One Minute with the Editor

Just an Appetizer

PERHAPS this is the first copy of this magazine that has come to you; or perhaps you are one of the folk who never, never read serial stories. In either case, listen:

Paul Corbet, twenty-two years old, meets another young chap in Liverpool down by the docks. The other chap proves to be valet to Vincent Gore,—or Red Bob, as he is called,—the celebrated explorer. Says Paul to the other youngster, "I'll fight you for your job." They fight; Paul wins, becomes Red Bob's secretary, and sails with him to New Guinea to hunt a secret pearl island.

Red Bob hates women, and Paul thinks he does. They land on a "nutmeg isle," and there Paul meets a woman such as he has never seen. Imagine his surprise, after they have sailed away again, to discover her on the boat.

She seems to like Paul, too; at least, she takes occasion to warn him of a plot she has overheard on the part of a group of Germans on the boat. The Germans want the pearl island too, and they are going to "get" either Paul or Red Bob. Then, at the moment when Paul is head over heels in love with her, he learns that she is married.

A man named Richter had been sick and at the point of death. The girl's parents had taken care of him, and in gratitude he married her on his death-bed, in order that she might have his property. Then—having prepared himself for death—he didn't die. She is on her way to the South Seas to meet her husband now.

As if all this were not enough, after Paul has fought his duel with Hahn and whipped him, after he has recovered from his fever, he awakes to find the girl has disappeared.

"I shall never go on until I find her," he says.

But Red Bob, who knows something he will not tell, answers: "Trust me and come along; you'll find her yet."

...Now, gentle reader, don't tell me you haven't any curiosity to learn whether he ever does find her. If you are blessed with the ordinary amount of interest in other people's love affairs, turn over to page 7 and see what happens.

Sure—We Have No Secrets

DEAR EDITOR: I don't know whether you will care to answer this question or not; but it would interest a great many of your readers to know how many stories you receive in your office every week, and whether they are all read.

We like to answer questions. The one or two short stories that are printed in this magazine each week are selected from a weekly supply that sometimes runs a low as three hundred a week and often runs a high as five hundred. And they are all read.

The Vampire

He had worked all his life as a clerk, and she, his wife, had sucked his money away just as fast as he earned it. That is why the other people in the office called her the Vampire.

Of course you know what always happens in a case like that.

Well, this time something else happened.

The author is Richard Washburn Child, who writes as good short stories as any man in America to-day. It's our leading story next week.

What Becomes of Girls Who Marry Foreign Titles?

A FEW weeks ago we published an article by Burton J. Hendrick entitled, "Can a Millionaire's Son Make Good?"

Now comes another article by Mr. Hendrick on the millionaire's daughter—the American girl who married a foreign nobleman. Does she live happily ever after? Or doesn't she? That's the question Mr. Hendrick's article answers.

From a Newspaper Man—of Course

DEAR EDITOR: That was a good little article you published some weeks ago on "The Bankers' Plan for Doubling Your Income." I didn't realize money would increase so fast—never having had any.

How Can I Keep My Hair from Getting Gray?

By EDWIN F. BOWERS, M.D.

THE natural coloring of hair is due to a substance supplied to the hair cells, called pigment. This pigment is furnished with each and every head of hair, except albinos, and is really a form of nutrition.

Now, this nutritive process is influenced by various physical or mental conditions. Long-continued debilitating illnesses or a general run-down condition are very efficient gray hair producers. But the purely mental causes are much more effective and infinitely more rapid in their action. Numerous authenticated instances are recorded in which the hair—as a result of shock, terror, or grief—turned from black to white in a night.

These phenomena illustrate the influence of emotional states over the organic functions, and the only way to prevent them is to "don't."

Refuse to be scared; refuse to worry; refuse to continue under mental strain. Cultivate placidity. Also, everything that interferes with the nutrition must be tabooed, if youthful pigmentation is to be retained. Local treatment—such as shampoos, inunctions of olive oil, massage, various tonics, local or general, as may be required—are all helpful.

On the contrary, anything that has tendency to rust or dry the hair—as soaps containing an excess of alkali—should be avoided.

Dyes should be used with great caution. Those containing irritant metallic substances are especially injurious. Those of vegetable origin are not so objectionable; indeed, many of them are quite harmless, provided they are kept away from the scalp.

But if you find yourself growing gray, for the love of kind Heaven, grow gray gracefully. Remember that there are many things infinitely worse than having pigmentless hair. One is to have no hair. Another is to have no patience.

And, after all, gray hair is beautiful. I know, because I have it.

Each week Dr. Bowers answers the most interesting question. Next week: "Can Laziness Be Cured?"

The Savings Bank—or What?

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

A READER who signs himself "Manhattan" submits this question:

"Do you consider it wise, fro one who is able to save $10 a week from his earnings, to deposit it in a savings bank and allow it to accumulate there, or what do you consider a better way?"

The great difficulty with this question which Mr. (or perhaps it is Miss) Manhattan presents is its sweeping character. Has Manhattan a family dependent upon him? If so, then by all means the first $10 a week saved should go for some time into life insurance rather than into a savings bank. It is a more primary, fundamental form of investment. Is Manhattan old, with no dependents? Then the first use to make of that $10—assuming that nothing else has been saved and no property is owned—should be to buy an annuity to protect his last years.

But if my inquirer is fairly young, unmarried, and with no entirely dependent relatives, reasonably healthy, not engaged in an especially hazardous occupation, with no savings or investments to speak of, and with a small checking bank account—why, then by all means put the $10 a week into a savings bank.

I have already explained why in certain cases life insurance and annuities come first. Sickly persons or those engaged in hazardous undertakings might do better to take out sickness or accident insurance first—if they can get it. Persons who already have large or moderate savings and investments in other forms are either foolishly timid or reprehensibly lazy to be satisfied with the low rate of interest that the New York City savings banks pay—3 1/2 to 4 per cent/ Finally, most people, in these modern days of paying for almost everything by check, will insist upon the convenience before they use money for other purposes; and the savings banks of New York do not permit the use of checks.

The Savings Bank for a While

BUT, having made all these assumptions, I want to repeat most emphatically that the savings bank is the place for that $10 a week—for a while at least.

But remember, Manhattan, that when you enter one of your local savings banks, you enter a cold money vault—safer considerable than the Bank of England, but where you are No. 147,896, upon whom humanity and courtesy are usually wasted. The average New York savings bank (there are a few exceptions) has as much personal interest in a depositor as the General Post Office. But you don't go there for afternoon tea, and if you want financial advice you must get it elsewhere. The main point is that your money is safe.

It is not necessary to describe here the security afforded by the New York savings banks, at least in detail. They are permitted by law to invest only in carefully prescribed first mortgages on real estate in New York; in United States, State and certain carefully regulated municipal bonds; no stocks at all. Also, most of the savings banks have a surplus over the amount due depositors, such surplus being solely for protection and not for distribution to stockholders, of whom there are none. Moreover, the larger savings banks—several boast deposits of $100,000,000—have their investments so widely distributed that they are insured by this means alone against any possible loss. Finally, both precedent and law impose a standard of honest in management close to perfection.

But, if Manhattan wants my personal opinion, let him stick to the savings bank until he has one or two hundred there, and leave it there. Leave the little sum as a back-log; for nowhere else except in life insurance will it be as absolutely safe, and nay one who says it is "just as safe" in bonds or stock, or payment schemes for buying them, is either grossly ignorant or trying to sell something. After one or two hundred has been salted away, then begin to buy securities with the $10 week.

If anybody should ask why I advise the man or woman with practically nothing to leave $200 on deposit in the savings bank, while warning the owner of thousands to keep away from it, my answer simply is that the owner of $200, unlike his richer brother, can not afford to take any risk whatever.

Next week Mr. Atwood will answer: "Can I Have Absolute Safety?"

How Much Does It Cost an Actress to Dress?

By ADA PATTERSON

AN actress is fully justified in spending ninety per cent. of her income for clothes."

"Nineteen per cent.?" I inquired feebly, my memory groping for the old and honored estimate: a quarter for your savings fund, and twenty-five per cent. for clothes.

"Ninety per cent.," firmly repeated Lillian Russell.

"Actresses have a reputation for vanity and extravagance," Miss Russell went on. Most of them do not deserve it. It is true that they spend more money for clothes in proportion to their income than do other women. It is true, too, that they spend more time thinking about clothes.

"But this does not come from either vanity or extravagance. It is cold business. The actress is not satisfying her own desires, but the demand of her manager and of her audience. She spends nine tenths of her income on clothes because she must.

The Actress Is Judged by Her Clothes

"THE public judges her by her clothes. If she looks badly dressed on the stage or carelessly dressed off the stage the public becomes impatient with her. It thinks she is careless; and carelessness is a sign of laziness. If she has become lazy, she is through—finished. The public knows it, and looks about for a new favorite.

"Ever since I could afford it, I have worn real lace on the stage. My handkerchiefs and lingerie have had real lace for trimming.

"It is a great many years since I wore what are known as 'stage jewels.' There are two reasons for this:

"First, there are always people in the boxes or in the front row who recognize a counterfeit article.

"Second, it gives me great satisfaction to know, when I step on to the stage, that I have dressed the part perfectly—that, if I am playing a grand duchess, I am dressed as I believe a grand duchess would be dressed.

"Every real actress has this sense of thoroughness in dress. I have been surprised, as I traveled about the country with a chorus, to see how the little chorus girls managed their personal wardrobes on their small salaries. I have seen them embroidering shirt-waists of the kind that would cost fifteen dollars in a shop, to wear when they got to New York; they would wear dollar shirt-waists for traveling.

"They knew that these fifteen-dollar shirt-waists were an essential part of their wardrobe. They would have to wear them For they went to call upon the manager. For the actress must have not a double, but a triple wardrobe. She must have clothes for the stage, clothes for her personal use, and clothes for the manager. The outsider may smile at this last category; but these costumes, as well as her others, are an actress's stock in trade.

"If a woman's income is, we will say, $5000 a year, and she is an actress, I insist that she must spend $4500

for clothes, and she must do so at considerable sacrifice of her personal comfort.

"She must live in a hall bedroom; must do her own fine laundry, like the chorus girls I have seen on tour; she must be satisfied with poor and insufficient food; must walk when she would prefer to ride, and ride in street-cars instead of taxicabs. And she must do all this for the pure commercial reason that it pays.

$20,000 a Year for Clothes

"SINCE I reached a position of prominence on the stage, I have spent at least $20,000 a year on clothes. This I have regarded as a necessary investment. The last year of my Weber & Fields engagement cost me, for clothes, $11,500. One gown, with accessories, cost $4000. and the hat that I wore with this gown cost $450.

"My personal wardrobe for many years has cost $15,000 a year. This is without counting furs or jewels. I find it necessary to have in my private wardrobe about twenty-one gowns at a time. The average cost of these is $200. This wardrobe must be renewed three or four times a year. That is, I require between seventy and eighty gowns a year.

"For the fall season I have four evening gowns. Then, I have what I call chiffon gowns. These are for afternoon use, and can be worn at a luncheon, a matinee, or even at a restaurant dinner. Of these I usually have about five.

"Then, there are the suits to be worn for motoring, walking, or general out-of-door use. They are of corduroy, broadcloth, cheviot, linen, or velvet, according to the mode and the season. Of these I need six or seven.

"I also have four or five tea-gowns or lounging gowns. They are simple enough for rest gowns, yet elaborate enough for informal dinners.

"I use about fifty pairs of shoes. These fifty pairs of boots and shoes average $8 apiece, and aggregate $400. Of hats I have about fifty a year. Most of them cost $250, although I had one that cost more than $1000.

"The costliness of this hat was due to four birds-of-paradise, placed at each of the four corners of the hat. These birds cost $250 apiece.

"The accessories of dress are without number, and it is difficult to compute their cost.

"Take the matter of shoe-buckles, for instance. I had at one time three pairs of buckles, each pair set with diamonds. and costing at least $2500. Petticoats are a large item, for they must be of either silk or chiffon, and cost about $50 apiece. I need ten of them.

"Gloves are also important. I use perhaps fifty pairs a year, although I have them cleaned. I have no patience with the theory of throwing away soiled gloves. My maid takes them to a French cleaner who cleans them beautifully, sending them back as soft as when new.

Jewels Are Now Worn with Discrimination

"MY furs I do not include in my annual expenses; but I am quite willing to tell what they cost. The price of my sable cloak was $10,000. My chinchilla wrap cost $5000. I have an ermine the price of which was $3500. My silver fox furs are worth $2000.

"My jewels represent an outlay of about $400,000. Jewels are worn now with more discrimination than they used to be. The time has gone by when they were strewn over the gown and person as one papers a wall. Jewels now serve a purpose. They are used, or seem to be used, as fastenings. For instance, a diamond brooch catches the lace at the throat; a ruby pin fastens a girdle; a cluster of sapphires catches up the drapery of a tunic.

"The wearing of jewels now follows the basic principle of art, that all decoration must be, or seem to be, of use.

"There is one final fact about dress that I should like to emphasize. The secret of dressing is, not money, but management. A woman can dress very well on a small sum if she will really use her brains.

Every Woman Should Learn Dressmaking

"I SHOULD advise every woman to learn dressmaking. It is not a difficult art, and the woman who understands dressmaking will always have a more satisfactory wardrobe than the woman who is dependent upon shops and dressmakers. Dressstuffs are cheap; it is the fashioning of them and the trimmings that make clothes expensive.

"If a woman saves her trimmings they may be used year after year for a large part of her life-time, with admirable effect. Let me cite the four birds-of-paradise which cost $1000, but which I have used again and again, year after year, to embellish innumerable other hats, since the black maline they first adorned has disintegrated with time."

He Won't Cheer Up

SURELY a man who can make a noise like a steam engine, a crowing cock, and a mouse-trap, all at once, should not be "down-'earted." Yet a trap drummer's face is a sad one—sadder than an undertaker's, sadder than a joke editor's. It is the saddest face in the world. Every trap drummer that you will ever see, besides all those that you won't, looks just as gloomy as this one. It does no good to remind a drummer of his blessings, his kettledrums, snare-drums, xylophones, tambourines, castanets, or a thousand and one delightful kinds of bells (if he is hot there are the sleigh-bells for him to jangle; if he feels a draft he can temper the air with the tinkle of a cow-bell). There is simply no getting round his melancholy.

Always a Guess, Usually a Wrong One

"IT'S this way," says J. A. Hager. "We have to keep one eye on the director and the other on the performer, and if we suit one it's a sure thing that we get in wrong with the other. Another thing: we don't have any score—only a part; and we have to keep constantly asking ourselves where it is we come in.

"You never know what may happen. While you are keeping the rhythm with one foot on the pedal of your bass drum and feeling round on the floor for your wood-block with the other foot, the nervous lad who is trying out for a comedy part takes a notion to do a joint-twisting stop, and you have to be there with your ratchet (the whirligig thing). Or he thinks he may get a laugh out of tearing his clothes. You have a quarter of a second to reach for your window-shade—yes, a bit of window-shade gives the best tearing sound in the world.

"Of course, really good comedians don't work like that with a drummer. They get their act the way they want it, and it stays put. If you give them horse's hoofs right once (cocoanut-shells on a marble slab), you can count on giving it to them the same way just in that place as long as the piece plays. To be sure, Frank Tinney improvises, but he has a talent for letting his drummer know what he wants."

The Drummer Who Made a Comedian

IT is said that Bert Williams was "made" by a trap drummer. Williams had a small black-face part in a vaudeville road show. He wore big, flapping, square-toed boots. One night the drummer was inspired to catch the inaudible pad of his big soft soles with a sort of double beat on the timpani—k' flip-k' flap. The house roared, so the drummer had to keep it up. Every time Williams stirred, the drummer, James Lent, gave his footfall this absurd double echo.

Williams proceeded to walk into the Broadway houses with that catlike tread, and they laughed just as the small town had laughed. When Williams (and Lent) later appeared before the King of England, his Majesty, between roars, presented Williams with a diamond-studded cane and the trusty Lent with a gold-and-silver drum inlaid with mother-of-pearl.

In point of number of medals, probably nobody has beaten "Battle-Ax" Tenney, the colored drummer who used to play for Bessie Clayton. The thing that the trap drummer must have is rhythm, and for that reason the best drummers have been negroes.

"In between times," say the harassed drummers, "when you might suppose we could take things a little easier—when our parts don't call for any particular exertion—then is when we must get down to getting our drums tuned up; and if there is any animal that can do with more coaxing and petting than a drum, we'd like to be shown the thing, that's all. Sorry you don't happen to care for the style of expression we wear when at work, but the complications of our jobs are such that we should just naturally worry—and we do."

One of These Men Can Make the Other Disappear

"YOU can fool the scientist, but it's a different proposition to fool the sharp-eyed newsboy," say two famous magicians who recently met in New York. Harry Kellar, our noted American

conjurer, and the Chinese wonder worker, Ching Ling Foo, are agreed on this point.

"Your scientific man is always on the lookout for a scientific explanation, not a trick; but every newsboy on the side is something of a lightning-change artist himself—something of an actor too. He knows what to watch for," says Mr. Kellar.

When Kellar himself was a small boy he joined a company of traveling magicians as a page. After a few years he owned his own show, and toured the States as the logical successor of Alexander Hermann, America's first great magician. At one time a Mexico City newspaper devoted a whole front page to an attempt to prove that Mr. Kellar was Satan himself. After a career of forty-seven years the magician has retired to his beautiful California estate.

Ching Ling Poo was one of the first men to introduce Oriental magic in this country, and he is still busy baffling the public. Most of the methods employed in legerdemain are open secrets among the members of the profession; but even magicians have puzzled over Mr. Foo's water tricks. Asked how they are accomplished, he merely smiles, shakes his head—and says nothing.

"Magic is the business of entertaining people by fooling them. They like to be fooled, and the peculiar psychology of the whole thing is that they are invariably disappointed when they learn how they were fooled," so say these two masters of magic from opposite ends of the earth.

This Villain Wore an Oxygen Helmet

Hang On to This Suit-Case

THIS suit-case looks as if it had something seriously wrong with it. But such is not the case. it's a much better suit-case than the regular kind, because it can keep you from drowning when your boat blows up or tips over.

Recent submarine activity has decidedly stimulated the invention of life-saving devices for sea-goers. Balthasar Zepfi of Santa Rosa, California, is putting on the market an arrangement that comes with your suitcase. In this way, you always know where to find it, and don't have to go down on your knees under the bunks or seats or climb up walls where life-belts are hung.

It takes up only a small part of the space in the suit-case, leaving ample room for other articles. When a shipwreck occurs the other articles can, of course, be spared; so the rubber bag within the suit-case is blown up and the traveler, case in hand, jumps overboard without unnecessary uneasiness.

Actual tests with this device have shown that it will easily support the weight of two persons in the water.

Much advice has been given as to what the efficient traveler should and should not take with him. Some people think a dress suit is far more necessary than a rain-coat. There are people that leave out books and people that leave out rubbers: Strong-minded women travelers omit packing petticoats, and sometimes a collegian even without his lettered sweater.

This little life-saver of Mr. Zepfi's prove to be the indispensable article with which to go abroad.

The Girl Who Was Afraid to Get Married

By GRACE MacGOWAN COOKE

Illustrations by Robert Amick

THE house stood at the dark corner of the square. It was the hour when most people are eating the evening meal, or cleaning after it. The streets lay empty. The square, a sordid spot by day, held now some dim, pleasant mystery. At the other end it opened out into lights and noise: a trolley clanged; the mechanical piano at a motion picture booth offered its contribution of sound as music.

Teresa leaped free into the April dusk, and forgot what she left behind her as only blessed youth can forget. The jar and fret in the Durgan apartment, where the immemorial argument over a question that would never be settled proceeded,—and had proceeded, as long as her memory held, between her father and mother,—the more passionate upbraidings that shook the air in the flat above, where Jess, her married sister, wrestled with the problem of a boy husband and a teething baby, these dropped away as the dimness received her.

Durgan was a night watchman. Mrs. Durgan never found time for the necessary mending of his wear.

How d'ye s'pose a man's goin' to hold down a job, when you send him to it bagged as a tramp?" So Teresa's father had questioned his domestic sphinx from time immemorial.

The answer was not yet satisfactory. Teresa believed, if she thought about it at all, that it never would be satisfactory.

And upstairs Jess told Carl that she wished she was dead—all because he refused to complain that she had burned the biscuits for the evening meal. It was aggravating—that way he had of sitting silent and hacking off the biscuit top without looking at you. Teresa dismissed the remembrances with the mental comment that Bally, to whom she fled from these asparities and common-places, like Carl. She and Billy had played together in the streets since they were what she called kids. Billy was the only one of the boys she still found interesting after she had taken to reading what her mother held to be "fool love stories" from the public library.

Mrs. Durgan had burned her daughter's library ticket, by way of stopping this misuse of time. Then Billy lent her his; the book that Teresa was carrying had been taken out on Billy's ticket. She had been happily reading aloud from it—Teresa could get more out of the sentences when she intoned them—"An'—G-l-a-d-y-s-e, Gladi-ce—St. Albans had come into her hurry-hurry-tudge of love, deep, true, saddusfyin', ordained for every woman's heart from the foundations of time—"

Just like that it sounded; and it woke Durgan, the night watchman, so that he came in, and stared at her with reddened eyes in which sleep defeated rose to frenzy.

He had threatened to burn the book. That had brought out the fact that the volume was on Billy's ticket. Billy was forbidden the house. And now Teresa was out to return it, and to promise to meet him in the evenings down here in the square. This was pretty nice and romantic, ever so much like the book on her arm, only that Durban wasn't an earl, and Billy—well, she'd rather have Billy just as he was. Billy was good enough for her.

ON the opposite pavement somebody approached, whistling. She ran across the street-railway tracks, a slim, eager figure in the dimness.

"'Llo, Tress."

"'Llo, Billy."

They took hands for a minute, and stood peering at each other—happy just in that. Then the music of the piano on the avenue suggested to the boy:

"Want to go to the movies?"

"Nope. Le's set on a bench here a while. I got something to tell you."

He stepped beside her, a loose-jointed young fellow, rather like a rangy colt, in need of filling out. Yet he was an efficient individual of his sort—or promised well for it. No doubt Teresa's instinct, which preferred him to the viscount of the love tale, was quite sound. They found an unoccupied bench—the one farthest from the lights.

"I brung your book—the one I got on your ticket."

Billy was stowing the volume in his pocket before he thought to ask:

"Found your own ticket yet? You can keep mine if you ain't. I can get what I want on Bud's."

"No, I ain't found mine—and I reckon I never will. Like as not maw burned it up. She was always sayin' she would."

"Better keep this, then."

The book was half withdrawn again when Teresa stopped him.

"No—you keep it. I want you to read it. It's—it's an elegunt story. It's grand. I want you to read it now, Billy."

The boy laughed. A long arm on the back of the bench curved a bit to cradle her shoulders.

"Me readin' love stories!" he jeered. "Bud an' me're pickin' out books that makes a kind of correspondence course. What a man needs is somethin' that'll help him to a better job."

"Wisht you would read it," Teresa urged inadequately.

What she really wanted to say, could she have found the words,—and even the ideas,—was that this tale of Gladyse St. Albans and her viscount lover bore upon the job of love, and that she didn't want to have that regarded as only the woman's job.

"You've read it—tell me what it says," counseled Billy. "Tell it all to me now. I'd love to have you."

The policeman paced his beat; the trolley rounded its corner, flashing and clanging; the music from the motion picture booth came to them, softened on the spring air; and Teresa told the tale of love as it appeared to her.

There were interruptions. Sometimes Billy showed that he was listening by demanding elucidation. Sometimes she discovered that he was not, because he leaned forward and watched her face, forgetting what she said in the motion of her lips.

"Say that over. You make your mouth such a pretty shape when you say viss-count."

Yet who could complain that the details of another's love story were neglected for the warm, living movements of one's own? The tale of Gladyse St. Albans had not reached its conclusion when Teresa's head was on Billy's shoulder, his comfortable sandpapery cheek against the satin bloom of hers. Perhaps there was no need to repeat those words about deep, true, and satisfying!

IT was, as usual, Eve who let the serpent into Eden with:

"Paw's mad and says you sha'n't come to the house any more."

"What's he mad about?"

"I don't know—just mad."

"Don't he want you to have a fella?"

"Huh-uhn," uneasily. "I guess not."

"They let Jess marry when she wasn't much older'n you are."

Something in the suggestion seemed to irritate the girl.

"Le's don't talk about it," she said.

"Ain't it nice out here? Wouldn't you druther be here than in the house with them?"

"Yep. But winter's comin'. What in time we goin' to do then?"

Billy spoke with a certain remoteness. He had gone into a realm that was not woman's. That word "time" jogged her memory—her subjective memory, that linked Billy with the thing that existed from the foundations of it. She twitched his sleeve to make him look at her.

"Aw—it don't make any difference about paw," she whispered.

"It don't as long as the weather's warm," agreed Billy; "but I've got to get a better job by winter—huh?"

"Oh, Billy! You know I ain't thinking about anything like that!"

"Well, I am."

"Oh, no!"

"I gotta. What'd we do?"

"Jess'd let us meet up at her place. She said she would. I'd ruther. Please, Billy."

Feminine fear of that male ruthlessness she divined in him put the crown on Teresa's love. She dreaded while she adored him. Coaxing him into accepting the idea of Jess's flat for a meeting-place, diverting him from that other proposition which hovered in the air, heart-shaking, inexorable, engaged all her powers.

The bench in the park sat in no

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secluded nook; yet, if one whispered, the man and boy on the next one could not overhear, the tired woman with an unnecessary and quite unornamental shawl over her head, who was lingering past and staring at them, need see nothing. Desperately Teresa brought out that inspirational litany—love's own formula, that never fails to rush to the lips at need.

"Do you think about me sometimes, when you're doin' other things, at the shop? I kep' a-thinkin' about you all day, an' then maw'd get just as mad at me because I didn't hear her when she'd speak to me." So the first intonation.

Billy, her congregation, responded:

"Betcha." Then, "What did I seem to be doin' in them thinks of your'n?"

"Nothin'. You was just there—like now."

"Like—now?"

Like now. The cradling arm back of Teresa's shoulders drew her close; the resting-place for her head was meant for no other purpose in life. The cheek that touched hers, the lips that responded to her litany without words—these meant that she had Billy at last. Not so much of his attention as could be spared from an anxious looking ahead, or so little as was left after the jar and fret of ordinary human intercourse, but the whole creature, for the moment set to that same note which trembled through her. This it was that had been ordained from the foundations of time!

THROUGH what was left of April, on into May and June and July, when summer nights, one after another, like a procession of Ethiop queens, took the city and held it in warm, jeweled black hands, Teresa slipped away to the square to meet her lover as regularly as the nights came. "'Llo, Tress!"—"'Llo, Billy!" was the pass-word to that World of Other Estimates—a place of moon and stars, of dusk, spaciousness, and love.

Entering it did not destroy permanently the facts of ordinary living. Monday morning still brought Monday's wash. Nothing but good screens could have kept the flies out of the Durgan flat; nothing but the coming of fall would abate its intolerable temperature. But memory of the hours with Billy sometimes walked, shod in silent, cool dusk, right into the sizzling rooms next morning, whispered above the weird whir of flies on the ceiling, brought something to her nostrils and ears that was not the smell of daily life, the noise of its contentions. When it came, teething babies and hot weather, and a tormented father who believed he was getting a bone felon on his thumb, mattered as little as the humming of the flies.

At such times Durgan and his wife scarcely knew what to do with Teresa. The ordinary family discipline passed her by and left her unscathed, smiling, aloof.

"You've got to come down on her harder—like I do," the night watchman admonished his spouse. "Don't you see she's gittin' too much for you? They all do 'bout her age."

Then, in August, came the time that Billy went away to try for that better job. He attempted to explain fully to Teresa; but she only wiped furtive tears and was sulky.

"Ain't you makin' a livin' now?" she asked resentfully. "I wisht you wouldn't go."

And that was so sweet that Billy had to answer it with lovers' nonsense, rather than bleak wisdom concerning his present job and the amount of money a couple dare marry on.

Disasters seem to attract each other. On the first day of Billy's absence Jess's baby was so sick that they had to send for a doctor—a desperate pass financially and physically for people in their situation. Poor Jess fretted almost as much over the anticipated bill as she did about the condition of her child.

In the next twenty-four hours Durgan's felon arrived—and drove him frantic. Mrs. Durgan labored at dressing his hand and doing his bidding, and she sent Teresa upstairs to help the married sister.

The days were one long nightmare, and when night came down, merciful, wide-winged, with healing in her pinions, there was no Billy waiting outside in the dusk for Teresa to fly to. Instead, during the latter part of the time, they had to sit up with the baby. Jess insisted that Carl mustn't lose sleep, or he might fall off the scaffolding next day—he was a painter. Teresa felt that her keeping watch wasn't much use, for Jess came every fifteen minutes to look at the boy, and Carl rose up in bed and groaned at their whisperings.

BILLY'S stay was to be a week. The first six days and nights of it brought Teresa to the pass where life on any terms was not worth having. Her flesh quivered on her bones. Her whole body seemed to hum and sing. Her head felt light and queer. She could hardly imagine how it would be to go down into the square at the appointed time and find Billy waiting for her; yet toward this consummation something in her subconsciously yearned every waking moment, whatever she was doing. It haunted such sleep as she got; it was like thirst or hunger.

Nobody ate regular meals any more in either flat. Mrs. Durgan fed her man when he roared for food; she snatched her sleep when he could sleep. The entire establishment had a bone felon on its thumb.

Above stairs in Jess's flat Carl got his own meals, silently, stolidly. Teresa could almost feel the weight of his dumb hostility. The sisters picked up anything they could find, and ate it as they moved about, carrying the baby to soothe it, or doing the housework.

That last day, the evening of which would bring Billy, stretched out interminably; yet the sun did go down upon it, and just after what would have been dinner—if there had been any dinner—Teresa came to the street and looked about her.

Everything seemed wavy and queer. The people out here were not real. Even the familiar figure across there, waiting, seemed to be a long way off. She felt as if she had traveled miles to reach the wonted—

"'Llo, Tress!"

"'Llo, Billy!"

After that, with Billy's arm around her, they got to their bench, and found it mercifully empty.

"Oh, Billy—oh, Billy!" In the relaxation of the moment the words were a sort of wail.

"Did you miss me as much as all that?"

"Oh—it's been awful! Jess's baby's sick, and paw's got a felon on his thumb, an' you can't have a minute's peace anywheres."

Billy did not tell her that she could have peace now—there was no need. Her head had found its old resting-place, his arm was round her, his cheek dropped over against hers; the two trembled to one ecstasy, beyond peace or rest.

"Poor kid—you've had an awful time! I'm a-goin' to take care of you now."

She stirred in his hold, pushing her face a little toward his neck, as the baby was wont to move on her shoulder as she paced the floor with it. In the plenitude of her relief, she murmured:

"Jess and Carl just hate each other."

"I guess not"—with male tolerance. "Married folks has to scrap a little—bein' human; but I reckon they—"

"He hates her, anyhow. He won't even speak to her, if he can help himself."

"Aw—I guess that's just his way. He was crazy to get her two years ago."

CRAZY to get her two years ago!

Teresa took that into her tired consciousness, and it reverberated ominously. She had been child enough during Jess's courtship to help the young couple out in securing that privacy denied love by poverty. It flashed back upon her mind that Jess and Carl might have felt very much then as she and Billy did now! Oh, no—not that. Never!

"I expect Jess and Carl think a heap of each other yet," Billy's voice roused her.

"Well, paw and maw don't."

Teresa was a little surprised at her own mention of parents who, in thus naming them, started suddenly forth as individuals—persons who had at one time been prompted to the adventure of marriage by— No, her wildest imaginings could not link the word "love" with them.

"They hate each other, all right."

"You just think so." It was easy for Billy.

"Don't I live right with 'em? Don't I know?"

She leaned back and closed her eyes against him. Behind those dropped lids her mind raced like wildfire through the list of married people that ended with her own parents. Marriage—what had it to do with love?

"All married folks hate each other!" she burst out.

Billy laughed indulgently, as if she had said something childish, instead of expressing bitter, hard-wrung wisdom.

"Well, then you're goin' to get a chance to hate me pretty soon," he teased. "You ain't asked about it, but I'm tellin' you. I got my job. We can be married now any time you say."

She rested very quietly on his arm, her eyes still closed. She had a mounting terror of movement or speech. So a rabbit crouches before intruding danger, striving to keep so motionless that it may be passed over. Billy meant marriage. She knew marriage. Love was not in it. She would say him neither yea nor nay—she would evade as she had evaded. Winter was a long way off yet. Billy's words were, "Any time you say." He left her the say. Ah—she was safe!

The silence was long. It ended with her breathed sigh of relief, the relaxing of her tense body against him.

Billy, who had been gazing at her pale little face with its bluish shadows about the closed eyelids, took this as a signal to push his cheek against hers and press her lips with his own.

"Don't!"

She was free of his arm and on her feet, weariness forgotten in the wild terror of a heart that hammered at her ribs.

"What's the matter, honey?"

He sat a moment where she had left him, and Teresa stood before him, poised for flight. Then be got slowly to his feet. A man asleep on a near-by bench raised his head to look and listen. Billy drew nearer.

"What is it?" he whispered.

As he came on Teresa retreated. She backed away till she brought up awkwardly against a bush, glanced about, and saw that she was not going in the direction of home, then turned to face her pursuer. That was what he seemed. In that moment he was a stranger; the love-light in his eyes was only the keen foresight of the hunter. It seemed to his palpitating quarry that she must fight for her life.

"Let me alone, Bill Ford. I'm going right back to the house now—I am! You let me alone!"

"Why, honey!" his voice reckoned with her weakness, groped toward some lack in himself. "Didn't I do right someway? What is it you want me to do?"

"Go away!"—desperately.

"Don't you want to see the ring?"

A moment she hung on fleeing foot. Then realization of what the ring stood for swung her round.

"No!" she cried over her shoulder. He caught her at the curb.

"See here," he demanded, putting himself between her and the street. "What's

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the matter? Ain't you going to marry me? Is that what you mean?"

"No—I ain't. I ain't never going to marry anybody!"

She ducked under his arm and ran, fleeing as from pursuit—though Billy, after staring a few moments toward her retreating figure as it bounded over tracks and gutter, turned and went back to the bench, letting himself slowly down on it and dropping his head in his hands.

She saw him sitting there as she turned in at the door of the house. There was no impulse to return to him. She was numb, unable to think or feel. So far as she had any impulse, she wanted only to crawl back safe into the old, unlovely life of her childhood. Groping toward this, she wondered if Jess needed her.

SHE hurried past the Durgan landing, out of breath, and stopped panting a moment before pushing the bell of her sister's flat.

Her hand was out for this purpose when the door opened quietly and showed Carl there in shirt and trousers, his hair sticking up over his head. He looked tired but triumphant.

"Ssst!" he whispered. "Don't you make no noise."

"Why?"

"Jess's asleep."

"Jess?"

"Ye-ah." His broad, shiny, blond face looked more animated than Teresa had ever seen it. The loquacity of achievement seemed to come upon him. "I put her asleep," he grinned. "Doc give the kid some'n an' he slep'—an' then Jess couldn't."

"You put her to sleep?" Teresa wondered.

"Rocked her an' sung to her." The brother-in-law nodded happily. "Say—you oughter heard me! She's asleep. Want to come in an' look at her? You darst if you tiptoe."

Teresa stared, trying to adjust something in her own mind.

"I guess I'll go downstairs, if you don't need me," she said dully.

It was so quiet at her own door that, but for the strip of light under it, Teresa would have believed her father and mother asleep. She touched the knob. No sound. She turned it and went in.

Mrs. Durgan was changing the dressing on the felon—always a somewhat desperate adventure. Durgan's teeth were locked, but the opening door startled him into letting slip a groan.

"Did I hurt ye? I'm doin' my best. It's 'bout through"—anxiously—"if ye can just stand it a minute more."

"'Twasn't you," Durgan gritted out. "'S got to hurt 'bout so bad. 'Druther have you fix it than the doc."

"It'll feel better now for a while," comforted Mrs. Durgan. "That stuff always does seem to ease it up for a spell."

Durgan relaxed in his chair with an expulsion of the breath he had been holding.

"'S gittin' a leetle easier, I b'lieve. You go on, Teressy, an' have some rest. You look beat out."

Teresa had started forward as her father called her name. She dropped back a pace as she remembered that it was her mother's also. She recognized, with some newly awakened understanding, that he only pronounced it that way when it meant the wife.

"Oh, I'm all right." Mrs. Durgan was waddling toward the kitchen door. "I ain't tired. I got a lot of things out here to do."

Teresa, following the familiar slogan of work, found the small kitchen grotesquely decorated with Durgan's clothing, laid out to mend.

"Want me to help you, maw?"

"No; I can 'tend to 'em."

The tone held a sort of jealousy, as if Mrs. Duman felt the need of expressing herself by means of stitches. She threaded a needle, hunted out a patch, and snipped it into shape, before she seemed to notice her daughter.

"What you lookin' at, Tressy?"

"Nothin'."

There was no use for Teresa to attempt to tell her mother what it was she saw as she gazed at the shapeless figure and pudgy fingers, the graying hair and sweating face.

"Well, ye needn't stand staring at me as if I was a show," Mrs. Durgan admonished. "Didn't ye never see me mend yer paw's shirts before? It ain't any special sight, is it? Whad ye want, anyhow?"

"Why won't you let me help you do that?"

Teresa felt as if a world's ransom hung on the reply to her question.

"Because I'd ruther do it myself," grunted Mrs. Durgan. "Because nobody but me ever could set a patch to please yer paw."

Still the girl stood. Her mother seemed to have forgotten her. The bungling patch that nobody else could set to please Durgan was going on with a good will. The first faint rasp as of some one sawing a board sounded from the inner room.

"For any sakes, don't wake yer paw—he's dropped off now," Mrs. Durgan cautioned, as the girl wheeled and ran.

"I left somethin'—on a bench—down in the square. I got to go back for it," cried Teresa.

GETTING down the stairs was fairly swift, though it seemed to Teresa that their number was doubled. The street was emptier than when she had left it a few moments before. Would Billy be gone? No; some one was sitting in the same spot on the bench, his head still in his hands. She ran for fear he would get up and go away before she could reach him. Love and terror, and something older and stronger than either, winged her feet,

"Oh—Billy!"

"Tress!"

A moment they stood, trembling toward each other. Then, with a single movement, Teresa crossed the frontier upon which she had hesitated, and entered fully that World of Other Estimates, never again quite to forget her citizenship in it. For a time there was no need of words.

After a while the young fellow raised his head to say:

"What made you run away from me that way, Tress—and then come back?"

The language of this new place Teresa was in, is not words. She put up a hand against her lover's cheek for answer; she offered her lips in reply. Yet, so do old habits and beliefs cling that, when he had kissed her again, she made some effort to put her explanation into speech. It broke down, crumbled into foolish little endearments, before it had more than mentioned that Jess's baby was better, and gone off sidewise into the apparently irrelevant statement that she wished he'd read that liburry book about Gladyse St. Albans.

THE noise of the mechanical piano at the upper end of the square was music, the trolley rounding the corner a car of light, the policeman pacing his beat a friendly presence. And over all the high, black night sky, studded with immemorial stars, sheltered and kept them.

Billy hunted in his pocket for the ring. With closed eyes she pushed her hand toward him. With rapture she felt the circlet slip on. Nothing new had happened. It was not that she expected her lot to be different from that of Jess, or even her mother. Pain ambushed the path ahead. She would meet disillusion, loss. But a ray of illumination had been vouchsafed. In this light she could see Billy and marriage, and what might come with them, a woman's heritage,—deep, true, satisfying,—ordained from the foundations of time.

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

By BEATRICE GRIMSHAW

Illustration by Harvey T. Dunn

AT Friedrich Wilhelmshaven we were able to make immediate arrangements for our voyage to the islands lying north of New Britain. Ethnological research was supposed to be the object of our trip. In reality, it was to be the wildest, most dangerous and delightful pirate picnic that ever gladdened the heart of an adventurous youth.

This seemed to me the kind of thing I had come out to see. I had honestly done my work for Gore through all our journeying; nevertheless, the secretary business had been against the grain. In my secret heart I thought it an amazing thing that a jolly, splendid fellow like Red Bob should care for such musty stuff as ethnology, while there was a gun left in the world to shoot with or an island to explore. I am older now; I understand that the study of ethnology was simply Red Bob's spiritual tobacco. Every man, it seems, must have spiritual tobacco of some kind, when he is past the age that needs no narcotic. Things happen to people as life goes on,—horrible things, mostly,—and, though the things pass over, the memory does not. That is where the tobacco comes in—the interest or pursuit that keeps a man from thinking.

ONLY one thing troubled me in those delightful hours of preparing for our adventure—the fact that I had heard nothing more of Isola. If she had stowed away on the Afzelia, she kept herself invisible and no one suspected it. If she was still in Rabaul, she was in good hiding. German New Guinea was of the opinion that she had either drowned herself or run away into the bush—which would come to the same in the end. A launch had come through from Rabaul on the day of our arrival, bringing no news of the bride, but reporting the bridegroom as half distracted, and searching every gully and old volcano cup about the capital with teams of plantation boys, spurred on by the promise of big rewards. If I had not trusted Red Bob as I trusted no one else on earth, I should have gone out of my mind with anxiety. But I was as certain that Red Bob could put his finger on the missing bride, when he liked, as I was sure of the sun rising in the morning.

Next day we sailed out of Wilhelmshaven harbor. I could have sung for delight.

"It's beginning at last," I kept saying to myself, as our little schooner flew through the water under a heavy breeze, heading toward all the smaller, unnamed islands that tangle themselves about the end of New Britain.

What "it" might be I did not specify.

But everything on board the schooner was "it." The Winchester rifles slung on the bulkheads of the tiny cabin, the outfit of long bush-knife, cartridge-belt, and .48 Colt revolvers, in a leather holster, worn by Gore and myself, the crew, naked New Britainers with fierce bison eyes glowing under bison-like shocks of hair, the wild, wonderful ranges of New Guinea that opened out behind us as we sailed—the scarcely charted ocean—even the narrowness and inconvenience of the little Cecilie after all those months of luxurious travel on great steamers.

Red Bob was captain, and I was mate, of this little cockle-shell, manned by black savages who had eaten human flesh, and were doubtless ready to do so again if the chance presented itself. We were tossing about on an ocean of which no good charts were to be had. We were going to unknown islands, which we had to find for ourselves. Our food was tinned and bagged stuff from Friedrich Wilhelmshaven, to be cooked by Bo in a galley like a sentry-box.

Yes, undoubtedly "it" had begun.

OUR native crew, though the roughest of savages, had had some teaching from white men, and could handle a boat well enough. We let them run the Cecilie that morning, Red Bob and I steering by turns. While one held the wheel the other stood alongside, and, safe from all possible overhearing, we reveled—at least, can answer for myself—in being able to speak loudly and freely of our plans. It was true that most of the crew knew pidgin-English, but the following of a connected conversation in ordinary language is not within the New Britain native's powers.

"First," said Red Bob, standing with bare feet apart on the deck, and leaning to the Cecilie's heavy list, as he turned the wheel in his hands, "we go to the island where the inscription is. I've got the bearings of the arrow, but I must see it again, to avoid any possibility of mistake. After that we make for Schouten's pearl island as quick as we can go. Then—we shall see."

"How are you going to get the pearls?" I asked.

The huge coast-line of New Guinea was fading behind us into the pale, thin blue of distance. Ahead, bright islands, purple as wisteria flowers, were pricking up out of the sea. A December squall of fierce; hot rain had just swept over us; the decks were wet and shining; and over to windward the sea was silver with new sun.

Red Bob laughed.

"You may well ask," he said. "You don't suppose one could bring diving gear through the customs at Friedrich Wilhelmshaven or Rabaul, without questions being asked that would be pretty hard to answer."

"No," I said. "And, by the way, suppose we get it all right, aren't we pearl-poaching?"

"Oh, yes," said Gore, laughing till his eyes were nothing but two blue slits in a mass of wrinkles. "You may certainly call it that. Pearl-poaching and smuggling are about the two forms of dishonesty that you may commit without being dishonest. It's up to you not to get caught, that's all. Well, about the diving gear. It's down in the hold, labeled 'Trade goods.' A friend of mine managed that for me at Friedrich Wilhelmshaven. Same friend who got me the boys."

"Are they safe?" I asked.

"Reasonably so," said Gore. "I've done what I can. Couldn't get quite all of them from separate districts, but three out of the five are strangers to one another. All the same, sleep with your belt on, and overhaul your pistol now and then. This climate's the deuce on gunnery. I don't know that I admire that automatic of yours. They're a little too fine for these equatorial countries. Have known 'em jam."

"Not mine," I said. "It's looked after, and I can shoot to a hair with it. I can't do with that beastly kicking old navy pattern."

"It has its points," said Gore. We talked no more for a while.

The Cecilie, like Gore's revolver, had

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her points, but she was not the nicest of sailers on a following wind. I grew restless, as the day went on, over the slowness of our progress. It seemed to me, with such a breeze, we should have been out of sight of New Guinea before dark. But the afternoon wore on; the purple islands turned to palm-fringed green, and then faded to blue behind us; the wide-open sea grew wider, and glowed like a golden shield with the unbearable glory of the westering sun—and still the coasts of Kaiser Wilhelm Land, high and far and blue, stood up in the sky behind.

"I think the dashed place is tied to us," let out Red Bob, looking over his shoulder yet again, as we made another tack.

"Pity we haven't an engine," I said, leaning on the rail to keep my footing as we lay over. "Of course, the objection about an engineer coming along—Talking of things coming along, there's a launch behind."

"Take the wheel," was Gore's reply.

He dived below, brought up a glass, and fixed the oncoming boat with his eye.

"Not a government launch," was his verdict. "Whatever she is, she's signaling. We may as well heave to."

WITH slatting sails and heaving deck, we waited. I will confess that I did not feel altogether comfortable, in view of the errand we were on. The pearls of Willem Corneliszoon Schouten seemed likely to weigh as heavy upon our enterprise as a belt of gold upon a swimming sailor. What if, supposing—

The launch, which seemed to be a swift one, overhauled us rapidly, jumping through the seas with tremendous smother and foam. We could not see who was on board, beyond her steersman.

She ran under our lee and stopped her engine. Out of the little engine-room came a lean, yellowish man in a worn khaki suit—a man I had seen in Friedrich Wilhelmshaven at work in a boat-shed.

"I've got your Malay fellow on board," he shouted in German. "He was very anxious not to miss you, but there's not another launch in the country would have caught you, after such a start. Hallo, you Hendrick, come on out!"

OF course I knew that we had no Malay in our service, and didn't intend having any. Of course Gore knew it too. But we had both been accustomed to walk warily of late, and neither of us contradicted the launch-driver.

"My Malay, have you?" said Gore. "Well, bring him out."

"You don't seem glad to see him, after all the trouble he took to get here in time," observed the engineer. "He paid me not so much, either."

All this time the launch was plunging and dipping fearfully alongside the Cecilie, and the Cecilie, wallowing in the trough of the sea, threatened every now and then to slew round and cut the other down with her shining copper keel. The wind was getting up, too. I noticed that the engineer could scarcely keep his footing on the deck of the launch.

"He had no business to be late," was Gore's reply. "Corbet, have you any silver? I suppose Hendrick has run through all his cash."

"I suppose the beggar has," was my diplomatic reply, the while I wondered who in the wide world Hendrick could possibly be. "Yes, I've a few marks."

"Thirty marks more—that's my fair due; I wouldn't have set the engine going, only he promised his master would pay," declared the man.

I threw him the money, and he stepped from in front of the cabin door.

"Now come out, thou!" he shouted. "He has paid; but if he had not I would have taken thee back. Thou art a rascal who has got into trouble, so I believe."

Out of the little cabin of the launch stepped—not indeed a Malay, but a Malay half-caste: a handsome, slender, nervous-looking lad, with sleek black hair and an olive-brown skin. He had on a wide felt hat that shaded his face. I rather thought, in spite of the hat, that I had met him somewhere before—probably among the islands of Dutch Malaysia, where half- castes are as common as flies in summer.

The Jacob's ladder was swaying about dangerously, but he came up it lightly enough, and sprang down from the bulwark to the deck. His bundle—a wad of clothing tied up in a sack—was slung after him by the launch-driver.

"Good evening, gentlemen," called the latter, evidently mollified by the thirty marks. "A pleasant voyage!"

"Good evening," I replied, feeling as if, for the first time in my life, the motion of a vessel were making me sick, or at least giddy. What did it all mean?

THE half-caste disappeared, and Gore did not seem minded to explain his presence.

"Get her under way at once," he ordered. "The sooner we're clear of all these reefs, the better, at this hour of the evening."

Indeed, the water about the Cecilie was marbled in many places with the beautiful patches of malachite green that all South Sea men dread.

We got her an her course again, not without much howling and stamping about on the part of the crew, and a little hard language on ours. When the pretty little ship was flying once more close up into the wind, with New Guinea fading away on her starboard quarter, Red Bob drew me to him with the lift of a finger.

"This is a nice business, upon my soul," he said, with a graver countenance than I had ever seen him adopt before.

"Who is he?" I asked.

"Don't you know?"

"I've seen him before, I think, but—no, I don't."

"You monumental young ass, it's Frau Richter!"

"Lord Almighty!" I said.

THERE seemed to be nothing else to say. Isola—here—in that disguise! The skies seemed crumbling above me.

"Why, I thought," somehow I found breath to say—"I thought you knew where she was!"

"I did," said Gore. "I didn't want to tell you till we were well away, because I was dead certain you couldn't be kept from going to see her, and giving her away to the amiable people who knew what was good for her better than she did herself—or thought they did. She came up to Friedrich Wilhelmshaven on the Afzelia with us. The stewardess knew her well—used to call at Banda—and she hid her in her own cabin. She meant to get back to Banda and ask some of her mother's old friends to take her in. Seems she couldn't stand Richter at any price, not so much because she thought him unpleasant—he's a man who has some good points, if you know him—but because of a young idiot who had turned her head.

Continued on page 18

Husbands and Wives In the Movies

Why I Like My Job the Best

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Queer Things Turn Up in Their Mail

HERE are two New York women whose ways of making good have been exactly opposite. Mrs. Charles K. Lawrence does only one thing, and does it better than any one else in the world. Miss Serena Coggswell runs what she calls a Wish Shop, where they claim to be able to carry out any wish you can think of; and consequently she never does the same thing twice.

"You can have anything you wish for here," says Miss Coggswell, "from a complete wardrobe to a complete pantry or a complete library; from ideas as to how to get a rest from your children to ideas about novel children's parties; from meeting friends at the train to home-hunting."

The Wish Shop

IN this shop of Miss Coggswell's there are not any shelves of goods. This merchant never has to "take stock" or "close out old stuff." A woman wanted her baby taken from New York to Mexico. They attended to the matter at the Wish Shop. A woman whose position makes it necessary for her to appear frequently on public platforms confided her troubles to the Wish Shop. She had to look well, but she just couldn't stand shopping, or even deciding between two gowns. They took her in hand at the Wish Shop and fitted her out completely. A person came into the shop who had a trunkful of family letters of a good deal of historical interest, but was appalled by the magnitude of the task of sorting them for preservation. Some one from the Wish Shop went down to Washington Square, and the mountain of correspondence melted in a trice.

"Of course, says the Wish-Shop-keeper, "even in this delightful brand-new profession of mine, one has to take the thorns with the roses. The other morning, when I was waiting for the elevator, a woman who was standing beside me looked at my sign and said to her friend very ironically: 'What sort of a business, I wonder, could be run by a person with such a name as Serena!'"

She Restores Tattered Maps

MRS. LAWRENCE'S job is restoring old books, maps, and documents whose owners have given them up for lost. In her tiny office she will show you books hundreds of years old, whose leaves are in tatters and dropping from their bindings, that are brought to her to restore. And restore them she does, yet without sacrificing any of the ear-marks of age.

Maps are often sent to her that are nothing but odds and ends of paper stuck into an envelop.

These are laid out carefully and matched—a work that takes infinite patience; after which the whole is backed with a transparent silk, so that when it is finished the original map is all there, in perfect condition and without a crease or blemish.

After the Paterson (New Jersey) fire a few years ago, Mrs. Lawrence was called upon to restore many of the city records and maps. These were received in a condition that would seem utterly hopeless to any one else. But Mrs. Lawrence restored the whole collection, and her reputation has become international.

How Did He Find Time to Go to This Ball Game?

MUCH has been written of the indomitable energy of the "Wizard of Menlo Park," as Thomas A. Edison is sometimes called. The stories of his furtive sleep snatchings and grueling stretches of labor—self-imposed—have long since lost their novelty; but here's the documentary evidence in the case. Edison's time-card for August, 1912, punched in the time-clock by the great inventor, exactly the same as the card of any ordinary workman in his great West Orange plant, gives a striking idea of his industry.

The initial that you see to the left of each time record indicates the day of the week. Thus, beginning with a Wednesday, Mr. Edison did not come in that morning at all—for he was already in, having worked all night. He left at 8.16 in the morning, and appeared

on deck again a little over six hours later, "punching In" at 2:20—and you will notice that he didn't leave again that day, but did finally allow himself some breathing-space: the following morning at 8:11 again, after a little eighteen-hour spell of toil.

Night after night the inventor worked, until the end of the week's punchings showed a total of 95 hours and 49 minutes. And yet, this week—which makes most of us look like sheer loafers—is not the exception with Mr. Edison. You will also note that the work referred to was done in August—not the coolest month of the year around New York.

It's easy enough to keep tabs on Tom Edison. Oh, dear, yes! Only—somebody snapped the top picture of him keeping score at a ball game that same sultry week.

You Needn't Be Insured to Do This

A SWARM of honey-bees smitten with the wanderlust was captured on top of a building in the heart of Atlanta recently by Ernest F. Deacon, an insurance man, while from the windows of skyscrapers all around curious people watched him at his novel undertaking.

It is suspected that the bees escaped from a hive in one of the suburbs. They were first noticed when they hummed by the windows of office buildings in a black cloud. After buzzing about for more than an hour, they settled on the roof of the Central Club, a two-story structure between two skyscrapers. The bees clustered in a thick mass around a chimney.

It seemed evident that something ought to be done. Regiments of bees are valuable, and when they go off somebody at home worries.

Mr. Deacon—who knows bees and their ways—made his exit to the roof with a packing-box. Scooping up handfuls of bees, he transferred all of them to the interior of the box, which he then muffled with canvas. The job took him nearly an hour. The city-bred watchers in neighboring offices were surprised that Mr. Deacon didn't get stung. When they asked him the reason, he replied:

"Bees never sting while they are swarming—that's all."

A Late Flop by Hicks

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by F. Vaux Wilson

I COULD tell by the worried look in Sadie's eyes as she watches for me to swing off the smokin' car and come down the platform that something was wrong. Besides I usually like to hoof it home from the station; so it ain't often she meets me with the car. Which is why I ask' right off the bat, what's up.

"Sully!" says she. "He—he's been gone since right after breakfast!"

"Huh!" says I. "The young tarrier! Ain't spendin' the day at Dominick's again, is he?"

"No; I've been over there" says she. "They haven't seen him."

"Or at the Baileys'?" says I.

She shakes her head. "Both the Bailey boys are away," says she. "In camp, you know."

"Didn't anybody around the house see him leave?" I goes on.

"It seems not," says Sadie. "Mother Whaley and I were busy with baby sister, and the others say they thought he was playing about the grounds. He's always so starved and eager for his luncheon too; but to-day he—he didn't come at all. I don't know where he can be or what can have happened."

At which Sadie chokes up a bit and gets a firm grip on one of my hands.

"There, there!" says I. "You know what boys are. And Sully's gettin' to be quite a young husk, remember."

"But nine hours!" says Sadie. "He's never been away that long before. And I don't know where to look."

"Pooh!" says I. "Likely he's at home now. Let's go see."

HE wasn't, though, and Mother Whaley the was just on the point of telephonin' the police.

"Ah, stow that!" says I. "Those town flatfoots couldn't find a lost elephant own it stepped on 'em. Let's do our sleuthin'. First off, what was he wearin'?"

"Sure, ain't I tellin' ye no wan saw the darlint go?" wails Mother Whaley. "So how should we—"

"Can't you tell by what's missin'?" says I.

"Of course," says Sadie, and makes a dash for Sully's room. In two minutes she reports: "I don't find his Scout hat and leggings."

"Then he must have 'em on," says I.

"That gives us something to describe. Come on' Sadie; we'll take a jaunt around in the car."

It's a wonder too I didn't have bean enough to follow the hunch closer; for Sully's been wild over this Boy Scout business ever since they got up a comp'ny among the town boys. Course he is 'most too young to join; but we had to buy him off with an imitation outfit,—hat, leggin's, and red cotton handkerchief to drape around his neck,—and he's been wearin' the costume constant.

Still, all I thought of was that he was around the neighborhood somewhere, playin' Scout; so we starts to make a circuit, stoppin' now and then to ask people if they'd seen him. Nobody had. We'd covered some ground too in half an hour, and it was just by accident I'd turned into this Dunkirk Pike.

"But he couldn't have got as far away as this," protests Sadie. "Why keep on?"

"I don't know," says I; "only I thought we'd run up here and then cut through and come back along the Post Road."

We was eight or nine miles from home then, and goin' north at that; so it did seem sort of hopeless. It was near half past six too. I'd come to the cross road, and was just makin' the turn, when I gets a glimpse of something comin' down the pike. On a chance I slows up and waits. Pretty soon we could make out a tall, slim party walkin' along, holdin' a youngster by the hand. A minute more and Sadie sings out gleeful:

"Oh, it's Sully! I'm sure it's Sully!"

She's right; for when the pair comes trudgin' along there's little Sully in his broad-brimmed hat, his face all streaked with dust and sweat, and his feet movin' draggy. Don't take long either for Sadie to gather him in.

"Ah, say!" says Sully, tryin' to wiggle free. "Don't squeeze a feller so tight."

"But, dear," says Sadie, "where have you been? Were you lost?"

"Lost!" echoes Sully disgusted. "Say, ma, I was just takin' a hike, that's all. Wa'n't I, Mister Bob?"

At which the tall, kind of stoop-shouldered stranger who'd been towin' him along chuckles good-natured.

"Rather an ambitious hike too for such short legs," says he. "He was bound for Camp Pemiwassett."

"But that's twenty miles!" gasps Sadie. "We drove up there only the other day. You didn't think you could walk that far, did you, Sully?"

"I guess Chick Bailey did it," says Sully. "I'd done it too, if—if my shoe hadn't hurted."

"Blisters," puts in the stranger. "It was all the fault of the shoe, I assure you. We managed to fix it up with a little absorbent cotton and surgeon's tape. Even then Master Sully didn't want to give up. I fear I persuaded him to turn back. The fact is, we were having such a good time together, that I was rather selfish about it. You have a real boy there, if Sully will pardon the personal remark. Mr. and Mrs. McCabe, I presume? My name is Leavitt."

IT seems they'd run across each other about four o'clock' when the blisters were just gettin' in their fine work, and after some little talk Sully had been induced to ride pigback into the nearest town, where Mr. Leavitt had applied first-aid treatment outside a drug-store. They were strikin' for the Rockhurst trolley when we found 'em.

So that's how we happens to entertain Mr. Bob Leavitt at dinner that night. Kind of a seedy-lookin', middle-aged gent he is, when we get him in a good light. He needs a shave and hair-cut, and his clothes could have stood a trip to the pressin' club. I expect that's why he shies so at comin' home with us; but of course we wouldn't listen to anything else.

A soft-spoken party he is, though, with a quiet, chuckly laugh and mild, deep-set eyes. So it wa'n't long before we'd completely forgotten the chin stubble and the outin' shirt. Didn't have much to say about himself. In a vague sort of way, though, he hints how he'd been laid up for a spell with the collywobbles or something' due to the grub dealt out in the third-class cabin of some steamer that he'd come over on, and that he'd been on a walkin' trip since leavin' the hospital, tryin' to get back in shape.

"It's my great cure-all—walking," says he.

"Mine too'" says I. "Ever tramped much in this section before?"

"No," says he. "I've been in the States very little these last dozen years. I've heard of Rockhurst-on-the-Sound, however. I believe that some one I used to know is living here."

"That so?" says I.

"Morton Hick,'" says he.

"Oh!" says I. "Morton J."

He nods. "We used to go to school together years ago up in Utica," he goes on. "I haven't seen him since; but I—I thought I'd look him up sometime."

"Sure," says I. "He's one of our solid citizens, Hicks. Just moved into his new house. Suppose I run you around there after we've had our coffee?"

Leavitt hesitated a bit. "I don't know as I ought to go—like this'" says he, rub-bin' his hand over his chin doubtful.

"Oh, what's the odds?" says I. "An old schoolmate! He's no silk-stockin', Hicks. Well fixed' I guess, and all that; but no great swell. Course it looks like he meant to cut quite a figure soon, with that near-Moorish mansion of his. Kind of fond of showin' it off, I understand. Come along. I've been meanin' to drop in on him myself some evenin'."

Maybe I shouldn't have urged him;

---

but it seems the decent thing to do, specially since he'd been so good to little Sully. Anyway, I gets him started. I expect I was a little curious to get a line on him. Then too it was up to me to be a little sociable with Hicks. He'd been livin' here two or three years sort of quiet in a rented place, and then all of a sudden he'd branched out and built this big, fancy house."

Fancy may not be just the word, but that's the way it strikes me. Even by moonlight, as we swings in through the high-arched white gateway and up the cement drive, it looms up sort of pompous and showy on the bare top of the hill. But Hicks is a bit that way himself,—one of these chesty, high-shouldered parties that walks heavy on his heels and waggles his head when he talks. Just the kind of a house, come to think of it, you'd expect him to build.

It's more or less a whale of a joint, all white cement, with the walls carried above the roof and cut up odd, like the top of a fort, or the front of a storage warehouse. The entrance is some flossy, bein' through a twenty-foot arch, with the inside all worked out in diff'rent colored tiles, like a movie palace, and illuminated brilliant by a bunch light.

"'Most knocks your eye out, don't it?" says I, pushin' the button.

Leavitt only smiles and gazes around curious while I interviews the grouchy-lookin' butler. First off the prospects of our gettin' any further than the mat didn't look good; but in a minute or so back trots the flunky actin' quite diff'rent. He throws the big door open wide and tows us into the grand reception-room, where Mr. Hicks, in full evenin' regalia, and wearin' a thick black cigar jaunty in one side of his face, is waitin' to greet us.

"Why, hello, Shorty McCabe!" says he.

"About time you were getting around to see us. And you've brought a—er—why—"

The cordial hail is choked off abrupt, and he stands starin' surprised at Leavitt. It's plain he don't quite place him. "I hardly thought you'd remember me," says the boyhood friend. "Bob Leavitt, who used to go to the old Webster Street School when you did; under Jumbo Williams, you know."

"Oh!" says Mr. Hicks. "Slat Leavitt, eh?"

"That's right, Tubby," says Leavitt, beamin' friendly.

But that don't work up a chummy response from Hicks. He's gazin' critical at the outin' shirt, takin' in all the details of the baggy trousers, dusty shoes, and chin stubble.

"Huh!" says he. "How'd you come to find me?"

He don't even offer to shake hands, and Leavitt smiles sort of fussed. So I jumps in and explains how he'd rescued little Sully on the road, and how, when he'd mentioned knowin' a Mr. Hicks that lived here, I'd insisted on bringin' him round. Hicks nods, but don't enthuse.

"Tramping, eh?" he sniffs. "Looks as though you'd done a good deal of it too."

Which struck me as puttin' it kind of raw. But Leavitt don't seem to get peeved. He just shrugs his shoulders careless.

"I have," says he. "I find it a good way to see the country and indulge in fresh air."

"I do my sight-seeing from a touring car or a limousine," says Hicks. "I've got both."

"Have you?" says Leavitt. "Been getting on, haven't you, Tubby?"

"Say, if you don't mind," cuts in Hicks, "just forget that old nickname, will you? I never did like it much."

"Oh, certainly," says Leavitt, smilin' amused.

"Yes, I've been getting on, as you say," Hicks adds, swellin' out his chest. "And you know where I started; not on Genesee Street, like you. Nor I didn't get to any college. I learned how to work, though, and how to make others work for me; which is more'n some can say who used to think I was a joke."

He wags his head cocky after this speech and pats the bulge of his watered-silk evenin' vest approvin'. So our little reunion wa'n't turnin' out such a huge success, after all. Leavitt, though, don't seem disturbed. He glances round at the pink satin chairs and sofas, at the silk rugs on the floor, and at the showy chandelier swung from the high ceilin'.

"No doubt about that," says he. "Let's see, you're in some manufacturing line, aren't you?"

"Drain pipes," says Hicks.

"Really!" says Leavitt. "Why, that's odd!"

Struck me he says it pleasant and inoffensive enough; but Hicks turns on him sharp.

"Yes, drain pipes," he snaps, "just common, ordinary drain pipes—for sewers and such! Nothing high flown about 'em; but this is what they bring in," and he waves a dumpy hand around lordly.

"You sure have got a swell place here," says I, tryin' to switch the line of chat to safe grounds. "I've heard about your dinin'-room decorations too."

That soothes him down sudden. "Come on," says he. "I'll show you through."

HE includes Leavitt with a jerky nod; so we starts off on a grand tour of the house. And when Hicks gets started exhibitin' his new home he does it thorough. We has to inspect everything, from the vacuum cleaner machine in the basement to the oriental garden on the roof. He tells us how many square feet of mural decorations it took for the dinin'-room, and what it cost him to put in them sunken marble tubs in the bath-rooms. I admires tapestry hangin's and Circassian walnut wainscotin' and so on until I'm nearly hoarse sayin' "Great stuff! Bully! Fine dope!" and I'm glad when he leads us back to his Turkish smokin' den on the first floor. By that time Hicks is feelin' so good that he sets out mineral water, Scotch, and cigars.

"So you see what can be got out of drain pipes," he shoots significant at Leavitt. "Now I suppose you've been makin' a fortune writin' poetry?"

Leavitt laughs easy. "You don't mean, Hicks," says he, "that in all this time you haven't forgiven me for those jingles in our school paper?"

"I haven't forgotten, anyway," says Hicks. "'Tubby, or not Tubby, they began. Oh, you had a lot of fun with me then, didn't you? Had all the girls laughing at me. For months after that they'd giggle whenever I came near. One of the smart ones, you were! Well, where has it landed you, eh?" And Hicks looks him over scornful. "Got anything like this," he demands, "to show for your smartness?"

Leavitt shakes his head, eyin' him calm.

"What you been doing, anyway?" asks Hicks.

"Why," says Leavitt, "I specialized in chemistry while at college. I've been following that."

"Chemistry!" snorts Hicks. "Never heard there was much in that."

"It is sometimes useful in the industrial arts," says Leavitt.

"I know," says Hicks. "I've hired chemists out at my plant; paid 'em twenty-five a week. I can get any number for that—women chemists for sixteen and eighteen. Just as good too. Lookin' for a job, are you?"

Leavitt don't even flush up. "Thank you, not just now," says he. "I'm taking a rest. But about this drain-pipe business—how did you get into that?"

"By starting work in a brick yard—wheeling clay," says Hicks. "Did that all one hot summer. Then they put me in charge of the firing. Inside of a year I was foreman. Why? Because I lived on the job, stayed with it day and night. I was saving my pay too. The second year I bought in—a third interest. Two years more and I owned the yard,—Hicks' Bricks. Sold 'em everywhere.

"Then I found there was good money in drain pipe. I got hold of a plant over in Jersey that wasn't being run right. Got it cheap. And I'd run across an old German who knew how to turn out glazed stuff. I got together a gang of good workers,—not a loafer in the lot. I picked out the ones that would work cheap and would stand for a ten-hour day. Of course the unions tried to make trouble; but I put 'em out of business. Wouldn't let 'em dictate to me how to run my business —not a bit! I put on boys at half wages, and got as much out of 'em as if they were men. That's how I could undersell the other firms and land the big orders.

"The plant grew year by year, and I saved my profits. We lived in a little frame house near the works. I was there every morning before the whistle blew. I kept the force on the jump. Oh, I'm letting up a little now; but I've got foremen who can get the work out of 'em,—drivers. They got to be, or I've no use for 'em. They know me. Well, that's how it's done. That's what brings in this sort of thing." And he puffs away at his cigar satisfied.

"Now do you think it's odd," demands Hicks, "my making drain pipes?"

"PERHAPS I should explain why I said that," says Leavitt. "Let me ask, though, what glazing process you are using now?"

"Same one I've always used," says Hicks. "Why?"

"Haven't tried the Von Lieder method?" asks Leavitt.

"Never heard of it," says Hicks.

"It was adopted by most of the big German potteries and tile works five or six years ago," says Leavitt. "You see, I was over there, when the war knocked the bottom out of things, working as a shop chemist and getting the hang of their ways. A firm in Budapest sent me up. I'd been experimenting on my own hook too, and at last I worked out a process which I think is even better than Von Lieder's."

"Huh!" says Hicks.

"Now, just what does it cost you a cubic yard to glaze your pipe?" asks Leavitt.

"Don't know," says Hicks. "Never figured that fine—never had to."

"Well, on a thousand feet of ten-inch pipe—a rough estimate?" insists Leavitt.

Hicks scratches his head and makes an offhand guess. Leavitt takes a pencil and does a little arithmetic on the back of an envelope.

"Using my vacuum retort process," says Leavitt, "I can do better than cut that cost in half."

"I—I don't believe it," says Hicks.

"Neither did the Draco people," says Leavitt, "until I set up my demonstration kiln and proved it. Then they were ready to talk business."

"The Consolidated Drain Pipe Company?" says Hicks, perkin' up a bit;

"Business rivals of yours, aren't they? says Leavitt. "Perhaps you'll be interested then to see the offer they made. I have their letter somewhere. It had just come when I was taken ill. Ah, here it is!"

Hicks he reads it careful, and the deeper into it he gets the more stary-eyed he grows.

"Why, see here, Leavitt!" he gasps. "If—if this is so, then they—they can run me out."

"If they adopt my process," says Leavitt, "they can undersell any firm in the business and still double their profits. I guarantee that. And they offer me two hundred and fifty thousand dollars for it outright."

"BUT you—you won't sell to them, you?" pleads Hicks, the sweat startin from his forehead and his pasty face turnin' blotchy. "Why, they'd break me inside of two months! Any other time might have pulled through; but just now—well, you see, I've been chump enough to try to make a splurge; got all my spare capital tied up in—in this. It was this way: We'd been nobodies all our lives, Millie and me. We thought we wanted something grand for a home. Well, we got it. Fifty thousand cash I've put into this place—and during a dull year too! Honest, I haven't made a dollar in six months. Now things are brightening up. There are big contracts about to be let, and if you tie up with the Draco people, I—why, Leavitt, I'll be a ruined man' Yes, sir, ruined! McCabe, you talk to him. Just think, we're old friends, went to school together, and here you come and—please, Leavitt!"

"I haven't signed up with them yet," says Leavitt; "though I'd about made up my mind to take what I could get. Really, I should have a share in the profits. We might talk that over, say some day this week."

"Why not now, to-night?" urges Hicks, "You haven't got to go anywhere else, have you? And there's our new guest-room suite! Come, I want you to christen it. We'll make you comfortable here. Besides, I couldn't think of letting you go. What would Mrs. Hicks say—an old friend! And those Draco people are strangers—crooks too; take it from me! We'll fix up a deal together. We'll show 'em a few point!"

Leavitt smiles and nods. "Perhaps," says he.

And when I left Hicks was pattin' him brotherly on the back and pushin' another twenty-five-cent-cigar on him.

"Why," says Sadie as I drifts in alone. What have you done with Sully's Mr.Bob?"

"Leavitt?" says I. "Oh, I left him up with Hicks, his dear old chum. I don't know whether he's goin' to be adopted or just taken into the firm."

How Joe Won the Crown Imperial

By SOPHIE KERR

Illustrations by G. E. Wolfe

A BALLET of daffodils rioted from the gate to the door stone, and all about them bloomed a thick mat of purple violets that had long ago forgotten the pleasant meadow wilderness from which they had come. Beyond these, against the fence, was the real distinction of the little front yard,—a double row of thrifty crown imperial, lily-like and stately, with proud aigrets of green above the jeweled scarlet blossoms. Grammaw Neal had watched them dotingly from their first shoot to their flowering, and today, in spite of the April wind and threatening neuralgia, she wrapped a shawl about her head and stood in the opened door to revel in the sight of them.

The click of the gate latch made her look up, and there was Clary Neal, her youngest grandchild, laughing and breathless. She swooped down on her grandmother and gave her a tumultuous hug.

"Oh, me!" she cried. "I got to runnin' down the long hill, an' I just couldn't stop. I got such a stitch in my side! I 'spect I've spilt the cream." She cheerfully explored the basket she carried. "No—it's all right."

"Here, le' me look in that basket!" said her grandmother. "'Pears t' me you're past the age f'r runnin' an' racin' like a Young 'un. 'Tain't seemly nor fittin' in a growed gal. It's time you got married 'n' settled down." She raised her keen old eyes, as blue as Clary's, and looked hard at the girl; but Clary only tossed her head.

"My laws, Grammaw!" she exclaimed. "I do wisht there was somebody that wasn't always goin' on at me about gettin' married. I ain't goin' to got married till I'm good and ready."

"Huh!" sniffed Grammaw Neal. "'N' then, like's not, nobody will want yuh. There hain't two likelier boys in the County than Link Walters 'n' Ed Todd, 'n' if you keep on your dillydallyin' first one an' then t'other, you're goin' to lose 'em both."

"Huh!" sniffed Clary in her turn. "You ain't made mention of Joe Collison."

"No, an' I shain't," said Grammaw. "You know what y'r paw says about the Collisons." She closed the subject definitely. "I be'n standin' out there till my neuraligy's jumpin' like a holler tooth; but 'pears like I cain't disingage my mind from my crown imperial when it's a flowerin'."

Clary turned to look at the flowers.

"It's shorely doin' grand this year," she cried. "Laws! how I do wisht we had a row of it at home!" She eyed the old woman teasingly.

"Hit's the one plant I cain't never make up my mind to give none away of," affirmed Grammaw Neal, unmoved; "not even to my own blood kin. There hain't nobody round here got it, an' they hain't never goin' to git it from me. Crown imperial's too choicy a plant to be in keerless hands."

"Your flowers are shorely sightly," said Clary. "Well, I got to put fer home."

"Land!" mused Grammaw. "She's gone a skitin'. An' hain't she purty? With that slim little body, an' that red an' white skin, an' that kind a sperreted way she holds her head, she's like—she's like—" her eyes wandered to the proud blossoms of the crown imperial, swayed by the wind, but not buffeted, for the high fence protected them—"she's kind a like my crown imperial, blest if she hain't!"

CLARY ran breathlessly into the wind, heedless alike of caution or compliment. Over in the pasture field three awkward young colts were racing, excited as she by the tingling spring weather. They wheeled and kicked and ran down the field abreast with her.

"I'll beat yuh!" Clary called to them, quickening her steps, and, with laughing and running and watching the colts, she did not see a horseman who turned out of the wood road just above and waited, looking on at the play.

"Here, what's all this?" he called as she drew near. "Tryin' to race the colts, are yuh?" He flung himself from his horse and came to meet her.

Clary stopped in her tracks, and the red of her cheeks flamed over her throat and temples. But she was not too much fluttered.

"Funny thing," she said, addressing nobody in particular, "how there's always somebody turnin' up when they ain't expected—ner needed."

They looked at each other, and both burst out laughing.

"Howdy, Miss Neal," said the young man, sweeping off his hat with a great flourish. "I hope I see you well. How's all?"

"Howdy, Mr. Collison," returned Clary with a bow as mocking as his own. "I'm fair to middlin', thank yuh, an' all my folks is well."

"Your paw, now," went on Joe in the same grandiloquent voice, "is he still 'flicted with that onfortnit mislikin' of a worthy young man named Collison?"

"Paw, he air about the same," returned Clary, twinkling. "I cain't notice no let-up in his affliction."

"Unc' Zeb Mather, he 'lows when he was up to the city that time he saw a place fer jest sech afflicted ones," went on Joe gravely. "Hit was called Home for the Oncurables. Guess we'll hey t' send y'r paw up there, Clary."

The laughter left Clary's face and she dropped the game. "Oh, Joe," she exclaimed, "I just wisht we could! It ain't nothin' but setness with Paw. He cain't say nothin' against you that's true."

"HE cain't say nothin' but that the whole tribe o' Collisons is worthless an' drinkin'—an' Paw's the worst of the lot," said Joe bitterly. "But, Clary, I 'low's I c'n just as easy be like Maw's folks as like Paw's. I c'd take good care o' you, Clary. Come," he came close to her and put his arms gently about her, "what say we just up an' run away? Your paw would get over it, wunst hit was done. An', Clary—I'll be good to you—" he swallowed hard.

Clary put her roughened braids against his shoulder and gave a little sob. "I cain't do it, Joe," she said. "I just cain't make up my mind to sneak off that away. Cousin Betty Wingate run off, an' tongues are a waggin' yet about it, an' her maw hain't never got over it. Oh, Paw'll come round in time—he'll just have to! I want to be married in style like the rest of us was, with a big weddin' supper an' a dance an' a big settin' out. Paw's able to give it to me, an' he ought to. He give Sis' Molly an' Sis' Addie each six head o' cattle an' a ridin' horse. It ain't no more'n right f'r him to give me the same. I'm going to put in some pow'ful hard licks on Paw, Joe. I bet I'll bring him round."

"I hope so," said Joe, and swung himself to his horse. "So long, honey." He waved his hand and cantered off.

Clary went home very thoughtfully. All the Neals were set; but Wingate Neal prided himself on his setness, gloried in it, one might say, and made it a matter of constant notice that, having given his say-so in any matter, however serious or however slight, he never changed. Yet, Clary reflected, she had coaxed him into several concessions, proving to him by the falsest of arguments that he had really intended something quite different from what he had said. "Paw's willing to see reason if you give him a chanst to back down without nobody seemin' to notice it," she concluded sagely. But this matter of Joe Collison was different. At home and in public Wingate Neal had made it very clear that Joe Collison was not to shine up to Clary, and he had laid down the law to Clary for the first and only time in her whole petted life. There didn't seem to be any way to escape from a thing stated so plainly as this.

AS Clary came down the hill toward home her father drove out of the gate, stopped the team, and waited for her.

"Where you been?" he asked.

"Grammaw's," stated Clary. "She's got a tech of neuraligy. She's goin' to make molasses cakes, 'n' I took 'er the sour cream."

"Guess I'll drap in 'bout the time they're baked," growled Wingate Neal, a gleam of laughter under his heavy brows.

Clary started up to the house with pretended rage. "There now!" she called back. "I 'lowed to git one er two. But if you're goin' over—"

Wingate Neal threw back his big head and laughed as he drove away. Clary was surely his own child!

Joe, meanwhile, had ridden on slowly down the road Clary had come, and he had just passed the little house where Grammaw Neal dwelt alone when her voice hailed him commandingly:

"Here, you young man, come back here an' help me git this pig out o' my yard! It's that old black pig o' Sim Turner's," pursued Grammaw wrathfully as Joe came up. "He gits in here, an' try as I will I cain't budge him. Shoo there!" and she waved her apron wildly at the fat porker, which, indeed, never budged.

Joe picked up a stick from the side of the road and with a very few blows vanquished the invader.

"I'm glad I happened by," he said cordially. "There, ever'thing looks all hunkydory again. If you'll gimme a hammer, I'll tighten up the button on your gate so's no critter c'n bust it open. No'm, it ain't no trouble—I like to do them little jobs. Maw use to say I wasn't never so happy as when I was tinkerin' on somethin'."

"Who was y'r maw?" asked Grammaw sympathetically, bringing the hammer.

"She was a Ringgold from over to the Corners," spoke Joe briefly.

Grammaw gave him one of her sharp glances. "I reckon you must be Kitty Ringgold's boy, she that married Jeems Aaron Collison, hain't you?"

"Yes'm," said Joe. "That's who I am—Jeems Aaron Collison's son. There's y'r hammer. I reckon that pig won't trouble you again soon of you keep your gate latched."

Grammaw's gratitude overcame her distrust. "I'm shorely obliged to yuh," she said with emphasis. "There hain't many young men would a took all this trouble f'r an old woman."

"You c'n call on me," said Joe, mounting his horse, "any time, just like I was one of the fam'ly." With which audacious speech he cantered away.

"The impidence of 'im!" gasped Grammaw, pleased and excited. "The goodlookin', impident young rascal! I'm 'bleeged t' say I don't blame Clary none f'r liking 'im."

TWICE before the crown imperial faded Joe Collison stopped at Grammaw Neal's little house and offered his service to do whatever she might need. Once she sent him to bring water from the spring. Once she set him to chopping an armful of kindling. Each time she put him through a sharp cross-examination as to his morals and his manners, his tastes and his worldly goods. She had to own to herself that he had a way with him.

Both times they parted in excellent humor with each other; but as Joe rode away after his second call on Grammaw, luck chanced it that Wingate Neal himself drove by and saw him going from his mother's house. In a moment his heady passion was inflamed. He did not speak

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to Joe; but he stopped his team with a vicious jerk before Grammaw's door and entered raging.

"What's that good-fer-nothin' Joe Collison doin' hangin' round yere?" he demanded.

Grammaw looked up from her knitting with something in her eyes that suddenly reminded Wingate Neal of a day nearly forty years before when he had disobeyed his mother about going in swimming. "Is that you, Wingate?" asked Grammaw smoothly, but with steel beneath her voice. "You come in so suddent you most scart me. What was you askin'?"

"I was askin'," said her son a little sheepishly, and in a quieter tone, "what that worthless Joe Collison was hangin' round yere for."

"An' sence when' Wingate," pursued Grammaw, clicking her needles without a pause, "hey you got into the custom of askin' y'r maw who she's associatin' with?"

"Now, Maw," protested Wingate Neal, "you know I didn't mean nothin'. But that young scamp has been hangin' round Clary, against my express word an' say-so, an' I ain't a goin' to hev it. He's one o' that worthless, triflin', no-account Collison tribe,—drinkin', card-playin', hardridin', all of 'em,—an' he shain't marry no daughter of mine!"

"Well, he hain't married her, s' far's I c'n see," returned Grammaw. "'N' you're workin' yourself int' one o' your black spells without no just cause. An', wuss an' more of it, Wingate, you've made yourself free to come into y'r maw's house with uppity words an' brash manners, which you know I don't nowise allow from none of my childern."

Wingate Neal looked at her hopelessly. "I'm sorry, Maw," he began stiffly, "but I was afeerd he was meetin' Clary here—"

"Wingate Neal," fairly snapped his mother, "how dast you to come into your own maw's house and make out that I'd encourage a child of yourn an' my own grandchild to meet her beau here ag'in' her paw's say-so? I got some better idee of what's due to parents from their childern." She drew herself up in offended scorn.

"My Lord, Maw!" apologized the now humble and contrite Wingate. "I didn't mean nothin' like that. Ain't I said I was sorry?"

"Well, let this be the last time you ever use such words to me, Wingate," pursued his mother relentlessly. "I hain't use't to no such behavior from my childern' an' I won't hev it! Now, that bein' settled, we'll say no more about it. How's all over to your house?"

"Fair to middlin'," said her baffled son. "I hope you ain't had no more neuraligy."

"No, I hain't," said Grammaw graciously. "Could y' eat a piece o' 'lection cake, Wingate?"

"Could I!" exclaimed Wingate joyfully. And presently he left, munching his cake like a boy, while his pocket bulged with another great slice.

Grammaw watched him from the window, with a little smile.

"Laws!" she said to her knitting, "'pears like no man don't never grow up! Be firm with 'em, an' give 'em enough sweet stuff to eat, an' yuh can manage them fr'm the cradle to the grave."

IT was unfortunate that Clary was the first person Wingate Neal saw when he got home. He was striding up from the barn after stabling his horses, when he heard her singing in the spring house. She was busy and perfectly happy. Her father's step at the door brought her blue eyes up to him as sweetly as a child's.

"Hayo, Paw!" she said gaily. "Want a drink o' buttermilk?"

Even in anger Wingate Neal softened before her. She had always been his favorite, had Clary, his youngest, the smartest and prettiest girl in the neighborhood. He did not say what he had intended to say.

"No, Da'ter," he began seriously, "I don't want no buttermilk. But I reckon the time has come when you an' me have got to have a complete onderstandin' about Joe Collison."

The color in Clary's cheek fluttered painfully, and her blue eyes widened a little. She set the pitcher of buttermilk aside and came toward the door.

"What about Joe, Paw?" she asked quietly.

"I found out t'day," said Wingate Neal, heating as he thought of it, "that he's been going to see y'r Grammaw, honeyin' around her, I suppose, to get her to take his part ag'in' me. An' I ain't goin' to have it. You mind what I say, Clary, —the day you marry Joe Collison' you ain't no longer a child of mine! I cast yuh off, lock, stock, an' barrel, an' never, so long as I live, dast you set foot in your paw's house—no, not even if your maw was layin' dyin' ! I won't have no put with the Collisons—now or never! An' if you marry him, I'll cut yuh off from my prop'ty, every stick of it! Now I've said my say-so, an' I stand by it. Mind what I tell yuh!"

He turned away and went on up to the house.

Clary watched him hopelessly. "Oh, laws!" she sighed. "Whatever possessed Joe to go an' see Grammaw? He might a known Paw'd find it out and get mad. When I see him again I'm just goin' to give it to 'im good an' hard!" Tears trembled in her eyes.

Her chance to see Joe, and Grammaw too, did not come soon; for Wingate Neal had gone from the spring house straight to the kitchen' where he found his wife presiding over the great weekly baking. Mary Neal was a still-tongued, gentle soul, who held her domineering husband's lightest wish as binding as all the law and the prophets. She followed his impatient nod into the living room and waited his speech.

"Mary," said Neal, "from this time on I want Clary kept close't at home. Let 'er do some extry sewin' 'r somethin'. See to it when she goes over to Grammaw's that you 'r one o' the childern goes with her, an' whenst she goes into town you go along. I'm goin' t' break up this Collison business, wunst an' fer all!"

The children he had referred to were his grandchildren, offspring of his married daughters and sons, one or more of whom wore always visiting in the great, easygoing, bountiful home of their grandfather.

"Mind, now," went on Neal; "I don't want her worked down. Mebbe we might ask Cousin Lisha Wingate's da'ters over f'r a spell, 'n' give a party 'r two. I just want her time taken up so's she won't have no chanst to see nor sca'cely to think about that young rapscallion."

SO—no more chances to run in the wind, no more stolen meetings in the pine woods or back by Indian Rock. Mrs. Neal, like many women of her easy-going type, was an astute manager of people. There were recipes to be tried, clothes to be made, her garden of herbs and flowers to be tended, and she gave over to Clary's care an enormous brood of young turkeys. A very few extra duties, over and above the regular work of the big farmhouse, sufficed to fill in the chinks of Clary's day. And, that she might not be "worked down," her mother filled the house with "young company," and gave a party that included every man and maid for thirty miles—except Joe Collison. There was not the slightest hint of coercion or espionage.

Clary herself did not realize but that all things were as usual, except that somehow—she could not quite understand how—she never had a moment to herself. The spring bloomed into summer, and the summer began to take on the fullness of the harvest, and still Clary did not recognize what had been done. The thought of Joe did not leave her heart, and the steadiness of her love for him did not waver. Every night when she crept between the homespun sheets she would promise herself:

"T'morrow I'm going to plan t' see Joe—" but to-morrow came and inevitably put off the plan another day.

As for Joe, he had his farm, that long neglected mighty tract of the Collisons, and a young farmer in the spring and early summer has precious little time for courting if he means to grow a crop. Besides, Joe was astute. Dimly he had sensed the Neals' intentions, and dimly he felt that it might be better to let the edge be taken off their wariness and care before he attempted to combat them. But it wore cruelly hard on him never to see Clary and to have no assurance that she was not being turned away from him.

ON the night of the Neals' big party he got out his saddlehorse, and, so late that he would not meet any of the guests on the way to the feast, he rode over the hill road and past the gaily lighted house, on down the hill, and as he neared Grammaw Neal's house he saw a light there and caught the shadow of the little old woman as she sat knitting. On a sudden impulse he leaped from his horse, hitched it, and went in.

"Can yuh give me y'r company to the party, Mis' Neal?" he began jokingly.

Grammaw gave a little startled "Hey? Then, "Come right in and set down. It's been a mighty long time sence you drapped in."

"It's been pretty well noised round the neighborhood," said Joe, "that I wasn't welcome to none of the Neals' houses, 'n' so—"

Grammaw looked up at the big, handsome, downcast boy very kindly. "You hain't heerd that I said you wasn't welcome in my house, hev yuh?" she asked.

"Why, no'm," said Joe. "But Clary's paw's talked so brash ever'where—"

"Shuh! Wingate!" said Grammaw. "Wingate hain't got no say about my comp'ny—not hardly! Still," she went on graciously, "I c'n see how you'd feel."

There was a silence.

"Kind a down in the mouth, hain't ye?" asked Grammaw at last.

"Yes'm, I am," brought out Joe, almost in a groan. "It's been three weeks clear sence I laid eyes on Clary, an' that was at meetin' an' I never got no chanst to speak to her. An' it's been nigh to three months sence I've had a word with her. I reckon she's gimme the go-by—an' yet—an' yet—I just cain't believe that. She ain't promised to nobody else, is she?" He regarded Grammaw anxiously.

"Laws, no!" said Grammaw comfortingly. "I'd be the first they'd tell it to, of she was. Clary's no flighty fly-up-the-creek to say yes wunst an' then fergit it."

"I 'lowed," went on Joe, "that her paw an' maw figured to take her mind off me with one distraction after another, when I heard about all that passel of kin visitin' there, an' all the goin' on they're havin'. Well, by cracky, I ain't beat yet! Mis' Neal," very coaxingly, "ain't you got some kind of leadin' words to give me?"

Grammaw considered. True, she had never interfered with the parental discipline of any of her many sons and daughters; but Wingate surely had been trying. Ever since the day when he had up-braided her in her own house he had been very cool and close-mouthed. Grammaw saw, as Joe spoke, why Clary's visits to her had become so rare and were never made alone. A quick flame of resentment kindled in her breast. She began to feel that she might really enjoy checkmating the high-handed Wingate, provided it could be done successfully and without any break in the family. She clicked her needles very fast and looked at Joe reflectively over them.

"Air you a layin' out to be at Bethlehem camp meetin'?" she asked him slow' ly. "Wingate's family's got a tent on the circle, an' they're very urgent that I should go along with 'em—an' I'm goin'."

"I'll be there," declared Joe jubilantly, quick to catch the drift of her intention. "Yes'm, I'll be there stiddy."

"So do," said Grammaw, "so do. An' now," she laid aside her knitting, "what say to a glass of cider an' a piece o' cake. Sence we hain't at the party over to the big house, the' hain't nothin' to prevent our havin' a party of our own."

GRAMMAW NEAL, with a pink flag of excitement flying in her cheek, watched the great rolls of bedding untied

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and the great baskets of provisions unpacked, while the tent was set quickly in order for that first Sunday in camp that always seemed so specially sweet. As soon as she could unearth it, Grammaw pulled out her best bonnet, and tied it on her head with a jerk. She drew Clary away from her work and commanded her to pretty herself at once.

"'Pears like I hain't seen you f'r a coon's age, not to talk to," said she. "Le's you an' me promenade all round the circle before the meetin' begins. Then you c'n settle me down in a good place to hear the preachn' before any of your beaux gets around. An' meanwhile we c'n have a good dish o' discourse." They were safely out of earshot of Clary's mother and father. Grammaw tilted her head up toward Clary's tall and buoyant youthfulness. "Was you expectin' anybody in pertielder to be here?" she asked meaningly.

Clary caught Grammaw's arm and squeezed it rapturously. "Oh, Grammaw," she said, "I been lookin' forward so to camp! You c'n see everybody here!"

Grammaw talked on, her eyes fairly snapping. "Clary," she began, "despite y'r paw's say-so, I'm a good mind to tell ye su'thin'."

Clary waited in respectful silence.

"All I got t' say is this, Clary," went on Grain maw craftily. "Do you marry where your heart leads yuh, an' don't y' let no-body make up y'r mind f'r ye—no, not y'r paw, nor nobody. I figure it this way: The Lord picked out y'r paw f'r ye; but the Lord didn't give y'r paw the right t' pick out y'r husband f'r yuh. The Lord put that in y'r own hands t' do as y'r heart an' y'r judgment inclines yuh. When I married y'r Grammaw my paw an' my maw was both set against it; but they come round—an' if they hadn't I'd never a' regretted marryin' Henry. There, I said my say!"

And she had no chance to say more; for old friends were approaching with greetings and gossip, and the two were swept into the midst of things.

AT last the light on the preacher's stand was lit and people began to group themselves around it. Then, at intervals about the circle, clusters of pine knots on huge wooden trays filled with sand and nailed to high posts were also lit, and shone with smoky radiance through the late August dusk.

"Now," said Grammaw, "find me a place where I c'n lean my back up against a tree, an' I'll settle myself f'r the first preachin'. Then go an' bring y'r paw an' c maw so's they'll set nigh me. An', Clary, ef anything happens, you come straight to me, do you hear?"

Clary paused a moment and gazed at her grandmother in grateful joy. "Yes'm," she said, "I understand, Grammaw. If—anything—happens, I'll come to you first off."

Grammaw sat down and tucked up her black barege skirt so that it did not touch the ground. From her pocket she took her clove apple, her handkerchief, and a peppermint drop. With these aids to comfort near, she waited the appearance of her son and daughter-in-law.

Presently Wingate and his wife arrived, with Clary and a batch of young cousins and grandchildren, just as the first hymn was given out. Mary Neal sat down wearily beside Grammaw. Wingate sat at the other side of his mother, and Grammnaw gave him a look that was full of affectionate malice.

A hymn was given out, and the congregation began joyfully to sing:

A charge to keep I have,
A God to glorify-y,
A never-dying soul to save
And fit it for the sky-y.

SUDDENLY, somewhere back of them, a scuffle arose. One of the board seats was knocked down with a clatter. Threatening voices—rough, angry, outraged—were lifted in anger, and, as those nearest turned to look there was a sudden press around two figures—in the dim light it was impossible to see who they were.

"Somebody drunk, I s'pose," whispered Mrs. Neal. "It's shameful!"

The voices rose louder: "Let 'im alone, I tell yuh"—"Don't you lay your finger on me!"—"Be careful there who you're shovin'!"—"Take 'im out—take 'im out!"—"Git 'im away, somebody!" And, in a thick guttural, "You lemme 'lone!" repeated over and over with the foolish insistence of a drunken man.

Suddenly the crowd swayed, parted, and there, in plain sight of all, was old Jeems Aaron Collison,—dirty, disordered, his face swollen with liquor, his eyes bleary, his hat gone, his clothes torn and miserable. And holding him up, supporting and protecting him, was Joe,—tall and clean and straight, his eyes blazing with anger, but his face white with shame. He spoke to the men about peremptorily.

"I'll git 'im away!" he said. "Let 'im alone!"

One of the young cousins next to Clary, pretty little Pharisee that she was, said indignantly, "I sh'd think Joe Collison'd be ashamed to ever lift his head again amongst decent folks!"

As if the speech had been a physical blow, Clary Neal drew back trembling. Then she jumped to her feet. She turned and, with her face as pale as Joe's own, made her way swiftly through the press and stood at his side.

"I'm goin' to help you with 'im," she said passionately, looking straight into the young man's distressed eyes.

Wingate Neal, livid with rage, leaped to his feet also as he realized Clary's intent; but a sudden shifting of the returning crowd pushed him back and delayed him an instant from following her. In that instant a little figure slipped under his arm and passed him and, by dint of a quick shove here and a bit of dexterous elbow work there, gained quickly to Joe, and Clary and capably seized hold of the wavering Jeems Aaron.

"Here!" said Grammaw Neal to Joe. "Take 'im right out this way! stand back, folks, an' let us git by!"

Thus it was that the astonished assembly of Bethlehem camp meeting partook of sensation far beyond that of any year preceding; for Grammaw Neal and Joe between them piloted the unsteady steps of Jeems Aaron into outer darkness and Clary walked beside, while behind them hastened the certain wrath of Wingate Neal.

They had reached the outskirts of the camp, however, before he caught up with them. Before he could speak Grammaw turned on him like a wasp.

"Don't yuh open your mouth, Wingate Neal!" she commanded. "I've took this matter in hand, an' I'm not to be gain-said. Ef so be you make a fuss an' mortify me an' Clary, I'll discipline yuh proper, that's what I'll do! Here, Joe, put y'r paw in y'r buggy an' let y'r hired man take him home. Now!"

The disgraced form of Jeems Aaron being thus disposed of, the four turned with with one accord for the inevitable reckoning.

CLARY held tight to Joe—cool and determined Joe. Grammaw's bonnet was askew, and she had lost her clove apple—but not her spirit. Wingate Neal, towering and relentless, stretched out a hand that shook with rage.

"Stand away from 'im, Clary!" he said; then, turning to Joe, "You worthless whelp, I warn yuh t' keep out o' my sight, or I'll thrash yuh like I would a dog! You better get away fr'm here, 'r I'Il do it now. As f'r you, Miss, I'll deal with you later!"

Joe's hands clenched and he stepped forward; but Grammaw was before him, addressing her son with awful quietude.

"You, Wingate Neal," she said, "as I'm the maw that bore yuh, I'm plumb ashamed of yuh! Hey yuh lost whut little sense you ever had? You've got nothin' against Joe here but your own setness. He's as stiddy a young chap as there is in the county. He's got more prop'ty than you had whenst you got married. His paw's failin' ain't no more his fault than your ugly disposition is Clary's. Let this here be an end to y'r ill talk an' prideful actions; f'r Clary loves him—an' she's goin' to marry 'im too, by y'r leave 'r not!"

"Then she's no da'ter of mine!" burst out Wingate Neal. "I warned her I'd cast her off, an' cast her off I will, an'—"

"You'll do nothin' of the sort,' replied Grammaw, her bonnet slipping a little more wildly awry as she wagged her head threateningly at Wingate. "I lay this onto you, Wingate, that the Bible tells us; 'Childern, obey y'r parents,' an' then, followin', 'Parents, provoke ye not y'r childern to wrath.' That first commandment is f'r you, Wingate, an' it means that whilst I'm y'r maw you got to obey me; an' that secont commandment is f'r you too, an' it means that you got to quit your pigheadedness, an' leave Clary to do as she sees fit an' proper. Reach out y'r hand here an' shake hands with Joe; f'r I hain't goin' to have no more rookuses in the fam'ly, an' he's goin' to be one of the fam'ly. Don't you try disobeyin' y'r maw, Wingate; f'r I hain't a goin' to have it!"

She faced him with magnificent authority, authority that could not be denied.

THE angry eyes of Wingate Neal fell before his mother's. Her determination had overmatched his obstinacy. Then, as they stood there, tensely waiting, Clary suddenly left Joe's side and flung herself upon her father's breast.

"Oh, Paw," she pleaded, clinging to Jim tenderly, "please—please don't turn against me! I couldn't bear it to have my own paw cast me off—I couldn't bear it!" Her voice was drowned in sobs.

Slowly Wingate Neal's great arm folded itself about his daughter. His angry brow lightened a little. He patted her comfortingly. After all, she was his youngest, his favorite—he could not wholly play the tyrant with her. His heart was traitor to his will. "There, there!" he soothed her in spite of himself. "Don't take on so. Don't cry, Clary—honey. Sh-hh!"

"Well, then, don't speak so ha'sh t' me," sobbed Clary, holding to him closely.

Wingate Neal looked up. He met Grammaw's compelling eyes—he met Joe's eager ones. There was a long, long wait. Then, slowly, very slowly, Wingate Neal's right hand found itself being stretched stiffly and unwillingly to Joe.

"You done a good piece o' work, young man," he said grudgingly, "when you got Grammaw here on your side. I reckon we'll let bygones be bygones."

Joe grasped the proffered hand mightily and a tremor of relief relaxed his stiff young body. "I thanky', Mr. Neal," he said huskily. "I'll never give you no cause to repent it."

"See that you don't," said Wingate Neal sternly; "see that you don't. I'm no friendly party to this arrangement; but if Clary's so bound to have yuh—well, yuh got to behave y'rself, that's all!"

"Shuh, Wingate!" said Grammaw. "Remember you hain't such a great shakes a pattern y'rself. But—there—you've been pretty biddable, all things considered."

Clary caught her father's big hand in hers and laid it against her tear-stained cheek. "He's the best paw in the whole world!" she cried. "Nobody never had such a good paw as mine!"

"That's why y'r so willin' to leave him somebuddy else, I reckon," said Neal. He looked down at her quizzically.

"It's the way o' the world," broke in Grammaw complacently. "Listen here t' me, Clary—I'm goin' to give yuh what I wouldn't give to another livin' soul. I'm a goin' to give yuh a whole row of crown imperial f'r y'r front yard, blest if I hain't! Now straighten y'rself out an' smooth up y'r dress. We're all goin' back t'gether to the meetin'. Wingate, you walk along of me."

Here is the rest of this instalment of

The Girl of the Nutmeg Isle

Continued from page 8

You. Told me—she did—that she never meant to have anything to do with Richter, or with any man. Means to go into a convent and spend the rest of her life expiating her sin—"

"Her what?"

"Sin. Sin of having taken a fancy to a young ass like you, when she'd vowed to love and obey some one else who did not prove lovable or obeyable. There, we've talked enough, with the girl down in the cabin wondering what's going to become of her. Go on and see what's happened, while I take the wheel. There are too many horse-heads about these waters to leave it to the boys."

I did not wait to be told twice. Three steps took me down into the cabin, a small, blue-painted place with a narrow table and two lockers, a swinging tray and swinging lamp, and a strongly pervading smell of cockroachs.

ISOLA sat at the table. She was in a loose cotton gown. Her sack of clothing lay open on the locker-top, and the khaki coat and trousers in which she had come aboard were invisible, whatever she had done with them. I suspected that she had simply flung her dress over them, the moment she found herself alone.

Her hair—her lovely hair!—was cut short round her neck. Her face and hands seemed to have been stained with some brown dye. It had been very well done—I never should have suspected the ruse had I not seen her in her natural ivory fairness. Deprived of the fairness, with her fine falcon-like cast of feature and her black Italian hair and eyes, she made the most convincing half-caste one could imagine. Her slight, active figure, helped by the loose coat she wore, had been (I remembered) boyish in appearance when we saw her in the launch; and the slender hands and feet were not too conspicuous in a youth supposed to be of Malayan blood. On the whole, the disguise was excellent.

Sitting there at the cabin table, in her loose dress, with her big eyes shining out from under the short, heavy hair, she simply looked a half-caste island girl of unusual beauty and refinement—to any one untrained in the true signs of race.

In the unsteady, ill-smelling little cabin, with the wide seas of New Guinea swinging beneath our keel, I stood at the other side of the table and looked at her—the girl I loved who was not for me, yet who—thank God!—was not for any one else either, so it seemed. I could think of nothing else but that, for a moment. Then suddenly it occurred to me that she must be weary, perhaps hungry and thirsty, that she was certainly in some grave trouble, and that I had not yet done anything but stare like the idiot Red Bob had just called me.

"Isola!" I said, taking her hands in mine,—they were chilly, for all the warmth of the evening,—"you must be tired, and famished—and— What has happened? Gore told me— Bo! get some tea, along galley plenty-plenty quick. What's the matter? Why didn't you get away on the Afzelia? Do you know where we are going? It's a terrible place, not fit for—"

"You said," she answered, looking at me with a light of perfect confidence in her beautiful eyes—"you said, 'If you want me, I'll come to you alive or dead.' And I did want you terribly. But I heard that you were dying—and I was afraid to let you know, because you would have tried to come—"

"What awful rot!" I exclaimed. "I had only a touch of fever."

"They said you were very ill," she replied. "So I had to do what I could. When I found out that Herr Richter was not Schultz's friend, but Schultz himself— If you had ever seen a man in that awful cholera collapse you would understand how easily—"

"I have," I interrupted—for Gore had chanced on an adventure or two in Singapore that I have said nothing about. "I have, and I can understand his own mother wouldn't know him, if she only saw him then."

"It came—it came—as a dreadful shock," she said. "For, you see, I did not like him, and I knew—or guessed, at any rate—he had been a cruel enemy to you. He can be cruel! People who knew him on his plantation have told me things. And I realized that I simply couldn't, after all. But I had no money, or hardly any, and no one in Rabaul was on my side; he is very popular there—they say he has 'such fine qualities.' Perhaps he has. It was a fine thing enough to do as he did, when he thought he was dying, just in order to repay my parents—oh, my poor dear Mammie and Dad! But it wasn't a fine thing to hold me to it, whether I liked or not—when I said I had changed my mind—told him I did not care—said I would rather wash clothes or scrub floors for a living. He just laughed and said that no one in that country would give me clothes to wash, and nobody would give me money to get away; and that girls were always silly about marrying older men, but the older men made the best husbands, and for my own sake—oh, I'm too tired to tell it all!"

Her little dark head was drooping back against the bulkhead; she looked worn out.

"You sha'n't speak another word," I said. "You shall have some tea,"—the war-whoop of Bo announced that it was on its way from the galley,—"and you shall go right off to sleep in that little cabin—it's lucky we have one. And tomorrow, when you are quite rested, you can tell me anything you like."

RED BOB was still steering when I came up, his eyes set on a distant island.

"Well?" he said, shifting a spoke in his lean brown hands.

I told him all that Isola had said.

"H'm!" was his comment. "More behind, of course. Richter must have found out and come after her. You remember they said there was a launch just in from Rabaul. Clever little hussy that she is! Never saw a better disguise in my life, and I've seen some. Yes—some."

He stood with the spokes in his hands, looking a long way out across the sea—farther, I thought, than eye could carry him; back into strange happenings and places of which I had never known anything.

"Well," he said presently, "it's an awkward position."

"Not a bit," I contradicted. "There's that small cabin; we can shift our things out of it in two minutes, and sleep on the lockers."

"That wasn't what I meant. You can surely understand that the trip we've started on isn't likely to be a picnic for ladies."

"If you send her back," I said, "you send me too. I—I won't desert her—if I were to be hanged for it."

"No one wants you to desert her, young fire-eater," answered Gore. "The only question is, whether we shouldn't give up our own trip, and run her down to Brisbane, or back to Banda, or something of that kind. There are objections to that, however.

"Let her have her night's rest, and then we'll hold a council of war."

So it was settled. I found Isola asleep on the locker cushions when I went back to the cabin—evidently worn out with trouble and fatigue. I took care not to wake her in shifting my things and Gore's out of the small inner cabin. When it was ready—a poor little place it was, with a narrow bunk, and a washstand, and just enough floor-space, besides, to stand up on—I placed her bundle on the rack, went back into the cabin' and lifted her up very gently indeed from the locker.

She was so tired that she never waked as I carried her into the cabin and placed her on the bed. There I left her sleeping the naïve, innocent sleep of a child. After all, she was but nineteen, and young for that—too young, by far, for all the trouble that had fallen on her head.

Next morning she was up and about as early as we were, and when Bo brought in the breakfast, with his usual shout, she was ready to pour out the tea, and serve the tinned meat, hot and glutinous on its iron plate. She looked very bright and fresh, and as happy as a child on a picnic.

WE were clear of reefs for the present, so one of the boys took the wheel while Gore and I came down to breakfast. Nothing was talked of but the weather and the ship while we were eating; but when the table had been cleared, Red Bob, with the courtly manner that he used toward women, handed Isola to the most comfortable seat, and asked her permission to smoke.

"We'll have some talking to do," he said, "and I can talk better with a cigar. Now, we want to know just what's happened. When I last heard of you, the stewardess had you pretty close. What let the cat out of the bag?"

"Just an accident," said Isola regretfully. "But for that, I'd have been into Dutch territory by this time. The Afzelia lay at the wharf all day, and the heat in that small cabin was fearful. I couldn't stand it when the night came, so I got into some clothes belonging to a Malay steward, and darkened my face and hands, and went for a walk ashore."

"Where did you go?" asked Gore, narrowing his eyes as he looked at her.

Isola, for no reason that I could see, turned slowly pink.

"Not very far," she said.

"As far as the hotel?"

"Not much farther."

"Oh!" said Red Bob, watching the pinkness spread. "Well, go on."

"When I was coming back," she said, "I saw him."

"Richter?"

"Yes. I saw him walking about in the shadow, up and down, looking at the boat and the wharf. I was so frightened that I didn't dare to go near her. You see, they were taking on cargo, and there were big lamps, acetylene or something very bright, and no one could come or go without being seen. He must have found out or guessed somehow, and followed in that big launch that came in two days after us; and he was looking for me. And the look of his face terrified me so that I ran away in among the palms, and stayed there all night. But in the morning, when I came back, the ship was gone. So there I was, left, and I had hardly any money, and I didn't dare let myself be seen. But I meant to wait, and to come to you for help. Then I heard people talking, and—oh! they said you had sailed that afternoon. And then a file of native police came down the road. Something—I don't know what—made me hide from them in a clump of bushes. They passed quite near, and I heard them saying to each other in pidgin-English that they would soon find the 'one-fellow Mary belong Master,' and they would 'catchem fast for Master.' When I heard that I felt sick. I waited till they were gone, and then took all the money I had left, and ran to the place where I knew that launch was, and bargained with the man. I had only twenty marks left, and he wanted fifty, so I told him my master would pay him the rest. And—and that's all."

"About enough," said Red Bob, taking his cigar out of his mouth, and looking at it as if it were somehow at fault. "You did the right thing. We'll stand by you, never fear."

"If you will let me be your cook," said Isola timidly. "I can cook quite well—and wash and mend your clothes. I only want to keep out of his way till I find some way of living. It's having none that makes me so helpless."

"Cook!" I said indignantly. "Cook and wash! I should like to see you doing it—or my letting you!"

"Keep your hair on, young Corbet," said Gore. "If Frau Richter, as I suppose we must call her, wants to cook, and mend and so on, by all means let her. People are happier employed."

"Thank you," said Isola, with a glance that made me angry with Gore for having earned it.

Of course, he was in the right. I saw that as soon as I took time to think. She would be a hundred times more contented if she were allowed to do something—or fancy she was doing something—for us.

"Well," said Gore, fixing his passionless blue cat-eyes on Isola and on me, "it seems that the best thing we can do is to go on—for the present, at any rate. No one is looking for a Malay lad; they're looking for a white girl. By and by they'll give her up, and then we can come back with you, and get you aboard the Banda boat."

"Thank you, more than I can say," said the girl in a low voice. "Both of you—you are very good. I—I am going into a convent when I get to any place where I can. I'm not a Catholic—mother was Church of England; but there are Protestant convents too."

"I hope you'll never do anything so horrible!" I cried indignantly; but I do not think she heard me, for she had left the cabin.

"There are worse things," said Gore, inspecting the ash on the end of his cigar as closely as if he were estimating its ratio to the volume of smoke.

"I can't imagine anything worse than mewing yourself up for life like that!"

"Have you ever," said Gore, "heard of that part of the Pacific where they all have the D.S.O.?"

"Distinguished Service Order? No."

"That sort of D.S.O. isn't the Distinguished Service Order. It's the Done-Something-or-Other. There are groups of islands where every white man has it. I've seen 'em. Places where all the whites are sort of runaways. Men—and women. They don't—on the whole—seem to find it an enjoyable life."

I WANTED to speak, but my lips found no words. With his uncanny power of divination, he had seen the vision of the coral island in the far South Seas that had flashed across my brain—the beautiful girl, tied only by a fiction of the law to another man, who was to be the angel of the dream—

Well, since we had been running all the previous day through islands that were like a foretaste of Paradise on earth,—islands steeped to the shores in romance and loneliness,—the guess was not such a very difficult one.

"Another thing," went on the cold voice beside me. "If you are going to carry off any one's wife—even your own—to the ends of the earth, you can't do it for nothing. Elopements are not a cheap form of amusement. They cost about one and a half times as much as getting married, if you do it economically. If you do the thing in any sort of style, it's more than three times as expensive. And the income, afterward, doesn't go near so far as a married man's income. You need, much more, to live at the same rates. Somehow, the lady you elope with never is what they used to call a 'notable woman about a house."

"I never heard such beastly cold-blooded—" I began.

Gore looked at me with a half-smile.

"Facts are cold-blooded things," he said. "What about taking your trick at the wheel?"

I took it, and while I was steering the little schooner—an easy job enough this morning—my thoughts had leisure to roam beyond the deck and the wheel-spokes. Where were we sailing? Whet was to be the end? I thought and thought, till I let the Cecilie come up so far into the wind that I nearly put her into irons—but I saw no clear path ahead.

To be continued next week

She Started on $38

SEVEN years ago, Alice Foote MacDougall faced the necessity of earning her own living, and that of her small children. Her capital was a level head, determination to give a square deal, ambition, and thirty-eight dollars in United States currency. Her husband had been a coffee broker; and, although during his illness the business had fallen off badly, his wife determined to carry it on herself.

Learning the Business

SHE decided that the first thing to do was to determine the best blends of coffee, and to discover what kinds of the raw material made the best blends.

Blending and tasting coffee is something more than a knowledge of where coffee is grown. The coffee expert must possess an exceedingly delicate palate to enable him to determine just how much more of this bean or that will create the brew that the individual customer wants.

The three small trays seen in the picture contain samples of the green bean, which are judged by their color, size, and general character. The samples are roasted and ground, after which comes the delicate task of blending.

Freshly ground beans are weighed with apothecary's scales, and an equal amount of each is put into separate cups. Cold water is brought to the boiling point, and an exact and equal amount is poured into each cup. It is then left to cool, ad when it is at blood temperature the tasting takes place; for to get the coffee flavor the coffee should not be as much warmer than the month.

Two other factors enter into Mrs. MacDougall's success: the speed with which she fills orders and the cleanliness of her shipping-rooms.

Every morning she receives her day's supply, freshly roasted. Then each order is specially ground, and by twelve o'clock every order that has come in up to that time is packed and shipped. By packing in parchment triple-lined bags, Mrs. MacDougall sends coffee to any part of the country without its losing strength.

From Mrs. MacDougall's capital of thirty-eight dollars seven years ago, she last did a business of $30,000.

A Bungalow on Top of a Skyscraper

THERE has recently been built in New York probably the most unique little dwelling house to be found in this country.

A well known firm, in building its splendid new office building, had a brilliant inspiration, and decided to make use of the roof—to make of it something more attractive than the dreary tin-covered wilderness, surrounding a water-tank, which is the crowning finish of the average building in New York.

And so, upon the roof of this twenty-one-story skyscraper, it has built at once end—a bungalow! Yes, actually; here in the center of the city is to found that transplanted flower, a genuine country cottage. The roof is surrounded by a wall five feet high, and is paved with red tiles, and the cottage is one story high, and contains an entrance-hall, an living room, a good-sized kitchen, a bath-room, and two bedrooms.

The fortunate dwellers in this bungalow are Mr. and Mrs. Donald Brian.

The living-room is about twenty feet long and thirteen feet wide. Its walls are covered with black and white striped paper; the furniture is of wicker, painted in black enamel; and the carpet is woven into

black and white squares, like the mosaic of a marble tiled floor. Striking across the somber effect of this black and while decoration is a blaze of color from the curtains, slip-covers, and cushions, which are covered with a magnificent shade of orange corduroy.

Plenty of Sunshine

FROM the living-room, a short hallway leads the two bedrooms and the bath-room, all of which open directly upon the roof, and are flooded with sunshine.

The roof itself has been made into a delightful playground, and the illusion of the country is increased by the great awning overhead, which is lined with green, and by the many flower-boxes, easy-chairs, and rugs.

The roar of New York at this height fades into a distant murmur; the fresh winds, free of all dust, come and go; the glorious sunshine is unimpeded; and at one's feet stretches one of the marvelous views of the world—Manhattan Island. The East River and the Hudson lie sparkling and blue, seemingly only a block or two away.

One can imagine New York becoming a modern city of hanging gardens, eclipsing in beauty the wonders of old Babylon.