Do Women Think Too Much About Their Looks?

MOST of the histories are written by old men with big rimmed glasses and warts on their cheeks. Their books are very dull.

I wish that a beautiful woman would write a history of the world.

Instead of making useless speeches, why doesn't some anti-suffragist write such a book?

A book that would show how much the beauty of woman has had to do with changing the course of the world.

You remember the story of Paris and Helen?

All the gods and goddesses were invited to some party—except one. That one bad-tempered goddess who had been omitted decided to break up the party; so she hurled a golden apple into the midst marked "For the Most Beautiful."

Immediately there was trouble. Venus, Juno, and Minerva all claimed the apple. The male gods wisely refused to decide. But a mortal was found—a young chap named Paris—who dared rush in where the wise gods feared to tread.

To him the goddesses came and each pleaded her cause. "Decide for me," said Juno, "and you shall have all the wealth your heart can desire."

"Decide for me," said Minerva, "and wisdom shall be yours."

But Venus, speaking last, said: "I will give you the most beautiful woman in the world for your wife."

And Paris did not hesitate. Few men would. So Paris won Helen as his reward: and brought on the Trojan War.

Julius Cœsar and Mark Antony fill many more pages of history than Cleopatra.

Yet how much of Cœsar's thought and Antony's centered around Cleopatra? For how much of the history that they made was she really responsible?

When things looked blackest for France, when the English were everywhere victorious, suddenly a beautiful girl appeared, put herself at the head of the French troops, and led them on to victory.

Joan of Arc was undoubtedly intelligent: probably she could make a good speech, and would have made a good voter at the primaries. But I notice also that all her pictures represent her as being very beautiful. Thousands of men followed her gladly, even to death.

There is a legend about Napoleon and the beautiful Louise of Prussia.

When, after his victories, he had ordered the Prussian army completely disbanded, she appeared before him, and with her beauty pleaded for her native land.

The story has it that Napoleon finally consented to allow Prussia 10,000 men under arms. Whereupon the beautiful Queen and her statesmen marshaled in 10,000 men, drilled them and discharged them, and marshaled in 10,000 more. So the whole nation was welded into an army, 10,000 men at a time.

The brains of Frederick the Great and of Bismark and von Moltke get all the credit for modern Prussia: how much credit is due the loveliness of Louise?

In these days of feminism (whatever that is) and suffrage and all the rest, there is a tendency to disparage the woman who still regards it as an important duty to the world to be as beautiful as she can.

I raise a long old-fashioned voice in praise of that good-looking woman.

More rings for her fingers and pearls for her neck, more pretty gowns for her, and powder for her nose, if she wants it.

Her name may not flare upon the front pages of the newspapers: it may never get into the dull history books.

But some day the real true history of the world will be written.

And, when it is, it will be found to be largely a story, not of loud talking—but of beautiful women.

Bruce Barton, Editor

Take Your Pickford

The Fire of Youth

By GEORGE WESTON

Illustrations by Robert Robinson

MADAM, do you remember the day when you first did up your hair and put on long dresses? Do you recall the dreams you had of what you were going to do with your love and your life?

And you, dear sir, do you remember the day when you faced the world to seek your fortune? Do you recollect the visions of greatness that glowed in the flame of your youth?

Perhaps you thought those dreams were yours and yours alone, but they are the heritage of mankind. William Roscoe Adams dreamed them, for instance, when he was twenty; and so did Mabel, his wife. And I am going to tell you what happened to William Roscoe Adams and Mabel when they reached the age of fifty.

If you have ever been in Stockton you probably saw the substantial-looking grocery store that used to stand between the harness-maker's and the First National Bank. Over the window was the sign, "William R. Adams," and on the awning the legend, "Select and Fancy Groceries."

In the corner of the store was a desk; and standing behind this desk at the moment when my story opens, working on a huge ledger, was William Roscoe Adams, the proprietor—who was fat, who was fifty, and (I may as well tell you right away) was a sad-eyed failure as well. Mr. Adams turned the leaves of that confounded ledger and made notes on bits of paper and chewed his pen and rubbed his head with desperation.

"Guess I might as well go home," he said, looking up at the clock—"though, Lord knows, I haven't any appetite."

FIVE minutes later, old Bill entered a striking residence on Willow Street. It had a porte cochère like a palace, a tower like a castle, and overhanging eaves like a Swiss châlet. There had been a time when Bill boasted that he owned the handsomest house in Stockton—that was the year when he ran for Mayor. But on the night when my story opens he let himself in the side door without any vaunting.

"Why, hello, Will!" said his wife, who was frying potatoes. "Late to-night; aren't you?"

"Yes; I stayed to look over the books." Whereupon old Bill heaved a sigh. "I don't know what we're going to do, Mabel," he said. "And it's all my fault."

"Oh, you'll pull through somehow," Mabel assured him. "You always have before."

"Yes—but not this time! I've always had the bank back of me before. I was in there nearly an hour this afternoon talking to old Pennypacker, but he won't lend me another cent—and that note of two thousand dollars due to-morrow—and less than three hundred dollars to meet it with. I don't know how you feel about it, Mabel, but I wish I was dead and out on the road. If something would only happen to me and take me off, you'd have my insurance money, anyhow—"

"Well, gracious sakes, Will!" said his [?] ded little wife, "suppose you can't meet your note! They won't put you in jail for it, will they?"

"No; but they'll close the store—sell everything up—fixtures and all—"

"And good riddance, too! It's been nothing but worry, worry, worry for the past three years!"

"Yes, I know," despaired old Bill. "But what am I going to do when the store's gone? I tell you, Mabel, it's no joke to take a man of my age and throw him out in the world and tell him to do something else. I'm too old."

"Too old!" scoffed Mabel. "Why, William Adams! You're only two years older than I am, and I'm sure I don't feel old. Mr. Pennypacker would give you a position in the bank if you asked him, keeping books or something—"

"No opening there, Mabel," said old Bill, sadly shaking his head. "I know Pennypacker. He's never really forgiven me for the time I took the nomination away from him."

"Well, then, some of the other grocery stores—"

"No," said old Bill. "I'm too old; and, to tell you the truth, Mabel, I'm too fat. The stores want spry young men. I know; I haven't been hiring men all my life for nothing."

"Yes, Will; but listen," persisted Mabel. "Suppose you were twenty-one and were beginning all over again. You'd probably start in business for yourself, just the same as you did before; wouldn't you? Well, then! Why can't you do it now?"

"Why, I don't know," said old Bill thoughtfully. "It's different, somehow, when you're young. You're all on fire to do something then—and have bigger ideas. Remember how I was going to own a chain of grocery stores all over the country? Remember how you were going to ride in your own carriage, and go to Europe every summer in our own private yacht, the Maybelle? Why, even when we built this house, didn't we have a day nursery, and a night nursery, and three servants' rooms finished off in the attic? That's the sort of thing you do when you're young; somehow you never dream of doing things like that when you get old."

"Of course when you're young you can hustle more. But when you're older you have more sense. Now, take our Willy. He hustles around just like you did when you were his age. I wonder if— Say, pa!"

Old Bill looked up in wonder at the eager note in her voice.

"Why can't you and Willy form a sort of partnership?" she breathlessly asked. "He won't be able to go to college if you lose your business, and he's just such a hustler as you were at his age!"

"Yes; but what does he know?" scoffed old Bill.

"What did you know when you were his age?" retorted Mabel. "And, anyhow, you would supply the sense and experience, and he'd supply the—the bounce—the imagination—the fire of youth, I guess you can call it."

"I suppose I could talk to him," said old Bill doubtfully. "Where is he? Out as usual?"

"No; he's up in his room, reading. I'll call him now; supper's ready."

So half a minute later down the stairs came bouncing Master William R. Adams, Jr.

"'Lo, dad!" he cried, drawing a chair to the table with a noise like the collapse of a grand-stand.

Shock head, steel spectacles, and a sun-browned nose—that would have been your first idea of young Bill. Your second observation would have taken in the nervous energy that kept him fidgeting in his chair as if he were afraid of being glued fast. And your final impression would have told you that Master William Roscoe Adams, Jr. (Stockton High School, 1915) looked upon the world with a condescending eye and saw great room for improvement.

"Willy," said his mother, "your father's got something to tell you."

"Yes, dad?"

"Well, William, my boy, old Pennypacker at the bank has turned against me, as I was afraid he would, and I shall have to close up the store. Every cent we've got is in that business, Will; and when the business goes—why, then the money goes too, of course."

Master William buttered another slice of bread and inquired cheerfully: "What are you going to do now, dad?"

"That's just it," said his mother eagerly. "Of course, your father's getting on in years, Willy. You must remember he's been battling with the world ever since he was younger than you are. But I've been telling him that you and he ought to be able to start in something—and, what with your young heart and his wise head, I'm sure I don't see why you shouldn't get along."

"Why, sure!" said young Bill. "It's easy enough to make money. All you've got to do is to think out a good scheme, and then work like the dickens on it."

"Is that so?" queried old Bill. "Well, what particular scheme have you in mind right now?"

"Oh, I don't know," said William carelessly. "But I guess it wouldn't take me long to think out a few."

"Well, I'll tell you what to do, Willy," said old Bill, looking very wise. "You think up a scheme a day—something you and I could handle. Remember: we'll have to start without capital and without a store—in fact, with nothing but our two selves and the blue sky. And it's going to take some thinking."

THE next day young William spent his time between his room and the public library, except that once he paid a long call upon a local painter and decorator.

"Well, now, folks," he briskly began, as soon as the supper things were cleared off, "I've got the greatest scheme ever, Dad, do you know how many houses there are in the United States, to say nothing of barns and other out-buildings?"

Old Bill shook his head.

"Well, I'll tell you. There are fifteen million houses in the United States. Now! What do all those houses need every five years? What does this house need right now—in the very worst way?"

"A coat of paint?" timidly suggested his mother.

"Yes, sir!" cried Bill, Jr. "You've said it! Fifteen million houses in the United States, and every one will need painting before 1921. That's three million houses that need painting every year. Well, now, here's the scheme. We'll call ourselves the Coöperative Painting Association, and charge our members twenty-five cents a week. Every five years we'll paint their houses without further charge. Horsefield, the painter, says he can make a first-class job of the average house for $50. See the point? By collecting a quarter a week for five years, we take in $65; but when we paint the house we only spend $50. That's $15 profit to us, or $3 a year on each house. Fifteen million houses in the United States—figure it out for yourself! We'd soon have our own paint factories and— What's the matter, dad? What are you shaking your head that way for?"

"Nothing doing, my boy; nothing doing," said old Bill. "No, sir."

---

"Why not?" warmly demanded Master William.

"Well, take this house. You say it needs painting right away. Then suppose you come to me, a stranger, and propose to paint my house at the end of five years. Nothing doing. I can't wait. Or suppose this was a little house, and I knew I could get it painted for $35—do you suppose I'd pay you $65 to do it? Not if I know myself! But listen to this, William. If I had a big house and knew it would cost $100 for any one to paint it, and if I could wait five years, why then maybe I'd join to get it done for $65. But if I did you'd lose money on it! No, Willy. You'll have to try again. Scheme Number One's no good!"

"I think it's worth trying, myself," said William; "but I don't care, if you don't. I'll have another scheme ready to-morrow night. Guess I'll go out for a while."

"WELL, dad," he began the second night, "I've got a dandy this time. It took me all day to think it out, but it certainly is a peach!"

It had been a bad day for old Bill at the store, his note having been protested that afternoon, with a notary making a formal demand upon him, while the two clerks gaped over the counter.

"Now, what do you say to this?" cried young William. "We'll organize an Automobile Loan Association, like the Building Loan Association. Say we get 250 members here in Stockton, each paying a dollar a week. We'll have a drawing every two weeks, and the one who draws the lucky number has the car. Think of the advertising when the first few fellows get their machines!"

"No good, my boy; no good," interrupted old Bill. "Lotteries are against the law."

"Yes, but the Building Loan Associations—"

"Yes, I know. But they're different. They're under control of the banking department—altogether a different case. No, Willy. Let me tell you something.

You must think of something practical—no more of these fantastic affairs. You want to get hold of some good, sound, old-fashioned idea—some sort of a business that appeals to everybody and that you and I could handle by ourselves."

Master William puckered his lips and whistled at that.

"It's easier to knock 'em than it is to think 'em," he said. "But never mind; I'm going to keep it up. Guess I might as well go out awhile; I sha'n't be late."

"That's three times this week he's been out," said his mother, coming away from the back window, where she had been watching him cross the brook that ran through the meadow behind the house.

"Yes," sighed old Bill; "it's hard to keep them in when they get that age. I know my folks never could— Great Scott! What's that?"

The back door had burst open, and Master William rushed in, shock-headed, snapping his fingers, dynamic with youth and incoherent with breathlessness.

"I have it!" he gasped. "We'll build a dam—flood the big meadow—sell ice next summer! That big barn of ours will make a peach of an ice-house, and we'll have everything our own way. The nearest ice-house now is at Spring Lake—nearly five miles. That's what makes ice so dear here. We could keep three or four wagons going all next summer, and simply coin money. Yes, sir! Simply coin it!"

"Wait a bit," said old Bill with a cautionary gesture. "How about this dam you speak of? Won't that cost a lot of money?"

"No, sir!" cried young William. "Our big meadow has a clay bottom, and you and I can do the work ourselves with a wheel-barrow. All we've got to do is to wheel a lot of clay and stones and fill in the gully down by the maple tree. That'll raise the brook six feet and flood the meadow three or four feet all over!"

"But wouldn't we need a regular ice-house?"

"No, sir!" cried William. "Our barn is better than the average ice-house; and if we take out the stanchions and stalls and the haymow floor, we could store a thousand tons in there—easy!"

Old Bill rubbed his head. "But isn't it a big job to harvest ice?" he asked.

"No, sir!" cried William again. "I've watched 'em every year when I've been skating over at Spring Lake. Why, our fellows used to help, just for the fun of it. It's just as easy!"

"Yes, yes!" said old Bill. "But where are we going to get the teams from?"

"From Hoffman's coal-yard! They have to keep eight teams for their fall and winter business, and they never work more than two or three in the summer. They'd be glad to hire them out to us."

OLD Bill said nothing for a few minutes, but the longer he sat quiet, the louder he breathed.

"The boy's hit it at last!" he thought. "There's a lot of money in the ice business, for see what the Riley boys have done in Jewett City, and Jewett City isn't as big as Stockton. And, oh, what a chance to show old Pennypacker whether I'm a dead one!"

"Well, dad, what do you think?" cried William.

"We'll call it the Stockton Ice Company," said old Bill, rising ponderously to his feet. "Is the moon out to-night? Then let's go down and have a look at the meadow. Come on, ma! The only times I ever went wrong were when I didn't follow your advice!"

And so they walked around the meadow in the moonlight—young William in the center, glowing with the fire of youth and warming the older hearts that beat on either side of him.

That night, for the first time in months, old Bill slept soundly, and the next morning he and young Will were down in the meadow, wheeling stones and shoveling clay, before the clock struck six. As they worked they talked.

"I'm through with the store," old Bill said. "I might just as well close to-day as the day after Christmas, and we've got to get this done before the frost sets in. I'll run over about seven o'clock and get the keys from the boy."

BY the middle of November old Bill had a healthy color; and the day before Thanksgiving, when the dam was finally completed, he did a thing he hadn't done since the year of the Buffalo Exposition: he danced Mabel around the kitchen table and gave her a kiss that made her cheeks look as if they had never been faded at all.

The next week the store and fixtures were sold at a sheriff's sale; and after the debts were paid old Bill found himself with $36.28 as the result of his life's labor. The following day he went to Jewett City and borrowed $240 on his life insurance policy, which was every cent he could get. Having thus realized on his past and discounted his future, he added up the assets, and found he had a total of $276.28 with which to keep the pot boiling till the ice began to pay.

"We ought to set aside $100 to pay for extra help in harvesting the ice," said young William. "Sometimes you have to do it all in a few days; and if you aren't careful it begins to thaw and you lose everything."

"That leaves $176.28," thoughtfully reported old Bill.

"Yes; and we'll need some of that for lumber. We ought to have at least one chute down into the water."

"Then suppose we lay aside the $76 for lumber. That leaves just a hundred dollars to keep us for the next six months. We never can do it! We never can do it in this world!"

Young Will gave his mother an appealing look, and immediately she cried: "Oh, but we can! We've got clothes enough, and no rent to pay, and if you two aren't fussy about what you eat, I'm sure I can keep things going somehow on four dollars a week."

Whereupon, springing up from his chair, young William kissed his mother, and old Bill followed suit.

Next morning young Will and his father started work on the barn, taking down the stanchions and the haymow floor. It froze steadily all that week, and it wasn't long before old Bill was taking venturesome little trips out on the ice, armed with a shingling hatchet and a two-foot rule.

"Four inches!" he reported one noon, and then: "Five inches!"—"Six inches!—"Seven and a half inches! Don't you think we ought to start cutting her pretty soon, Will?"

But young William, shock-headed, spectacled, went hustling on with his work in the barn.

"We'll wait till she gets to ten, dad," he said. "It'll only be a day or two now."'

ON the following Sunday morning old Bill was up before daylight.

"Ten inches, Will!" he announced, knocking on his son's bedroom door. "I've got the saws ready, and ma's making the coffee!"

So, as soon as breakfast was over, young Will marked a double row of squares on the ice, and before you could say "Jack Robinson," the two saws were going "Whish—whish—whish."

If you could have seen old Bill's expression when the cakes of ice began to slide in the barn!

That evening young Will went out and engaged half a dozen huskies. These were kept working till the hundred dollars was gone, and then young Will and his father kept at it by themselves. And Mrs. Adams helped them pack it in the barn, and brought them coffee, and declared she had never seen such beautiful ice in all her life, and otherwise cheered her men to greater and greater exertions.

The spring thaw started on Lincoln's Birthday that year, and the first hot wave struck town the week before Decoration Day. Setting down the leading events of that summer month by month, so far as they concerned the Adams family, the report reads as follows:

May. Two converted coal-wagons appeared on the streets of Stockton, cleaned, scrubbed, painted yellow, covered with tarpaulin, and each one bearing the cardboard legend: "Stockton Ice Company." Mr. and Mrs. Adams began to arrange a surprise for young William; and young William began to arrange a surprise for Mr. and Mrs. Adams.

June. Three additional wagons joined the Stockton Ice Company's fleet. Each driver carried a cloth over his shoulder, and after filling a housewife's refrigerator, each driver endeared himself to the aforesaid housewife by bending his manly back and wiping up the messy spots that dripped on the kitchen floor. This was a flower of young William's fancy—and a flower that bore good fruit.

July. Mrs. Adams went to church in a new silk dress, new silk stockings, and a hat covered with silk violets. On her right walked old Bill, keeping a proud eye peeled for Mr. Pennypacker of the First National Bank; and on her left walked young Will, a far-away look upon his sunburnt face and his hands full of callouses. Mr. and Mrs. Adams went on perfecting their surprise, and Master William went on perfecting his. Another converted coal-wagon was added to the fleet. And (the result of young Will's far-away look that Sunday morning) the financial details of the Stockton Ice Company were

Continued on page 22

The Triflers

By FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT

Illustration by George E. Wolfe

MONTE COVINGTON, an American, thirty-two years old, finds himself in Paris before the season. He is bored for the first time in his ten years of leisure and travel. One evening he meets, coming from the opera alone, Marjory Stockton, whom he has long known, but who has been devoted to an elderly aunt to the exclusion of her friends. The aunt is dead, and Marjory, inheriting her fortune, is tasting freedom for the first time. This freedom is marred by admirers offering marriage, the chief offender being Teddy Hamilton, a music-hall favorite, whom she met on the boat coming over. To get rid of him and the others, Monte makes a strange proposal—that Marjory marry him for protection and as a camarade de voyage, with no further obligation on the part of either. Marjory accepts it. In an encounter with Teddy, the latter shoots Monte in the shoulder. Soon after this Marjory and Monte go through the marriage service, in pursuance of their strange compact. They spend the day in a whirl of pleasure, concluding after the theater with supper at Maxim's. There they again meet Teddy Hamilton, who, crazed by absinthe, attempts to "kiss the bride," and is knocked down by Monte. Monte hurries Marjory home, leaving her in Marie's care at her apartments, next to his. Going to his rooms, he thinks over the day. He is curiously agitated. There had been a moment in the cab, coming home, when he wanted to kiss Marjory, but he had overcome the temptation. He wonders whether he is in love, and decides, if he is, that there is only one thing to do—to pack up and leave. He decides to tell Marjory in the morning.

THOUGH it was late when he retired, Monte found himself wide awake at half past seven. Springing from bed, he took his cold tub, shaved, and after dressing proceeded to pack his bags. The process was simple; he called the hotel valet, gave the order to have them ready as soon as possible, and went below. From the office he telephoned upstairs to Marie, and learned that madame would meet him in the breakfast-room at nine. This left him a half hour in which to pay his bill at the hotel, order a reservation on the express to Calais, and buy a large bunch of fresh violets, which he had placed on the breakfast table—a little table in a sunshiny corner.

Monte was calmer this morning than he had been the night before. He was rested; the interval of eight hours that had passed since he last saw her gave him, however slight, a certain perspective, while his normal surroundings, seen in broad daylight, tended to steady him further. The hotel clerk, busy about his uninspired duties; the impassive waiters in black and white; the solid-looking Englishmen and their wives who began to make their appearance, lent a sense of unreality to the events of yesterday.

Yet, even so, his thoughts clung tenaciously to the necessity of his departure. In a way, the very normality of this morning world emphasized that necessity. He recalled that it was to just such a day as this he had awakened yesterday. The hotel clerk had been standing exactly where he was now, sorting the morning mail, stopping every now and then with a troubled frown to make out an indistinct address. The corpulent porter in his blue blouse stood exactly where he was now standing, jealously guarding the door. Vehicles had been passing this way and that on the street outside. He had heard the same undertone of leisurely moving life—the scuffling of feet, the closing of doors, distant voices, the rumble of traffic. Then, after this lazy prelude, he had been swept on and on to the final dizzy climax.

That must not happen again. At this moment he knew he had a firm grip on himself—but at this moment yesterday he had felt even more secure. There had been no past then. That seemed a big word to use for such recent events covering so few hours; and yet it was none too big. It covered nothing less than the revelation of a man to himself. If that process sometimes takes years, it is none the less significant if it takes place in a day.

"Good morning, Monte."

He turned quickly—so quickly that she started in surprise.

"Is anything the matter?" she asked.

She was in blue this morning, and wore at an angle a broad-brimmed hat trimmed with black and white. He thought her eyes looked a trifle tired.

"I—I didn't know you were down," he faltered.

THE interval of time upon which he had been depending vanished instantly. To-day was but the continuation of yesterday. As he moved toward the breakfast-room at her side, the outside world disappeared as by magic, leaving only her world—the world immediately about her, which she dominated. He was conscious of no portion of the room other than that which included their table. All the sunshine in the world concentrated into the rays that fell about her.

He felt this, and yet at the same time he was aware of the absurdity of such exaggeration. It was the sort of thing that annoyed him when he saw it in others. All those newly married couples he used to meet on the German liners were afflicted in this same way. Each one of them acted as if the ship were their ship, the ocean their ocean, even the blue sky and the stars at night their sky and their stars. When he was in a good humor he used to laugh at this; when in a bad humor it disgusted him.

"Monte," she said, as soon as they were seated, "I was depending upon you this morning."

She studied him a second, and then tried to smile, adding quickly:

"I don't like you to disappoint me like this."

"What do you mean?" he asked nervously.

She frowned, but it was at herself, not at him. It did not do much except make dimples between her brows.

"I lay awake a good deal last night—thinking," she answered.

"Good Lord!" he exclaimed. "You oughtn't to have done that!"

"It wasn't wise," she admitted. "But I looked forward to the daylight—and you—to bring me back to normal."

"Well, here we are," he hastened to assure her. "I had the sun up ready for you several hours ago."

"You—you look so serious."

She leaned forward.

"Monte," she pleaded, "you mustn't go back on me like that—now. I suppose women can't help getting the fidgets once in a while and thinking all sorts of things. I was tired. I'm not used to being so very gay. And I let myself go a little, because I thought in the morning I'd find you the same old Monte. I've known you so long, and you always have been the same."

"It was a pretty exciting day for both of us," he tried to explain.

"How for you?"

"Well, to start with, one doesn't get married every morning."

He saw her cheeks flush. Then she drew back.

"I think we ought to forget that as much as possible," she told him.

HERE was his opportunity. The way to forget—the only way—was for him to continue with his interrupted schedule in England, and for her to go on alone to

---

Etois. It was not too late for that—if he started at once. Surely it ought to be the matter of only a few weeks to undo a single day. Let him get the tang of the salt air, let him go to bed every night dog-tired physically, let him get out of sight of her eyes and lips and away from that something—intangible as a perfume—that emanated from her, and doubtless he would be laughing at himself as heartily as he had laughed at others.

But he could not frame the words. His lips refused to move. Not only that, but, facing her here, it seemed a grossly brutal thing to do. She looked so gentle and fragile this morning as, picking up the violets, she half hid her face in them.

"You mean we ought to go back to the day before yesterday?" he asked.

"In our thoughts," she answered.

"And forget that we are—"

She nodded quickly, not allowing him to finish.

"Because," she explained, "I think it must be that which is making you serious. I don't know you that way. It isn't you. I've seen you all these years, wandering around wherever your fancy took you—care-free and smiling. I've always envied you, and now—I thought you were just going to keep right on, only taking me with you. Isn't that what we planned?"

"Yes," he nodded. "We started yesterday."

"I shall never forget that part of yesterday," she said.

"It wasn't so bad, except for Hamilton."

"It wasn't so bad even with Hamilton," she corrected. "I don't think I can ever be afraid of him again."

"Then it wasn't he that bothered you last night?" he asked quickly.

"No," she answered.

"It—it wasn't I?"

She laughed uneasily.

"No, Monte; because you were just yourself yesterday."

HE wondered about that. He wondered, if he placed before her all the facts, including the hours after he left her, if she would have said that. Here was his second opportunity to tell her what he had planned. If he did not intend to go on, he should speak now. To-morrow it would be too late. By noon it would be too late. By the time they finished their breakfast, it would be too late.

He met her eyes. They were steady as planets. They were honest and clear and clean and confident. They trusted him, and he knew it. He took a deep breath and leaned forward. Impulsively she leaned across the table and placed her hand upon his.

"Dear old Monte," she breathed.

It was too late—now! He saw her in a sort of mist of dancing golden motes.

She withdrew her hand as quickly as she had given it. It was as if she did not dare allow it to remain there. It was that which made him smile with a certain confidence of his own.

"What we'd better do," he said, "is to get out of Paris. I'm afraid the pace here is too hot for us."

"To Etois?" she asked.

"That's as good a place as any. Could you start this afternoon?"

"If you wish."

"The idea is to move on as soon as you begin to think," he explained, with his old-time lightness. "Of course, the best way is to walk. If you can't walk—why, the next best thing—"

He paused a moment to consider a new idea. It was odd that it had never occurred to him before.

"I have it!" he continued. "We'll go to Etois by motor. It's a beautiful drive down there. I made the trip alone three years ago in a car I owned. We'll take our time, putting up at the little villages along the way. We'll let the sun soak into us. We'll get away from people. It's people who make you worry. I have a notion it will be good for us both. This Hamilton episode has left us a bit morbid. What we need is something to bring us back to normal."

"I'd love it," she fell in eagerly. "We'll just play gypsy."

"Right. Now, what you want to do is to throw into a dress-suit case a few things, and we'll ship the trunks by rail to Nice. All you need is a tooth-brush, a change of socks, and—"

"There's Marie," she interrupted.

"Can't we ship her by rail too?"

"No, Monte," she answered, with a decided shake of her head.

"But, hang it all, people don't go a-gypsying with French maids!"

"Why not?" she demanded.

She asked the question quite honestly. He had forgotten Marie utterly until this moment, and she seemed to join the party like an intruder. Always she would be upon the back seat.

"Wouldn't you feel freer without her?" he asked.

"I shouldn't feel at all proper," she declared.

"Then we might just as well not have been married."

"Only," she laughed, "if we hadn't taken that precaution it wouldn't have been proper for me to go, even with Marie."

"I'm glad we've accomplished something, anyhow," he answered good-naturedly.

"We've accomplished a great deal," she assured him. "Yesterday morning I couldn't—at this time—have done even the proper things and felt proper. Oh, you don't know how people look at you, and how that look makes you feel, even when you know better. I couldn't have sat here at breakfast with you and felt comfortable. Now we can sit here and plan a wonderful trip like this. It's all because you're just Monte."

"And you just you!"

"Only I don't count for anything. It makes me feel even more selfish than I am."

"Don't count? " he exclaimed. "Why—"

He stifled the words that sprang to his lips. It was only because she thought she did not count that she was able to feel comfortable. Once let her know that she counted as at that moment she did count to him, and even what little happiness he was able to bring her would vanish. He would be to her then merely one of the others—even as he was to himself.

He rose abruptly.

"I must see about getting a machine," he said. "I want to start this afternoon if possible."

"I'll be ready," she agreed.

As they went out to the office, the clerk stepped up to him.

"I have secured the reservation, m'sieur," he announced.

"Please cancel it," replied Monte.

"Reservation?" inquired Marjory.

"On the Calais express—for a friend of mine who has decided not to go," he answered.

MONTE made an extravagant purchase: a new high-powered touring car capacious enough for a whole family—his idea being that, the roomier the car, the less Marie would show up in it. On the other hand, if he cared to consider her in that way, Marie would be there as much for his protection as Marjory's. The task that lay ahead of him this next week was well defined; it was to get back to normal. He had diagnosed his disease—now he must cure it. It would have been much easier to have done this by himself, but that was impossible. He must learn to gaze steadily into her eyes, while gazing into them; he must learn to look indifferently upon her lips, with her within arm's reach of him. Here was a man's job.

He was not even to have the machine to occupy his attention; for there was no time to secure a license, and so he must take with him a chauffeur. He was fortunate in being able to secure one on the spot: Louis Santerre, a good-looking lad with the best of recommendations. Monte ordered him to be at the hotel at three.

Thus, in less than an hour from the time he entered the sales-room, Monte had bought and paid for his car, hired his man, given orders for certain accessories, and left with Monsieur Mansart bowing him out and heartily wishing that all his customers were of this type.

There were, however, several little things that Monte still wished to purchase—an automobile coat and cap, for one thing; also some rugs. These he found in a near-by store. It was as he was leaving that the clerk—who, it seems, must have had an eye—noticed the shiny new gold ring upon Monte's left hand.

"Madame is well supplied?" he inquired.

"Madame? Who the devil is madame?" demanded Monte.

"Pardon, m'sieur," replied the clerk in some confusion, fearing he had made a grave mistake. "I did not know m'sieur was traveling alone."

Then it was Monte's turn to show signs of confusion. It was quite true he was not traveling alone. It was the truest thing he knew just then.

"What is necessary for a lady traveling by motor?" he inquired.

The clerk would take great pleasure in showing him in a department devoted to that very end. It was after one bewildering glance about the counters that he became of the opinion that his question should have been: what is it that a lady does not wear when traveling by motor? He saw coats and bonnets and goggles and vanity-boxes and gloves, to mention only a few of those things he took in at first glance.

"We are leaving in some haste," explained Monte, "so I'm afraid she has none of these things. Wouldn't the easiest way be for you to give me one of each?"

That indeed would be a pleasure. Did m'sieur know the correct size?

Only in a general way. Madame was not quite his height and weighed in the neighborhood of one hundred and fifty pounds. That was enough to go upon for outside garments. Still there remained a wide choice of style and color. In this Monte pleased himself, pointing with his stick with sure judgment at what took his fancy, as this and the other thing was placed before him. It was a decidedly novel and a very pleasant occupation.

IN this way he spent the best part of another hour, and made a payment in American Express orders of a considerable sum. That, however, involved nothing but tearing from the book he always carried as many orders for twenty-five dollars as most nearly approximated the sum total. The articles were to be delivered within one hour to "Madame M. Covington, Hotel Normandie."

Monte left the store with a sense of satisfaction, tempered a trifle by an uncomfortable doubt as to just how this presumption on his part would be received. However, he was well within his rights. He held sturdily to that.

With still two hours before he could return,—for he must leave her free until luncheon,—he went on to the Champs Élysées and so to the Bois. He still dwelt with pleasure upon the opportunity that had been offered him to buy those few things for her. It sent him along briskly with a smile on his face. It did more; it suggested a new idea. The reason he had been taking himself so seriously was that he had been thinking too much about himself and not enough about her. The simple way out of that difficulty was from now on not to consider himself at all. After all, what happened to him did not much matter, as long as it did not affect her. His job from now on was to make her happy.

For the rest of his walk he kept tight hold of that idea, and came back to the hotel with a firm grip on it. He called to her through the door of her room:

"How you making it?"

"Pretty well," came her voice. "Only I went shopping and bought all my things—including a coat for you. Then, when I came back, I find a whole boxful from you."

"All my efforts wasted!" he exclaimed.

"No, Monte," she replied quickly. "I couldn't allow that, because—well, because it was so thoughtful of you. So I kept the coat and bonnet you selected— and a few other things. I've just sent Marie out to return the rest."

She had kept the coat and bonnet that he selected! What in thunder was there about that to make a man feel so confoundedly well satisfied?

THEY left the hotel at three, and rode that day as far as a country inn which took their fancy just before coming into Joigny. It was, to Marjory, a wonderful ride—a ride that made her feel that with each succeeding mile she was leaving farther and farther behind her every care she had ever had in the world. It was a ride straight into the heart of a green country basking sleepily beneath blue skies; of contented people going about their pleasant tasks; of snug, fat farms and snug little houses, with glimpses of an occasional château in the background.

When Monte held out his hand to assist her down, she laughed light-heartedly, refreshed in body and soul.

The western sky was aglow with crimson and purple and pink. At the door of the inn, which looked as if it must have been standing right there in the days of dashing cavaliers, the proprietor and his wife were bowing a welcome.

Monte stepped toward them.

"Madame desires to rest here for the night, if accommodations may be secured," he said.

For the night? Mon Dieu! The proprietor had reckoned upon only a temporary sojourn—for a bottle of wine, perhaps. He had never entertained such a host as this. How many rooms would be required?

"Four," answered Monte.

"Let me see; monsieur and madame could be put in the front room."

Monte shook his head.

"Madame will occupy the front room alone," he informed him.

"Eh? Oh, I understand; a sister. That was a curious mistake. Eh bien, madame in the front room. Monsieur in the room to the right. The maid in the room on the back. But there is the chauffeur."

There was no room left for him, or for the machine either.

"Then he can go on to Joigny," announced Monte.

So Louis went on, and in less than five minutes the others were safely sorted out and tucked away in their respective rooms.

"We ought to get out and see the sun set," Monte called to Marjory as she waved him an adieu at her door.

"I'll be down in ten minutes," she nodded.

THERE is a princess latent in every woman. She makes her appearance early, and too often vanishes early. Not many women have the good fortune to see her—except perhaps for a few brief moments—after seventeen. But, however far in the background, she remains as at least a romantic possibility as long as any trace of romance itself remains.

For a moment, here in the twilight, this princess returned to Marjory. As she sat before the mirror, doing over her hair, she held her chin a little higher at the thought and smiled at herself contentedly. She used to do just this—and feel ashamed of herself afterward—long, long ago, after she first met Monte at the Warrens'. For it was he who then had been her gallant knight. He had just finished his college course, and eager-eyed was about to travel over the wide world.

She recalled how one evening they sat alone upon the porch of the Warren house until late, and he had told her of his proposed journey. She had listened breathlessly, with her chin in her hands and her eyes big. When she came in, Mrs. Warren had placed an arm about her and looked significantly at her flushed cheeks and said gently:

"Be careful, my dear. Don't you let that careless young prince take away your heart with him. Remember, he has not yet seen the world."

He had sailed away for a year and a day soon after this; and, perhaps because he was safely out of her life, she had allowed herself more liberty with him than other-

Continued on page 20

The Most Closely Guarded Boy in the World

By L. S. KIRTLAND

IN the heart of Russia is a straggling, unkempt village, dust-swept by summer, frozen by winter. But no one, no matter of what degree, may approach by road without a permit, and the doors of passing trains are watched by armed sentries, who allow no unauthorized foot to step to the platform. You see, there is a boy of twelve playing in the streets, and he must not be interrupted.

Two years ago this boy was pale and delicate. He has four extraordinarily beautiful sisters, and when he used to have his photograph taken with them, he looked shyly out of the print through his big eyes, as if nature in whimsical irony had brought his frail form into the world to be a contrast to his sisters' perfect flowering. But now there is color in his cheeks, and he is outgrowing his uniforms faster than he can possibly outwear them.

If his father occupied any other position in the world except the one he does, it would probably be said that he kidnapped his own son and ran away from home—which in this case happened to be a palace, or rather several palaces. But you can't speak that way of the Czar of all the Russias, the Little Father of 170,000,000 subjects, and the ruler of one sixth of the land of this globe. You can say, however—and very truthfully,—that he did go thence from the atmosphere of stuffy ante-chambers and ornate throne-rooms, taking the boy away from the cohort of nurses who tagged him about with a bottle of medicine in one hand and a spoon in the other, and from anxious and coddling grand duchesses. But the kernel of this drama that startled his people was that he took the lad from out of the deep shadows of a world-whispered mystery which, in its multitudinous ramifications, finds no comparison in the court history of modern Europe.

Four times in the ten years that followed the marriage of Czar Nicholas in 1894, the heralds announced to his people, expectant of an heir, that daughters had been born. The superstitious—and Russia overwhelmingly believes in her superstitions—declared that there would never be a son, basing that belief on the symbolic accident of the coronation, when the Czar let slip the heavy scepter from his hand, to go crashing to the earth. But on the thirtieth of July, 1904, an heir to all the domains of Muscovy, christened the Grand Duke Alexis, was born.

The Gossips at Work

THE legend of the gossips was gone, but that did not prevent their weaving a new one to take its place. Everybody in every circle began to believe that the baby suffered from some strange, rare, unspeakable disease. There were bated tales too fearful to repeat above a whisper. The real newspaper of Russia, the one beyond the censor, is gossip, which flows out over the borders; and the unimaginative encyclopœdias on your bookshelves carry these hints.

Following upon the heels of this new mystery came still another. The Czarevitch had been taken aboard his father's yacht. Somehow, a fanatic gained a hiding place on the vessel. There was a sudden knife-thrust, and the Czarevitch fell to the deck. The news was wirelessed from tongue to tongue, and it was believed by all Petersburg that the surgeons, in their efforts to help the boy, had blundered.

No confirmations nor denials came from the top. The Czar retired to seclusion in the country palace of Tsarskoe Selo. The Czarevitch was rarely seen except by a narrow circle of the highest blood. The people were left to believe that only a shadow of a human life remained as heir to the scepter of Peter the Great.

Suddenly the Empire was at war. Then came the dramatic proclamation of the Czar that he had placed himself at the head of his soldiers. But even the thrill of that dénouement faded before the astounding news that the Czar had brought with him to the headquarters staff at the straggling village of Mohilev the little Czarevitch.

A Miracle of the Great War

OF course, the Czar can not be interviewed, and neither may the Czarevitch; but I have been told by officers attached to the staff, who saw the Czarevitch daily and intimately, that magic has not ceased in this world. Before their very eyes they saw a much-to-be-pitied royal child turn into a real boy. The apron-strings had been cut. And now their future Little Father is the friend of all his moujik soldiers. He is too much alive and too heartily interested to be spoiled by the spoiling of the warriors.

Thus, strangely, what no one ever did for him the boy has done for himself. He has dispelled all those elaborate mysteries by his own bubbling boyishness. All that is really left of the tales, after the sun has shone on them, is that he undoubtedly has the same extraordinary thinness of skin from which his great-uncle, the Duke of Albany, suffered. He bleeds profusely from a slight scratch, and it probably would be possible for him to bleed to death from a cut: but the chance of dying by accident is not confined to royalty.

But he is a regular, red-blooded boy. The war has done much for Russia in many different ways. And among its other gifts is this: it is making the heir to the throne a man.

Their Life-Work

Can Infantile Paralysis Be Conquered?

By BURTON J. HENDRICK

THE visitation of infantile paralysis, which is now sweeping over the United States, represents by no means our first experience with this disease. There has probably been no time in human history when this affliction has not assailed mankind. Medical literature contains fairly complete records of forty epidemics, extending through the last seventy years; and as recently as 1907 New York City had nearly two thousand cases of the disease.

The infecting organism that is now working such destruction in New York and other States unquestionably preyed upon the children of ancient Rome and Babylon. Yet it is only in the last few years that science has recognized infantile paralysis as a separate disease. Not until Doctor Simon Flexner and his famous Japanese pupil and associate, Doctor Hideyo Noguchi, finally imprisoned in the culture-tube the causative organism, did we really know that it was an infectious disease—"catching" in the same sense that smallpox and measles are "catching." This achievement not only scored another red-letter day for American medicine, but opened a new chapter in bacteriology. For this microörganism represented a different type from those with which we have been long familiar: it was a member of a microscopic world which, up to that time, had been closed to scientific men.

Science Embarrassed

FOR the universe to which the organism of infantile paralysis belongs is so infinitely little that medical science had long despaired of ever entering it. When Anthony van Leeuwenhoek, the ingenious Dutchman who invented the microscope, placed a drop of water under his lens, and, the first man in history, saw the animated particles now familiar to us all as microbes, he imagined that he was looking at the smallest representations of living matter. What van Leeuwenhoek really saw, however, were the giants of the microscopic world. They bore almost the same relation to the invisible universe that elephants and camels do to the animal creation. Nearly two centuries after this discovery, Pasteur demonstrated that certain of these animalculœ, as these curious particles were called, produced contagious diseases. Pasteur himself discovered and isolated several; his successors, in Europe and America, identified many more. Certain diseases readily yielded up their secrets. Cholera, typhoid, diphtheria, pneumonia, dysentery, the plague, and others betrayed the particular organisms that caused these particular diseases.

Yet from the beginning the investigators encountered one puzzling fact. Many of the commonest afflictions of human-kind had apparently no association with any microbe. For the most contagious disease known to us, measles, the germ has never been discovered. What infection has a more famous history, or what is more obviously infectious, than smallpox? Yet here again the infecting organism is unknown. The germs of chickenpox, cowpox, scarlet fever, yellow fever—to mention only a few—have thus far successfully eluded the most painstaking attempts to detect them.

Why is it that the microscope easily finds the organism of typhoid, but can not disclose that of trachoma or smallpox? Years ago, when the "germ theory" itself was a matter of acrimonious dispute, this puzzling circumstance caused some embarrassment to its defenders. They could not find these organisms, the enemy urged, for the sufficient reason that they did not exist. But this kind of arguing was all nonsense. There is nothing quite so obvious as that measles and scarlet fever are infectious diseases—among the worst known.

The same phenomenon observable in the universe that is infinitely great also regulates the universe that is no larger than a pinhead. The first telescope revealed only a minute part of the starry heavens. As the instruments increased in size, thousands of new stars revealed themselves to the astronomers. As the universe has infinite proportions, the astronomer will never have a telescope sufficiently powerful to lay it all beneath his eye. And evidently the same principle governs in the world that is infinitely little. As microscopes increase in power, things hitherto unseen stand out distinctly on the microscope slide.

About sixteen years ago a famous German investigator, Loeffler, removed the discussion from the bounds of controversy. He was experimenting with foot-and-mouth disease, a destructive cattle plague whose organism apparently belonged to the ultra-microscopic class. Making an emulsion from a diseased tissue, he passed his watery product through a Berkefeld filter.

Millions of Germs in a Drop of Water

NEARLY all of us now understand the province of a filter: it is an instrument regularly used for purifying water, the purpose it serves being to free the water from the microbes of disease. The water itself passes through the microscopic meshes, while any impurities, especially microbes, are firmly held back. Such filters easily free the water from such familiar disease germs as those causing typhoid, dysentery, cholera—practically all that have so far been isolated.

But Loeffler, obtaining a transparent watery extract as the product of this filtration, found, by injecting this into cattle, that it would still cause foot-and- mouth disease. What did this mean? Simply that the germ causing foot-and- mouth disease was so small that it readily passed through the filter, minute as its meshes were. Moreover, small as it was, it evidently existed in enormous numbers, as the injection of the minutest part of the filtrate would cause the disease. Loeffler placed his watery extract under the most powerful microscope known; there was not the slightest trace of an organism. Yet this clear drop of water, the scientist now knew, was swarming with millions of the most destructive germs!

As a result of this experiment, these undiscovered organisms became known as "filterable viruses." Such filterable viruses cause more than thirty well identified diseases. What renders this experiment especially interesting now is that the germ of infantile paralysis belongs to this family. Early in their experiments Doctor Flexner and Doctor Noguchi obtained from the spinal cords of diseased monkeys a watery extract that had been compressed through the finest filters in the laboratory.

These experiments explained a fact that has caused amazement and horror in the present epidemic, and that is the great infectivity of the germ. For the disease-producing power of this filtrate was almost unbelievable. You could take, for example, an extract no larger than a drop of water, divide this drop into seventy parts, inject one of these seventieths into a monkey, and in record time the animal would fall sick, become paralyzed, and die—though it was humanely killed with ether before the acutest forms of the sickness had set in.

The isolation and cultivation of an agent so incredibly small apparently presented insuperable obstacles. How could the scientist dip into this drop of water, pick out the unseen organism, and make it flourish independently in the culture-tube? Yet Doctors Flexner and Noguchi accomplished this apparently impossible feat.

Doctor Noguchi had already distinguished himself by doing things hitherto unaccomplished in the laboratory. After a promising medical career in Japan, he came to this country in 1901 as Doctor Flexner's assistant at the University of Pennsylvania. The two men have been closely associated ever since.

A Japanese Discovers the Germ

DOCTOR NOGUCHI'S work on snake venoms early lifted him out of the ranks of the mediocrities, and his experiments on syphilis gave him world-wide fame. He was the first man to obtain the organism of the latter disease in pure culture, and he devised a skin reaction by which its presence in the individual may be detected. He also demonstrated that paresis and locomotor ataxia, far from being, as has always been believed, distinct diseases, were merely manifestations of this world-wide scourge. In all this work Doctor Noguchi had developed a laboratory technique of his own, too recondite for popular description, by which he had been able to isolate organisms that had hitherto baffled the investigator. He now proceeded to apply these original methods to the identification of the organism of infantile paralysis.

Dr. Noguchi succeeded in the task. It would require an immense amount of technical, incomprehensible language to describe precisely how he did it. If you had chanced to drop into his laboratory after several weeks' experimenting, you would have seen the Japanese expert absorbed in a long, many-colored test-tube. Half way up from the bottom it was filled with a yellow watery substance—really ascitic fluid, the material that fills the abdominal cavity in the disease of dropsy. Imposed upon this was a layer of bluish paraffin oil to the depth of about an inch.

The purpose of this oil was to prevent the air from reaching the ascitic fluid in the lower story. It was in this fluid that the elusive germ was expected to manifest its presence—and this germ was an "anaërobe"; that is, it was a form of animal life that could not exist in the presence of oxygen.

In the bottom of the tube were two easily discernible pieces of tissue—one a minute segment of the brain of a person who had died of infantile paralysis, the other a small piece of rabbit liver. What was the purpose of these various substances? Clearly, the brain tissue, being taken from a victim of the disease, must contain the organism in enormous abundance. The problem was to make this organism leave its shell and circulate in the ascitic fluid; and the rabbit liver was placed next to the brain tissue in the hope of tempting the microbe into the outside world.

After a few days a faint opalescent glow began to surround the rabbit liver. Gradually, day by day, this cloudy substance ascended into the fluid. When Doctor Noguchi placed a specimen of this opalescence on a microscope slide, lively dancing bodies, no larger than points of light, filled the entire field of vision. Here and there, hardly clearer than faint microscopic shadows, appeared other objects, shaped like seeds hung together in chains, and other masses. Later, by using familiar laboratory methods, Doctor Noguchi succeeded in bringing these shrinking organisms into greater prominence. He found that one hundred and thirty thousand, ranged side by side, would make an inch. When he injected a minute colony of these organisms into a monkey, it promptly died of infantile paralysis.

The Fight Must Be Prevention

HERE, then, was this fearful enemy of the human race. That was the organism which has caused all this havoc. The discovery was a great laboratory triumph, and held forth the promise of ultimate benefit. Up to date, however, it has been rather barren of practical result. Doctors Flexner and Noguchi have carefully studied the habits of the germ, know its usual means of ingress to the human body,—through the nose and throat,—have learned that sunlight readily kills it and that it can be carried in dried particles like dust. Precisely how the contagion is spread—whether by a biting insect or strictly by contact, either with a sick person or a healthy "carrier"—is yet unknown. This is the one harrying mystery that makes the operations of this organism so terrible.

What is especially discouraging, however, is that the germ voluntarily attacks only one animal, and that is man. A monkey can be artificially inoculated; but even this animal never "catches" the disease in nature. And the monkey is the only animal, except man, that can be given the disease experimentally. This makes all but impossible serum treatment, since a monkey is not a useful animal from which to obtain a serum. If only that old, faithful friend of humankind, the horse, were subject to infantile paralysis, the problem would be more than half solved, for then it would be possible to obtain an anti-toxin. As it is, the only animal that can be depended upon to yield a possible serum is man himself. A patient who has had the disease and recovered owes a peculiar duty to his kind; for his blood, in all probability, contains the substances that can destroy the disease.

Under these circumstances, therefore, the fight against infantile paralysis will be one of prevention. The genius who discovers how Doctor Noguchi's organism goes from one sick person to another will be the conqueror of infantile paralysis. Until that discovery is made, these dreadful plagues will appear intermittently.

WHAT WILL THESE WOMEN DO NEXT?

YOU CAN'T KILL THESE PEOPLE

---

WHAT GIRLS EXPECT TO FIND IN NEW YORK

When the Navy Horned In

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by Hazel Roberts

ONE thing about this yacht-cruisin' act is how close a line you get on the people you're shut up with. Why, this cross-mated bunch of ours hadn't been our in the Agnes more'n three days before I could have told you the life hist'ry of 'most every one in the party.

I knew that the late Mr. Mumford had been a noble soul who wore full-face lambrequins and was fussy about his food. From the picture Mrs. Mumford showed Vee and me, I judged he must have looked like an up-State banker; but come to get down to cases, she admits he was in the coal and lumber business over in Montclair, New Jersey.

About J. Dudley Simms I dug up all kinds of information. He'd been brought up by an old uncle who'd made a million or so runnin' an ale brewery and who had a merry little dream that he was educatin' J. Dudley to be a minister. If he'd lasted a couple of years longer, too, it would have been the Rev. J. Dudley Simms for a fact; but when uncle cashed in, Dudley left the divinity school abrupt and forgot ever to go back.

I even discovered that Professor Leonidas Barr, the fish expert and Old Hickory's cribbage partner, had once worked in a shoe store and could still guess the size of a young lady's foot by lookin' at her hands. But when it came to collectin' any new dope about Captain Killam, he's still Rupert the Mysterious.

Durin' them long days when we went churnin' steady and monotonous down towards the hook end of Florida, with nothing happenin' but sleep and meals, 'most everybody sort of drifted together in twos and threes and got folksy. Not Rupert, though. He don't forget for a minute that he's conductin' a dark and desperate hunt for pirate gold, and he don't seem contented unless he's workin' at it every hour of the day.

Course, after he's pulled that break of tacklin' J. Dudley for a mutiny plotter, Old Hickory shuts down on his sleuthin' around the decks, so he takes it out in gazin' suspicious at the horizon through a pair of field-glasses he always wears strapped to him. Don't seem to cheer him up any, either, to have me ask him frivolous questions.

"Can you spot any movie shows or hot-dog wagons out there, Cap'n?" I asks.

He just glares peevish and declines to answer.

"What you lookin' for, anyway?" I goes on.

"Nothing I care to discuss with you, I think," says he.

"Bing-g-g!" says I. "Right on the wrist!"

And then all of a sudden Mrs. Mumford

gets hipped with the idea that Rupert is sort of bein' neglected. Well, trust her. She's been a sunshine worker and a social uplifter all her life. And no sooner does she begin sympathizin' with Rupert than she starts plannin' ways to chirk him up.

"The poor dear Captain!" she gurgles gushy. "He seems so lonely and sad. Who knows what his past has been, how many dangers he has faced, what ordeals he has been through? If some one could only get him to talk about them, it might help."

"Why not tackle him, then?" says I. "Nobody else could do it better."

"Oh, really, now," protests Mrs. Mumford, duckin' her chin kittenish. "I—I couldn't do it alone. Perhaps, though, if you young people would—"

"Oh, we will; won't we, Torchy?" says Vee.

I nods. Inside of half an hour, too, we had towed Rupert into a corner beside the widow and had him surrounded.

"Tell me, Captain," says Mrs. Mumford impulsive, "have you not led a most romantic life?"

RUPERT rolls his eyes at her quick, then steadies 'em down and blinks solemn. Kind of weird, starey eyes, them buttermilk blue panes of his.

"I—I don't say much about it as a rule," says he, droppin' his chin modest.

"There!" exclaims Mrs. Mumford. "I just knew it was so. One daring adventure after another, I suppose, with no thought of fear."

"Oh, I've been afraid plenty of times," says Rupert; "but, somehow, I—well, I've gone on."

"Isn't he splendid?" asks Mrs. Mumford, turnin' to us. "Just like a hero in a book! But we would like to know from the very beginning. As a boy, now?"

"That wasn't much," protests Rupert. "You see, I lived in a little town in southern Illinois. Father ran the general store. I had to help in it—sold shingle nails, molasses, overalls, mower teeth. How I hated that! But there was the creek and the muck pond. I had an old boat. I played smuggler and pirate. I used to love to read pirate books. I wanted to go to sea."

"So you ran away and became a sailor," adds Mrs. Mumford, clappin' her hands enthusiastic.

"I planned to lots of times," says Rupert. "But father made me go through the academy. Then afterwards I had to teach school—in a rough district. Once some big boys tried to throw me into a snow-drift. We had a terrible fight."

"It must have been awful," says Mrs. Mumford. "Those big, brutal boys! I can just see them. Did—did you kill any of them?"

"I hit one on the nose quite hard," says Rupert. "Then, of course, I had to give up teaching. I meant to start off for sea that winter, but father was taken sick. Lungs, you know. So we sold out the store and bought a place down in Florida, an orange grove. It was on the west coast, near the Gulf.

"That's where I learned to sail. And after father died I took my share and bought a cruising boat. I didn't like working on the grove—messing around with smelly fertilizer, sawing off dead limbs, doing all that silly spraying. And my brother Jim could do it so much better. So I fished, and took out winter tourists on excursions: things like that. Summers I'd go cruising down the coast. I would be gone for weeks at a time. I've been out in some fearful storms, too.

"I got to know a lot of the strange characters who live on those west coast keys. They're bad, some of them—kill you for a few dollars. Others are real friendly. Like the old fellow who told me about the buried treasure. He was almost dead of fever when I found him in his little palmetto shack. I got medicine for him, stayed until he was well. That's why he told me about the gold."

"Think of that!" says Mrs. Mumford. "He'd been a pirate himself, hadn't he?"

"Well, hardly," says Rupert. "He was

a tough old citizen, though—an atheist or something like that. Very profane."

Mrs. Mumford shudders. "And you were alone with such a desperado, on a desert island!" she gasps, rollin' her eyes.

"Oh, I can generally look out for myself," says Rupert, tappin' his hip pocket significant.

He was fairly beamin', Rupert was, for Mrs. Mumford was not only lettin' him write his own ticket, but was biddin' his stock above par. And all the rest of the day he swells around chesty, starin' out at the ocean, as important as if he owned it all.

"At last," says I, "we know the romance of Rupert."

"I hope it doesn't keep me awake nights," says Vee.

"Look at the bold, bad ex-school-teacher," says I. "Wonder what blood-curdlin' mind plays he's indulgin' in now? There! He's unlimberin' the glasses again."

IT must have been about four o'clock, for I remember hearin' eight bells strike and remarkin' to Vee what a silly way that was to keep track of the time. We was watchin' Rupert go through his Columbus-discoverin'-Staten-Island motions, and I was workin' up some josh to hand him, when he comes rushin' back to the wireless room. No, we didn't stretch our ears intentional, and if we sidled up under the cabin window it must have been because there was a couple of deck-chairs spread out convenient.

"Isn't that some kind of war-ship off there?" Cap'n Killam is demandin' of Meyers.

"Wait," says the operator, fittin' on his tin ear. "He's just calling." Then, after listening a while, he announces: "He wants to know who we are."

"Don't answer," orders Killam.

"Oh, all right," says Meyers, and goes on listenin'. Pretty soon, though, he gives out another bulletin.

"It's the United States gun-boat Petrel, and he's demanding who and what. Real snappy this time. Guess I'd better flash it to him, eh?"

"No, no!" says Rupert. "It's no business of his. This is a private yacht bound for a home port. Let him whistle."

It struck me at the time as a nutty thing to do, but of course I'm no judge. I had a hunch that Rupert was registerin' importance and showin' how he was boss of the expedition—something he hadn't had a chance to get over before. It ain't long, though, before Meyers begins talkin' like he was uneasy.

"He wants to know," says he, "if our wireless is out of commission, and if it is why we don't run up a signal."

"Bah!" says Rupert. "These naval officers are too nosey. It'll do this one good if we take no notice of him."

"All the same," insists Meyers, "I think Mr. Ellins and the Captain ought to know what's going on."

"Oh, very well," says Rupert. "I'll call them down and we'll talk it over."

COURSE, we had to clear out then, for it's a secret confab of the whole executive committee that develops, includin' Vee's auntie. But we got a full report later. It seems Rupert was skittish about havin' naval officers snoopin' around the yacht. For one thing, he don't want 'em to find out that this is a treasure-huntin' cruise, on account of the government's bein' apt to hog part of the swag. Then, there's all them guns stowed away below. He explains how this Petrel is a slow old tub that he don't believe can overhaul the Agnes before dark. So why not make a run for it?

The reg'lar yacht captain was dead against anything like that. He wouldn't advise monkeyin' with the United States navy, if they was askin' him. Better chuck the guns overboard. As for Old Hickory, he was sort of on the fence.

Who do you guess it was, though, that stood out for makin' the nervy getaway? Auntie. Uh-huh! All this panicky talk by Meyers and the yacht captain only warmed up her sportin' blood. What right, she wanted to know, had a snippy little gun-boat to hold up a private party of perfectly good New Yorkers and ask 'em where they was goin'? Humph! what was the government, anyway? Just a lot of cheap office-holders who spent their time bothering our best people about customs duties and income taxes. For her part, she didn't care a snap about it. If the Agnes could get away, why not breeze ahead?

I expect that proposition must have

---

appealed to Old Hickory, for he swung to her side at the last, and that's the way it was settled. They decided to make no bones about what was up. Mr. Ellins calls us together and makes a little speech, sayin' if anybody don't like the prospect he's sorry, but it can't be helped.

THEN the crew gets busy. Black smoke begins pourin' out of the stack and the engines are tuned up to top speed. All the awnin's are taken in and every flag pulled down. The Agnes proceeds to hump herself, too.

"Twelve knots," reports Old Hickory,

inspectin' the patent log. "The Captain thinks he can get fourteen out of her. The Petrel's best is sixteen."

"At least, we have a good start," says Auntie, gazin' off where a thin smudge shows on the sky-line. "And before they can get near enough to shoot they can't see us. I suppose they'd be just impudent enough to shoot if they could?"

"Oh, yes," says Old Hickory. "We're outlaws now, you know."

"Who cares?" says Auntie, shruggin' her shoulders.

Say, I wasn't so much surprised at Mr. Ellins. He's spent most of his life slippin' things over on the government. Auntie, though! A steady, solemn old girl with her pedigree printed in the Social Register. You wouldn't have thought it of her.

"Some plunger, Auntie, eh?" says I to Vee. "She don't seem to care what happens."

"I never knew she could be so reckless," says Vee. "Getting us chased by a war-ship! Isn't that rather dangerous, Torchy?"

"I shouldn't call it the mildest outdoor sport there was," says I.

"And the casual way she talks of our being shot at—as if they'd fire tennis-balls!" goes on Vee.

"I didn't care for that part of the conversation myself," says I. "I'm no hero, like Rupert. If there's any shootin' takes place, I'm goin' to get nervous. I feel it comin' on."

"You don't think Auntie and Mr. Ellins would let it go that far, do you?" asks Vee.

"It would be just like Auntie to fire back," says I. "What's a navy more or less to her, when she gets her jaw set?"

"I—I wish I hadn't come on this old yacht," says Vee.

"If I could row you ashore," says I, "I wouldn't mind stayin' to keep you company. Look! That smoke off there's gettin' nearer."

If Auntie and Old Hickory 'was pinin' for thrills, it looked like they was due to get their wish. Just what would happen in case the Agnes was run down nobody seemed to know. The only thing our two old sports was interested in just then was this free-for-all race.

Anyway, we had a fine evenin' for it. The ocean was as smooth as a full bath-tub, and all tinted up in pinks and purples, like one of Belasco's back drops. Off over the bow to the right—excuse me, to the starboard—a big, ruddy sun was droppin' slow and touchin' up the top of a fluffy pile of cottony clouds back of us, that looked like they was balanced right on the edge of things. Bang in the middle of that peaceful background, though, was this smear of black smoke, and you didn't have to be any marine dill pickle to tell it was headed our way.

We groups ourselves on the after-deck and watches. Everybody that could annexes a pair of field-glasses; but, even with that help, about all you could see was some white foam piled up against a gray bow. Now and then Rupert announces that she's gainin' on us, and Old Hickory nods his head.

"Only an hour until sunset, though," Auntie remarks.

"I suppose," suggests Rupert, "we could change our course after dark and slip into Miami Bay."

"No," says Old Hickory, waggin' his head stubborn. "We will hold our course right down through Florida Straits. We ought to make Key West by morning, if we're not overhauled."

"If!" I whispers to Vee.

DINNER was announced, but for once there's no grand rush below. Mr. Ellins orders a hand-out meal to be passed around, and we fills up on sandwiches while keepin' watch on that black smudge, which is creepin' closer and closer. Don't take long for it to get dark down in this part of the country after the sun is doused, but the stars shine mighty bright. On the water, too, it seems so much lighter.

Then the Petrel turns on a couple of search-lights. Course, we was 'way out of range, but somehow it seemed like them swingin' streaks of light was goin' to reach out and pick us up any minute. For an hour or so we watched 'em feelin' for us, gettin' a bit nearer, reachin' and swingin', with the Agnes strainin' herself to slip away, but losin' a little of her lead every minute.

Must have been near ten o'clock when Rupert announces cheerful: "By George! She's falling behind. Those search-lights are getting dimmer."

"I believe you're right," says Old Hickory.

Half an hour more and there was no doubt about it.

"Humph!" says Auntie. "I was sure we could do it."

And Mr. Ellins is so tickled that he orders up a couple of bottles of his best fizz, so all hands can drink to the U. S. navy.

"Long may it wave," says J. Dudley Simms, "and may it always stick to its new motto—Safety First."

He got quite a hand on that, and then everybody turned in happy. As I went to sleep the Agnes was still joggin' along at her best gait, and it was comfortin' to know that our wrathy naval friends had been left hopelessly behind.

I expect I must have been poundin' my ear real industrious for five or six hours when I hears this distant boom, and comes up in my berth as sudden as if some one had pulled the string. Sunshine was streamin' in through the porthole, and I was just wonderin' if I'd slept right through the breakfast gong when boom! it came again. There's a rush of feet on deck, some panicky remarks from the man up in the bow, a quick clangin' of the engine-room bells, and then I feels the propellers reversed.

"Good night!" says I. "Pinched on the high seas!"

I didn't waste much time except to throw on a few clothes; but, at that, I finds Auntie scrabblin' out ahead of me and Captain Killam already on deck. She's a picturesque old girl, Auntie, in a lavender and white kimono and a boudoir cap to match; and Rupert, in blue trousers and a pajama top, hardly looks like a triple-plated hero.

"Nabbed!" gasps Rupert, starin' over the rail at a gray gun-boat that's just roundin' in towards us. It's the Petrel; sure enough.

"The idea!" says Auntie. "They were shooting at us, too, weren't they? Of all things!"

Then up pads Old Hickory in a low-necked silk dressin'-gown, with his gray hair all rumpled and a heavy crop of white stubble on his solid set jaws.

"Huh!" says he, takin' a glance at the Petrel.

That's about all there is to be said, too. For it was odd how little any of us felt like bein' chatty. We just stood around quiet and watched the businesslike motions on the Petrel as she stops about a block off and proceeds to drop a boat into the water.

Projectin' prominent from one of her steel bay windows is a wicked-lookin' gun about the size of a young water main, and behind it a lot of jackies squintin' at us earnest. And you know how still it seems on a boat when the engines quit. I almost jumps when some one whispers in my ear. It's Vee.

"Now I hope Auntie's satisfied, " says she.

"There's no tellin' about her," says I.

Anyway, she wasn't fannin' herself, or sniffin' smellin' salts. I'd noticed her hail a deck steward, and the next I knew she was spoonin' away at half a grapefruit, as calm as you please. Mr. Ellins is indulgin' in a dry smoke. Only Mrs. Mumford, when she finally appears, does justice to the situation. She rolls her eyes, breathes hard, and clutches her crochet bag desperate.

THE Petrel people were takin' their time about things. After they got the boat in they had to let down some side stairs, and then the sailors waited with their oars ready until an officer in a fresh laundered white uniform gets in and gives the signal to shove off. Our Captain has the companionway stairs rigged too, and there ain't a word passed until the naval gent comes aboard. He's rather a youngish party, with a round, good-natured face, and he seems kind of amused as he sizes up our bunch in their early mornin' costumes.

"Pardon me," says he, touchin' his cap, "but who is in charge of this yacht?"

"I suppose I am," says Old Hickory.

"Not a bit more than I," puts in Auntie. "And I want to tell you right now, young man, that I consider your action in shooting off those guns at us was—"

"I presume you recognize the United States navy, madam?" breaks in the officer.

"Not necessarily, " snaps Auntie. "I don't in the least see why we should, I'm sure."

"Certainly we do," corrects Old Hickory. "But, as Mrs. Hemmingway observes, we dislike to be shot at."

"Even though you couldn't hit us," adds Auntie.

The officer grins.

"Oh, our gunners aren't as bad as that," says he. "We were merely shooting across your bows, you know. I am Lieutenant Commander Faulhaber, and it is part of my duty to overhaul and inspect any suspicious acting craft."

"Why didn't you do it last night, then?" demands Auntie.

"Because we blew out a cylinder gasket," says he. "The Petrel isn't a new boat, by any means, and hardly in first-class shape. But we managed to patch her up, you see."

"Humph!" says Auntie.

Honest, I was almost sorry for that naval gent before she got through with him, for she sure did state her opinion, free and forcible, of his holdin' us up this way. He stands and takes it, too, until she's all through.

"Sorry you feel that way about it," says he, "but I shall be obliged to make a thorough search of this boat nevertheless. Also I shall require an explanation as to why you disregarded my wireless orders. Unless you can satisfy me that—"

IT'S about there this cheery hail comes from J. Dudley Simms, who is just appearin' from his state-room, all dolled up complete in white flannels.

"By Jove!" he sings out. "If it isn't Folly. How are you, old man?"

The lieutenant commander swings around with a pleased look.

"Why—er—that you, Dud, old chap? Say, what are you these days? Blockade runner, smuggler, or what?"

"You're warm, Folly, you're warm!" says Dudley. "Hunting for buried treasure, that's our game—pirate gold—all that sort of thing."

And say, in less than two shakes he's give the whole snap away, in spite of Old Hickory scowlin' and Auntie glarin' like she meant to murder him with her grapefruit spoon.

But the news don't seem to impress Lieutenant Commander Faulhaber very serious.

"Not really?" says he, chucklin'. "Oh! Then that's the reason for all this mystery? Treasure-hunting! Well, well!" And he grins more expansive than ever as he takes another look around.

Next he's introduced proper to everybody, and inside of ten minutes we're all sitting down to breakfast together, while J. Dudley explains how him and Folly has been lifelong chums.

So we didn't get pinched, after all.

"Although," says the lieutenant commander, as he starts back towards the Petrel, "I suppose I ought to fine you for exceeding the speed limit."

The Agnes has got under way again and we'd stopped wavin' good-by to the jackies, when I catches a glimpse of a head bein' poked cautious out from under the canvas cover of one of our life-boats. Nudgin' Vee to look, I steps up to Mr. Ellins, who's talkin' with Auntie and Mrs. Mumford, and points out my discovery. By that time the head has been followed by a pair of shoulders.

Old Hickory just narrows his eyes and stares.

"Why!" gasps Mrs. Mumford, "it—it's Captain Killam!"

"Yep!" says I. "Rupert the Reckless. Only this trip he seems to be playin' it safe, eh?"

"In hiding!" says Auntie. "All the time, too!"

"Huh!" grunts Old Hickory, watchin' Killam crawl out and slip around a corner. But say, Mr. Ellins can make that "Huh!" of his mean a lot. He knows when he's been buffaloed, take it from me. My guess is that Rupert's stock is in for a bad slump. I'd quote him about thirty off and no bids.

WHAT SCIENCE IS DOING

To Roll This Old World Along

THE COWS ENJOYED THIS BANQUET

IF all of us had the same sort of hobby that a man out in Spokane has, this old world would be such a fine place to live in that we never would want to leave it. In fact, dying under such conditions would be a difficult job, because this man—just for the fun he gets out of it—raises cows for producing rich, healthy milk for the children of Spokane. He breeds cattle for a living, but his spare time he devotes to better milk.

After he had fitted up a stable with all manner of sanitary improvements, he wanted to convince his friends how prophylactic it actually was, so he invited them to a banquet.

In the cow stable, a long table with snowy white linen and shining silver was waiting. Amid the mooing of the cows, the guests sat down to dinner. Some of the guests stepped daintily to their seats; but there was no cause to be so particular. The barn was as spick and span as a Dutch wife's kitchen.

During the meal the cows—all polite, aristocratic Jerseys—chewed their cuds and regarded the banqueters haughtily. But they inhaled such quantities of fumes from the champagne cider that they could hardly stagger to pasture next morning.

RADIUM, FIRST AID TO WIRELESS

ALTHOUGH the world at war, and the other fraction of the world which is at peace, does not deeply concern itself with the stifled hopes of one young, almost unknown German, the occurrence of the war did interrupt some extremely interesting experiments that he was conducting near Berlin.

In order that other scientists may take up his work and carry it to a conclusion, E. Bernier has described his experiments in a recent issue of the Elektrotechnische Zeitschrift.

He was endeavoring to carry out a theory of his own, that the presence of radium causes a definite and remarkable action upon a wireless station.

The first experiments were carried on indoors, with an antenna consisting of a small wooden rod, upon which wire was loosely wound. With the receiving instruments adjusted, he placed a tube containing 50,000 units of radium salts near the wooden rod. Immediately he could hear the buzzing of distant signals which the apparatus was unable to detect otherwise.

Encouraged by this success, he carried on his experiments, using a full-sized outdoor antenna, or aërial. With a delicate measuring instrument known as the galvanometer, he discovered that the presence of the radium tube near the aërial wires would cause an appreciable current of electricity to flow. But when the radium tube was attached to the wires at their mid-point, reception of signals was found impossible, even with the most sensitive of ear receivers.

Technically speaking, it was found that the presence of radium under certain conditions shortened the wave length. That there is some definite relation between wireless, or Hertzian, waves and the electric waves or "ripples" emanated by that mysterious chemical, radium, has long been known. Exactly what that relation may be is a conclusion not to be drawn from these foreshortened experiments.

FEW MEN ARE AS STRONG AS HORSES

DID you ever feel "as strong as a horse"? In case you think you are, Professor H. H. Laughlin, of the Eugenic Record Office, Cold Spring Harbor, New York, will be glad to prove to you how wrong you are.

Professor Laughlin has invented a machine called the "eurostometer," which, though it operates on simple principles, is tremendously effective. The "horse-power machine" estimates with scientific accuracy the combined strength of arms and legs. The result is your horsepower. To record all of this youthful energy of yours, the machine has a hand-operated crank and a foot-propelled bicycle attachment. Both devices are geared to a central resisting cylinder which is regulated by a scale-beam on which the unit of measurement is indicated in horse-power instead of pounds and ounces.

First you grasp the hand-crank and turn with all your might. Little by little the Professor increases the pressure on the resisting cylinder until you can no longer turn the crank. That means that the horse-power limit of your arms is reached.

Then you mount the bicycle saddle, and pedal away just as if you were climbing a steep hill. The hill continues to get steeper and steeper—until you finally decide to get out and walk. Your energy is exhausted; all of it has gone into friction, through the resisting cylinder.

If you are an ordinary, everyday man, you will discover, upon consulting the scale, that you are as strong as half a horse. In other words, you register 5/10 horsepower. The every-day woman, whether she beats upon a typewriter or a washboard, tips the scale to 3/10 horsepower, a little less than one third. Assembling these last facts together, in a rough-and-tumble fight two men ought to be able to lick three women with ease—and 1/10 horsepower left over. But as long as the ladies will insist on using their fingernails when fighting, that test can never be made.

SHORT AND INTERESTING

RECALLING the fact that deaf and dumb people do not become seasick, some well known New York physicians claim that seasickness is an ear phenomenon. The end organ of equilibrium in the ear canal, the static labyrinth, is displaced by the movement of the boat.

GERMAN military aëroplanes are equipped with a minuteness of detail almost equal to an expensive automobile. They have convenient drawers containing a flask of stimulant, a Thermos bottle, chocolate cubes, a sponge for wiping goggles, map-case, map, and colored pencils.

Tid-Bits.

LAST year the American people consumed two hundred and fifty million gallons of ice cream, which, figured at eighty cents a gallon, cost four hundred million dollars.

Chicago Daily News.

SPIDERS THAT GET MEN OUT OF BED

A "TROUBLE-SHOOTER" is the man who goes out any time of day or night, in sunshine, snow, or thundering storm, and fixes the electric power, telephone or telegraph wires when something goes wrong.

Down in the Argentine, for example, the trouble-shooters' troubles are spiders. In the day-time these industrious insects spin their webs between the convenient telegraph wires, and when night comes the threads, fine as gossamer, become saturated with dew. Moisture makes an excellent conductor of electricity at high voltages, and the wires become short-circuited.

The trouble is so serious, according to Telephony,that the Argentine government has sent circular letters to the different telegraph administrations throughout the world, to ascertain whether any one else is having the same difficulty, and, if so, whether a means for counteracting it has been found.

Men armed with long brooms are sent out to sweep the wires; but, invariably, two or three days after the wires are swept clean, greater masses of web than ever accumulate.

When the weather is calm and dry, the trouble-shooters sleep peacefully, for the webs will not accumulate enough moisture to interrupt the service then. But these occasions are comparatively rare, owing to the immense area of the River Platte and its great evaporation.

Trouble-shooters have collected many sackfuls of the web. It smolders, but will not burn readily. The Argentine government hopes that some commercial use may be found for it.

WHY NOT MAKE YOUR OWN MOVIES?

WE have been hearing so much lately about "Million Dollar Movies" and the "high cost of filming" that those of us who ever had the hankering to use an amateur moving-picture camera have passed the idea up.

As a matter of fact, there is no reason why we should not own our own movie cameras and earn all the pin-money we need. At least, J. William Hill, writing in Camera Craft, expresses that opinion.

The cost of a moving-picture camera should not be considered high when it is remembered that enlargements are easily made from the negative. EVERY WEEK has published a number of photographs made from moving-picture film.

The price of moving-picture cameras ranges from $40 up. Learning to operate the camera is not difficult; and in nearly all large cities are firms that develop and print film cheaply.

As for money-making: local events offer the amateur camera man a profitable field. Photo-play theaters can pay twenty cents a foot for such subjects and show them at a profit.

The national topical weeklies pay from twenty cents to a dollar a foot for good material. An eye, or a nose, for news is necessary in this work.

A TREE ON STILTS

HE way an old tree will keep right on living when the very ground has been washed out from under its feet, as this 200-year-old elm has done so successfully, is a good enough text for a Sunday school lesson. Seventy years ago, the Delaware River began to undermine the roots of the elm which rears its proud branches on the bank near Phillipsburg, New Jersey. Since then the earth has been filled in time and time again, only to be washed away when the spring freshets came. Some of the staunch old roots are fifteen inches thick.

OUR OWN CARNEGIE LIBRARY

On These Two Shelves—The New Books and Magazines

ROUNDING UP THE WOMEN "SLACKERS"

ENGLAND is on the verge of conscripting her women. They are needed in all branches of work, to take the place of men, so that more soldiers can be released for the trenches. And if they will not work voluntarily, England will try to shame them into shouldering their responsibilities.

A huge poster campaign is planned to arouse women "slackers," just as 2,000,000 men were recruited for the army a few months ago. Then, little boys of a generation hence were pictured asking their fathers what they did in the great war, and receiving the shamefaced reply that they did nothing. Now little girls will be shown saying to their grandmothers, "How did you help in the great war?" And the young women who now refuse to work will be obliged to say to their grandchildren—if there are any: "I did nothing."

This is the scheme of Captain Locker Lampson, M. P., who says in the Boston Post:

"Now that the men are all under orders, it is time every woman realized that she must do her bit for her country. If she does not do it voluntarily, she must be conscripted, like the men.

"So far the women of the working class have done nobly. It is almost impossible to obtain female labor of the domestic servant, shop-girl, or factory-girl classes now, and even typists and secretaries are hard to find; for the ministry of munitions and the various war departments have absorbed a vast amount of girl clerical labor. It is the girls of the middle class—the daughters of the doctors, lawyers, ministers, and business men—who are wanted, and who have not as yet come forward in any large numbers.

"The problem before England now is to convince these girls that they must do something for their country, or, failing that, to compel them. They are all intelligent, able-bodied girls, who would make excellent workers, and they are willing enough, but they are prevented by the snobbery of their class from undertaking any work which they do not consider ladylike. They are willing enough to undertake nursing in a Red Cross hospital, or even to drive an ambulance; and the thing they like most of all is to sell little flags in the street for the various war charities: but they look on real work as degrading and undignified.

"As a matter of fact, it is on the farms that women are needed most just now. There is still a vast reservoir of female labor to be tapped in England, and many people believe that only conscription will tap it."

MARK TWAIN AS A MINER

ONE more pail of water, and Mark Twain would have been twenty thousand dollars ahead. But he was cold and drenched to the skin, and he said to his pal, "Not another pail, if it means a million dollars."

In his "Boys' Life of Mark Twain," appearing in St. Nicholas, Albert Bigelow Paine relates the incident.

"The mining was rather hopeless work," says Mr. Paine. "The constant and heavy rains were disheartening. Clemens hated it, and even when one afternoon traces of a pocket began to appear, he rebelled as the usual chill downpour set in.

"Gillis, as usual, was washing and Clemens carrying the water. Gillis, seeing the gold color improving with every pan, wanted to go on washing and climbing toward the precious pocket, regardless of wet and cold.

Clemens, shivering and disgusted, vowed that each pail of water would be his last. Finally he said:

"'Jim, I won't carry any more water. This work is too disagreeable.'

"Gillis had just taken out a panful of dirt.

"'Bring one more pail, Sam,' he begged.

"'No, sir, not a drop—not if I knew there was a million dollars in that pan!'

"Gillis tore out a page of his note-book and hastily posted a thirty-day claim notice by the pan of dirt. Then they set out for Angel's Camp, never to return.

"Meantime the rain had washed away the top of the pan of dirt they had left standing on the hillside, exposing a handful of nuggets—pure gold. Two strangers, Austrians, happened along, gathered it up, and, seeing the claim notice posted by Jim Gillis, sat down to wait until it expired.

"They did not mind the rain—not under the circumstances—and, the moment the thirty days were up they followed the lead a few pans further and took out twenty thousand dollars."

WHEN BUTTER COST TEN CENTS A POUND

A HUNDRED years ago it cost hardly anything to live, according to the Chicago Tribune. In North Wales, Pennsylvania, at least, things were very reasonable in 1813.

Pork, 4 cents a pound; veal, 5 cents; beef, 6 cents. Carnivorous people must have been in clover. Fresh warm eggs cost from 6 to 12 cents a dozen; butter, 10 cents a pound; potatoes, 30 cents a bushel. As for the Sunday shoes of North Wales, they made an item of $1.20 a pair, and trousers were 33 cents—not marked down.

Some things, of course, came higher. The good, necessary tea was $1.02 a pound; sugar, 27 cents; a sheet of writing paper, 4 cents, and nothing less than a 25-cent stamp, would start a letter on its way. If you lost your handkerchief, it meant you had lost your best wedding present, for it cost all of 55 cents. As for stockings, they were 61 cents.

One of the pleasantest features about North Wales was the low cost of dying. The largest coffin was only $7.50. You could die for a song.

Of course, the farm-hands around North Wales got only $3 a week—which wouldn't keep us in sodas.

WILL THERE BE ANY HORSES IN 2000 A. D.?

THE horse is doomed. In the farmer's barn ten years hence only the impatient motor-truck will paw the ground and champ its bit and hoarsely toot for its morning meal of gasolene. Oil-tanks will stand where hay-stacks were once piled, and the vigorous odor of gas will fill the once clover-perfumed air.

The reason for all this is the great American malady, the high cost of living, which has penetrated even the stable.

It costs a man $30 a year to shoe a horse—probably more than it costs him to shoe his wife; it costs 90 cents a day to feed a horse—more than a recent estimate by a railroad man on what was necessary for a family of five. It costs the United States $10 a year per horse for sanitary measures; and as it possesses 26,000,000 horses,—one fourth of the 100,000,000 horses in the world,—that means a large sum for equine house-cleaning.

The Saturday Night quotes G. Arthur Beal, of the Bureau of Animal Industry of the United States government:

"At $3 per day for 300 working days the horse gives a total service of $900 per year. Against this the cost of a horse per year, carefully estimated, is placed at $880, including equipment and driver's wages.

"In some lines of business a horse's useful life does not exceed three years. Compare this with the longevity of the electric truck, for example, which is from ten to fifteen years. The total expenses which the United States assumes for the ten million horses in use in its cities and towns are in excess of $7,400,000,000.

"The economic waste resulting from feeding the total of 26,000,000 horses and draft animals in the United States is practically impossible to calculate. Using the government's estimate that one horse requires five acres of land for his upkeep and the fact that five acres of land devoted to food product can be made to feed five people per year, the result shows an acreage sufficient to maintain a population of 125,000,000 people that is now being devoted to the raising of horse feed. To feed these 26,000,000 horses it costs $2,000,000,000 annually."

In view of these facts, what wonde [?] the horse becomes as extinct as the dodo.

THE MOST DARING WOMAN IN ENGLAND

SHE is the real Prime Minister of England. She organized that weird society called the "Souls," which fell from its high ethical pinnacle when its "affinities" became sadly mixed. She was the original of "Dodo," the heroine of Benson's daring novel, and she inspired William Watson's cryptic poem, "The Woman with the Serpent's Tongue." She championed Oscar Wilde after he had been cut from the calling list of the rest of the world, and she encouraged Maud Allan to disport herself on the Asquith lawn in Salome's dance, after Manchester had pronounced it "dreadful." For three decades and more the audacious lady has kept London in sensations by her varied departures from convention. Just lately, the London Globe accused her of being friendly with German prisoners. Her name wasn't mentioned; but the implication was so clear that she made the Globe humbly apologize and pay her $5000. No other woman in England has achieved a more unfettered career, coupled with so exalted a social position. Here is Mrs. Asquith's latest picture, unpublished before in any American magazine.

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GENTLEMEN HOUSEKEEPERS

NOT always have fashionable gentlemen been absent-minded about the little domestic duties of women. In the seventeenth century many noblemen took a serious interest in housework, and, when they weren't fighting their king's wars, spent much of their time in busying themselves about the house—especially in the kitchen. Gentlemen housekeepers were as common as hangings.

Cook-book after cook-book was written

by gentlemen and dedicated to gentlemen, says an article in the Christian Science Monitor. Patrick, Lord Ruthven, wrote "The Ladies' Cabinet"; and Robert May dedicated his cook-book to Lord Lovelace and Lord Lumley. Every recipe was named after some particular friend of the author. Poor Lord d'Aubigny became more famous as the namesake of Lord d'Aubigny's Herrings than as a verse writer and a soldier.

But the Mrs. Rorer of the period was Sir Kenelme Digby, a fat, good-natured knight of many abilities. He was a diplomat, a gentleman of the bed-chamber to King James I, a student of Galileo and Bacon, a pirate on the high seas, and the author of a cook-book, "The Closet." A piratical man-of-all-work, he might be called.

"The Closet" is no ordinary cook-book full of add-boiling-water-and-serve directions. Sir Kenelme's recipes have all the thunder of blank verse. One dish, he says, must be watched until it "boil in a great ebullition, in great galloping waves." A certain sauce should have "a pale color with an eye of green, to be watched until it begin to blink or till you see your shadow in it."

As for the ingredients, he used the tops and buds of almost every hedge and wild flower—red sage, violets, marigolds, lettuce, gilliflowers "in natural good handfuls." Candy and jellies were enriched with ivory, hartshorn, white amber, and often gold leaf.

It all calls up a picture of innocent pleasure—Sir Kenelme and the other lords of the shire visiting one another's kitchens, dicing some newly discovered root into the caldron with their poniards, and taking alternate tastes of the brew over their enormous starched ruffs.

JAPANESE FOR "PEP"

IF ever you are in Japan, and overhear two of your neighbors agreeing that "you have absolutely no tea in you," pack your wardrobe-trunk and take the first boat to San Francisco. The plain fact of the case is that you are not a social success. If you are in the silk exporting business in Yokohama, about to engage a native manager, and they tell you he is a good fellow, but "lacks tea," look further: he is not the man you want. Tea is Japanese for "pep," good American pep, that sturdy little new word now on its way to a good place in the dictionary.

Says Okakura Kakuzo, in his Book of Tea (Duffield & Co.):

"In our common parlance we speak of a man 'with no tea in him' when he is insusceptible to the serio-comic interests of the personal drama. Again, we, stigmatize the untamed esthete who, regardless of the mundane tragedy, runs riot on the springtide of the emancipated emotions as one 'with too much tea in him.'"

Which means what we said above.

Tea started out as a medicine, and then became a beverage. In the eighth century its status was that of a polite amusement. In the fifteenth it became a religion—"Teaism"; and such it has remained in esthetic Japan. Mr. Kakuzo says that tea "has not the arrogance of wine, the self-consciousness of coffee, nor the simpering innocence of cocoa." At all events, it soon became a necessity of life.

When tea-time comes round in Japan, life becomes very real and very earnest, especially for the American traveler anxious to avoid blunders in etiquette. The ritual follows the form laid down by great tea masters like Rikiu, who lived in the days of Taiko-Hideyoshi.

First you leave your Panama and your Oxfords and your cane (also your sword, if you are in the habit of carrying one) on the rack outside; for "the tea-room is a place of peace." Then you go down a garden path—which signifies meditation—strewn with seven or possibly thirteen rose-leaves. A wave of rare incense leads you to the appointed place. The door leading into the tea-room is only three feet high. You have to stoop to enter it. This teaches you humility. The ideal tea-room is only four mats and a half (ten feet) square, and aside from the tea things it 'has only one ornament—one vase or one spray of flowers—in it.

DANGERS OF THE GREAT WAR

D'ANNUNZIO CONFESSES

ARE you convinced that you could write a masterpiece if you only knew how to go about it? Well, methods vary. In "Some Confessions," from the Saturday Westminster Gazette, Gabriele d'Annunzio describes how he does it.

The working methods of the Italian are in some respects common to artists. Like most writers, particularly those of a dark, poetic, bilious complexion, he drank coffee and tea to excess—sometimes as much as fifteen cups a night. Once he kept himself going by eating lumps of sugar dipped in ether. But now, since he found that his working capacity is greater without stimulants, he has given up all exciting drinks, including wine. Nor does he even smoke.

Like most writers, too, he works better at night. At one period of his career, he would begin writing at four o'clock in the afternoon, take a light supper at eight, and work until five the next morning.

It is his habit to think slowly, perhaps by years, and write fast, usually by days. The first idea of "La Figlia di Jorio" came to him in 1887, but he did not write it until 1903, when he began and completed it in one furious month.

If you would be a d'Annunzio, your greatest task will be the enlargement of your vocabulary. He not only mastered the classics, so that he was able to mark up every bit of the margin with his own notes, but he read straight through vocabularies of the arts and the professions, so that the technical terms of the lawyer and doctor and violinist were his own.

"A German," he says, "has made the calculation that in the 'Fuoco' there are a thousand words more which I have used than are used by other celebrated Italian novelists. This intimacy with our classics, the wealth of words I had acquired, became a natural gift, almost a new literary organ."

So get down the old biology and master every word.

HOW WOMEN CONVICTS ARE TREATED

MADELEINE DOTY was interested in convicts—those people behind high gray walls that the rest of the world tries to forget about. She had a hunch that they are much the same sort of people that we are—just as kind-hearted and affectionate, and with the same need of companionability and cheerfulness and decent work to do. So, on a trumped-up charge of forgery, she had herself arrested and taken to the Auburn State Prison. After the prison recorder looked her over carefully, he remarked in a low voice to his companion, "All the stigmata of criminality," and put her down in the books as "Maggie Martin, 933."

In Society's Misfits (Century Company) Madeleine Doty gives a careful account of the week she spent in prison. She learned many things. The food was revolting. She could eat nothing but the bread, "that was never wasted; for all uneaten bread is gathered up and reserved for the next meal—a splendid way of transmitting disease."

She learned not to ask for another blanket. The night matron, a white-haired, feeble woman, "who might have made a pleasing and venerable figure in her Sunday best," answered her with: "You've a wash rug on your floor; use that if you're cold." She learned that in prison one is bathed once a week, and in preparation for this three-minute ceremony the prisoners on that day are kept in their cells, with no work and no exercise.

But the worst feature of prison life is the rule of silence. That is what breaks the spirit of the prisoners. In two days, says Maggie Martin, 933, her mind was filled with the horror and hopelessness of a person buried alive. She dared not break the rule of silence, for fear of being put in the "cooler"—a damp basement cell without a window, where every meal is more bread and water, and there is nothing to do but listen to the silence and to wonder what time it is.

The schools that prepare children for Sing Sing are the reformatories. After Miss Doty experienced prison life, she collected nearly two thousand records of convicts, and discovered that two thirds of them had, as children, been in reformatories.

"If I had a son," wrote a convict, "and there was no way to support him, I would shoot him rather than send him to a reformatory. I was sent five times. The first time, I learned to pick pockets. The second, to creep behind a man with a bat, hit him on the head, and take his money. The third, to stick a man up with a gun."

"They beat the children dreadfully," wrote a Sing Sing prisoner to Miss Doty, describing his life in a reformatory. "There was a little Jew boy, and he didn't want to go to church because he was a Jew. He was hit on the head, and the ear-drum broke. I felt awfully sorry, and gathered the little Jew boy up off the floor, and put him to bed. For my humane act I received a 'berrie' (stripped, put under cold shower, and beaten).' If I could have written my mother, she would have done something; but letters home are read, so you can't tell anything; besides, I had been bad for helping the Jew kid, so I couldn't write at all."

This country, concludes Miss Doty, needs reform schools that reform—schools with self-government, and open to the continual criticism and interest of the outside world.

The Triflers

Continued from page 8

wise she would have done. At any rate, that year she was a princess and he her prince.

Outside her window she heard a voice: "Oh, Marjory."

She started. It was her prince calling. It was bewildering to have dreams suddenly blended with life itself. It was bewildering also to have the thoughts of seventeen suddenly blended with the realities of twenty-seven.

"Marjory," he called again.

"Coming," she answered.

Hatless and with a silk shawl over her shoulders, she hurried to where he was waiting. He too was hatless, even as he had been that night long ago when he had sat beside her. Something, too, of the same light of youth was in his eyes now as then.

Side by side they strolled through the quaint village of stone houses and to the top of a near-by hill, where they found themselves looking down upon Joigny outlined against the hazy tints of the pink-and-gold horizon.

"Oh, it's beautiful!" she exclaimed enthusiastically. "It's a fairy world."

"Better, it's a real world," he answered.

"I doubt it, Monte," she disagreed, with a touch of regret. "It's too perfect."

IT would not last. It would begin to fade in a moment, even as her fairy prince would fade and become just Monte. She knew from the past. Besides, it was absolutely essential that he should. If he didn't—why, that would be absurd.

Somewhat shyly she glanced up at Monte. He was standing with his uninjured hand thrust into the pocket of his Norfolk jacket, staring fixedly at the western sky as if he had lost himself there. She thought his face was a bit set; but, for all that, he looked this moment more as she had known him at twenty-one than when he came back at twenty-two. After his travels of a year he had seemed to her so much wiser than she that he had instantly become her senior. The mellow light softened his features and the light breeze had tousled his hair, so that for all his years told he might have been back in his football days. He had been like that all the afternoon.

A new tenderness swept over her. She would have liked to reach up her hand and smooth away the little puzzled frown between his brows. She almost dared to do it. Then he turned.

"You're right," he said, with a shrug of his shoulders. "It isn't real. See, it's fading away now."

The pink clouds were turning gray.

"Perhaps it's better that way," she suggested. "If it stayed like that all the time, we'd get so used to it we wouldn't see it."

He took out his watch.

"I ordered supper to be ready in a half hour," he said. "We'd better get back."

She fell in step by his side—by the side of her fairy prince. For, oddly enough, he had not begun to fade as the sunset faded. The twilight was deepening into the hushed night—a wonderful night that was like beautiful music heard at a distance. It left her scarcely conscious of moving. In the sky the stars were becoming clearer; in the houses, candles were beginning to twinkle.

There was no abrupt change even when they came into the inn, where near the open window a table had been set and two candles were burning.

"Oh," she exclaimed again, "here is another bit of fairy world."

He laughed abruptly.

"I hope the supper is real, anyhow," he said.

Chops and cauliflower and a salad were served to them, with patties of fresh butter and crusted white bread. She prepared his salad with a dash of salt and pepper, a little vinegar and oil. That much, at least, she was at liberty to do for him. It gave her a new pleasure.

"Monte," she asked, "do you suppose it's always as nice as this here?"

"If it were, would you like to stay?" he asked.

She thought a moment over that. Would it be possible just to drift on day after day, with Monte always a fairy prince beside her? She glanced up and met his eyes.

"I—I guess it's best to follow our schedule," she decided, with a little gasp.

THROUGH the golden sunshine and beneath the blue sky, they went on the next day, until with a nod she chose her place to stop for lunch, until with another nod, as the sun was getting low, she chose her place to stop for the night. This time they did not ask to know even the name of the village. It was his suggestion.

"Because," he explained, "that makes it seem as if we were trying to get somewhere. And we aren't, are we?"

"Wherever we are, we are," she nodded gayly.

"It isn't even important that we get to Etois," he insisted.

"Not in the slightest," she agreed. "Only, if we keep on going we'll get to the sea, won't we?"

"Then we can skirt the shore or take a boat and cross the sea. It's all one."

"All one! You make me feel as if I had wings."

"Then you're happy?"

"Very, very happy, Monte. And you?"

"Yes," he answered abruptly.

She had no reason to doubt it. That night, as she sat alone in her room, she reviewed this day in order to satisfy herself on this point; for she felt a certain obligation. He had given to her so generously that the least she in her turn could do was to make sure that he was comfortable and content. That, all his life, was the most he had asked for. It was the most he asked for now. He must wake each morning free of worries, come down to a good breakfast and find his coffee hot, have a pleasant time of it during the day without being bored, and end the day with a roast and salad and later a good bed. These were simple desires—thoroughly wholesome, normal desires.

This morning she had come down early and looked to his coffee herself. It was a slight thing, but she had awakened with a desire to do something positive and personal for him. She had been satisfied when he exclaimed, without knowing the part she played in it:

"This coffee is bully!"

It had started the day right and given her a lightness of spirit that was reflected in her talk and even in her smiles.

Her thoughts went back to the phrase he had used at the end of the day's journey.

"We aren't getting anywhere, are we?" he had asked.

At the moment she had not thought he meant anything more than he said. He seldom did. It was restful to know that she need never look for hidden meanings in his chance remarks. He meant only there was no haste; that it made no difference when they reached this town or that. They had no destination.

That was true, and yet the thought disturbed her a trifle. It did not seem quite right for Monte to have no destination. He was worth something more than merely to revolve in a circle. He should have a Holy Grail. But would not that destroy the very poise that made him just Monte?

It was too puzzling a question for her own peace of mind. She turned away from it and slowly began to take down her hair.

ON and on they went the third day—straight on—with their destination still hidden. That night, when again alone, she sat even longer by her open window than she had yesterday. In some ways this had been rather a more exciting day than the others. Again she had risen early and come down to order his coffee; but he too must have risen early, for he had come upon her as she was giving her instructions. It had been an embarrassing moment for her, and she had tried to carry it off with a laugh.

"So this is the secret of my good coffee?" he asked.

"There is so very little I can do for you," she faltered.

"That is a whole lot more than I deserve," he answered.

However, he was pleased by this trivial attention, and she knew it. It was an absurdly insignificant incident, and yet here she was recalling it with something like a thrill. Not only that, but there was another and equally preposterous detail. She had dropped her vanity-box in the car, and as they both stooped for it his cheek had brushed hers. He laughed lightly and apologized—forgetting it the next second. Eight hours later she dared remember it, like any school girl.

The fourth day came, with still the golden road unfolding before them. Then the fifth day, and that night they stopped within sight of the ocean. It came as a surprise to both of them. It was as if, after all, they had reached a destination, when as a matter of fact they had done nothing of the sort. It meant, to be sure, that the next day would find them in Nice, which would end their ride, because they intended to remain there for a day or two until they arranged for a villa in Etois, which, being in the mountains, they must reach afoot. But if she did not like it they could move on to somewhere else. There was nothing final even about Etois.

THAT evening they walked by the shore of the sea, and Monte appeared quieter than usual.

"I have wired ahead for rooms at the Hotel des Roses," he announced.

"Yes, Monte," she said.

"It's where I've stopped for ten years. The last time I found Edhart gone, and was very uncomfortable."

"You were as dependent upon him as that?" she asked.

"It was what lured me on to Paris—and you," he smiled.

"Then I must be indebted to Edhart also."

"I think it would be no more than decent to look up his grave and place a wreath of roses there," he observed.

"But, Monte," she protested, "I should hate to imagine he had to give up his life—for just this."

"At any rate, if he hadn't died I'm sure I should have kept to my schedule," he said seriously.

"And then?"

"I should not have been here."

"You speak regretfully?" she asked.

He stopped abruptly and seized her arm.

"You know better," he answered.

For a moment she looked dizzily into his eyes. Then he broke the tension by smiling.

"I guess we'd better turn back," she said below her breath.

It was evident that Monte was not quite himself at that moment. That night she heard the roll of the ocean as she tried to sleep, and it said many strange things to her. She did not sleep well.

The next morning they were on their way again, reaching the Hotel des Roses at six in the evening. Henri was at the door to meet them. The man, Monte thought, had greatly improved since his last visit. He seemed to understand better without being told what Monsieur Covington desired. The apartments were ready, and it was merely a personal matter between Monte and the garçon to have his trunk transferred from the second floor to the third and Marie's trunk brought down from the third to the second. Even Edhart might have been pardoned for making this mistake in the distribution of the luggage, if not previously informed.

That evening Marjory begged to be excused from dinner, and Monte dined alone. He dined alone in the small salle-à-manger where he had always dined alone, and where the last time he was here he had grown in an instant from twenty-two to thirty-two. Now, in another instant, it was as if he had gone back to twenty-two.

A thing that impressed Monte was how amazingly friendly every one was. His old table in the corner had been reserved for him, but this time it had been arranged for two. Even the empty chair opposite him seemed friendly. It said, as plainly as it is possible for a chair to speak:

"Madame Covington is disappointed to think she could not join you this evening, but you must remember that it is not to be expected of a woman to stand these long journeys like a man. However, she will have breakfast with you in the morning. That is something to look forward to. In the meanwhile let me serve to remind you that she is upstairs—upstairs in the room you used to occupy. Perhaps even at this moment she is looking out the window at this same languid blue sea. Being up there, she is within call. Should you need her—really need her—you may be perfectly sure that she would come to you.

"That time you were ill here two years ago, you had rather a bad time of it because there was no one to visit you except a few chance acquaintances about whom you did not care. Well, it would not be like that now. She would by your bed all night long and all day long, too, if you permitted. She is that kind. So, you see, you are really no dining alone to-night. I, though only an empty chair, am here to remind you of that."

Felix, who was in charge of the salle-à-manger, hovered near Monte as if he felt the latter to be his especial charge. He served as Monte's right hand—the hand of the sling. He was very much disturbed because madame refused her dinner, and every now and then thought of something new that possibly might tempt her.

EVERY one else about the hotel was equally friendly, racking his brains to find a way of serving Monte by serving madame. It made him feel quite like one of those lordly personages who used to come here with a title and turn the place topsy-turvy for themselves and for their women-folk. He recalled a certain count of something who arrived with his young wife and who in a day had half of Nice in his service. Monte felt like him, only more so. There was a certain obsequiousness that the count demanded which vanished the moment his back was turned; but the interest of Felix and his fellows now was based upon something finer than fear. Monte felt it had to do with Marjory herself, and also—well, in a sense she was carrying a title too. She was, to these others, a bride.

But it was a great relief to know that she was not the sort of bride of which he had seen too many in the last ten years. It would be a pleasure to show these fellows a bride who would give them no cause to smile behind their hands. He would show them a bride who could still conduct herself like a rational human being, instead of like a petulant princess or a moon-struck school girl.

Monte lighted a cigarette and went out upon the Quai Massena for a stroll. It was late in the season for the crowds. They had long since adjourned to the mountains or to Paris. But still there were plenty remaining. He would not have cared greatly had there been no one left. It was a relief to have the shore to himself. He had formerly been rather sensitive about being anywhere out of season. In fact, this was the first time he had ever been here later than May. But the difference was not so great as he had imagined it must be. Neither the night sky nor the great turquoise mirror beneath it appeared out of season.

Monte did not stray far. He walked contentedly back and forth for the matter of an hour. He might have kept on until midnight, had it not been for a messenger from the hotel who handed him a note. Indifferently he opened it and read:

I've gone to the Hotel d'Angleterre. Please don't try to see me to-night. Hastily, Marjory.

To be continued next week

Isn't Your Tire Bill Too Large?

By ERNEST A. STEPHANS

ALTHOUGH you, as a motorist, are ready to admit that your tire bill reaches an annual total beside which the cost of your gasolene, even at its present high prices, is relatively insignificant—are you really ready to affirm that the high cost of tiring is a matter over which you have no control, and in which you are at the mercy of outside influences?

Just as a matter of curiosity, take a casual glance at the next dozen cars drawn up at the curb in your street. The chances are that six of them are fitted with tires which are insufficiently inflated, that at least three of the number have rear tires streaked with lubricating oil or grease, and that the front tires of four bear the outward and visible signs (once seen and realized—never forgotten) which indicate that the wheels are out of alignment.

When you have done this, think the matter over in relation to the fact that ninety per cent. of the troubles start inside the tire, and that you know little or nothing of their existence until—bang!

There is little art in purchasing tires. Pay no attention to the color of the tread: it has just as much effect on the wearing qualities as has color on the taste of candy. Don't, as a rule, buy seconds or so-called cheap lines: there is no real saving effected. And remember that an oversize tire will, under normal circumstances, pay for its extra cost several times over.

Under-inflation is the direct or indirect cause of the majority of the ills to which tires are liable, and it is a good rule to keep your tires pumped to a pressure of twenty rounds per inch of cross-section; that is, eighty pounds for a four-inch tire. Do not reduce the degree of inflation because the weather is warm. The heat of the sun, plus that generated by traction, does not increase the pressure to any appreciable extent. If you use an engine-driven or other high-speed pump, test the pressure in the tires an hour or so after you have inflated the tires. Rapidly compressed air becomes heated, and as it cools the pressure drops in the tires.

Don't be afraid to use the pump; the margin of safety in a good tire is such that you can not over-inflate it. If you try to do so, the first result will be that your friends will refuse to go riding (or bumping) with you. You can buy a reliable tire gauge for a dollar.

Should your front tires look as if a giant [?] ile had been used on their treads, and if the lining fabric is showing as a wavy ridge, you may depend upon it that the wheels are out of line, and that the sooner they are inspected at the service station or garage the better for your bank-roll. If the rear tires present this appearance, look to your brake adjustments and equalizers. Probably one brake is acting before the other.

Drive carefully across car tracks, see that your tire chains are neither too tight nor too loose, remember that oil or grease should not be allowed to touch a tire (or any rubber), and that a bent axle means a badly worn tire. Hesitate before fitting a reliner or casing reinforcement to a new tire, on account of the extra friction developed, but be prompt to fit one to a partially worn tire.

The inner tube is a faithful servant, if treated with a little consideration. Do not carry it in your tool-box, as a single grease spot may cause it to fail you ten miles from anywhere. When you fold it for transportation, do it in such a way that the vibration of the car will not cause it to chafe against either itself or its valve. Keep it in a red or black individual bag when not in use, in order to protect it from bright or actinic light, and when you have occasion to fit it to the tire, do so carefully and evenly. French talc is the natural lubricant for rubber, but do not use too much when fitting the tube, and also be sure it isn't damp. If you neglect these precautions you may expect the talc to form a number of pellets between the tube and the casing, with results disastrous to both.

Extra tire care will amply repay you just now. No doubt you used your car considerably during your vacation, and are more or less anxious that your tires should last for the remainder of the season. Assuming this to be so, let it be reiterated that your pump and your gauge are your best friends, and that tires and teeth are alike in that even brief neglect spells trouble.

Our Motor Service Department

Let us help to solve your problems. Write fully, and remember that you incur neither expense nor obligation. Mark your letter "Automobile Editor."

Please inform me if the top fitted to my car needs any attention after use in rainy weather. How can I remove stains from it? C. L.

Do not fold the top while it is wet and do not attempt to dry it by exposure to heat. A lather made of good castile soap and water rubbed in with a stiff brush will remove spots and stains; this should be removed with clean cold water. Do not use gasolene, as it may dissolve the rubber with which the top material is impregnated.

The springs of my car are rattling, and the effect is very annoying. How can I remedy the trouble? J. T. S.

Try the effect of tightening the shackle bolts. The noise is probably caused by play or looseness between the shackles and the spring ends. If tightening has not the desired effect, place thin strips of metal, known as shims, between the spring and shackle. Keep the bolts well lubricated and do not allow mud to accumulate, as hard particles are likely to find their way between the working parts.

I am experiencing carburetor troubles which I am told are the result of incorrect adjustment. I have tried to put matters right, but have failed. I am inclined to think that too rich a mixture is the cause, as black smoke comes from the exhaust when the engine is running. Can you tell me what to do? F. M. D.

The first thing to do is to start the engine and to retard the spark lever so that it runs slowly with the throttle about half open. Then screw down the needle valve until the engine runs irregularly or misses, but stop just short of the point where it shows signs of stopping altogether. This means that you are giving it a minimum of fuel. Then gradually unscrew the needle valve until the engine develops its highest speed, and when this point is reached secure the lock-nut to prevent alteration of adjustment. Open the air inlet until the engine misfires or pops back in the carburetor, and then reduce the supply until the engine speeds up to an appreciable extent. These are general instructions, but the principle is about the same in all carburetors, and with needle and air valves set rightly, your troubles should be at an end.

The Fire of Youth

Continued from page 6

greatly simplified by selling strips of ice-tickets to the housewives—eleven ten-cent tickets for a dollar if they were paid for in advance. Also young William was up at four every morning, and worked till after dark every night.

"Fire of youth!" grinned old Bill to Mabel. "I was just that way when I was his age!"

August. A garage was built on the Adams property and a car was installed in the same. Young William took his place at the wheel. On the back seat sat his mother, in a lavender motor veil, and by her side sat old Bill in a tweed duster and gray cap. As they approached the First National Bank, old Bill leaned forward and whispered: "Drive slow here, Will! I don't want old Pennypacker to miss this!"

September. A new building was erected by the side of the ice-house, machinery was installed, and a sign appeared, "Stockton Wet Wash Laundry." Three new wagons were purchased and kept continually on the run, fetching and returning bundles of laundry.

"Fire of youth!" chuckled old Bill to Mabel. "Who else would have thought of this laundry business? Chip of the old block! Didn't I tell you?"

But the month of October was the star of them all, being the month of harvests and the fruition of rare surprises.

"Will, my boy," said old Bill, one night, "to-morrow's your birthday. Your mother and I have been thinking it over for a long time, and we've got a little surprise for you. I've had the ice and laundry business made into a stock company, and half the stock issued in your name. And here's the certificates—right here in this envelop. We'll hold a meeting to-morrow, and I think we'll be able to draw fifty dollars a week each—maybe more if the money keeps coming in the way it has been doing."

Whereat young William blushed like a peony, and after he had kissed his mother he shook his father's hand. "I—I guess I've got a surprise for you folks, too," he said. "I—I'm going to get married!"

"Married?" cried Mr. and Mrs. Adams in startled concert. "Who on earth are you going to marry?"

"Grace Hoffman."

"Oh, ho!" cried his mother in sudden enlightenment. "So that's where you've been going nights, is it—when we thought you were out with the other boys?"

Young William nodded.

"She told me last fall she'd have me when I'd made good," he said. "I guess maybe that's one reason I've been trying so hard. Say, do you mind if I run over and tell her about this? I'll be right back."

AS soon as he had gone—which didn't take long—old Bill roguishly winked one eye. "The young rascal!" he said. "Wait till old Pennypacker hears this! You know, Mabel, those Hoffmans have barrels of money, and—"

"Money!" scoffed Mrs. Adams. "Anybody can marry money, but it isn't many girls who can marry a young man with brains like our Will's."

She thought it over with increasing resentment, and then she suddenly broke out: "You can say what you like, but this idea of our Willie getting married has quite upset me. I think he's a lot better off the way he is!"

"Oh, I don't know, ma," said old Bill, rubbing his head. "Where would we be now if it hadn't been for him? And maybe it when he gets my age he'll need some of that fire of youth himself. You know, you never can tell!"

A Business You Can Start for Nothing

SOME people would think that treeing mountain lions and pulling them down into the snow, tying their jaws with a muzzle and carting them off in a stretcher, was an occupation for only those with small sense or enormous courage. But W. H. Bakker, a Montana hunter and trapper, is a man of neither little sense nor—so he says—of unusual courage. But we fancy that there is a good deal of the courageous in the daily work of the lion-catcher.

Bakker proceeds something like this: Accompanied by his pack of fox-hounds, he trees the lion, shins up the tree himself, not much slower than the animal, and with a careful and much practised fling throws his noose around the lion's neck. After that it is a matter of climbing out of the tree, whence he drags the struggling animal after him, slipping the muzzle over the lion's neck, tying all four feet, and carrying it off to the exhibitors.

Sometimes Mrs. Bakker accompanies her husband. In a moving picture taken while the hunter was in the act of catching a large lion, Mrs. Bakker marches up fearlessly to a spot in the snow where the dogs are surrounding a lassoed lion, grabs it by the tail, and hangs on tight while her husband does the collaring. Of course, there is always a scrap. Scars on the lion-catcher's body attest that fact. And now and then Bakker loses one of his pack of trained fox-hounds. But these things are merely part of the day's work to Bakker.

When the lion is securely bound with chains and rope, Bakker and his wife often have a "carry" of ten or fifteen miles, with their catch riding in a canvas stretcher for all the world like a wounded soldier.

"How in the world did you ever think of catching lions for a living?" was asked Mr. Bakker.

"Well, now," he drawled casually, "I was a guide and hunter for a long time in that country, and a friend of mine had been catching mountain lions for some years. I thought I might try it, and it wasn't so bad at all. So I'm still at it, and there's lots more up there. As soon as I'm through touring the East with my pictures, it's back to Montana and the lion country."

Bakker used to have Airedales in his pack of hunters; but the Airedales, he says, haven't much sense when rounding up lion, and they usually manage to get themselves killed.

Sometimes the lions, as they are driven up into the trees, turn and threaten. Often they charge the dogs. But the lion catcher seems to have them cowed, and, they retreat from his rope with all possible speed. Bakker is quite a climber himself and so are the dogs. If you happen to be in the Montana woods some day near the town of Libby, don't be surprised if you see the whole procession—lion, Bakker and dogs—shinning up the nearest fir tree.

The Commuter's Cow

I LIVE in the country, and I keep a cow. The thing that surprises me is that everybody else who lives in the country, or even in a small suburb, doesn't do likewise. I figure it out this way:

Two pounds of butter at thirty-six cents a pound, and two quarts of milk a day at eight cents a quart, amount to $1.84 a week. Since it costs less than $1.50 a week to keep a cow that will give at least fourteen quarts of milk a day and four or five pounds of butter a week for at least nine months out of the year,—and a calf that will pay for the other three months,—it will be seen that a good cow pays her way nine times over.

I was a rank ignoramus about cows, milking, and all dairy matters when we first moved into the country. I had only a fifteen-year-old boy for outside help, who was quite as unskilled as myself. So when I had a chance to buy a good Jersey cow at a reasonable price, I hesitated until I discovered that a man who had been engaged for a week to dig a ditch and cut brush was a good milker, and that I could arrange with him to give us lessons.

The first morning the boy and I watched him closely, and received a lot of valuable information, but made no attempt to assist. Before night the ditch-digger was missing; and, as he was a notorious lover of cider, I resigned myself to fate, and resolved to undertake the business myself. I sat down on the milking-stool, held the pail between my knees, and proceeded to imitate the man's motions.

Having once mastered the mystery of milking, I was content to turn the task over to the boy. But I have the serene satisfaction of knowing that if he ever fails to report in the morning I am competent to handle the situation.

The city man who moves to the country goes into chicken-raising almost inevitably. Seldom, if ever, does he think of a cow. Yet the number of people who lose money in chickens is probably larger, on the whole, than the number who make a profit; whereas the cow,

given reasonably intelligent care, is almost sure to pay her way, and then some. There would be a lot more money in the savings banks if the little building behind the suburban home had a cow under its roof instead of chickens or a fliver.

The Jump in Junk

ONCE more the voice of the junk-dealer is heard in every corner of the land, and a business that has languished in the financial doldrums for years is again upon its feet and growing fat. It is on a highly paying basis to-day, and junk-dealers in every part of the country who were fortunate enough to have on hand a large store of old metals and scrap iron at the beginning of the war have made their fortunes.

A little more than two years ago the junk market had sagged to such an extent that, at the best, the average dealer could hardly expect more than a profit of one per cent. Then came the unusual demand from Europe for iron and steel materials of all sorts. In a few months the market prices had advanced from 75 to 200 per cent., a figure that will probably be maintained throughout the war. From $2 a ton the price began an upward climb that was not halted until the present level of $10 and $12 a ton was reached.

$100,000 for Junk Thought Worthless

THOUSANDS of men and women are finding the collecting of junk a profitable business, and gradually are denuding the back yards and dumping-grounds of all salable metals. It is estimated that the war prices have added from $75,000 to $100,0000 to the profits of junk-dealers in cities of from 50,000 to 100,000, so that the value of the junk business in the larger cities may be said to be well up in six figures.

A typical case of this new-found prosperity is that of Thomas Robinson, an Iowa junk-dealer who had used every available resource in collecting 11,000 tons of old iron and scrapped metals. His supply covered a three-acre lot from ten to sixty feet deep; but before the war began there was not enough money to be made in selling the material to pay for breaking it up for the market. Before the war had been in progress many months, Robinson disposed of his entire holdings to an eastern manufacturer for $100,000.

The markets in many cities are being swamped with materials brought in by school-boys, who are making dollars now where dimes and nickels came in before. Many metals that had no cash value before the war are forging to the front as profitable side lines for the junkmen. This is true especially of worn out battery plates.

A year ago heavy copper commanded a market price of 15¼ cents a pound: today the latest quotations range from 22 to 25 cents a pound, with no limit in sight. Brass junk has increased more than 100 percent., and is still climbing; while the quotations for aluminum cutting are more than twice the priced offered two years ago. Zine prices have jumped more than 100 per cent., as have pewter, electrotype, and stereotype metals.

In five months' time more than 1000 car-loads, or about 400,000 tons of scrap iron and other metals, have been shipped out of Sioux City, Iowa, alone. Railroad yards in some of the Middle West river cities are nothing but mountains of junk.

Iron Recovers from Slump of 1907

THIS condition of affairs probably never will arise again in the United States, though it seems assured that junk prices will remain near the present level for several years, even though the war should end soon. The iron market has recovered from the slump that followed the over-production of 1907, and the rail-roads and foreign countries have snapped up every available bit of iron and steel on the market. Most of the iron mills have contracts that will keep them busy for many months, and there is no danger of over-production in the iron mines of the country; so the future, as far as the junk dealer is concerned, looks bright.

She Keeps Their Memories Green

MEN got the habit of telling long stories of their achievements to their wives back in the Middle Ages, when the latter were always in need of "copy" for their tapestries. "Single-handed and alone," a hero would reminisce, during the long winter evenings, "I met the twelve gigantic knights that guarded the entrance, and felled them one by one."

"Did you get that, girls?" the lady of the castle would say to her hand-maidens; and they would all fall to, to picture the story in their tapestry. Indeed, it has even been suggested that the Crusades were instigated by housewives who wanted to redecorate their dining-halls.

All this, of course, was before the days of clubs or careers or votes for women, and naturally a great deal of tapestry accumulated, which it has become the duty of posterity to preserve.

The Metropolitan Museum of New York owns some sixty tapestries of varied beauty and value, and the care of them constitutes the life work of a young Austrian, Wilhelma Körte.

Frau Körte's work-shop and laboratory are on the roof of the museum, confronting its glass domes. Hung in tapestries, flanked with dye-pots, skeins of silks, and coils of raw wools, it exhales the aroma of a Renaissance craftman's guild.

The war has not affected Frau Körte's dye supply, for this resourceful young woman makes her own vegetable dyes. Having studied chemistry in school, she preserved with four basic colors, until now, when our textile manufacturers are decrying dye shortage, there is no tint, however brilliant or faded, that she can not get in her laboratory.

That tapestry restoration is not mending as commonly understood, but literal weaving,—the enforcing of the warp after the manner of hte original bobbin of the original loom,—a visit to Frau Körte's work-shop reveals. Hers is art, not to be confounded with commercial restoration, where holes are wont to be patched up by the insertion of bits cut from old discarded tapestries; by the painting of a lost feature of a face or limb of a body; by restoration without relation to the period or details of a costume.

"To restore one small hole successfully I often count a good day's work," said Frau Körte, at work on a rare seventeenth-century gold basket tapestry—a treasured Museum loan, which its owner had consigned to her for restoration preparatory to its removal to his own residence.

It requires scarcely less skill to restore a fine tapestry than to design or weave one. For the restorer must have not only facility in drawing and designating and a fine color sense, but must understand anatomy and be familiar with the tapestries of various periods. This expert knowledge is the restorer's stock in trade. In the exercise of his sill it is all that he has to rely upon; for, unlike the original tapestry, he has not the designer's cartoon to guide him. All this and much more are Frau Körte's, not a little assimilated in the art galleries of Munich, Vienna, and Berlin.

The late Purdon Clarke, who was connected with Kensington Museum before he became director of the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York, gave Frau Körte, as a "try-out," the Museum’s Verdure tapestry, which was split from top to bottom. So skilfully did she repair it that Sir Purdon was unable to discover the line where the loom left off and the woman's needle began.

"It took me thirty-five days to weave that rent," says Frau Körte, "but it was worth it." Which is just what the museum thinks.