seems to have struck his gait."

"Really!" says Old Hickory. "And now, solely in the interest of the Corrugated Trust, could you go so far as to predict a date when he might reasonably be expected to resume business activities?"

I chews that over a minute, and runs my fingers thoughtful through my red thatch.

"Nope," says I. "If I was any such prize guesser as that, I'd he down in Wall Street huckin' the market. Maybe after Sunday, though, I might make a report one way or the other."

"Ah! You scent a crisis, do you?" says he.

"It's this way," says I. "Marjorie's givin' a little week-end house-party for 'em out at her place, and—well, you know how that's apt to work out at this stage of the game."

"You think it may end the agony?" says he.

"There'll be a swell chance for twosin'," says I. "Marjorie's plannin' for that."

"I see," says Mr. Ellins. "Undisturbed propinquity—a love charm that was old when the world was young. And if Marjorie is managing the campaign, it's all over with Robert."

THAT was my dope on the subject, too, after I'd seen the layout of her first skirmish. There was just half a dozen of us mobilized at this flossy suburban joint Saturday afternoon, but from the start it was plain that four of us was on hand only to keep each other out of the way of this pair. Course, Vee and I hardly needs to have the cue passed. We was satisfied to hunt up a veranda corner of our own and stick to it.

But brother-in-law Ferdie, with that double-ply slate roof of his, needs watch-in' close. He has a nutty idea that he ought to be sociable, and he no sooner spots Mr. Robert and Miss Elsa Hampton, chattin' cozy in a garden nook, than he's prompted to kick in and explain to 'em all about the Latin names of the surroundin' vines and shrubbery. Which brings out business of distress from Marjorie. So one of us has to go shoo him away.

"Why—er—what's the matter?" says he, blinkin' puzzled, after he's been led off.

"You was makin' a noise like a seed catalogue, that's all," says I. "Chop it, can't you?"

Ferdie only stares at me through his thick window-panes and puts on an injured air. Half an hour later, though, he's at it again.

"You tell him, Torchy," sighs Marjorie. "Try to make him understand." So I makes a strong stab.

"Look," says I, towin' him off on a thin excuse. "That ain't any convention they're holdin' out there. So far as they know, it's just a happy chance. If they're lot alone the meetin' may develop tender moments. Anyway, you might give 'em a show, and if they want you bad they can run up a flag. See? There's times, you know, when two is bliss, but a third is a blister. Get me?"

I expect he did, in a way. The idea filters through sort of slow, but he finally decides that, for some reason too deep for him to dig up, he ain't wanted mixin' around folksy.

So from then on until dinner-time our couple had all the chance in the world. Looked like they was doin' noble, too; for every once in a while we could hear that ripply laugh of hers, or Mr. Robert's hearty chuckle—which should have been good signs that they was enjoyin' each other's comp'ny. We even had to send out word it was time to doll up for dinner.

BUT an affair like that is like a feather balanced on your nose. Any boob is liable to open a door on you. In this case, all was lovely and serene until Marjorie gets this 'phone call. I hears her summonin' Vee panicky and sketchin' out the details.

"It's Ella May Buell!" says she. "She's down at the station."

Seems that Miss Buell was a boardin'-school friend who was about to cash in one of them casual blanket invitations that girls give out so reckless—you know, the Do-come-and-see-me-any-time kind. And, with her livin' down in Alabama or Georgia somewhere, maybe it looked safe at the time. But now she was on her way to the White Mountains for a summer flit, and she'd just remembered Marjorie for the first time in three years.

"Goodness!" says Marjorie, whisperin' husky across the hall. "Some one ought to go right down to meet her. I can't, of course; and Ferdie's only begun to dress."

"Ask Torchy," suggests Vee.

And, as I'm all ready except another half hitch to my white tie. I'm elected. Three minutes more and I'm whizzin' down in the limousine to receive the Southern delegate. And say, when I pipes the fairy in the half-masted skirt and the zippy Balkan bonnet, I begins bracin' myself for what I could see comin'.

ONE of these pouty-lipped, rich-tinted fairies, Ella May is, wearin' a baby stare and chorus-girl ear-danglers. Does she wait to be hunted up and rescued? Not her! The minute I drops out of the machine, she trips right over and gives me the hail.

"Are you looking for me?" says she. "I hope you are, for I've been waiting at this wretched station for ages."

"If it's Miss Buell, I am," says I.

"Of course I'm Miss Buell," says she. "Help me in. Now get my bags. They're inside, honey."

"Inside what?" I gasps.

"Why, the station," says she. "And give the man a quarter for me—there's a dear."

Talk about speed! Leave it to the Dixie girls of this special type. I used to think our Broadway matinee fluffs was about the swiftest fascinators using the goo-goo tactics. But say, when it comes right down to quick action, some of these cotton-belt belles can throw in a high gear that makes our Gwendolyns look like they was only hittin' on odd cylinders. Ella May was a sample. We was havin' our first glimpse of each other, but in less'n forty-five seconds by the watch she'd called me honey, dearied me twice, and patted me chummy on the arm. And we hadn't driven two blocks before she had me snuggled up in the corner like we was old friends.

"Tell me, honey," says she, "what is dear old Marjorie's hubby like?"

"Ferdie?" says I. "Why, he's all right when you get to know him."

"Oh!" says she. "That kind! But aren't there any other men around?" "Only Mr. Robert Ellins," says I. "Really!" says she, her eyes widenin'.

"Bob Ellins! That's nice. I met him once

Page 16

She dives into her vanity bag and proceeds to retouch the scenic effects on her face.

"Don't waste it," says I. "He's sewed up—a Miss Hampton. She's there, too."

"Pooh!" pouts Miss Buell. "Who cares? She doesn't keep him in a cage, does she?"

"It ain't that," says I; "but his eyesight for any one else is mighty poor."

"Oh, is it?" says she, sarcastic and doubtful. "We'll see about that. But, anyway, I'm beginning to be glad I came. Can you guess why?"

"I'm a wild guesser," says I. "Shoot it."

"Because," says she, "I think I'm going to like you rather well."

More business of cuddlin', and a hand dropped careless on my shoulder. We were still more'n a mile from the house, and if I was to do any blockin' off stunt, it was high time I begun. I twists my head around and gazes at the careless hand.

"Excuse me, sister," says I, "hut before this goes any further I got to ask a question. Are your intentions serious?"

"Why, the idea!" says she. "What on earth do you mean?"

"I only want to be sure," says I, "that you ain't tryin' to trifle with my young affections."

She stiffens at that and goes a little gaspy. Also she grabs away the hand.

"Of all the conceit!" says she. "Any one might think that—that—"

"So they might," says I. "Of course, it's sweet to be picked out this way; but it's a little sudden, ain't it? You know, I'm kind of young and—"

"I've a great mind to box your ears!" breaks in Ella May.

"In that case," says I, "I couldn't even promise to be a brother to you."

"Wretch!" says she, her eyes snappin'.

"Sorry," says I, "but you'll get over it. It may be a little hard at first, but in time you'll meet another who will make you forget."

THAT last jab had her speechless, and all she could do was run her tongue out at me. But it worked. After that she snuggled in her own corner, and when we lands at the house she's treatin' me with cold disdain, almost as if I'd been a reg'lar brother. There's no knowin', either, what report Marjorie got. Must have been something interestin', for when she finally comes down after steerin' Miss Buell to her room, she gives me the knowin' wink.

Ella May gets even, though. She holds up dinner forty-five minutes while she sheds her travelin' costume for an evenin' gown. And it's some startlin' creation she springs on us about the time we're ready to bite the glass knobs off the dinin'-room doors. She's a stunner, all right, and she sails down with that baby stare turned on full voltage.

You'd 'most thought, though, with all the hints me and Marjorie had dropped, and her seein' Mr. Robert and Miss Hampton chattin' so busy together, that she'd have hung up the net and waited until she struck better huntin'-grounds. But not Ella May. Here was a perfectly good man; and as long as nobody had handcuffs on him, or hadn't guarded him with barbed wire, she was ready to take a chance.

Just how she managed it I couldn't say, even if it was done right under my eyes; but when we starts in for dinner she's clingin' sort of playful to one side of Mr. Robert, chatterin' a steady stream, while Miss Hampton is left to drift along on the other, almost as if she was an "also-ran."

Mr. Robert wa'n't havin' such a swell time that meal, either. About once in three or four minutes he'd get a chance to say a few words to Miss Hampton, but most of the time he was busy listenin'

Say, she was some whirlwind performer, take it from me. I discovers that everybody was "honey" to her, even Ferdie. And you should have seen him tint up and glance panicky at Marjorie the first time she put it over on him.

AS for Miss Hampton, she appears to be enjoyin' the whole thing. She watches Miss Buell sparkle and roll her eyes, and only smiles sort of amused. For what Ella May is unlimberin' is an attack in force, as a war correspondent would put it—an assault with cavalry, heavy guns, and infantry. And, for all his society experience, Mr. Robert don't seem to know how to meet it. He acts sort of dazed and helpless, now and then glancin' appealin' across to sister Marjorie, or around at Miss Hampton.

All that evenin' the attack goes on, Ella May workin' the spell overtime, gettin' Mr. Robert to let her read his palm, pinnin' flowers in his buttonhole, and keepin' him cornered; while the rest of us sits around like cheap dead-heads that had been let in on passes.

And next mornin', when Mr. Robert makes a desperate stab to duck right after breakfast, only to be captured again and led into the garden, Marjorie finally gets her mad up.

"Really," says she, "this is too absurd! Of course, she always was an outrageous flirt. You should have seen her at boarding-school—with the music professor, the principal's brother, the school doctor. Twice they threatened to send her home. But after I've told her that Robert was practically engaged to Miss Hampton—well, it must be stopped, that's all. Ferdie, can't you think of some way?"

"Eh?" says Ferdie. "What? How?"

That's the sort of help he contributes to this council of war Marjorie's called on the side terrace.

And all Vee will do is to chuckle. "It's such a joke!" says she.

"But it isn't," says Marjorie. "Do you know where Elsa Hampton is at this minute? In the library, reading a magazine —alone! And she and Robert were getting on so nicely, too. Torchy, can't you suggest something?"

"Might slip out there with a rope and tie her to a tree while Mr. Robert makes his escape," says I.

A snicker from Vee.

"Please!" says Marjorie. "This is really serious. I can't explain to Elsa. But what must she think of Robert? I've simply got to get rid of that girl somehow. She's one of the kind, you know, who would stay and stay until—"

"Aiello!" says I, glancin' out towards the entrance-gates. "What sort of a delegation is this?"

A tall, loppy young female in a sagged skirt and a faded pink shirt-waist is driftin' up the driveway, towin' a bow-legged three-year-old boy by one hand and luggin' a speckle-faced baby on her hip.

"Oh!" says Marjorie. "That scamp of a Bob Flynn's Katie again."

SEEMS Flynn had been one of Mr. Robert's chauffeurs that he'd wished onto Ferdie a year or so back on account of Flynn's bein' married and complainin' he couldn't support his fam'ly in the city. If he could get a place in the country, where the rents wa'n't so high and his old chowder-party friends wa'n't so thick, Flynn thought he might do better. He had steadied down for a while, too, until he took a sudden notion to slope and leave his interestin' fam'ly behind.

"She's coming to ask if we've heard anything of him," goes on Marjorie. "I've a good notion to send her straight to Robert."

"Say," says I, havin' one of my thought-flashes, "wait a minute. We might—do I understand that the flitting hubby's name was Robert?"

Marjorie nods.

"And will you stand for anything I can pull off that might jar Ella May's strangle-hold over there?"

"Anything," says Marjorie.

"Then lend me this deserted fam'ly for a few minutes," says I. "I ain't had time to sketch out the plot of the piece exactly, but if you say so I'll breeze ahead."

It was going to be a hit raw, I'll admit; but Marjorie has insisted that it's a desperate case. So, after a short confab with Mrs. Flynn and the kids, they're turned over to me.

"I ain't sure, ma'am," says I, "that young Mr. Ellins can spare the time. He's pretty busy just now. But maybe I can break in long enough to ask him; and if he's heard anything—well, you can be handy. Suppose you wait here at the garden gate. No, leave it open, that way."

I had 'em grouped conspicuous and dramatic; and, with Mrs. Flynn's straw lid tilted on one side, and the youngster whimperin' to be let loose among the flowers, and the baby sound asleep with its mouth open, the picture was more or less pathetic.

AT the far end of the garden path was a different sort of scene. Ella May was makin' Mr. Robert hold one end of a daisy chain she was weavin', and she's prattlin' away kittenish when I edges up, scufflin' my feet warnin' on the gravel. She greets me with a pout. Mr. Robert hangs his head sort of sheepish, but asks hopeful: "Well, Torchy?"

"She–she's here again, sir," says I.

"Eh?" says he, starin' puzzled. "Who is here?"

"S-s-s-sh!" says I, shakin' my head mysterious.

All of which don't escape Miss Buell. Her ears are up and her eyes wide open. "What is it?" she asks.

"If I could have a few words in private with you, Mr. Robert," says I, "maybe it would be—"

"Nonsense!" says he. "Out with it."

"Just as you like," says I. "Only, she's brought the kids with her this time. She says how she wants her Robert back."

"Wha-a-at!" he gasps.

"Couldn't keep her out," says I. "You know how she is. There they are, at the gate."

I don't know which was quicker to turn and look, him or Ella May. And just then Mrs. Flynn happens to be gazin' our way, pleadin' and expectant.

"Oh!" says Mr. Robert, laughin' care-less. "Katie, eh?"

MISS BUELL has jumped up and is starin' at the group. Then, at that laugh of Mr. Robert's, she whirls on him.

"Brute!" says she. "I'm glad she's found you."

With which she dashes towards the house and disappears, leavin' Mr. Robert gawpin' after her.

"Why," says he, "you—you don't sup-pose she could have imagined that—that—"

"Maybe she did," says I. "My fault, I expect. I could find her, though, and explain how it was. I'll bet that inside of five minutes she'd be back here finishin' the floral wreath. Shall I?"

"Back here?" he echoes, kind of vague. Then he comes to.

"No, no!" says he. "I—I'd rather not. I want first to— Where is Miss Hampton, Torchy?"

Well, I gives him full directions for findin' her, slips Mrs. Flynn the twenty he sends her instead of news from hubby, and then goes in, to find that Ella May is demandin' to be taken to the next train. We saw that she caught it, too, before she changed her mind.

"By George!" Mr. Robert whispers confidential to me, as the limousine rolls off with her in it, "if I could insure against such risks as that, I would take out a policy."

"You can," says I. "Any justice of the peace or minister will fix you up for life."

Does that sink in? I wouldn't wonder. Anyway, from the hasty glimpse I caught of him and Miss Hampton strollin' out in the moonlight that night, it looked that way.

So I did have a bulletin for Old Hickory Monday mornin'.

"It's all over but the shoutin'!" says I.

Here is more of The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

Continued from page 8

Miss Siddis told me what a lovely name you have. Isola! Isola Bella!"

She made no answer. She was looking out to sea. There was a volcanic island coming nearer and nearer as we steamed—a tall, wicked horn that pricked up out of the blue water all alone, smoking ominously.

"That must be Vulcan Island," she said presently. "I have heard of it."

"Isola Bella," I repeated again, very softly. "A beautiful name—Isola."

Now she looked at me; she looked as straight and as coldly as young Dian might have looked at a venturesome huntsman trespassing on her forest grounds. And yet, there was something behind the look: a shadow of pain—for me? for herself?

"You must not call me by that name," she said.

"Very well," I said. "But I won't call you by any name, in that case, until you are less cruel."

She did not seem to hear me; and yet, I knew she was thinking of me. In another moment she had risen from her seat and flitted down the deck companion. There was nothing left of her but the faintest scent of sandalwood.

"Well," I said, looking after her with a feeling of depression I could not account for, "I've met some girls; but—but—but that—"

I did not want to finish the thought,—in fact, I did not want to think at all,—so I went to look for some work. There was small difficulty about that when Red Bob was aboard. One had only to show oneself in order to be pinned down at once upon a task likely to last till the next meal.

I REMEMBER that later I changed and went in to dinner feeling unusually light-hearted. The nameless depression caused by Miss Ravenna's manner had altogether passed away. What did her manner, or even her words, signify, when her actions were what they were? Perhaps I was absurdly vain, perhaps not; but, either way, I was sure that my safety, my welfare, were matters of concern to her, and that she had risked considerable annoyance to secure them. Things being so, it was a good world, and the weather was improving, and iced sweet soup with fruit in it, though German, was not to be despised.

How I remember all about that dinner—even the menu. We were talking about girls, I remember, and Wolff was setting forth, in flat South German, the superior beauty of the ladies of Munich, first over Germany in particular, and then over the world in general. Next to them, he was pleased to say, the Danes were the handsomest girls: and he had rather a weakness—acquired in Argentina—for a pretty Spanish girl of sixteen or so.

"Hear the married man, the fast and securely married man!" mocked Hahn from the other side of the table.

I was a little surprised, for Wolff was apparently no older than myself, if so old, and I had not been regarding him in the light of a married man.

"What, you already have a wife?" I asked him.

"Yes—yes," he said, with a pleasant grin. "See, now; if you doubt, there is my ring. We Germans wear a marriage ring—men and women too. We are not like you English, who are ashamed of that honorable state."

"But—" I said.

There was a glass of wine on my right; for some reason that I could not have defined, I lifted it and drank it down.

"But—you wear it on the wrong hand. Or perhaps," I went on, in a strange hurry, "German men wear wedding-rings on the right hand, and women on the left, like ours."

"No, no, no," said Wolff, shaking his head slowly from side to side. "German women and German men wear the wedding-ring on the right hand. The left hand is for the betrothal ring only."

I was calm now—as calm as I had been at Kronprinzhaven, when I had stood up against Hahn with a pistol in my hand.

"An Englishwoman," I said, turning to Wolff as he sat contemplating the shining ring on his plump third finger—"an Englishwoman married to a German—would she wear the ring on the right hand or the left?"

His reply was indifferent; and yet it came—to my senses—quick as the shot of Hahn's pistol the day before.

"Naturally, she would wear it on the right, since that is the custom of the country of her man."

I could have thanked God aloud that the captain rose at this minute and set most of us moving out of the hot saloon on to the cooler deck, so that I was able to swing round out of my seat without unnecessary hurry, and get away.

THERE was only one thought in my mind, and it drove me like a leaf in the wind down the alleyway leading from the saloon to the deck cabins, after the white, green-belted dress of Isola. I caught up to her just as she was entering her cabin.

"You told me," I said without preface, "that I must not call you Isola—Isola Bella. What name am I to address you by?"

I am not sure that she understood—fully; but she looked at me with an expression in her eyes that was like the look of a mother at a child that is hurt—she, nineteen years of age, scarcely out of pinafores and school.

"You must call me Frau Schultz," she said—and went into her cabin and closed the door.

As I was coming up the main companion, Red Bob met me.

"Come out and see Vulcan Island," he said. "She's playing up finely tonight."

I saw my face in a mirror as we passed. It looked quiet, yet—somehow—not like mine. "That is Paul Corbet," I said to myself, as the hawky young face flitted by in the bright light of the stairway, beside the handsome elder head of Gore. "Something has happened to him," I told myself.

"You well?" he asked.

"Yes," I answered; "perfectly."

He said nothing more, but looked at me again, and I knew he knew that something had happened.

That is one of the best characteristics of a man. A woman would have sympathized—would have talked, at least. Gore did neither. He went out on deck with me, and pointed to Vulcan Island, glowing red and evil against a splendid starry sky.

"She's at it," he said.

She was. A growl of thunder that seemed to shake one's vitals sounded across the water as he spoke, and a leaping burst of fire, unbearably golden, opened out like a flower upon the summit of the terrible island.

"How far off is it?" I asked.

My voice didn't sound quite right—it was a tone or two higher than usual; but Gore took no notice.

"About eleven miles," he said. "She throws pretty straight up and down, as a rule. Not so dangerous as she looks. Do you know who named her?"

"No," I said aloud, and to myself: "Isola—Isola Bella!" What was it the song said that kept running through my head?

THE story of Vincent Gore came up before me in a red flash like the flash of Vulcan Island, and died down as the volcanic fire sank Into its cone. Not Isola. Never the Diana of the mountain. Married or single, she was not that kind.

"It was a Dutchman found it, and gave it its name, some good few years ago," said Gore. "William Corneliszoon Schouten. Look at it."

I looked with all the interest I could bring to bear.

"Does any one live there?" I asked, trying to speak and act as usual, and—I think—succeeding well enough.

"Not on the island itself," said Gore. "There are two others in the group; a few natives live on those. Dangerous beggars, of course. There's scarcely a spot where you could be shipwrecked, from Geelvink Bay right along, without being eaten alive if you got ashore."

"Why," I said, waking to momentary interest, "the Germans have had this place since 1885!"

"Right," he answered; "but they haven't done more than sit on the edge of it anywhere. If we'd been making the usual trip, we should have called at two or three ports with big names already, and we've got a lot of them to call at yet. Sounds well, but they're nothing on earth but a jetty and a copra shed, with perhaps a mission house somewhere or other close by. I tell you, the Germans are only holding this country by the tip of its tail."

"Are they?" I said; and then, as it struck me I must talk—must seem quite as usual: "Is it worth holding?"

RED BOB laughed a little.

"It is worth it," he said, his lean, sharp profile—the very type of a true sea-rover's face—showing still and black against the glare of Schouten's burning mountain. "I wish our slice was as good. They're pretty near the same size, if you take in the Bismarcks and the Louisiades—each share is about twice as big as England. But the Germans have got the best ports and the best navigable rivers. The Fly's a showy river with a gigantic estuary, but it doesn't begin to compare with the Kaiserin Augusta for use. You remember—that big mouth we passed, when the water was yellow for miles? That's it. Smallish steamers can go up for two hundred miles, big ocean liners for forty. Fine plantation country all the way."

"Who lives there?" I asked, picturing brown plantation houses and orderly groves of palms.

"A rather bad lot of man-eaters. Nearly got me and Warburton once. You've heard of Warburton; he was knocked on the head by a stone club in Rubiana."

"What's in the country besides rivers?" I asked. I did not care in the least what was in the country; but it seemed well to talk.

"Anything you like to name," answered Red Bob. "Gold—lots of it; but they can't find it. We could, but we won't. Other metals—rank with 'em. Game, I suspect, and so do other people. Woods that will make your fortune in six months, if you get a fair chance at them—which in a German colony you won't. Birds-of-paradise, worth three pounds apiece in Simpsonhaven—worth anything you like at home. Gums that no one's investigated yet; probably valuable. Sandalwood—ours is cut out, but theirs isn't, and the Chinese are giving big money for it. Land—land, my boy, that will grow cocoanuts a year quicker than the Federated Malay States, that they make such a song about, and rubber a year and a half quicker. Labor, plenty of it, and on the spot. A bit of country twice as big as England, that's four fifths unknown, but the bit that is known is quite enough to make you want more. Oh, yes, worth having! I think old Schouten

Page 18

I DID not speak. None of these things appeared to me to matter in the least. Who cared that German New Guinea had better natural advantages than British, and didn't use them? I don't know when we passed the volcano. I don't know how long Red Bob stood watching on the deck, or whether he knew when I left him. I said nothing, but slipped away in the dusk and went to my cabin, where I snapped out the light, and lay with my face turned up toward the boards of the higher berth, trying to hold on to myself and to think.

I had only known this girl for a few days, argued one side of my mind. It was unreasonable to suppose that she should have taken any serious hold on my life—impossible, rather. One did not suffer agonies because a girl one had met only last week turned out to be married to some one else.

But another side of my mind argued differently, and I knew that I was suffering agonies. The future looked black and empty.

I lay long awake thinking, and the sum of my thoughts was that my life was not going to be happy. I did not know any one whose life was happy, now I came to think of it, but I had always fancied that I was to be an exception. One does fancy so at twenty-three. And all my wishes, of late, had met with such fairy-tale fulfilment, as soon as uttered, that this fierce cheek seemed incredibly unjust and cruel.

They say that men under torture have been known to sleep through sheer exhaustion. I slept at last.

NOTHING in my life has ever seemed to me less like life, and more like a dream, than that slow progress down the long, long shores of New Guinea, after leaving Vulcan Island.

I saw Isola every day, but I never spoke to her. For a man of my age, or youth, I think this showed some self-restraint. I thought her changed and quiet. She looked at me sometimes, when I passed her on deck, but she did not speak to me. I think she stayed a great deal in her cabin, and was seldom out.

If I could have been amused by anything, the sufferings of Red Bob on account of Miss Siddis would assuredly have done it. That small person was never, after we left the stormier seas and came into the sheltered part of the coast, off guard. She did not alarm her victim with the frankness of advance she had at first displayed, but none the less did she haunt his footsteps morning, lunch-time, dinner-time, and evening-walk-time, with the meekness of a mouse and the deadly persistence of a cat.

I have seen Red Bob come down to his cabin literally sweating with dismay after a stern chase round and round the deck, in which Miss Siddis, by dint of unsportsmanlike dodging through deck cabins and under bridge ladders, had succeeded in overhauling him.

I mention all this because, absurd as it was, it had a serious effect upon our fortunes, especially upon mine. If either of us—Red Bob in particular—had endured instead of escaping from the attentions and the talk of Miss Siddis, we should have learned things that it would have been well for us to know, and certain troubles that followed on our ignorance—on mine especially—never would have happened.

THE voyage wore out, and we came to Simpsonhaven, the capital of Kaiser Wilhelm Land. Though I did not know it, the day we entered the harbor I was sickening for an attack of fever. New Guinea does not belie its looks. Its hard, gaudy loveliness is the loveliness of the tiger, and, like the tiger, it hides talons beneath its velvet and gold.

Through a sunset of blood-red and liver-purple—a slaughter-house sunset that stained the sky from west to east—we steamed into Simpsonhaven and up to the town of Rabaul. I say again that I had fever coming on; but, even so,—even making allowance for the cloud of wild, dark thoughts that settles on the mind of the fever-stricken as vultures settle on a corpse,—I see Rabaul as a place of evil beauty.

Rabaul has been heard of often since then, after a fashion that none of us dreamed about in those days, unless indeed Red Bob— But of that I can not speak, since I do not know. It is always described as a spot of surpassing loveliness. On the evening that the Afzelia steamed in, it struck me as the wickedest-looking spot between Capricorn and Cancer.

In the gloom of a pouring dusk we disembarked and went to look for shelter. Isola was in the saloon as we passed through, and so was Mabel Siddis—the latter on hand to block Red Bob's pathway. While she held on to his hand and assured him they were quite certain to meet again, in that misfit pretty-woman's voice of hers, I took three steps across the saloon to where the girl who was not for me was sitting under a window, her ivory face strangely pale in the gloom of the falling rain. I took her hand for a moment—it was only a moment, indeed; yet our fingers trailed and slipped from one an-other, they did not fall, and I said boldly: "Good-by, Isola Bella. I'd have loved you if I could. And if ever you want a friend, I'll come, dead or alive."

"Good-by," she said. "It has—been—a pleasant voyage."

I left her with the dusk settling down about her motionless head. The stewards were coming to turn on the lights; they had not yet reached the saloon. On [?] deck, white star after white star sprang up. I saw nothing of what I had dreaded —no husband waiting for Isola.

WITH the strangeness of coming fever on me, I walked out into the town with Red Bob. We looked for lodging everywhere; for hotels, hoarding-houses, apartments—for anywhere, at last, where two wet, houseless travelers could find shelter. There was no such place. The capital Kaiser Wilhelm Land had no accomodation for strangers; did not like them, did not want them; abandoned them sleep under houses among the piles, and feed out of rubbish bins, if they so chose. It would not put them up. It would not even feed them. We could buy not so much as a piece of bread or a glass of b [?] in all that inhospitable town.

"Just the same," said Red Bob, "I rather anticipated this; but I thought I'd a friend I could put up with. It seems he has been cleared out—I suppose for harboring just such objectionable characters as me. We must try back for Herbertshöhe; it's ten miles down the coast, but they will give you a bed and a bite there."

I burst out laughing, for the fever was growing in me, and I saw the darkening town of Rabaul circled with halos of molten red.

"It's the devil's town," I said. "See the two horns sticking up as we came in?"

I laughed again; it seemed to me I had said a thing very clever.

"Oh, that's it, is it?" said Red Bob, and put his hand on my forehead. "Nice kettle of fish; you ought to be in bed!"

The town was dancing round me by now, and I became conscious of a red-hot spine, also of the fact that my legs—not my feet, they were all right—my legs were double-jointed and did not work properly. This, for some curious reason made me extremely cold. It did not matter,—nothing mattered,—but I could hardly speak without biting my tongue, my teeth chattered so. I assured Red Bob that I was all right, and that he had the loveliest dark eyes I had ever seen in a human face. I remember he bundled me at once into something that was standing there,—a sort of little truck on a tram-line,—ran it down to the wharf at a smart trot, and carted me in a second or two (or so I thought) on to the deck of a small schooner that glittered very wet under the lights. Somebody was put in a cabin after that—myself, I thought—and some other people began fighting in German outside. There was a talk about marks by and by, and some one called someone else a robber, and then—immediately, it seemed—there was a fresh sea breeze blowing on my face, and blocks creaking, and a boom swinging across the deck.

After which I dreamed bad dreams for a week.

To be continued next week

A Little Sprout Split This Boulder

HERE is pictorial evidence of how a mighty boulder may be split by a tiny and tender sprout that seeks to reach the air and light and refreshing summer rains.

The huge sandstone boulder, of which only part is shown in the picture, lies on what is called the Split Rock Road, between Pelham and Pelham Bay, Westchester, New York.

Within the memory of comparatively young inhabitants of that region this rock was one solid piece, of approximate dimensions of 25 feet long by 15 feet wide by 10 feet high.

Thus, its approximate volume is 3,750 cubic feet.

As sandstone of this grade weighs about 160 pounds to the cubic foot, it is evident that this gigantic boulder, which had probably been deposited there by some passing glacier, say a few hundred thou-sand years ago, weighs in the neighborhood of 600,000 pounds or 300 tons.

It can be seen quite plainly that t sapling which grows up in the cleft the rock is not more than twenty years old.

Note in what a clean way the steady upward push of this plant split the rock asunder.

Try to Do It Yourself

IF you want to get an idea of the force that must have been expended to accomplish this, just take any piece of good, firm sandstone, a cold-chisel, and a hammer, and see how long you will have to pound on it to split it as this rock is split.

This is about the most graphic example we have ever seen of what a little force, continually applied, can accomplish.

Isn't it perhaps a lesson to those of us who feel that we have not been blessed with tremendous capabilities?

Where New York Gets Its Pies

THAT more than half of the apples used in the pies of New York City come from Wayne County, New York, is not generally known by devotees of the "pie habit" in and around Manhattan.

The fruit belt in the lake towns of Sodus, Williamson, Ontario, and Wolcott supplies the major part of the pie timber consumed in the metropolis.

One New York baking company sends its buyer into the orchard district annually, and it has placed with the growers orders for as many as 35,000 barrels.

The photograph shows a large bin of greenings, the favorite pie variety, at Sodus. When this photograph was taken, there were nine other bins of equal capacity on the premises.

One may realize the magnitude of the apple industry in western New York when it is understood that five shipping stations in this section annually forward more apples to the markets of the world than are grown in the two States of Washington and Oregon.

Moving $1,000,000 in Gold

MILLIONS and billions in real cash, gold and bills, are vague things to most of us, and few people have any idea where this immensely wealthy nation keeps its real money, or how it is guarded on its travels.

It is with the greatest reluctance that its owners or trustees ever move it: they prefer to exchange the checks, notes, drafts, or securities that represent it. But there are times when the real money must go, and then its journey is a very interesting thing.

How Money Is Safeguarded in Banks

EVERY bank and trust company is required by the banking laws to keep a certain amount of money on hand, the amount being in proportion to the size of the institution; and, in addition, the cur-rent business of the house requires that so many millions more be available for use at the paying teller's window. To safeguard these large sums is the business of safe- and vault-building experts, and so far advanced is this science that it is practically impossible for the best equipped crooks to extract one dollar from any big bank vault. Bank-robbing these days is practised on small country hanks, or is achieved by dishonest hankers.

The manganese steel vault, with its electric skin, is the last word in protection. The vault designer selects a spot in the institution, in any place from the cellar to the roof, where the vault can be isolated and can not he reached easily by tunnelers, and there the big steel house is built. Its walls are so thick that they will resist fire, earthquake, and heavy explosives, and the whole is protected by an electric skin. This is usually of a soft foil of alloy, and if even a pin is thrust through it at any point a short circuit is made and alarm bells set ringing in the building, in police headquarters, in the offices of private protective agencies, and in the homes of certain officers of the bank. The burglar, with a torch that would burn a hole through the steel in a few minutes, or tools that would cut out a door in an hour, has not a chance, even after he has tunneled to the vault and overcome the watchmen.

Messengers are never employed in carrying very large amounts of money. It is a familiar sight in the financial district to see two sturdy young men, each holding to the handle of a heavy leather bag, with one or more guards walking behind. But the chances are ninety-nine in one hundred that the bag contains not more than a few thousands at most, though there may be millions in bonds or other securities.

When millions in cash are taken from the vaults, a picked corps of guarded clerks check it out in steel casks of the kind known as express strong boxes, and these are placed in wagons in which the carrying compartments are wholly of steel screens. Each wagon has its set of guards, usually two on the front seat, one driving, one locked in with the money, and one riding on the rear.

For transit from city to city the big banks follow the system of the National City Bank, which is the largest handler of real money in this country—not even excepting the United States mint. They utilize the express companies. Each big company has spent large amounts of money in picking its employees, and in elaborating systems for tracing stolen parcels. Every professional thief would rather steal from a police captain than steal from an express company, as all of them are allied together to form a perfect network through which thieves and plunder can scarcely hope to escape.

The Express Companies' System

THE money is checked out of the vaults into the hands of express company employees, who cart it to their express cars in the railroad yards, and it travels to its destination in as simple and unostentatious a manner as if it were so many crates of eggs. The express company employees never know what is in the strong boxes—they merely know that they have so many of them in given numbers to receive and to deliver, and that is all there is to it.

An additional safeguard is the very weight of any given quantity of gold and the serial numbering of large bills. These latter are kept in the same packets in which they leave the banks if possible, and the groups of numbers make them as individual and as easily identifiable as one man from another. If a thief extracted a million in ten-thousand-dollar hills, he could not cash a single one of them.