Where Are the Nine?

THERE were ten lepers standing by the roadside in Palestine. And Jesus of Nazareth passed by.

Outcasts they were—human refuse: forbidden out their warning to the world, "Unclean, unclean."

Moreover, some of them at least were Samaritans—a people with whom the Jews were forbidden even to speak.

And Jesus, a Jew, saw the pitiful misery of the ten, and healed them.

"Go, show yourselves to the priests," He said, which meant, go, report to the authorities and get a clean bill of health.

So He passed on His way, and it was an hour or two before He heard from them again.

Then, far down the road behind Him, He saw a dust cloud, and a man running. He stopped: the man drew nearer. It was one of the ten who had been healed, and a Samaritan at that.

Falling on his face, he began to pour out his thanks to the Man who had so miraculously made him a man among men again.

And Jesus, looking down on the poor fellow, smiled a rather pathetic little smile.

"Were there not ten cleansed?" He asked, turning to the crowd that was always about Him, and had seen the healing. "Were there not ten cleansed? but where are the nine?"

Where were the nine, indeed?

They had wives, to whom they had long been strangers. They had children, who had long counted them as dead. They had children, who had long counted them as dead. They had home towns, where their return would be nothing less than a sensation. They would be heroes, for a day—they who for so long a time had suffered all the agonies of the doomed.

It is easy enough to imagine where they were: easy enough to excuse them.

Yet the record that their thoughtlessness wrote that day has come down through the ages as a supreme instance of ingratitude.

We know little about those ten lepers, but it is safe to assert that the one who returned to give thanks was the biggest, most successful of the ten.

For, the bigger a man is, the more likely is gratitude to be numbered among his virtues.

The little man is "self-made," and worships his maker.

The man of vision recognizes that the factors in his success which he himself controls are only a part—and often a small part—of the whole.

He constantly takes time to remind himself of that fact: he will be especially conscious of it on Thanksgiving Day this year.

Through no virtue of his own, he finds himself in good health, while millions of men, his equals in every way, are wounded and dying.

He leaves his wife and daughters in the morning, with the reasonable knowledge that when the day is over he will find them safe. No enemy's blighting hand will have been laid upon them.

In a year when half the men of Europe are losing the accumulated savings of a life-time, and mortgaging the future of their children, he has made more money than ever before in his life.

The fool will not think of these things. He will count up his gains and raise himself a little in his own estimation. Not by one penny contributed to the Belgians, not by so much as a pleasant smile for the people who work for him, will he express his gratitude.

But the wise man will stop, look, and listen very humbly on Thanksgiving Day, 1916. The world will be made better by his gratitude; and he himself be blessed.

For gratitude is literally a saving virtue. Gratitude keeps a man simple: and simplicity keeps a man sound.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

When Is a Man Too Old?

By OLIN L. LYMAN

MAN that is born of woman is but of 14,600 days—plus an extra allowance for leap years—and thereafter full of trouble. He is by then forty years old, and nobody will hire him. So says the tradition of the "industrial dead line." It is a tradition that is seriously dished by the facts of to-day.

Cynics assert that the "dead line" is growing younger every year. Truth is a total stranger to this fiction. The Pennsylvania Railroad formerly enforced a rule that no applicant over thirty-five years old be employed or any position. Nine years ago this limit was raised to forty-five years.

There is no "hard and fast" rule governing the employment of help by the New York Central & Hudson River Railroad. It is left to the discretion of executives.

Right here, however, is a point for the prayerful consideration of the stripling of twenty years who will one day be forty, with the gray at the temples that spells one of two fateful conditions for veal or woe—the badge of tried and true efficiency or the ashes of failure.

It will all depend upon the inside of his skull whether, at forty, it is a graveyard or a battle trench.

An executive at the Grand Central terminal in Manhattan said:

"I have an application from a man for the position of stenographer. His references are irreproachable. I have no doubt he might give satisfaction. I may try him out.

"There is but one consideration which causes me to hesitate.

"He is forty-five years old. Why hasn't he, during these working years, developed sufficiently to hold a post of more authority than an ordinary stenographic position? For instance, why is he not now a court reporter? Why is he still, like a raw youth, standing at the foot of a new ladder, looking up?"

"Then there is a dead line?" the executive was asked.

He considered the question silently for a moment. His own hair is gray. He has risen high in railroad councils. He chose that field when a mere boy. To-day he has to hunt no jobs. Jobs hunt him. He may work, and he will, "till man's work is done."

"Yes, there's a dead line," he replied. To me it seems a terrible thing, the bar sinister of effort. For it lies in a man's brain.

"The dead line knows no age. It lies in thought. You and I have known boys of twenty who were done before they started. Conversely, thought may be the essence of eternal youth. James J. Hill dreamed a youth's dream in middle age. He achieved it, toiling like a super-man, in what superficial souls esteem old age. He died, fresh and sound and young. Old Ponce de Leon chased around the Everglades of Florida, hunting a fountain that was bottled in his heart."

A whimsical smile crossed a face of quiet strength—strength built by wise and busy years.

"Tradition, I grant you, maintains the 'industrial dead line' in some quarters," he pursued, "but it is fading. And a resourceful man can beat it. I will give you an illustration.

"In a large concern here in New York was employed for many years a machinist who had grown gray in the service of that establishment. He was past sixty. And not till then had he shown any inclination for wanderlust.

"Then welled within him a belated spirit of adventure. He decided that he wanted to go to Philadelphia.

"He resigned his job, despite vigorous protests; for he was one of the most valued machinists in that plant, which employed hundreds of skilled men.

"He adventured to Philadelphia. After a couple of days of sight-seeing—he said afterward that it didn't take long to 'do' Philadelphia—he felt impelled to hunt another job. You see, he had acquired the habit of work, which is as great a nuisance as that of idleness.

Beating the Dead Line

HE applied at three big establishments in turn. At each he was refused. In each case the man who denied him glanced covertly at his gray hair.

"He went back to his lodgings and thought it over. At a sudden inspiration he grinned. He visited a hair dyer's, and emerged with his gray locks as black as jet.

"Returning to the shop where he had suffered his first turn-down, he was unrecognized and was promptly engaged. He was there for a year. During that time his wages were raised twice and he was accounted one of the best men in the place.

"One morning he received a letter. His old boss, back in New York, wanted him to come back at better money than he had ever received. `We've naturally got to have you back,' the superintendent wrote.

"The young-old fellow gave in his notice that noon. The foreman was dismayed. He offered him a third advance if he would stay.

"'This is what I've been waiting for!' exulted the sojourner from New York. "Here is where I tell you where you can go, in three words. You'll find it hotter even than Philadelphia in this last heated spell."

"'What's the idea?' demanded the foreman. 'What are you bawling me out for?'

"'See that hair?' retorted the returning prodigal, pointing to a thatch that was black and glossy and still thick. 'Look close! It's dyed! Do you get it? Dyed! I came here for a job, and you turned me down because it was gray; and I went out and got it dyed, and you hired me! I've been storing it up to tell you. I'm leaving, see? I'm going back to New York, to the shop I came from, and I'm going to let this hair fade out gray; it's good enough for me! And you stay here and see if you can grow something gray under yours. Will you?"

Researches in realms of work where concentration of thought and effort yield promotion point unvaryingly to a stern requirement of to-day. They carry alike a reassurance and a warning.

For the man of forty and over, well grounded in his work and with his powers fused by years of preparation, there is no dead line.

For the vacillating weather-cock of forty, the industrial opportunist, the superficial, half-hearted seeker after a fender for the exigencies of the moment, there is a dead line. But it is not a new nor a sudden handicap. He has carried it with him from the beginning. As the years pass, and the flare of youth dies, it is there for all men to see—and the issue is hopelessness.

"There is much talk of the 'dead line' in department-stores. How about your men here?"

The inquiry was made of the instructor in one of New York's largest establishments, where one can buy anything from a pin to a piano to set amid an accompanying parlor suite.

"Firstly," he replied, "we do not speak of the establishment as a department-store. We refer to its parts as sections. Each of these is a store in itself, attended by specialists.

"I am in charge of twelve hundred men, trained in these various sections. Some of them started with us as youths. Others have been imported from other stores in New York, or perhaps from cities or towns up-State or elsewhere.

The man's age interests us not at all. We are merely watching his sales reports. How much is it costing us to keep him at work? Two per cent. or twelve per cent.? If it costs us twelve cents on every dollar he takes in, that is too much; we must have a man who will yield us better money on the investment.

"We let men of all ages go, simply for this reason. Age has nothing to do with it."

Some Men Old at Thirty

"BUT, in letting men out for this cause of falling behind in sales, is there not an average age? That is, an average age of failure?"

"There is not. It all depends on the man inside—his own forces. I can best illustrate it with this incident. We have just been obliged to let three men go because of apathetic sales in a certain section. We keep no record of their ages, but I should judge all three are under thirty years of age.

"In the furniture section we employ twenty-five men. There are no women engaged in this section. The hair of a number of these men is thickly sprinkled with gray. The average age of the entire twenty-five is at least thirty-eight, and I imagine it is nearer forty. The most significant feature of the situation is that there is not one of these men, young and older, whose sales record is not more than satisfactory. It is one of the most efficient sections in the establishment.

"Moreover, we recently engaged from another establishment a man well past fifty years of age to superintend one of our sections. Under his management it is showing better results than ever before.

"My experience has been that, all other things being equal, as a man's hair grows gray the inner lining is apt to grow gray with it."

Twenty-five per cent. of the twelve hundred men in this store are over forty.

Connected with the passenger department of the New York Central, with headquarters at the Terminal in New York, is a sprightly young man of sixty-eight years. He has one of the most responsible positions. His work has to do with rates and routings. Says his chief:

"He is one of the most energetic of

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our Little Band of Earnest Thinkers for Traffic. There are certain problems that come up in the course of the day's work. He may be out of the office, on business about the city. We are all helpless till he gets back. He solves the question with one illuminating sentence. For, you see, he carries in his head a map, not of the system alone, but of the entire country."

A manager of another department-store told of a man who arrived from a small city up-State to take his place in one of the sections.

"He would never see fifty again," said he. "He was new to New York. Inside of a month he was selling the other men in that section off their feet. That was a year ago. He is still selling first in the list. Moreover, he draws the best salary."

When Gray Hair Is an Asset

ALL along the line research establishes that if a seasoned man is really holding a job for a progressive concern, gray hair is an asset. If he is looking for one, it is a liability. And the evidence is overwhelming that if a man selects a field in his youth that is susceptible to advancement, and works consistently for self-development, the wolf howls on the other fellow's door-step.

Investigation proves the widespread delusion of the "dead line" to be in reality an inspiring "live line." This is composed of veterans of continued usefulness far beyond the limit set by Oster. Such a record is invariably gained through the exercise of consistency. In the beginning the youth sought a congenial line of effort. By middle life he was well grounded in it and was reaping the rewards of persistency. In young-old age he is still busy, and pridefully tells you that he's just as young as he ever was. No gloom for him!

At Seventy the "Roll of Honor"

THE Pennsylvania Railroad system retires veteran workers at seventy, whether they are track-walkers or vice-presidents, under liberal pensions. Seventy is a fairly liberal "dead line." The Pennsylvania calls it the "roll of honor."

Whenever one of these toilers, in whatever capacity, does his last day's work, is he tickled to death at the prospect of thereafter "being carried to the skies on flowery beds of ease"? He is not.

Concerned for a lifetime with one of the most fascinating and swiftest games in the world, he leaves it with a depth of regret that only he can understand. The zest of constructive labor that God planted in his heart has become with years the blood and fiber of him; the memory of sustained and faithful service is thereafter his compensation—plus the liberal pension.

The Pennsylvania recently retired seven men who had served the system for fifty years or more. The list included men who had risen high, and who, when they retired, still held responsible posts.

One man rose from a job as extra telegraph operator to the post of yard-master, which he held when retired. He began his life's work at sixteen.

Another started at fourteen as an engine-wiper. He retired as a passenger engineer after fifty-two years of continuous service for the road. He protests that he could, if allowed, fulfil the requirements till he was a hundred. Maybe he couldn't; but the important thing is that he feels that way.

Sixteen operating department employees of the Lehigh Valley Railroad have served the company fifty years or more. In July last the management gave each of these men an annual pass, good for himself and wife, over the entire system. The list of veterans includes machinists, boiler-makers, housemen, watchmen, skilled laborers, car repairers, track-walkers, carpenters, and laborers. One of the machinists has served the road fifty-seven years.

An inspiring sign of the times is that, in every office or shop where you find these veterans, the younger men are always consulting them.

The big enterprises all know the value of seasoning, so you find their executive forces sprinkled with gray-heads. Most of the smaller establishments have come to realize this.

Occasionally there is an exceptional concern. It is gripped with the delusion that youth is the running of the race rather than the preparation for it. Such a concern is apt to suffer. Here is an instance:

"More Motion" Sometimes Lost Motion

A CERTAIN advertising house in Manhattan became hypnotized by an "efficiency expert." It employed several executives whose ages ranged from forty to fifty-five. At the "expert's" recommendation these men were released as being "too old."

Their salaries had ranged from $3000 to $10,000 annually. Men of from twenty-five to thirty years were appointed to replace them, at salaries of from $1200 to $3000 "to start."

"These men are younger," submitted the expert. "You'll find there will be lot more of motion."

The expert passed to other verdant fields. That was a year ago. When his name is mentioned in the hearing of the head of the advertising concern the gentleman looks as if he had bitten into a sour pickle by mistake.

There has been more motion, all right, but a depressing amount of it has been lost motion. The energy of youth is proverbial. So is the fact that the average man of success spends the first half of his life in learning how to fuse for the second half.

The process of learning involves much of unlearning. Experiments pave the way for future achievement—but experiments are costly to the man who signs the salary checks.

It has been so in this case. The receipts of the house have fallen off fifty per cent. Its head has been renewing overtures to some of the discarded veterans. Thus far he has not met with success in inducing them to return to the helm. They are all well placed.

Yes, there is a dead line. It is in the mind. And not always is it in the mind of the employed. Sometimes it limits the mentality of employers; and to limit mentality limits progress.

Summed up, this is the advice of the present industrial and economies situation to the bright young man anxious at the outset to avoid future eclipse:

Pick a live one—and grow with it!

Making the Periscope Invisible

IT has remained for a mural decorator of New York, Mr. William A. Mackay, to solve the problem that chiefly vexes the captain and the crew who go down to the sea in submarines. This war has demonstrated the value of the under-water boat in practical naval operations; it has also demonstrated its shortcomings.

The English have captured not far from 150 submarines, and have captured nearly all of them because of one fact. Hundreds of British trawlers, launches, torpedo-boats, and other light and swift craft are constantly patrolling the British waters. The crews are constantly scanning the surface for one small but conspicuous object.

The submarine is as dark as night under the water; its navigators depend entirely upon the periscope for their hearings. This periscope, pointing a few feet above the waves, thus constantly acts as a sign-board for what is underneath. And whenever a torpedo-boat catches sight of the telltale emblem, it rushes with almost incredible speed in its direction. There is an impact, a crash, and another German submarine and crew are reposing on the bottom of the North Sea.

Clever as the Germans believe themselves to be, they have devised no plan to make the periscope invisible. Could they perform this little operation, they would enormously increase the destructiveness of the submarine. It is a sufficiently terrible agent under present conditions, but imagine the additional horror it would inspire were the periscope as invisible as the ship itself!

An Artist Teaches the Navy

CLEARLY, the submarine can not abandon its periscope; for then it would have to sail around in the dark. Clearly, likewise, the periscope can not be submerged; for then it would lose its usefulness. If this seemingly impossible problem is ever solved, the periscope must be permitted to elevate itself above the water with impunity—must stand up in full view and yet unseen.

Several months ago an interesting experiment took place in the Brooklyn Navy Yard. Mr. Mackay, who has spent a lifetime studying colors and optics, delivered a little lecture to the officers of the Tallahassee.

Present Method All Wrong

THERE was much in his little speech that the casual listener would have difficulty in comprehending. It dealt with such obscure subjects as the spectrum, light vibrations, the retina of the eye, the optic nerve. It contained citations from some of the greatest writers on chromatics. Mr. Mackay spoke with such clearness, however, such infinite humor, and had such a vast command of his subject, that these naval officers, immensely interested in the problem he was presenting, hung upon his every word.

It was certainly a queer story that fell from Mr. Mackay's lips. There was only one way, of course, in which a periscope, sticking two or three feet out of the water, could be concealed. It usually had for a background the sea-blue water. Clearly, the thing to do was to paint the object the color that most resembled that water.

That is the usual plan adopted to make objects invisible. Battleships are painted gray, under the delusion that this decoration makes them obscure. Soldiers now dress in khaki, modern military science believing that this shade blends most successfully with the landscape. Only the other day the Deutschland, Germany's famous mercantile submarine, sailed out of Baltimore with her sides painted to represent the sad sea waves, even the whitecaps being faithfully reproduced.

Now, Mr. Mackay explained, this sort of thing was not only foolish, but represented an ignorance of the laws of optics hardly to be expected from the scientific gentlemen who man our navies. He himself is an artist, used to studying landscapes and mixing colors. He has spent many a day in the open, reproducing on his canvas the colorful beauty of the external world.

These experiments, and his library studies in chromatics, have taught him the difference between an artificial pigment, as it appears on the artist's palette, and the effect of color which the human eye absorbs from nature. One is simply paint—a tangible mineral substance; the other is simply light, arranged in combinations that produce certain impressions of color on the human brain.

An artist paints a blue sea upon his canvas. That blue sea is paint, not light. It always will be blue, and can not conceivably, under any circumstances, be anything else. But it is quite different with the blue of the sea. No artist has covered the surface of the ocean with blue paint. Indeed, if you pick up some of this water in your hand, there is no blue at all—it is colorless, translucent, just like the water you draw from the tap.

What makes this clear fluid, seen at a distance, give us the wonderful blue of the sea? It would take an immense amount of technical writing to make that clear.

The blue of the sea is composed of nothing but light. Light, as most of us know, is a combination of several primary colors. Two of these colors, under the conditions of the sea, combine, and the etheric vibrations that result make the brain see blue. But blue, in the sense of the artist's palette, does not exist there.

The ingenious German, when he paints sea-blue waves on the side of his submarine, is making the fine mineral paint of the Fatherland compete with the vibrations of the spectroscope. The net result is that he merely makes his ship more conspicuous than it was before.

The Artist's Demonstration

NOW, Mr. Mackay does use paint, but in quite a different way. Two colors of the spectrum, he explained, green and violet, make the sea blue. Therefore, the thing to do is to paint your periscope these two colors. The vibrations of the two would then attack the retina, and mixing, would give the brain an impression of sea blue.

He then took a large board, removed it a considerable distance from his guests, and held it up in full view.

"What color does this board seem to be?" he asked.

Everybody saw the object the same—it was, all agreed, a beautiful sea blue. When taken out on a boat some distance away, and held up with the sea as a background, it disappeared from view. Gradually it melted away until, at a comparatively short distance, not a vestige remained. Had it been the periscope of a submarine, that vessel would have been absolutely concealed.

A Futuristic Checker-board

MR. MACKAY now showed his audience what they had been gazing at. The plank, when brought close, looked like a checker-board. The spaces were painted a glaring green and violet. The vibrations of these colors, especially on a ship in motion, so affect the optic nerve that they produce practically the same color as the blue sea. Consequently the two mingle and the object disappears. If a touch of red is added to this combination, the painted object at a distance comes gray.

In other words, the way to make a submarine invisible is to paint it, not looking like the sea, but approximating somewhat the appearance of a barber-pole. The navy has adopted the suggestion, and is now painting not only the periscopes but the body of submarines in these fantastic colors. There is even some experimenting with air-ships. Recently a fleet of submarines, decked out in these gaudy colours, made a trip from the Brooklyn Navy Yard to Norfolk. One of the ships, commanded by Lieutenant Grady, lost track of the rest of the fleet, which became invisible because of its decorations, and had to make the voyage alone.

PEP

By GRACE SARTWELL MASON

Illustrations by Frank Snapp

SHE dashed into Shirley's life through the elevator door, unaffectedly wiping from her red mouth the outward and visible signs of a chocolate éclair just consumed in Ye Old English Tea Room across the street. Her brown eyes sparkled; her brown hair, with a lively glint of red in it, crinkled out from under her brown velvet tam-o'-shanter. The genuine pink in her cheeks, the straightness of her back, the smart way she wore her well pressed brown suit, the curves of the smile that disclosed the whiteness of her teeth, all cried out to Shirley that here was a girl of health and energy and sweetness.

He stepped into the hall just behind her, and was privileged to see her dash for the office door of Duffy & Megargel, peeling off her jacket as she ran. As he entered he saw her catch up her dictation pad on her way to Megargel's private office. She gave him the merest laughing glance out of the corner of her eye, put out her tongue at the other girls, who were already at work, and disappeared behind Megargel's door.

It must have been her little red tongue that did for Shirley, although he was a conservative young man, with old-fashioned ideas about girls and the way they should behave on all occasions. But Shirley's kind always take it hardest when it comes. From the moment when he walked up to a man he knew in the later office and said, "Introduce me to Megargel's stenographer, will you?" he was in love with her. He was in love with her vitality, her high spirits, her health and dash, her quickness and vividness. For there was a lot of good dynamic force in Louise, due to health, joy in life, lean ancestry, a well nourished country childhood—all of which she rolled into one and called "pep."

"Oh, dear, I've got too much pep," she would laugh, when, in the evenings after they were married, she wanted to "go somewhere" and Shirley wanted to stay at home.

"Work it off!" Shirley would advise her, nose in a newspaper. "Bet you didn't take a walk this afternoon."

"Oh, yes, I did, Shirley. I walked down to Thirty-fourth and across to Broadway and up to Columbus Circle. But, somehow, there's nothing in just walking. There's no point to it, Shirley."

"Good work; keep it up," Shirley would murmur, his mind in Cincinnati with the Giants. And Louise would yawn, get out a nightgown yoke she was crocheting, or pick up and read without much interest that part of the paper Shirley had cast aside.

THEY had set up housekeeping in a two-room, bath, and kitchenette apartment, all of which would have rattled around in Duffy & Megargel's main office. But to Louise and Shirley this apartment was a casket of all the joys in the world.

The first meal they ate off their little new round table was so rapturous an occasion as to be almost solemn. As Louise poured the coffee and passed his cup to Shirley, her eyes shone so that one could almost have thought there were stars in them. And Shirley came around the table and caught her up to him in a surge of emotion that he could not have explained.

"Isn't it wonderful!" they whispered to each other. "Our own table, our own things, our own home!"

A these days Louise was brimming over with happy energy that somehow she did not seem to know what to do with.

At seven-thirty in the morning Shirley would start to work, whistling. Louise would stand listening to his footsteps pounding down the stairs and out into the morning life of the streets. The apartment would suddenly become very quiet. With an unconscious sigh, Louise would turn to the breakfast table. At Duffy & Megargel's she had learned to work swiftly and with more or less concentration, and applying these methods to house-work, in forty minutes the dishes were washed and the kitchenette in shining order. Thirty minutes more and the bedroom and sitting-room were in a like state of neatness. By half-past nine Louise had changed from her bungalow apron to her every-day street suit and was on her way to do the day's marketing. By half-past ten she was back again. Vegetables were prepared for dinner, a dessert made, a shirtwaist or two were washed, the morning paper was read, Shirley's laundry was looked over and put away, her luncheon was eaten, the geraniums were watered—and it was only one o'clock.

What would you do with six afternoons in the week from one to half-past five if you had no particular taste for reading, no social duties, no money for matinées, shopping, or afternoon tea, no inclination toward walking for mere exercise, no friends not themselves engaged in earning a living? Children? The fear of having children was the one cloud on Shirley's and Louise's horizon. Not that they did not want children—sometime. They had talked it over, shyly but earnestly, and they were agreed that children on twenty dollars a week were out of the question.

So Louise made an honest effort to keep busy and contented in the apartment that would have rattled around in Megargel's main office, and that was most appallingly quiet from seven-thirty in the morning to six o'clock in the afternoon.

BUT one evening she took the paper away from Shirley and sat down on his knee.

"Listen, Shirley; I've got a dandy idea," she cried with enthusiasm. "It came to me this afternoon. You know, there are about five hours a day when I don't have a blessed thing to do. Now, here's the idea. All that time is just simply going to waste. I could be doing something with it. I could be earning some money."

Shirley blinked rapidly. "Umph! You could?"

"Sure, I could! There are lots of places where they employ extra girls for part of the day. Of course I wouldn't earn so much I couldn't carry it home, but I might make five or six dollars a week, and that would help, wouldn't it?"

She was quite vivid now with pride in her idea. A hurt expression came into Shirley's eyes.

"Do you mean," he asked slowly, "that you want more money? Do you need a new dress or something? Maybe I could—"

She gave him a little shake, with her arms around his neck.

"No, no, of course not, old silly! It isn't the money, exactly. It's just that I—" She stood up, laughing, and flung out her arms in an energetic gesture. "I don't have enough to do in this dinky little apartment. I get all restless and fidgety. I've got too much pep, Shirley. It's just going to waste."

SHIRLEY did not smile, as she expected him to. He looked about him at the little apartment, perplexed, taken aback.

"I supposed a woman could always find enough to do if she wanted to. I don't want you to have to work hard, anyway, Weejy. Aren't you—happy?"

She snuggled her face into his neck in a way he had always found adorable.

"Of course I'm happy, old dear. But somehow I can't seem to find enough to do. The afternoons are so long."

"What do you mean—so long?"

Then she tried to explain to him; but she did not quite understand it herself. And Shirley understood it even less. Like most husbands, he accepted all his ideas of matrimony second hand. You loved a girl and married her and took good care of her, and it was up to her to be happy. What if she had formed a few habits of living of her own? If they were the kind of habits that had nothing to do with being a good wife and housekeeper, then the quicker they were forgotten the better.

"But, Shirley," Louise cried, when he expounded these things to her, "what if you found that your business took up only half your time?"

"Oh, well, a man's different," said Shirley.

He thought awhile, frowning a little. At last:

"I don't see what you're getting at, Lou, but there's one thing straight: I don't want my wife working for wages. A nice kind of husband I'd look, wouldn't I? Suppose some of the fellows in the office should find it out, what would they think? D'you think Hinkley or Brown let their wives go out to work? Well, I guess not! No. When it gets so I can't support my wife, I'd better quit!"

THAT was Shirley's ultimatum. At intervals for some days this subject was renewed between them. But Shirley had taken up a position sanctioned by every precedent he believed in: he was going to protect his wife from the rude world, no matter what it cost her. He was very young.

And at last they spoke of it no more. Louise went on with the daily round of little duties. She had assured Shirley that it was not more money she wanted, exactly; but in her heart she knew she missed that weekly envelop, or rather she missed the sensation that accompanied that envelop. And day by day she grew more bored, not with matrimony nor with Shirley, but with the monotony of work that did not fully occupy either her hands or her brain. Her vaunted "pep" manifested itself only spasmodically now, in violent attacks of house-cleaning; but more and more often the breakfast dishes stood on the table half the forenoon, while she knelt with her elbows on the window-sill, staring down at the street; and most of the afternoons she lay on the bed in her kitchen apron, reading a novel or staring dully up at the ceiling.

She grew a little sallow from lack of exercise and play; she complained of indigestion: and she began to take less pains with her personal appearance.

Then one day the reaction set in. She had been lying on the bed in a kimono, feeling half nauseated with dullness, when suddenly she sat upright angrily.

"You're a regular slouch," she said aloud. "Get up and get out."

AN hour later she was stepping into the elevator of a ten-story building, each floor of which was given over to some form of amusement. As she left the elevator at the fifth floor the syncopation of a one-step brightened her eyes and set her toes to tingling. Over a floor like satin couples were moving briskly.

Louise had been here many times before with other girls, and once or twice with Shirley before they were married. In a businesslike way she walked up to a desk, deposited a quarter, and asked for an "instructor"—in other words, a partner. Her quarter allowed her three dances with a slightly bored, rather pimply young man. But he could dance! And so could Louise. She moved as if her feet were thistledown, her eyes bright and happy.

As she left the floor after the third dance she caught sight of a girl she knew. She was a slender, pretty blonde, who wore no hat and convoyed a middle-aged man with a somewhat sheepish smile on his face. By these tokens Louise knew that Dora was one of the "lady instructors."

"Hello, Lou!" cried Dora. "Haven't seen you since the year one. Heard you got married. How'd you like it?"

"Fine!" declared Louise. "Where you working now?"

"Mornings at the Amsterdam Hotel, public stenog. Afternoons I come up here and dance for a change. Say, it beats pounding a typewriter. Last week I made twelve dollars without trying. And look at me! Never so well in my life."

As Dora came off the floor after her third dance, Louise beckoned to her.

"Look here," she said abruptly. "I think I'd like a job like this. I don't have anything to do all the afternoon, and you

---

know I'm a good dancer. D'you suppose I could get in here?"

"Sure you could. It's awful hard to get girls that can lead well. They'll give you a try-out, you know, and then you'll have to have a reference. They're strict here; a girl's got to be straight, all right. Will your husband like it?"

Louise's face set, but she said brightly:

"I guess he won't mind. I'll give 'em D. & M.'s for a reference. Will you introduce me to the manager?"

That night she did not tell Shirley that she had been tentatively accepted as a "lady instructor." She told herself that she would wait and see if she made a success of it. Next afternoon she put on her navy blue taffeta with the full skirt that came to the tops of her trim boots, powdered her nose carefully, and set forth with a good deal of trepidation.

But from the first she was a success. She had danced all her life and had a naturally good sense of rhythm. Besides that, she had patience and intelligence and good nature. The first day she earned a dollar, and could have raised it by half if she had not refused a tip from a suit-buyer from Columbus, whom she had taught to fox-trot in the New York way in fifteen minutes. Besides her middle-aged suit-buyer, she was engaged for half a dozen dances by a nice boy from Medina, who confided to her that he was invited to a swell dance next week and was afraid he would muff it. Not so pleasant were three dances with a fat man who paid her compliments until his breath grew short. But he was only behaving according to his light, and the austere rules of the place protected her and satisfied her implacable sense of what was ladylike and right. Therefore, to her way of thinking, that dollar was as clean as if she had earned it taking dictation in an office.

But, all the same, she could not seem to find the right mood or moment to tell Shirley. Every evening she said: "Now I'll tell him." And every evening she put it off until some evening when they were not quite so cozy and happy. So she went on dancing afternoons from two to five, and, in spite of all the accepted rules for wives, she did not feel a single twinge of conscience. And, also against all the rules, she did not neglect Shirley or the apartment. In fact, having something different to look forward to in the afternoon had made her a better housewife. Her pretty color, her lightness of step, came back to her, and the old restlessness left her.

THE inevitable catastrophe held off for almost a month. Then, one afternoon, Louise, fox-trotting with a college youth, brushed past Shirley dancing with a tall blonde in a pink crêpe waist. They looked squarely into each other's eyes. Shirley gave a sort of grimace of astonishment; and Louise grew suddenly heavy on her partner's arm.

Louise slipped out, and they did not see each other again until Shirley came home to dinner. Louise was bending over the tomato soup in the kitchenette when she heard his step outside the door. She looked up at him and smiled waveringly.

"Hello, Shirley!" she said in a half voice.

He walked close up to her. "How long have you been going there?" he demanded.

At his tone defiance and fright came into her eyes. "Three or four weeks. What of it?"

He stepped back. "So you're just like all the rest of them—not to he trusted! Do you think that's a decent thing for a married woman to do? On the sly, too!"

She quivered and threw up her head. "Oh, Shirley!"

"Well, if you weren't doing something you were ashamed of, why didn't you tell me?" he cried.

"I wasn't ashamed of it. I'm not ashamed. I haven't done anything to be ashamed of, and you needn't speak to me like that. You wouldn't let me go into an office, and I got tired of doing nothing all the afternoon."

The more she tried to explain, the more illogically angry Shirley became. He could have forgiven her much more easily if she had owned up to doing what she

had done out of a mere irresponsible desire for amusement. That would have been natural and feminine, and he could have taken her into his arms after a severe scolding, and received her sobs of repentance in the orthodox manner. But she had earned money that way. He felt affronted and hurt.

"But you were dancing there yourself!" Louise exclaimed.

"That's different. Hinkley sent me up there to keep hold of a fellow he wants to build a factory for. I wasn't there to hire myself out. Pretty cheap kind of a thing to do, seems to me."

"I don't see it! I've been in offices where they didn't treat me as well!"

"Yes; but why should you do it? That's what I can't understand. Why?"

And then the little apartment that had been a casket of all the joys in the world, that had been a snug haven for both of them, that had seemed so full of the enchanted wonder of their love, became all at once merely a cramped set of rooms in a cheap neighborhood, furnished with cheap furniture and inhabited by two angry strangers, each bent on hurting the other for the hurts he or she was receiving. Dinner was eaten in a state of mind that would have poisoned the food and upset the digestion of a cave man and woman.

And it was much the same way with breakfast; for the bitter discussion had gone on at intervals all night. They rose in the morning with their nerves tuned up to almost any foolishness.

SO, when Shirley took up his hat and started for the door after breakfast without a glance at Louise, she flashed out hysterically:

"You think I'm not good enough for you to kiss! You think I've done something—something—"

"I don't understand you, that's all," returned Shirley coldly.

"You don't try to understand! I guess a woman's got a right to do what she wants to part of the time, even if she is married!"

"Yes, and a fine show a man stands for a home, if that is so!"

"Have I ever neglected you or the flat?"

"Never said you did. But how long would I have a home if you took to running to places like that?"

"Then let me get a position in an office!"

Shirley's face grew white and set.

"Never! I won't stand for it, that's all. You're my wife, and you've got to act like a wife should. If I could see any sense in what you want—"

"Then I'll go away!" Louise also was white to the lips.

"Very well; go," returned Shirley, unconsciously making a moving-picture gesture. "And," he added unwisely, "when you get good and tired of eight hours in an office, you will come back, I guess."

IF it had not been for this last remark, the chances are that Louise would never have packed her suit-case, put the apartment into apple-pie order, watered the geraniums alike from the tap and with her tears, kissed Shirley's picture, and written a cold little note in which she told him that she would send him her address when she had one. It was the memory of this remark that kept her trailing a job for a week, and that made her accept one finally at ten dollars. Her life, she told herself, should be from that time on one of austere labor. In fact, it looked as if it might have to be, for she soon discovered that the stenographer who takes a try at matrimony may gain in experience, but loses in speed. In the business world she had dropped down several rungs in the ladder and would have to work patiently up again.

In the course of the next month she also discovered other things: that somehow the sparkle had gone out of the wage-earning life; that it annoyed her to have to take orders; that she hated getting up in the morning and rushing for the downtown car. Also she could not get rid of a feeling that she was merely marking time. What she was waiting for was the appearance of Shirley, contrite, but masterful, come to carry her, even against her will, back home.

She did more real thinking in these days than she had in all her life before; and she got to the point where she could see the tragedy and the futility of what they were doing. She could even acknowledge that Shirley, according to his light, was right. But then, she was right, too—just a little bit more right than Shirley. Therefore it was impossible for her to take the first step toward making up. Of course, when Shirley had taken the first step, then she could be even more generous—but he would have to make the first advances.

But that was exactly what Shirley did not do. And gradually Louise passed from her mood of judicial waiting to one of enervating despair. The worst times in these weeks were when she waked in the morning and when she came back to her room at night. A hundred foolish little memories haunted her then: Shirley's hand feeling for hers in the dawn, and his voice: "Come on, little Weejy; is the workingman going to get his breakfast on time?"; Shirley's whistle as he came charging up the stairs at night; Shirley winding the alarm clock and teasing her about the mouse that she was always expecting to meet in the dark clothes-press; Shirley landing a drowsy kiss on her ear in the middle of the night. In the street some resemblance in carriage or form was forever starting her heart to beating wildly; but Shirley himself she never saw.

THEN, because Louise was young and full of vitality, this mood passed, and another took its place—a more dangerous one. It manifested itself in a feeling of rebellion against the dullness of her life, an unconscious hardening of her heart against any tender memory of Shirley, a revival of her old-time high spirits in a more reckless form. She fell into the habit of eating her lunch with a girl in the office named Inez Muldoon, whom two months before she would have avoided.

Inez Muldoon was a Broadway type in the making. She too had "pep," but it was not Louise's kind. It was conspicuous for its absence in the morning; and it blossomed best in the evening at a table for two at the edge of a dancing floor. She was the kind that protests she will take nothing but mineral water and winds up by accepting a cocktail. And she was the worst thing that could have happened to Louise just at that time.

"You take it from me, my dear," she would say, "a girl's a fool not to have a good time as she goes along—especially a girl with your eyes and hair. What's the use of moping every evening in a six-by-nine room with your feet on the radiator? I'd rather have mine under a swell little table at Jacques'."

"Yes, but how do you pay?" Louise would retort scornfully.

Inez would narrow her eyes. "You don't pay, if you're clever."

Of course, in the end, Louise tried it. Coming out from the office one evening, the two girls found the air clear and cold with the snap and sparkle of winter without winter's accompanying snow and slush. The blood danced and tingled in Louise's veins. She thought of her narrow bedroom with its lukewarm radiator and its one gas-jet, and a reckless rebellion

---

surged in her blood. An hour later she was following Inez Muldoon into the mirror-and-palm-lined entrance hall of a flashy restaurant. Inez said a word or two to the manager, who looked past her at Louise with an eye the color of a gun-barrel.

"All right," he said curtly, and made a sign to the head waiter.

Inez walked with a languid stride to a table at the edge of a circle of polished floor. She took up the menu card and ordered with an experienced air.

"Just a salad for me," whispered Louise.

"You're not paying for this, you little boob," Inez returned under her breath. "It's on the management. All you have to do is to dance—and look pleasant."

Two men at a near-by table, having eyed them with interest from the moment of their arrival, now spoke to the head waiter, and a few minutes later he brought them up to Inez.

"Sure," said Inez Muldoon, rising with languid promptitude in response to their invitation to dance. Louise, after an instant's hesitation, followed her example. She felt at first confused and stiff. This was very different from teaching dancing.

IN the center of the dancing floor was a bull's-eye of colored glass; the room was lined with mirrors; in one corner the water of a fountain cascaded over colored lights; the orchestra was a bizarre combination of banjos, piano, and drums. The endlessly multiplied lights, the little glistening tables repeated in every mirror, the blue flame from the bull's-eye streaming up under the feet of the dancers, were an incitement and a strange stimulation.

When they sat down again Louise saw that Inez Muldoon's manner had changed. She was vivacious; she had hung out all her banners for the benefit of her companion. He was a man with a great deal of nose and crinkly black hair getting thin on the temples, and he wore a huge blue diamond on his little finger. The girls began to eat their dinner.

"What's this?" exclaimed the man with the diamond. "A dry dinner? Waiter—"

"Just a mineral water," said Inez Muldoon demurely.

"Say, you amuse me!" laughed her companion. "Waiter—"

"A gin-rickey, if you insist." Inez looked into his eyes and lowered her lashes ingenuously.

"There, little girl, don't cry!" said the man with the diamond ironically. "Waiter, two Jacques Specials for the ladies."

"Please, not for me!" interrupted Louise.

But the head waiter, hovering over the man with the diamond, looked at her quickly with an eye like a sinister fish; and Inez pressed her knee warningly under the table. The cocktails were brought.

Inez and the man with the diamond became animated. But Louise's companion drank his cocktail meditatively, a smile of speculation on his rather thick lips. He had reddish-brown eyes with a wary twinkle in them, and he wore an expensive-looking necktie after Bakst. Ile regarded Inez Muldoon and her new con-quest with a tolerant knowingness; but when he looked at Louise it was as if here was a specimen he had not yet classified. He was, at this stage of the evening, conservatively friendly. Louise liked him a great deal better than the man with the diamond, whom she had already inadequately labeled as "fresh."

But she did not pay much attention to either of them. The glitter and noise of the place bewildered and absorbed her. And she was hungry—also thirsty. The food seemed to her delicious. She did not care for the Jacques Special, but she drank a little of it for politeness' sake. And presently they danced again.

WHEN Louise came back to their table this time she felt more at ease. The good food, the rhythmic movement, the music, the lights, the atmosphere of gaiety, set the blood to dancing through her veins. She laughed more easily now; the color rose in her cheeks and her pretty eyes sparkled. And, in the eyes of the man with the Bakst necktie, speculation began to give way to a gleam of interest. He became more attentive, more alert.

By this time Inez Muldoon and the man with the diamond had become autobiographic, confidential, and tender. This brought them rapidly to the absinthe frappé stage.

"No, no. please!" cried Louise. "I couldn't eat or drink another thing. That green stuff looks like poison to me."

She put her hand over her glass; but the man with the Bakst necktie smilingly caught and held it.

"Be a good little sport, Bright-eyes," he said. "Go ahead, waiter; a little more ice. That's right. Now, taste that. If you don't like it, it's no more fox-trots for you."

HE continued to hold her hand. They looked at each other, the absinthe forgotten, trickling down through its ice in the graceful glass on the table between them. Louise, laughing confusedly, tried to draw away her hand.

"D'you know," said the man, leaning to her, "you're the kind that improves with knowing. I've got a hunch that we're going to be friends, two of the best ever. What d'you think, girlie?"

"Oh, let's dance!" cried Louise, rising abruptly, but laughing again.

"When you've taken a taste of that frappé. Think I'm going to let you renig on me like that?"

Louise put her lips to the green liqueur, and set the glass down with a shudder.

"It's so bitter! It's horrid! Let's dance."

The man took her in his arms and they glided off.

"I pretty nearly believe," he murmured to himself, "that you're the real thing." And his red-brown eyes grew avid.

The eerie blue light streaming up through the bull's-eye in the center of the floor made Louise feel as if she were dancing at the edge of a crater; the multiplied lights on the little tables all ran together; the voices became louder and meaningless; the room grew immense and rocked to the syncopated plinkety-plink of the banjos. Louise's feet felt heavy and her head felt light; she was happy, and at the same time something within her shrank and quivered.

When they came back to the table Inez Muldoon and her companion were on their feet.

"Come on; we're going to a show," they announced.

The man with the diamond was paying the bill and the head waiter was bending his back. They all walked out across the dancing floor.

"Son, order us two taxi-cabs," said the man with the diamond to the first boy in the hall.

Louise put her hand up to her head.

"I don't believe I'll go," she said slowly. "My head aches. I guess I'll go home, Inez."

They gathered around her, rallying her, accusing her of being a quitter. Inez Muldoon took her by the arm.

"Come upstairs a minute while I fix may hair. Lou," she said. And Louise followed her to a chintz-hung dressing-room. Inez seated herself in front of the dressing-table and began carefully to repair her complexion.

"You take it from me, you're a fool to quit now," she said rapidly. "Those two fellows have each got a roll as big as my wrist. They'll give us a good time, if you don't queer things now. What's the matter with you. anyway. Lou? Your head don't ache, does it, really?"

"I don't know," returned Louise. "I've danced so much I'm dizzy, I guess. I ought to go home and go to bed."

"Well, you can't now, after the dinner they stood us. You don't want to be that kind of a cheap one, do you?"

"No; I don't want to be a quitter, of course," said Louise.

She walked over to the front windows and stood idly staring down at the lighted entrance to a tall office building across the street. She felt lax in every fiber, as if her mind and will were befogged. Three young men came out of the building across the street, and behind them was a fourth. Before the dressing-table the voice of Inez babbled on: "And he says to me: 'The sky's my limit!' And I says to him: 'Wish I had an aerio-plane!'"

But Louise did not hear her. She was leaning forward with dilated eyes and a sensation around her heart as if a hand had gripped it. For the fourth young man was Shirley. He stood in the doorway an instant, buttoning his overcoat, humping his shoulders as if he dreaded the cold wind that was sweeping spirals of dust before it down the street. There was something indescribably tired and listless in his attitude. Louise leaned nearer to the glass, for now he was moving off down the street. He passed a brightly lighted restaurant, and then Louise saw that he wore his old spring overcoat. She puzzled over this for an instant, and then there flashed into her mind a picture of his winter coat hanging where she had left it, with that torn place in the lining she had started to mend the day before she went away. If he had not already got his death of cold, he probably would do so before twenty-four hours were up. Shirley never took any care of himself in the winter.

"I've got him sized up all right," came the voice of Inez. "He says he's from Chicago, but I bet on Syracuse. He says to me—"

BUT Louise whirled on her heel, walked to the top of the velvet stairs, descended them rapidly, walked through the mirror-lined corridor with eyes fixed straight ahead. She did not see the man with the Bakst necktie, nor his friend with the diamond, although she passed within two feet of their astonished faces. Darting through the door, she made for

a trolley car. Nothing short of force could have stopped her; for, in that instant when she saw Shirley shivering in his thin overcoat, something that Louise had lacked awoke in her—a deep and tender conviction that a man is merely a child to the woman that loves him, a child she must take care of and make allowances for and love with patience as well as passion.

She was only a block behind Shirley when he turned in at the apartment-house where they had gone to housekeeping. He was just turning on the lights in their sitting-room. Twice she walked past the door of the house; but the third time, with a laugh that was like a sob, she went in and ran up the stairs.

Shirley had not latched the outer door behind him. Louise pushed it open without a sound, and stood in the narrow hall of the apartment. She could see across the lighted sitting-room to the kitchenette, where Shirley stood with a saucepan in one hand and a tin of soup in the other. She moved into the doorway and called: "Shirley!"

HE turned slowly, almost reluctantly, as if he had imagined this very sound before and was not going to be fooled again; and incredulously he stared for a long instant. Then his face flushed, his eyes blazed with a wondering rapture that Louise was never to forget. As if afraid she might vanish, he hurled himself across the room and caught her in his arms.

"Weejy, I thought you'd never come back!" he groaned.

"Why didn't you ask me, Shirley?"

"Because I was a fool!"

"No, no; I was wrong myself. I was thoughtless and selfish and—"

"No, you were right. I was the mean one. I—oh, kiss me, kiss me, Weejy!"

They clung to each other silently; and everything in the world was forgotten except that they were together again. There dropped from Louise's soul even the shadow of Inez Muldoon and the two men at Jacques'. She clung to Shirley with a passion and a tenderness that she had never felt before.

"Weejy," said Shirley, "I want you to know that I was going to see you to-morrow."

"To-morrow?" She remembered Jacques', and clung to him more tightly. "I wish it had been yesterday!"

But, bent on getting something off his mind, he did not hear her.

"The other day Hinkley asked me if you didn't want a half-day job in the office. Ben Martin's wife is working there now, and they seem to—to make a go of it all right. Ben says they're paying for a house. They're a mighty happy acting couple."

He stopped and pressed his lips to her hair.

"Just thought I'd tell you," he muttered. "You can do what you think best about it."

She looked up at him with shining eyes. "I wouldn't take it unless you want me to, Shirley. There are other things more important. I've—I've been thinking lately—"

"So have I," he interrupted. "Seems to me I've seen a lot of this apartment since you went away. It's darned lonesome! After a while we'll have a bigger one, and there'll be room for more than two of us, and you won't have a chance to get lonesome then. But in the meantime—well, I want you to be happy, Weejy. If it will make you happy to have more to do, why, go to it, dear."

She snuggled her face into his neck in the old way he had always found so adorable.

"Do you think I have too much pep?" she murmured.

"No!" he cried. "You are ab-so-lutely all right !"

The Triflers

By FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT

Illustration by Frederick Orin Bartlett

MONTE left Nice on the twentieth of July, to join—as Peter supposed—Madame Covington in Paris. Monte himself had been extremely ambiguous about his destination, being sure of only one fact: that he should not return inside of a year, if he did then. Peter had asked for his address, and Monte had given him the same address he gave Marjory.

"I want to keep in touch with you," Peter said.

Peter missed the man. On the ride with Marjory that he enjoyed the next day after Monte's departure, he talked a great deal of him.

"I'd like to have seen into his eyes," he told her. "I kept feeling I'd find something there more than I got hold of in his voice and the grip of his hand."

"He has blue eyes," she told him, "and they are clean as a child's."

"They are a bit sad?"

"Monte's eyes sad!" she exclaimed. "What made you think so?"

"Perhaps because, from what he let drop the other night, I gathered he wasn't altogether happy with Mrs. Covington."

"He told you that?"

"No; not directly," he assured her. "He's too loyal. I may be utterly mistaken, only he was rather vague as to why she was not here with him."

"She was not with him," Marjory answered slowly—"she was not with him because she wasn't big enough to deserve him."

"Then it's a fact there's a tragedy in his life?"

"Not in his—in hers," she answered passionately.

"How can that be?"

"Because she's the one who realizes the truth."

"But she's the one who went away."

"Because of that. It's a miserable story, Peter."

"You knew her intimately?"

"A great many years."

"I think Covington said he had known you a long time."

"Yes."

"Then, knowing her and knowing him, wasn't there anything you could do?"

"I did what I could," she answered wearily.

"Perhaps that accounts for why he hurried back to her."

"He hasn't gone to her. He'll never go back to her. She deserted him, and now—he's going to make it permanent."

"A divorce?"

"Yes, Peter," she answered, with a little shiver.

"You're taking it hard."

"I know all he means to her," she choked.

"She loves him?"

"With all her heart and soul."

"And he doesn't know it?"

"Why, he wouldn't believe it—if she told him. She can never let him know it. She'd deny it if he asked her. She loves him enough for that."

"Good Lord!" exclaimed Peter. "There's a mistake there somewhere."

"The mistake came first," she ran on. "Oh, I don't know why I'm telling you these things, except that it is a relief to tell them to some one."

"Tell me all about it," he encouraged her. "I knew there was something on your mind."

"Peter," she said earnestly, "can you imagine a woman so selfish that she wanted to marry just to escape the responsibilities of marriage?"

"It isn't possible," he declared.

"A woman so selfish," she faltered ahead, "that she preferred a make-believe husband to a real husband, because—because so she thought she would be left free."

"Free for what?" he demanded.

"To live."

"When love and marriage and children are all there is to life?" he asked.

She caught her breath.

"You see, she did not know that then. She thought all those things called for the sacrifice of her freedom."

"What freedom?" he demanded again. "It's when we're alone that we're slaves—slaves to ourselves. A woman alone, a man alone, living to himself alone—what is there for him? He can only go around and around in a pitifully small circle—a circle that grows smaller and smaller with every year. Between twenty and thirty a man can exhaust all there is in life for himself alone. Perhaps a woman lasts a little longer, but not much longer. Then they are locked away in themselves until they die."

"Peter!" she cried in terror.

"It's only as we live in others that we live forever," he ran on. "It is only by toiling and sacrificing and suffering and loving that we become immortal. It is so we acquire real freedom."

"Yes, Peter," she agreed, with a gasp.

"Couldn't you make her understand that?"

"She does understand. That's the pity of it."

"And Covington?"

"It's in him to understand; only—she lost the right to make him understand. She—she debased herself. So she must sacrifice herself to get clean again. She must make even greater sacrifices than any she cowed away from."

"What of him?"

"He must never know. He'll go round and round his little circle, and she must watch him."

"It's terrible," he murmured. "It will be terrible for her to watch him do that. If you had told him how she felt—"

"God forbid."

"It's a pity," said Peter suddenly—"it's a pity there are not two of you, Marjory."

"Of me?"

"He thinks a great deal of you. If he had met you before he met this other—"

"What are you saying, Peter?"

"That you're the sort of woman who could have called out in him an honest love."

There, beside Peter who could not see, Marjory buried her face in her hands.

"You're the sort of woman," he went on, "who could have roused the man in him."

How Peter was hurting her! How he was pinching her with red-hot irons! It hurt so much that she was glad. Here, at last, she was beginning her sacrifice for Monte.

"Some one else must do all that," she said.

"Yes," he answered. "Or his life will be wasted. He needs to suffer. He needs to give up. This thing we call a tragedy may be the making of him."

"For some one else," she repeated.

Peter was fumbling about for her hand. Suddenly she straightened herself.

"It must be for some one else," he said hoarsely—"because I want you for myself. In time—you must be mine. With the experience of those two before us, we mustn't make the same mistake ourselves. I—I wasn't going to tell you this until I had my eyes back. But, heart o' mine, I've held in so long. Here in the dark one gets so much alone. And being alone is what kills."

She was hiding her hand from him.

"I can't find your hand," he whispered.

Summoning all her strength, she placed her hand within his.

"It is cold!" he cried.

Yet the day was warm, and they were speeding through a sunlighted country of olive trees and flowers in bloom.

He drew her fingers to his lips and kissed them passionately. She suffered it, closing her eyes against the pain.

"I've wanted you so all these months!" he cried. "I shouldn't have let you go in the first place. I shouldn't have let you go."

"No, Peter," she answered.

"And now that I've found you again, you'll stay?"

He was lifting his face to hers—straining to see her. To have answered any way but as he pleaded would have been to strike that upturned face.

"I—I'll try to stay," she faltered.

"I'll make you!" he breathed. "I'll hold you tight! Soul of mine, would you—would you kiss my eyes?"

Holding her breath, Marjory lightly brushed each of his eyes with her lips.

"It's like balm," he whispered. "I've dreamed at night of this."

"Every day I'll do it," she said. "Only, for a little while, you'll not ask for anything more, Peter?"

"Not until some day they open."

"I didn't mean that, Peter," she said. "Only I'm so mixed up myself!"

"It's so new to you," he nodded. "To me it's like a day foreseen a dozen years. Long before I saw you I knew I was getting ready for you. Now—what do a few weeks matter?"

"It may be months, Peter, before I'm quite steady."

"Even if it's years," he exclaimed, "I've felt your lips."

"Only on your eyes," she cried in terror.

"Even there they take away my breath," said Peter.

LETTER from Peter Noyes to Monte Covington, received by the latter at the Hôtel Normandie, Paris, France:

Nice, France, July 22.

Dear Covington:

I don't know whether you can make out this scrawl, because I have to feel my way across the paper; but I'm sitting alone in my room, aching to talk with you as we used to talk. If you were here I know you would be glad to listen, because—suddenly all I told you about has come true.

Riding to Cannes the very next clay after you left, I spoke to her and—she listened. It was all rather vague and she made no promises, but she listened. In a few weeks or months or years, now, she'll be mine for all time. She doesn't want me to tell Beatrice, and there is no one else to tell except you—so forgive me, old man, if I let myself loose.

Besides, in a way, you're responsible. We were talking of you, because we missed you. You have a mighty good friend in her, Covington. She knows you—the real you that I thought only I had glimpsed. She sees the man in the game—not the man in the grand-stand. Her Covington is the man they used to give nine long Harvards for. I never heard that in front of my name.

We talked a great deal of you, as I said, and I find myself now thinking more of you than of myself in connection with her. I don't understand it. Perhaps it's because she seems so alone in the world, and you are the most intimate friend she has. Perhaps it's because you've seen so much more of her than I in these last few months. Anyway, I have a feeling that somehow you are an integral part of her. If you were not already married I'd almost suspect her of being in love with you.

This is strange talk from a man who less than six hours ago became officially engaged. I told her that I had let her go once, and that now I had found her again I wanted her to stay. And she said, 'I'll try.' That wasn't very much, Covington, was it? But I seized the implied promise as a drowning man does a straw.

I'm going to get my eyes back. I haven't the slightest doubt in the world about that. Already I feel time magic of the new balm that has been applied. They don't ache any more. Sitting here to-night without my shade, I can hold them open and catch the feeble light that filters in from the street lamps at a distance.

You won't object to hearing a man rave a little, Covington? If you do you can tear up this right here. But I know I can't say anything good about Marjory you won't agree with. Maybe, however, you'd call my present condition abnormal. Perhaps it is; but I wonder if it isn't part of every normal man's life to be abnormal to this extent at least once.

Always she, my princess, is somewhere in the background, when she is not actually by my side. When I saw her before, Covington, I marveled at her eyes—those deep, wonderful eyes that told you so little and made you dream so much. I saw her hair too, and her straight nose, and her beautiful lips. Those things I see now as I saw them then. I must wait a little while really to see them again. In their place, however, I have now her voice and the sound of her footsteps. To hear her coming, just to hear the light fall of her feet upon the ground, is like music.

But when she speaks, Covington, then all other sounds cease, and she speaks alone to me in a world grown silent to listen. There is some quality in that voice that gets into me—that reaches and vibrates certain hidden strings I did not know were there. So sweet is the music that I can hardly give enough attention to make out the meaning of her words. What she says does not so much matter as that she should be speaking to me—to my ears alone.

And these things are merely the superficialities of her. There still remains the princess herself below these wonderful externals. There still remains the woman herself. Woman, any woman, is marvelous enough, Covington. But a woman like Marjory—what in the world can a man do big enough to deserve the charge of such a soul? That thought makes me humble, Covington.

I fear I have rambled a good deal, old man. I can't read over what I have been scribbling here, so I must let it go as it is. But I wanted to tell you some of these things that are rushing through my head

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all the time, because I knew you would be glad for me and glad for her.

I'm not asking you to answer, because what I should want to hear from you I wouldn't allow any one else to read. So tear this up and forget it if you want. Some day I shall meet you again and see you. Then I can talk to you face to face.

Yours,

PETER J. NOYES.

Sitting alone in his room at the Normandie, Monte read this through. Then his hands dropped to his side and the letter fell from them to the floor.

"Oh, my God!" he said. "Oh, my God!"

LETTER from Madame Covington to her husband, Monte Covington, which the latter never received at all because it was never sent. It was never meant to be sent. It was written merely to save herself from doing something rash, something for which she could never forgive herself—like taking the next train to Paris and claiming this man as if he were her own.

Dearest Prince of my Heart:

You've been gone from the twelve hours. For twelve hours you've left me here all alone. I don't know how I've lived. I don't know how I'm going to get through the night and to-morrow. Only there won't be any to-morrow. There'll never be anything more than periods of twelve hours, until you come back: just from dawn to dark, and then from dark to dawn, over and over again. Each period must be fought through as it comes, with no thought about the others. I'm beginning on the second. The morning will bring the third.

Each one is like a life-time—a birth and a death. And oh, my Prince, I shall soon be very, very old. I don't dare look in the mirror to-night, for fear of seeing how old I've grown since morning.

Dearest heart of mine, I love you. Though I tremble away from those words, I must put them down for once in black and white. Though I tear them up into little pieces so small that no one can read them, I must write them once. It is such a relief, here by myself, to be honest. If you were here and I were honest, I'd stand very straight and look you fair in the eyes and tell you that over and over again. "I love you, Monte," I would say. "I love you with all my heart and soul, Monte." I would say. "Right or wrong, coward that I am or not, whether it is good for you or not, I love you, Monte," I would say. And, if you wished, I would let you kiss me. And, if you would let me, I would kiss you on your dear tousled hair, on your forehead, on your eyes—

That is where I kissed Peter to-day. I will tell you here, as I would standing before you. I kissed Peter on his eyes, and I have promised to kiss him again upon his eyes to-morrow—if to-morrow comes. I did it because he said it would help him to see again. And if he sees again—why, Monte, if he sees again, then he will see how absurd it is that he should ask me to love him.

Blind as he is, he almost saw that to-day, when he made me promise to try to stay by his side. With his eyes full open, then he will be able to read my eyes. So I shall kiss him there as often as he wishes. Then, when he understands, I shall not fear for him. He is a man. Only, if I told him with my lips, he would not understand. He must find out for himself. Then he will throw back his shoulders and take the blow—as we all of us have had to take a blow. It will he no worse for him than for you, dear, or for me.

It is not as I kissed him that I should kiss you. How silly it is of men to ask for kisses when, if they come at all, they come unasked. What shall I do with all of mine that are for you alone? I throw them out across the dark to you—here and here and here.

I wonder what you are doing at this moment? I have wondered so about every moment since you went. Because I can not know, I feel as if I were being robbed. At times I fancy I can see as clearly as if I were with you.

I see you reaching Paris and driving to your hotel. I wonder if you are at the Normandie. I don't even know that. I'd like to know that. I wonder if you would dare sleep in your old room. Oh, I'd like to know that. It would be so restful to think of you there. But what, if there, are you thinking about? About me, at all? I don't want you to think about me, but I'd die if I knew you did not think about me.

I don't want you to be worried, dear you. I won't have you unhappy. You said once, "Isn't it possible to care a little without caring too much?" Now I'm going to ask you: "Isn't it possible for you to think of me a little without thinking too much?" If you could remember some of those evenings on the ride to Nice—even if with a smile—that would be better than nothing. If you could remember that last night before we got to Nice, when—when I looked up at you and something almost leaped from my eyes to yours. If you could remember that with just a little knowledge of what it meant—not enough to make you unhappy, but enough to make you want to see me again. Could you do that without getting uncomfortable—without mixing up your schedule?

I cried a little right there, Monte. It was a silly thing to do. But you're alone in Paris, where we were together, and I'm alone here.

If you had only said, "We'll quit this child's play. You'll come with me and we'll make a home and settle down, like Chic." I'd have been a good wife to you, Monte—honest, I would—if you'd done like that any time before I met Peter and became ashamed. Up to that point I'd have gone with you if you had loved me enough to take me. Only, you didn't love me. That was the trouble, Monte. I'd made you think I did not want to be loved. Then I made you think I wasn't worth loving. Then, when Peter came and made me see—why, then it was too late.

But you don't know, and never will know, what a good wife I'd have been. Though I should have tried to lead you a little, too. I should have watched over you and been at your command, but I should have tried to guide you into doing something worth while.

Perhaps we could have done something together worth while. You have a great deal of money, Monte, and I have a great deal. We have more than is good for us. I think if we had worked together we could have done something for other people with it. I never thought of that until lately; but the other evening, after you had been talking about your days in college, I lay awake in bed, thinking how fine it would be if we could do something for some of the young fellows there now who do not have money enough. I imagined myself going back to Cambridge with you some day and calling on the president or the dean, and hearing you say to him:

"Madame Covington and I have decided that we want to help every year one or more young men needing help. If you will send to us those you approve of, we will lend them enough to finish their course."

I thought it would be better to lend the money than give it to them, because they would feel better about it. And they could be as long as they wished in paying it back, or if they fell into hard luck need never pay it back.

So every year we would start as many as we could, each of us paying half. They would come to us, and we would get to know them, and we would watch them through, and after that watch them fight the good fight. And they would come to you for advice, and perhaps sometimes to me. It would be so good for you, Monte. And good for me, too. Even if we had—oh, Monte, we might in time have had boys of our own in Harvard too! Then they would have selected other boys for us, and that would have been good for them too.

Here by myself I can tell you these things, because—because, God keep me, you can not hear. You did not think I could dream such dreams as those, did you? You thought I was always thinking of myself and my own happiness, and of nothing else. You thought I asked everything and wished to give nothing. But

Continued on page 22

Passing the Joke Buck

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by Hazel Roberts

I DON'T mind admittin' that this treasure-huntin' stuff does get you. Course, while I was only an outsider, with no ticket even for a brokerage bite at the gate receipts, I wasn't runnin' any temperature over the prospects.

But now it was different. Vee and I had gone out and shown this poor prune of a Captain Killam where his bloomin' island was, we'd rescued Auntie and Old Hickory from bein' stuck in the mud, and we'd been officially counted in as possible prize-winners. More'n that, we'd seen the treasure mound.

"Torchy," says Vee, the first chance we has for a few side remarks after lunch that day, "what do you think? Is it full of gold and jewels?"

"Well," says I, tryin' to look wise, "it might be, mightn't it? And then again you can't always tell."

"But suppose it is?" insists Vee, her gray eyes bigger than ever.

"I can't," says I. "It's too much of a strain. Honest, from what I've seen of the country down here, it would be a miracle to run across a single loose dollar, while as for uncoverin' it in bunches—Say, Vee, how much of this pirate guff do you stand for, anyway?"

"Why, you silly," says she. "Of course there were pirates—Lafitte, and Jose Gaspar, and—and a lot of others. They robbed ships right off here, and naturally they buried their treasure when they came ashore."

"What simps!" says I. "Then they went off and forgot, eh?"

"Some were caught and hanged," says she, "and I suppose some were killed fighting. No one can tell. It was all so long ago, you see. They're all gone. But the islands are still here, aren't they?"

"I don't miss any," says I. "There's the mound, too. It's big enough to hold forty truck-loads."

"I should say," announces Vee, "that we had all better be planning how to get that treasure on board the yacht. Captain Killam says we mustn't go there by day, you know, because some one might follow us. Then there's the crew. I wonder if they suspect anything?"

Come to find out, that was what we was all wonderin'. Course, Rupert would be the first to develop a case of nerves. He reports that he's come across groups of 'em whisperin' mysterious. Which reminds Auntie that she'd noticed something of the kind, too. Even Mr. Ellins admits that some of the men had acted sort of queer. And right while we're holdin' our confab some one looks around and discovers that a sailor has drifted up sleuthy almost within car-shot.

"Hey, you!" calls out Old Hickory. "What are you doing there?"

"Just touching up the brass-work, sir."

"Do your touching up some other time," orders Old Hickory. "Forward with you!"

"Yes, sir," says the party in the white jumper, and sneaks off.

"Listening!" says Rupert.

"Who knows what they may be plotting," says Auntie, "or what sort of men they are? Sailors are apt to be such desperate characters. Why, we might all be murdered in our beds!"

"As likely as not," says Rupert gloomy.

And you know how catchin' an idea like that is. Up to then we hadn't taken much notice of the crew. Oh, we'd got so we could tell the deck stewards apart. One was a squint-eyed little Cockney that misplaced his aitches, but was always on hand when you wanted anything. Another was a tall, lanky Swede who was always "Yust coomin', sir." Then there was the bristly-haired Hungarian we called Goulash. They'd all seemed harmless enough before; but now we took to sizin' 'em up close. At dinner when they was servin' things, I glanced around and found all four of our treasure-huntin' bunch followin' every move made. The usual table chatter had stopped, too.

I could tell by the look of Old Hickory's eyes that something was coming from him. And sure enough, after coffee had been passed, he waves off the stewards and sends for Lennon, the yacht captain.

ONE of these chunky, square-jawed gents, Captain Lennon is, and about as sociable as a traffic cop on duty. His job is runnin' the yacht, and he sticks to it.

"Captain," says Mr. Ellins, "I want to know something about your crew. What are they like, now?"

The Cap looks sort of puzzled.

"Why, they're all right, I guess."

"Please don't guess," cuts in Auntie. "Are they all good, responsible, steady-going, trustworthy men?"

"I couldn't say, madam," says he. "We don't get 'em from divinity schools."

"Of course not," chimes in Old Hickory. "What we really want to know is this: Do your men suspect what we are here for?"

The Captain nods.

"How much do they know—er—about the buried treasure, for instance?" demands Old Hickory.

Captain Lennon shrugs his shoulders.

"About twice as much as is so, I suppose," says he. "They're great gossips, sailors—worse than so many old women."

"Huh!" grunts Mr. Ellins. "And about how long have they known all this?"

"I overheard some of them talking about it before we sailed," says the Captain. "There were those new shovels and picks, you know; perhaps those set them guessing. Anyway, they were passing the word from the first."

Mr. Ellins shakes his head and glances at Killam. Auntie presses her lips tight and stares from one to the other.

"This is serious," says Old Hickory. "Why didn't you tell us of this before?"

"Why," says Captain Lennon, "I didn't think you'd like it, sir. And I've warned the men."

"Warned them against what?" asks Old Hickory.

"Against showing their grins above decks," says the Captain. "Of course, I can't stop their having their jokes in their own quarters."

"Jokes?" echoes Mr. Ellins.

"Jokes!" gasps Auntie.

Captain Lennon hunches his shoulders again.

"I thought you wouldn't like it, sir," says he; "but that's the way they look at it. I've told them it was none of their business what you folks did; that you could afford to hunt for buried treasure, or buried beans, or buried anything else, if you wanted to. And if you'll report one of them even winking disrespectful, or showing the trace of a grin, I'll set him and his ditty-bag ashore so quick—"

"Thank you, Captain," breaks in Mr. Ellins; "that—that will be all."

YOU should have seen the different expressions around that table after the Captain has gone. I don't know that I ever saw Old Hickory actually look sheepish before. As for Auntie, she's almost ready to blow a fuse.

"Well!" says she explosive. "I like that! Jokes, are we?"

"So it appears," says Mr. Ellins. "At any rate, we seem to be in no danger from a mutinous crew. Our little enterprise merely amuses them."

"Pooh!" says Auntie. "Ignorant sailors! What do they know about—"

But just then there booms in through the port-holes this hearty hail from outside:

"Ahoy the Agnes! Who's aboard there. Wha-a-a-at! Mr. Ellins, of Now York? Well, well! Hey, you! Fend off there. I'm coming in."

"Megrue!" says Old Hickory. "If it isn't I'll—"

It was, all right: Bernard J. Megrue, one of our biggest Western customers, president of a couple of railroads, and director in a lot of companies that's more or less close to the Corrugated Trust. He's a husk, Barney Megrue is—big and breezy, with crisp iron-gray hair, lively black eyes, and all the gentle ways of a section boss.

He's got up in a complete khaki rig, includin' shirt and hat to match, and below the eyebrows he has a complexion like a mahogany sideboard. It don't take him long to make himself right to home among us.

"Well, well!" says he, workin' a forced draught on one of Old Hickory's choice cassadoras. "Who'd ever think of running across you down here? After tarpon, eh? That's me, too. Hung up my third fish for the season only yesterday; a beauty, too—hundred and sixty-three pounds—and it took me just two hours and forty-five minutes to make the kill. But say, Ellins, this is no stand for real strikes. Now, you move up to Boca Grande to-morrow and I'll show you fishing that's something like."

"Thanks, Barney," says Old Hickory, "but I'm no whaler. In fact, I'm no fisherman at all."

"Oh, I see," says Megrue. "Just cruising, eh? Well, that's all right if you like it. People come to Florida for all sorts of things. Which reminds me of something rich. Heard it from my boatman. He tells me there's a party of New York folks down here hunting for pirate gold. Haw, haw! How about that, eh?"

Embarrassin' pause. Very. Nobody dared look at anybody else. At least, I didn't. I was waverin' between a gasp and a snicker, and was nearly chokin' over it, when Old Hickory clears his throat raspy and menacin'.

"Well, what about it?" he asks snappy.

"Why," says Megrue, "it seems too good to be true, that's all. As I told the boys up at the hotel, if there are any real treasure-hunting bugs around, I want to get a good look at 'em—especially if they're from New York. That's one on you, eh, Ellins? Proves you have a few folks in the big town who have bats in their belfries, don't it?"

That gets an uneasy squirm out of Old Hickory, but he comes right back at him.

"Just why?" he demands.

"Why, great Scott, Ellins," goes on Megrue enthusiastic, "don't you know that buried treasure stuff is the stalest kind of tourist bait in use on the whole Florida coast? The hotel people have been handing that out for the past fifty years. Wouldn't think any one could be still found who'd bite at it, would you? But it seems they exist. Every once in a while a new lot of come-ons show up, with their old charts and their nice new shovels, and go to digging. Why, I was shown a place just north of Little Gasparilla—Cotton River, they call it—where the banks have been dug up for miles by these simple-minded nuts.

"Every now and then, too, they circulate that musty tale about an old Spaniard, in Tampa or Fort Myers or somewhere, who whispers death-bed directions about finding a chest of gold buried at the foot of a lone palmetto on some key or other. And say, they tell me there isn't a lone tree on this section of the coast that hasn't been dug up by the roots. Good old human nature can't be downed, can it? You can suppress the green goods and gold-brick games, but folks will still go to shoveling sand if you mention pirates to 'em. What I want is to see 'em at it once."

The harder you jolt Old Hickory, though, the steadier he gets.

"Huh!" says he, smilin' sarcastic. "An ambition such as yours ought to be

Continued on page 15

EVERY WEEK'S OWN TRAVELOGUES

GUIDING YOU GENTLY THROUGH THE NEW PLAYS

Photographs by White Studio

---

UNCOMFORTABLE MEN

Passing the Joke Buck

Continued from page 10

gratified. Take a good look at us, Megrue."

"Wha-a-a-at!" gasps Barney, starin' at him. "You—you don't mean that—that—"

"Precisely," says Old Hickory. "We are the crack-brained New Yorkers you are so anxious to see."

Well, when he recovers his breath he does his best to square himself. He apologizes four different ways, gettin' in deeper with every turn, until finally he edges towards the stairs and makes his escape.

"At least," remarks Old Hickory, "I suppose it is something to provide a source of innocent merriment. I trust we are not overlooking any one who might wish to be amused."

Before the evenin' was over he had his answer. About eight-thirty out comes a fast motor-boat and ties up alongside without askin' leave. Reporters, two of 'em. They climbs up, grinnin' and amiable, specially the fat one in the tight-fittin' Palm Beach suit. They wanted to know when we was goin' to start diggin', and if we'd mind their bringin' out a movie machine, so one of 'em could get a few hundred feet of film for a picture news service that he represented.

"It ought to be great stuff," says Fatty.

"Young man," says Old Hickory, breathin' hard and talkin' through his teeth, "have you any idea what a splash you'd make if you were dropped overboard?"

"Oh, come, guv'nor," protests Fatty; "we only want to—"

About then, though, he decides to make a scramble for his boat and the interview was off. Old Hickory stands glarin' after the pair until they're out of sight. Then he chuckles unpleasant.

"For a private, not to say secret, enterprise," says he, "it occurs to me that ours is rather well advertised. What next, I wonder?"

"There's a big boat headed this way on the other side," says I. "Seems to me I hear a band, too."

"Excursionists!" says Auntie. "Do you suppose they would have the impudence?"

"Looks like a moonlight round trip, with the Agnes as the object, of interest," says I. "Yep! They've got the searchlight on us."

"This is insufferable!" says Auntie, and beats it below, to lock herself in her state-room.

"Gr-r-r-r!" remarks Old Hickory, and follows suit.

WE never did trace out who had done such thorough press work for us; but I have my suspicions it was the chief steward, who went ashore reg'lar every morning after milk and cream. But the round-trippers surely was well posted. We could hear 'em talkin' us over, shoutin' their comments above the rumble of the engine.

Vee and I didn't want to miss any of it, so we hikes up on the bridge and camps behind the canvas spray-shield. Captain Lennon come up too, sort of standin' guard. It was 'most like bein' under fire in the trenches.

"'That's her—the Agnes of New York!" we heard 'em sing out. "My, what a perfectly swell yacht, Minnie! Ain't they the boobs, though? Hey, Sam, why dontcher ask them squirrels can they make a noise like a nut? Huntin' pirate gold, are they? Who's been kiddin' 'em that way?"

"Little sample of Southern hospitality, I expect," says I. "All they lack is a few ripe eggs and some garden confetti."

"I wonder if Auntie can hear?" giggles Vee. "Do you know what this makes me feel like? As if I were a person in a cartoon."

"You've said it," says T. "What I mind most, though, is that fresh gink with the searchlight. Say, Cap'n, why couldn't we turn ours loose at him as a come-back?"

"Go ahead," says Captain Lennon, throwin' a switch.

Say, that was a great little thought, for the Agnes has a high-powered glim, and when I swung it onto that excursion boat I made theirs look like a boardin'-house gas-jet with the pressure low. You could see the folks blinkin' and battin' their eyes as if they was half blinded. Next I picks up the pilot-house and gives the man at the wheel the full benefit.

"Hey! Take off that light," he sings out. "I can't see where I'm runnin'. Take it off!"

"Switch off yours, then, you mutt," says I, "and run your cheap sandwich gang back where they belong under the hominy vines."

MY, don't that raise a howl, though! They wanted to mob us for keeps then, and all sorts of junk begun to fly through the air. Then Cap'n Lennon took a hand.

"Sheer off there!" he orders, "or I'll turn the fire-hose on you."

Well, the excursion captain stayed long enough to pass the time of day, but when he saw the sailors unreel the hose be got a move on; and in half an hour we was lyin' quiet again in the moonlight.

Must have been well on towards midnight, and I was just ready to turn in, when Mr. Ellins comes paddin' out of his state-room, luggin' two pairs of hip rubber boots.

"Torchy," says he, "call Killam, will you?"

By the time I'd routed out Rupert, I finds Auntie and Vee waitin' in the main cabin, all dressed for travel.

"I may be the oldest joke on record," says Old Hickory, "but I propose to know before morning what is in that mound. Of course, if any one feels foolish about going—"

"I do, for one," speaks up Auntie, "and I should think you would too, Matthew Ellins. We've been told how silly we are enough times to-night, haven't we?"

"We have," says Old Hickory. "Which is just why I propose to see this thing through."

"And I am quite as stubborn as you are," says Auntie. "'That is why I am going too."

Vee and I didn't put up any apologies. We just trailed along silent. As for Rupert, he'd been kicked around so much the last few days that he hadn't a word to say. Here he was, too, right on the verge of the big test that he'd been workin' up to so long, and he's so meek he hardly dares open his head. When we starts pilin' into the launch he shows up with a couple of bundles.

"What the syncopated seraphims have you there?" demands Old Hickory.

"Gas bombs," says Rupert. "To clear out the snakes."

"Careful with 'em," growls Old Hickory. "What else?"

"A few canvas bags for—for the treasure, sir," says Rupert, duckin' his head sheepish. "Shall—shall I put them in?"

"Oh, you might as well," says Old hickory.

AND once more, with Vee at the wheel, we sneaks off in the moonlight for Nunca Secos Key. We wasn't a chatty lot of adventurers. I expect we all felt like we was about to open an April fool package, and wished the others hadn't been there to watch. None of us could pass any one else the laugh; that was some satisfaction.

There was enough outsiders, though, to give us the titter. Megrue was sure to spread the tale among Old Hickory's business friends. And who knew what that pair of foiled interviewers would do to us? Some of their stuff might get into the New York papers. Then wouldn't Mr. Ellins be let in for a choice lot of joshin'! No wonder he sits chewin' savage at a cold cigar.

When we gets near the little island, though, he rouses up. He pulls on a pair of wadin' boots and tosses another pair to me. Rupert, he's all fixed up for rough work, and even Vee has brought some high huntin' shoes.

So, when we lands, each takes a shiny new spade or a pick and makes ready to explore the mound that looms mysterious through the mangrove bushes. First off, Rupert has to toss out a couple of gas bombs, in case there might be rattlers roamin' around. And, believe me, any snake that could stand that smell was entitled to stay on the ground. It's ten or fifteen minutes before we dare go near ourselves. Rupert suggests that we start a tunnel in from the bottom, and sort of relay each other as our wind gives out.

"Very well," says Old Hickory. "It's a good many years since I did any excavating, but I think I can still swing a pick."

Say, he could; that is, for a five-minute stretch. And while he's restin' up I tackles it. I didn't last so long, either.

Rupert, though, cones out strong. He makes the sand fly at a great rate. Vee stands by, holdin' an electric torch, while Auntie watches from the boat.

"We're makin' quite a hole in it, Mr. Ellins," says I, sort of encouragin'.

"It is the usual thing to do, I believe," says he, "before owning up that you've been fooled. Here, Killam, let me have another go at that."

He don't do it because he's excited about it, but just because it's his turn. In fact, we'd all got to about that stage. We'd shoveled out a wagon-load or two of old roots and sand and rotten shells without uncoverin' so much as a rusty nail, and it looked like we might keep on until mornin' with the same amazin' success. Considerin' that we was half beaten before we started, we'd done a pretty fair job. It was just a question now of how soon somebody'd have nerve enough to make a motion that we quit. That's when we had our first little flutter.

"Huh!" says Old Hickory, jabbin' in with his spade. "Must have struck a log. Hand me a pick, some one."

When he makes a swing with that, the point goes in solid and sticks.

"Right! It is a log," he announces.

Killam tests it, and he says it's a log, too.

"An old palmetto trunk," says he, proddin' at it. "Two of them, one laid on the other. No, three. I say, that's funny. Let's clear away all of this stuff."

So we goes at it, all three at once, and inside of fifteen minutes we can see what looks like the side of a little log cabin.

"If this was out in Wisconsin," says Old Hickory, "I should say we'd found somebody's root cellar. But who would build such a thing in Florida?"

"Come on," says Killam, his voice sort of shrill and quivery. "I have one of the logs loose. Now pry here with your picks, everybody. Together, now! It's coming! Once more! There! Now the next one above. Oh, put your weight on it, Mr. Ellins. Get a fresh hold. Try her now. It's giving! Again. Harder. Look out for your toes! And let's have that light here, Miss Verona. Flash it into this hole. Isn't that a—a—"

"It's a barrel," says Vee.

"Water-butt," says Killam. "An old ship's water-butt. There are the staves of another, fallen apart. And look! Will—you—look, all of you!"

WOULD we! Say, we was crowded around that black hole in the mound as thick as noon lunchers at a pie-counter. And we was strainin' our eyes to see what the faint light of the torch was tryin' to show up. All of a sudden I reaches in and makes a grab at something, bringin' out a fistful.

"Hard money," says I, "or I don't know the feel!"

"Why, it—it's gold!" says Vee, bringin' her flash-light close.

"There's more of it, a lot more!" shouts Killam, who has his head and shoulders inside and is pawin' around excited. "Quarts and quarts of it! And jewels, too! I say, Mr. Ellins! Jewels! Didn't I tell you we'd find 'em? See, here they are. See those! And those! Didn't I say so?"

"You did, Captain," admits Old Hickory. "You certainly did. And for a time I was just ass enough to believe you, wasn't I?"

"Oh, Auntie!" calls Vee. "We've found it! Honest to goodness we have. Come and see."

"As though I wasn't coming as fast as I could, child!" says Auntie, who has scrambled over the bow somehow and is plowin' towards us with her skirts gripped high on either side.

Thrillin'! Say, I don't believe any of us could tell just what we did do for the next half hour or so. I remember once Old Hickory got jammed into the hole and we had to pry him out. And another time, when we was rollin' out the cask, it was Auntie who helped me pull it through and ease it down the slope. She'd lost most of her hair-pins and her gray hair was hangin' down her back. Also, she'd stepped on the front of her skirt and ripped off a breadth. But them trifles didn't seem to bother her a bit.

"Ho, ho!" she warbles merry. "Gold and jewels! The jewels of old Spain and of the days of Louis Fourteenth. Pirate gold! We've dug it! The very thing I've always wanted to do ever since I was a little girl. Ho, ho!"

"And I rather guess," adds Old Hickory, fishin' a broken cigar out of his vest pocket, "that as treasure-hunters we're not such thundering jokes, after all. Eh?"

And say, when Old Hickory starts crowin' you can know he sees clear through to daylight. I looks over my shoulder just then, and, sure enough, it's beginnin' to pink up in the east.

"My dope is," says I, "that it's goin' to be a large, wide day. Anyhow, it opens well."

"I HAVE NO TIME TO READ"

All Right—We'll Do Your Reading for You. $300 Worth of New Books and Magazines Are Read for These Pages Every Week

MARSHALL FIELD'S ADVICE TO SHOP-GIRLS

MARSHALL FIELD'S clerks were not allowed to chew gum, or to do over their back hair while a prospective customer waited for silks or safety-pins. Neither could the men affect green suits and purple fedoras, or offend the esthetic taste of a customer with flamboyant ties and socks.

Mr. Field had twelve rules for success which he presented to every new employee, says London Tit-Bits. His simple formula is recommended for the consideration of American merchants who aspire to wealth and fame.

WHAT WILL BECOME OF COOK'S TOURS?

THOUSANDS of Cook's tourists have been personally conducted around the world and hack again since a famous temperance lecture in London seventy-five years ago: but most of them don't know how much they owe to that obscure lecturer, and to Thomas Cook's enthusiastic devotion to the cause.

Cook was by trade a printer, but by profession a prohibitionist. He worked assiduously to cultivate his principles in all his friends, and to this end got up a little party of Englishmen to attend the

lecture in London. His was the first excursion train that ever pulled out of a station.

To-day you can't turn a corner in the remotest spot on the globe without running across a Cook's office. He's a world banker. He's Egypt's mail-carrier. He's the ticket agent of the universe. Railroads and steamship companies and hotels owe him a monument as high as the Bunker Hill shaft, says the Philadelphia Ledger.

It was sixty-one years ago when Thomas Cook conducted his first party of tourists to a foreign land. They were Englishmen who wanted to see the sights of Paris. Sixteen years later a crowd of American Masons acquired a hankering to taste the joys of the audacious French capital. It was Cook who bought the tickets, looked after the luggage, and engaged accommodations; who told palpitating ladies what they ought to wear, and instructed American business men in the rudiments of polite European behavior.

But the war has gripped even benevolent Cook's in its ghastly hands. Cook's folders are dusty on their racks, and Cook's agents are marking time until the conflict is over. There used to be sixteen thousand persons employed in the home office at Ludgate Circus, London. To-day there are only six hundred.

How long will it be before one can board that famous Oriental express at Paris, and step off the train at Constantinople? No one knows. And no one ventures to guess how long it will take to heal the wounds at the international boundaries so that travelers can cross from one country to another without lauding in the enemy's dungeon.

DOWN WITH THE DENTIST'S FORCEPS

WHEN a Japanese dental student can extract a hard wooden peg from a slab of marble without half trying, he gets his diploma and adds "doctor" to the Mitsuro Hotoyama or the So Hurikara that he already had. He opens his office by buying a chair, and a towel to wipe his hands on.

The Japanese dentist scorns forceps and gas apparatus, and all such useless paraphernalia, says the Leavenworth New Era. He relies on his good strong fingers to extract all the offending molars that come in his office. It's a simple process. The dentist seizes his patient with the left hand, and plucks out the aching tooth with his right. One firm, bull-dog grip, a sudden scientific twist, and the worst is over.

From the moment when he begins to study dentistry, the student puts his fingers through a sort of jiu-jitsu course. First he learns to acquire strength by pulling out, with the thumb and one finger of his right hand, a number of wooden pegs that have been inserted in holes in a plank. When he can do this easily, a tougher log and tougher pegs are tried. The marble slab that contains pegs of the hardest wood, deeply driven in, is the last test of strength required.

To be a first-class workman, according to Japanese standards, a dentist must be able to extract five or six teeth in quick succession without resting.

ARE YOU A TIGER MAN?

IF you are tall and lank and lean, and have a hawk-nose, if you are active and agile, a pioneer, a creator, a conqueror—it is safe to conclude that you are a tiger man. And your neighbor who is broad, thick and heavy of body, and slow and plodding of mind belongs to the ox type. You are herbivorous, he is carnivorous. You have an Adam's apple and get bald before you are very old. He

keeps his hair, and does without the apple. You are a fighter, he is a pacifist.

If your two skeletons were stood side by side and it were convenient for you both to examine them, you would discover a difference in the curve of your spines and in the form of the vertebrae. And an X-ray picture would disclose a great difference in the length of the intestines. Those are the conclusions reached by Dr. Joel L. Goldthwait and Dr. John D. Bryant, though there are many apparent contradictions to their theory.

William Jennings Bryan, says the Chicago Examiner, is the perfect type of ox man. Heavily built, he has the broad back, the square, heavy jaw, and the short, thick neck characteristic of this type. Henry Ford, on the other hand, is physically the typical tiger man. He has a lean, wiry frame and narrow jaw. His movements are quick and active. He prefers cereals and vegetables to meats.

Yet Ford and Bryan have similar mental qualities. Both are ardent pacifists, and neither drinks wines or liquors. A large employer of labor told Dr. Bryant that the physical type often provided a key to wise selection of help. When he was asked how much help he wanted for a certain piece of work, he replied, "About so many broad backs, and so many narrow backs." The broad backs were the office force that worked up the data secured in the field by the more aggressive narrow backs.

HER OWN FAMILY WERE AFRAID OF HER

IF one of our own historic cow-punchers could have visited Queen Victoria, he would probably have confided to his pals that she had all England buncoed, and most of all her own family. The members of her household were awestruck in her presence. Her etiquette was pedantic. She kept her mother standing in her presence.

Shane Leslie has given us some delightful pictures of her in his book, The End of a Chapter (Charles Scribner's Sons).

"She was high-minded," says Mr. Leslie, "and stopped her ministers—even the Duke of Wellington—from swearing. Presentation at her court became a certificate in domestic morals.

"When an unhappy officer of the guard once risked a slightly improper story at her table, she insisted on its repetition, and remarked in the icy silence which followed: 'We are not amused!'

"She showed herself big-hearted to fallen sovereigns and worthless old servants. She repaired the tomb of the last Stuart king in France and welcomed the last Napoleon to England.

"To a Scotch gilly, John Brown, she extended real favor, and even consulted him on public affairs. He was a rough-grained fellow, complaisant when sober and rude to the Queen when drunk. He became the aversion of the royal family and ministers of state, who were glad when he died. But the Queen mourned."

Queen Victoria was the fairy godmother of England. She tripped blithely up to the throne as a very young girl, and before she died was lifted to the summit of one of the most peaceful and prosperous eras in the history of England—the Victorian age.

---

BEING COMFORTABLE IN THE WHITE HOUSE

"LAWS!" exclaimed the niece of John Quincy Adams, a vivacious maiden lady of seventy, when she visited the East Room of the White House. "Is this the old room? The meal-barrel used to stand in that corner. Here were the wash-tubs. From here to there"—pointing with her parasol—"a clothes-line was stretched; and in this corner we kept our play-things."

Evidently the White House, up to twenty years ago, according to an article

in the Springfield Republican, was like the home of almost any citizen "in moderate circumstances." The famous East Room was used by the wives of the Presidents as a laundry and a nursery. When poor, dear Mr. and Mrs. Van Buren moved in there wasn't a hot bath in the place; and Mrs. Benjamin Harrison complained loudly, on her arrival, that one half the upstairs was an office building; that she who was used to nine bedrooms must now live in only five.

To-day, however, the White House upstairs, where the Wilson family lives and rests in privacy, is the most comfortable palace in the world. "The presidential suite is done in blue and gold, and the walls of the boudoir, in lieu of paper, are lined with pale blue brocaded satin. The ten extra bedrooms, the library, and the corridors are also rich in the necessities of presidents—expensive paintings, mahogany chairs, ebony cabinets, and Oriental rugs.

When a man becomes President, he can put his own house in storage, for in the White House everything is furnished, even to soap and towels. Should Mrs. Wilson neglect to order meals, they would be served just the same, on National Observatory time. In the closets upstairs there are dozens of massive pitchers, trays, and gravy-boats of solid silver, and Mrs. Wilson can command the use of fourteen dozen pearl-handled knives (for best, of course) and twenty-four dozen solid silver forks.

Each presidential family has left its set of dishes; but the Roosevelt queen's-ware is used for state occasions. It had 3000 pieces originally, and cost $22,000.

President Wilson and his family, however, insisting on a serene home life, eat lunch from ordinary dishes, with plated-silver forks. Consequently, if the maid drops a platter there's no drama. And, realizing that his residence has the most complete system of electric burglar alarms in the world,—and that a secret service man is always stationed at the foot of the back stairs,—the President has nothing to worry about but German submarines and Mexican aggressions.

HOW TO BE SICK THOUGH POOR

WHEN a man had consumption a century ago, his family could do nothing but fold their hands and wait for the end. Many years after it was proved that tuberculosis was not fatal: it could be cured—but this only if the patient were a hereditary millionaire and therefore out of a job. In that case he could spend several years in mountain sanatoriums, living on the purest and costliest food, and for the rest of his life avoid cold winters and wet springs by traveling.

But now a book on the Home Care of Consumptives (G. P. Putnam's Sons) has been written by Roy L. French, saying that if an ordinary person, working for wages and supporting a family, develops tuberculosis, be can be cured at home without going heavily into debt. The plan of sending cases running about the country from East to West and the reverse is no longer considered necessary. In fact, the man who is cured in the climate where he must spend his life has a lot of advantages.

"The first requirement is that you start the fight at once. Don't let the convenience of your employer or anything else stand in the way. if you lack sufficient means to follow some of the directions in the book, strive so much the harder on other matters." If it is necessary to mortgage the house, to put off getting the Ford, it should be done in cheerful preparation for a two or three years' campaign.

Rest, plenty of food, fresh air, and freedom from worry are the big requisites. "Aim to spend a minimum of from eight to ten hours outdoors daily. Never stay out while you are chilly, but learn never to be chilly outdoors. Sleep not less than eight hours and not more than ten. Never talk to any one of your case save the doctor, and allow no one to talk to you of theirs. Don't be impatient to get well: it will only retard your recovery."

WHY METCHNIKOFF DIED

ONE day, stopping before a cage of white mice which had attained old age on a diet prescribed by himself, Metchnikoff said: "I am afraid my mice are going to survive me, and I shall not be able to complete my experiment. Fortunately for them, they have no organic heart trouble in their family."

"If you wish to live long, never eat anything uncooked, and drink soured milk," was a theme on which Metchnikoff had laid such great stress that the world at large knew more of him on this account than it knew of his vastly more important scientific works. He believed that old age could be indefinitely postponed.

His students feared that his death at seventy-one might reflect upon his life's work. They took great pains to explain how young and vivacious he was, even when he last visited the laboratory on July 13.

"He came, as usual, in the morning," says a writer in World's Work. "He worked all day, but he did not try to hide his uneasiness at the weakness of his heart. He surprised his students, however, by saying, as he put on his things to go home: 'To-morrow is the fourteenth, isn't it? So we won't work. I am afraid, then, this will be my last day here. I can not last two days. I shall die to-morrow.'"

He died, in fact, on the fifteenth.

"Though he laid much stress on the good effects of soured milk, Metchnikoff did not have a freakish appetite. He often cooked his own meals in his laboratory. One day friends discovered him frying bananas, and stirring them with a test-tube.

"He attributed one fifth of the cases of premature old age to the use of alcohol, one fifth to disease, and the other three fifths to the deleterious organisms fostered in the intestines by the use of uncooked foods."

Metchnikoff's greatest contribution to science was undoubtedly his discovery of phagocytes, the white corpuscles—those

friendly little organisms that fight off harmful microbes. He made this discovery after studying marine organisms for twenty years.

WHAT KINGS LIKE

IT'S hard to think of Royalty as having appetites. But monarchs have their favorite puddings, just as small boys have, says a short paragraph in Tit-Bits.

"The Czar of Russia has a fondness for all kinds of fish, especially codfish seasoned with oil, pepper, and garlic. He once remarked to the late President of France that he could 'eat coddlings till the cows come home!'"

Our idea of a queen always ate bread and honey, or tarts; yet "good old roast beef is the favorite dish of the Queen of Holland, and she is also partial to mutton." Really, Wilhelmina!

"The kings of Italy and Spain both have weaknesses for sweets, such as whipped cream, chocolate, and cakes. The late Pope liked the Italian national dish, polenta." As for the Emperor of Austria, that old, old man, he has a craving for a peculiar dish of calves' tongues in red wine.

The Kaiser has a wholesome relish for hot buttered toast. "Let us hope," says Tit-Bits fiercely, "he will have something hotter than toast served up to him very shortly by the Allies."

A LETTER WE WERE PROUD TO GET

EAT SALT AND WALK TWENTY MILES

THE Germans have discovered a pleasant new medicine, cheap but powerful—a teaspoonful of table salt. Each soldier is given his morning dose in a small glass of water, and, strange to say, it carries him almost buoyantly on a twenty-mile march. Company Surgeon Link of the German Army gives a report of his discovery in the Munich Medical Weekly.

Sweat contains a great deal of salt, and as the blood contains only about twenty grams of salt altogether,—about as much as a person eats every day in his food,—Dr. Link decided that sweat carries from the body a strength-giving chemical.

He experimented on soldiers, who often lose as much as twenty grams of salt from perspiration on a hot march. At 5:45 one morning he gave one hundred soldiers the dose. Marching twenty miles in damp sultry weather, they proved the power of salt. The hundred salted soldiers were less fagged than the rest of the regiment, and they had perspired only a fraction as much.

WHAT SCIENCE IS DOING

To Roll This Old World Along

ELECTRICITY FOR THE ICE-BOX

THE reasons in favor of iceless instead of ice refrigeration are legion. It is more effective, and vastly more sanitary. In addition, it does away with that disciple of the dirty floor, the iceman. Ice famines have no terrors for the house-wife with an iceless refrigerator, provided, of course, that she has plenty of electricity to take its place.

That is the secret of iceless refrigeration—electricity. Electricity goes into a little motor connected with a queer-looking apparatus in the basement, and in the iceless box overhead eggs, butter, and beer thrive in an Arctic atmosphere.

Without going into a technical explanation, the way of the iceless refrigerator is this: The electric motor is attached to a pump that circulates ammonia gas at low temperature through pipes terminating in coils in the refrigerator. The gas is cooled by brine tanks. The contents of the ice-box are, in turn, cooled by the gas.

The greatest advantage of the plant is the possibility of maintaining a temperature low enough for effective refrigeration. The ordinary ice-cooled refrigerator can seldom be kept long at a temperature of forty-five degrees. With the refrigerating plant, however, little difficulty is experienced in keeping a well insulated refrigerator below forty; which is low enough to prevent the rapid growth of bacteria in milk, meat, and other food products.

The first cost of the plant is considerable, amounting to $300 and $350 for family sizes, and $450 and $650 for sizes equivalent to refrigerators using 500 and 1000 pounds of ice a day. The low cost of operation, however, soon offsets the greater initial expense. A well insulated refrigerator with a capacity of thirty cubic feet can be maintained at a temperature of forty degrees for about $1.50 a month. For the larger sizes the saving is even greater; in fact, one of the great advantages in apartment-houses is that the owner is able to furnish tenants with refrigeration, so that the cost of ice is saved, just as that of heating is in winter.

Another desirable feature of the plant is the freezing chamber in the top of the refrigerator. The temperature in this chamber is sufficiently low to freeze ice-cream, without special preparations of ice and salt.

The plant is even more effective than a good refrigerator in keeping the food chamber sanitary. The moisture taken up from the food in the circulation of the air is frozen on the coils and brine tanks, so the air is kept dry and free from odors. There is no melting ice to give off water and introduce the problem of the slime bacteria which thrive in the temperatures produced by the ordinary refrigerator.

The fact that effective cold-storage temperatures can be maintained at very moderate cost in residences, apartment buildings, hotels, markets, and similar places, means that the small-size refrigerating plant has a future, as is the case with any appliance that meets a recognized want.

HIGH SPEED FOR EUROPE'S WOUNDED

ORDINARY stretchers would never be able to take care of all the wounded men who are struck down on Europe's battle-fields. Consider, for a moment, Verdun. Most military authorities have come to the agreement that the high death and wounded records of Verdun were due to nothing more nor less than national conceit. Verdun got too much publicity. Strategically, it was not nearly so important as it was cracked up to be. It was simply over-advertised, and both sides felt they must have Verdun, to clear themselves in the eyes of the newspaper-reading world.

At any event, wounded men on Verdun and other battle-fields have accumulated as they never accumulated in war before. Getting them off the field of glory, or horror, or whatever one cares to call it, represented a task that required stretchers by wholesale.

One of the American motorcycle companies was the first to realize how inadequate and slow the ordinary stretcher-bearers really are. So they devised a motorcycle that would carry, not one, but two wounded men off the battle-field in comparative comfort, at a speed higher, if necessary, than sixty miles an hour.

Motor-cyclists who volunteer to navigate the double-deckers are required to have at least a superficial knowledge of first-aid surgery and dressing. Suspended from the lower stretcher is a complete first-aid equipment.

The chief advantage of the double-decker is the speed, combined with comfort, with which the critically wounded men can be hastened from the firing line to the nearest hospital base for proper surgical treatment.

THE GRIMELESS RAILWAY COACH

AN heroic attempt to do away with the dirt and dust of railway travel is being made by the Grand Trunk Railroad of Canada, according to an article that appeared recently in Je Sais Tous. The railway coach proposed by the Grand Trunk is hermetically sealed. Externally, the grimeless coach resembles a monster with many goggled eyes. It has rounded ends, and a line of circular windows extends from front to rear on both sides. Even the doors, when closed, are sealed with great bands of rubber. Dirt and dust of all kinds are positively excluded. Internally the arrangement compares with the usual stock type of cinder-bearing coaches.

Traveling in a hermetically sealed car might be pleasant for a few minutes—to be exact, until the fresh air was exhausted. The grimeless coach provides itself with fresh air in an interesting way. In the front of the car, projecting from the roof, is a capacious intake pipe. The coach inhales its air through this pipe. All dust, dirt, and cinders are extracted by a filter. At the base of the pipe, under the floor of the car, is a suction fan. When the car travels at high speed, the fan is not necessary. But when the car is at a stand-still, or when the wind is blowing at high speed in the same direction as the car, the fan is turned on. Between the fan and another pipe which terminates in the floor of the car, electric heating coils are placed. On hot days ice is substituted for the heating coils. Vitiated air escapes from the car through vents in the roof.

WHAT HOUR WAS LINCOLN ASSASSINATED?

IF you are of an observing nature, you have noticed that the hands of the dummy clock out on the sidewalk in front of your favorite jeweler's shop point, almost invariably, to 8:18.

If you are of a deductive as well as an observing nature, you may have asked, or wondered, why the dummy hands of the dummy clock always pointed to three minutes past theater time.

Eight-eighteen has nothing to do with curtain-raising time, as far as the dummy clocks are concerned.

Do you know the hour of Lincoln's assassination? One of the commonest explanations of the world-wide 8:18 of the jeweler's clock is that that is the exact time of Lincoln's assassination. According to the legend that is responsible for this explanation, there was a convention of jewelers in Philadelphia at the time, and immediately following the death of the President the jewelers unanimously decided to adopt 8:18 for the position of the hands on their dummy clocks as a perpetual memorial.

Stories as generously sentimental as this are altogether too rare in American history, and nothing would please us more than to put the stamp of verity upon it. Unfortunately, we can not; for those are not the real facts. The time does not correspond with the hour of Lincoln's assassination, and, in addition, there was no convention of jewelers in session then. One man, digging into the history of the dummy clock, found that 8:18 was popular long before Lincoln began to split rails for a living.

The cold, hard truth of the matter is that no pretty little legend of any kind attaches itself to the hands of the dummy clock. They are put where they are simply because 8:18 is the most satisfactory position—because the sign-painter has more space for writing in the name of the jeweler.

NEW MODES IN BAGGAGE-SMASHING

THE United States government has gone into the baggage-smashing business. It can smash a box of canned water bottles with a greater degree of scientific accuracy and with a higher average of breakages than any truck driver. In fact, it smashes them on purpose.

A box-testing machine has been contrived by the Bureau of Forestry, which faintly resembles the large revolving hoppers in which sandstone and cement are mixed to become concrete. As it revolves, the box of water bottles is lifted on shelves, and when the hopper has turned half way around, the box drops to the steel floor.

Scientific facts have been deduced from this experiment. The kinds of wood best suited for boxes have been determined; even the depth to which nails should be driven is calculated to a nicety. Now the canneries are being instructed upon the proper way to build boxes.

A DOUBLE HEADER

THIS curious-looking calf, or, if one wishes to become finicky with his words, this curious-looking calves, is—or are, as the case may be—not the result of trick photography. The poor things were born this way. They belonged to Charles Brunson, who has a farm near Dayton, Ohio. Between them they had six legs, and food went in at either end, or both at the same time. In spite of their irregularity of structure, they managed to live about six months.

How Can that Gasolene Bill Be Reduced?

By ERNEST A. STEPHENS

WHEN you invest a dollar in the purchase of gasolene you get in exchange for your money about four gallons or so of what the chemist, in his light and airy way, terms a hydrocarbon fuel, consisting mainly of pentane and hexane. You, on the other hand, will probably call it, something else on several occasions; basing your remarks as to its past, present, and probable future on the fact that to-day gasolene isn't really gasolene as we knew it a few years ago, but a variable mixture in which the cheaper and less volatile crudes form a not inconsiderable part.

Ignore, for the moment, the quantity of fuel purchasable with your dollar, and direct your attention to what happens to your one hundred cents as represented by actual service and otherwise. Recent tests with standard automobile engines run under normal conditions tend to show that approximately one fifth of the dollar (twenty-one cents, to be accurate) actually produces power at the driving wheels of your automobile, and that the remaining seventy-nine cents are absorbed (and lost) by friction and in the exhaust gas.

The work of heating the water used for the cooling system also uses up quite a big proportion of the remainder of the dollar; but this seems to be necessary, in order to obtain effective service from your engine. Some of your dollar has also paid the cost of the carbon formations in the combustion chambers of your engine, and you have to pay again for their removal. This is due to the fact that the alleged gasolene of to-day contains an undue proportion of kerosene, which fails to vaporize, and promptly starts a deposit of carbon on the hot cylinder walls.

Of the many factors that, individually or in combination, contribute to increase your gasolene bill, it is obvious that the particular one that occupies your attention is the carburetor and its work of transforming the liquid gasolene into a combustible mixture. In fact, the subject of efficient carburetion is so very important that it too often causes the motorist either to ignore or to neglect the less apparent but nevertheless almost equally vital little things that possess powers for gasolene-good or gasolene-evil.

As it may reasonably be presumed that you have studied the idiosyncrasies of your individual carburetor, and have finally set it for economy rather than to produce maximum power, it may be profitable to refer to the lesser evils first.

Since anything calculated to increase friction means additional loss of transmitted power, with a consequent increase in your gasolene bill, it is a good plan to go over the power plant, the transmission, and the running gear, item by item, and carefully to readjust or otherwise eliminate the following faults:

Under-inflated tires, by reason of their increased bearing surface on the road and the additional suction caused thereby, are a prolific cause of lost power. The remedy is obvious; and in this connection examine your wheels for alignment, and see that front and rear axles are parallel.

Your next care should be the brake system. Examine both service and emergency brake bands and assure yourself that they do not drag or hear on the brake drums when not in actual use. The equalizers should also be looked over carefully, as, if they are not fulfilling their functions, your brakes are not acting simultaneously, although they may be otherwise all right.

Proceeding backwards, so to speak, along your transmission system, the next point of possible loss of power is in the final drive gear. Take up any lost motion in this and have a look at the universal joints, as they may be also loose. Of course, if you tighten anything up too much you may find yourself in a worse position than ever on account of increased friction.

Do not use too heavy a lubricant in your transmission, for the reason that the thicker the grease or oil, the more horse-power is absorbed. Remember that a slipping clutch is another source of lost power, and, finally, see that air does not obtain admission to the cylinders through loose valve guides, that your valves themselves are in good condition, that your pistons and piston rings are O. K., and that your ignition system is doing its duty.

When you are satisfied that every possible cause of unnecessary friction has been eliminated as far as it is possible to do so, test your car by allowing it to coast until it stops on a known grade. When next you have any doubts, repeat the operation on the same grade under similar weather conditions, and judge by the result. A little care and thought expended on the indicated lines, supplemented by a correctly adjusted carburetor and judicious driving, should benefit your pocket-book at the expense of gasolene men.

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I am having quite a lot of trouble with a cone clutch which slips badly, although the leather appears to be in good shape. Can you suggest the cause?

C. R. E.

Assuming that the condition of the clutch facing is as you say, it seems probable that the spring tension is not sufficient to keep the parts closely in driving engagement. Readjusting the spring is an easy matter, but you should look it over, as it may have become weak through long service and may need renewal. There may be a coating of oil or grease on the leather. This would also account for your trouble. You can absorb the oil by the application of fuller's earth, holding the clutch out of engagement by the application of the emergency brake.

My engine doesn't develop as much power as formerly; there is a hissing noise and very little resistance when I turn the starting crank. What is wrong?

P. C. W.

Bad compression. Perhaps the valves need regrinding, but if this has been done recently it is possible they do not all seat properly, or that a stem is bent and is sticking in the guide. Worn, broken, or sticking piston rings would account for your trouble, or possibly the rings have worked around until the slots coincide. Before you spend money, try the effect of using a heavier lubricant. This sometimes will effect a great improvement in a worn engine. Cracked or broken spark plugs will also cause the trouble.

How can I effect a temporary radiator repair? The leak is not large and I do not want to go to any considerable expense, as I shall be storing my car in a couple of weeks.

L. M. P.

If the leak is not excessive and you can see exactly where the hole is try ordinary chewing gum. Don't use it straight from the package, but masticate it in the usual way (or get some one to do it for you). Apply to the leak and hold it in position with ordinary tape—adhesive tape is still better. This will put matters right for a time; but do not fail to have the job done in a more permanent manner when opportunity affords.

I am undecided which of two cars to buy. I like them almost equally, but am inclined to prefer the one which has cantilever rear springs. Are these springs batter than the usual elliptic type?

K. N.

Your question is a difficult one to answer, for the reason that the leading automobile engineers are undecided on the point. In a cantilever spring a greater proportion of its own weight is yieldingly supported, instead of constituting dead weight on the axle, and it is possible to make springs of this type with relatively fewer and heavier leaves. It is also claimed that the tendency to side sway is minimized.

Unspoiling Spoiled Children

By LELLA FAYE SECOR

"MOTHER, where's my ball?" demands your small son.

You are busy and you answer absently: "I don't know; I haven't had it."

He goes on with his search, and presently returns to you.

"I want my ball," he shouts in high, imperious tones. "I want it now!"

You are more or less nervous yourself, and you shout back at him:

"Well, go and find it, then. I tell you, I don't know where it is!"

Thereupon your son throws himself on the floor, kicking and screaming in a paroxysm of rage, and defying any one who has the temerity to approach him. This wild tantrum goes on until you start every one in the house in search of the elusive toy. Indeed, you would gladly allow the boy to swallow his father's watch or commit any other juvenile depredation, if only calm could be restored in the household.

Finally you sink into a chair, exhausted, and say to yourself, as you have often done after similar scenes: "What am I going to do? That child, with his ungovernable temper, is entirely beyond my control!"

A New York woman makes a specialty of telling distracted mothers what to do with ungovernable children. She is Mrs. Miriam Finn Scott, "child diagnostician," and it is her business to give mothers expert advice concerning the character-building of their children. She undertakes to unspoil spoiled children. As yet Mrs. Scott is the only person to enter this field in America. In fact, it may be said that she originated the profession. It grew out of sixteen years' experience in training and developing children in settlement houses, kindergartens, play-grounds, and her own home.

Just as the doctor takes Johnny's temperature when he is ill, so Mrs. Scott measures his temperament, sizes up his characteristics, and finds the weak spot in his development. She secures a complete history of the case, studies the symptoms of her patient, makes a diagnosis, and prescribes a course of treatment. Among her patients have been children who were spiteful, disobedient, wilful, selfish, stubborn, mischievous, spiritless, shy, deceitful, or a hundred other unpleasant things.

"Faults," says Mrs. Scott, "are, in the majority of cases, only the unpleasant expression of forces that in themselves were originally admirable."

It takes physical energy, will power, emotional strength, power of concentration, and persistence to stage successfully a violent fit of temper. And each of these qualities, in itself, is highly desirable. So, it appears, it is better for Johnny to possess those substantial qualities that produce temper than for him to be colorless and devoid of positive personality.

In order that the child who is brought to her for observation may be in his natural element and reveal his innate characteristics, Mrs. Scott has designed a playroom that she calls the "Children's Garden." In this artistic room she studies and observes her youthful patients.

Mary was six years old, and a "terror." "She is absolutely unmanageable," confessed her mother, "and no nurse will stay with her."

A history of the child's life revealed these facts: Her physical habits were irregular; she ate little, was extremely nervous, and cried a great deal; she was wilful, and would kick, pinch, and strike people about her, or destroy any object near at hand, if she were crossed; and she had to be watched all the time.

At the time of the first visit of Mary and her mother, Mary would not even look at Mrs. Scott. The child seemed like a wild animal caught in a trap. She braced herself against a window, and stood alert and defiant. To her, adults had always existed for one purpose—to watch and check her. And Mrs. Scott was but one more adult whom she would have to fight.

Quickly noting this attitude, the child diagnostician assumed a manner of utter indifference to her patient. She talked with the mother, ignoring the little girl until she felt that the child's suspicions of hostility were less tense. Then she invited the mother to go into the Children's Garden, and merely suggested to Mary that she might also go if she cared to see the play-things. Mary followed into the sunny play-room, with its little tables—red, blue, green, and white—and its long cabinet equipped with every kind of desirable toy and play material, all within easy reach of a child.

Mary did not yet trust Mrs. Scott sufficiently to warrant direct approach, so her mother was made the medium for conversation. Mrs. Scott showed the mother the various games, pointed out the blackboard with its crayons, the water-color paints and convenient pads, and demonstrated a game of ring toss on the floor. Then, quite naturally, they withdrew to an adjoining room, and Mary was left to her own devices.

It is one of Mrs. Scott's theories that freedom of action, in so far as such freedom does not interfere with the rights of other people, is the first principle to practise in trying to know your child.

When Mary began to investigate the objects about her, the child diagnostician undertook a careful study of the little girl. The first point noted was that the child was clumsy and awkward. She dropped nearly everything she touched. This indicated that she was not practised in handling things—that the coördination of mind and muscle had been seriously neglected. Also she kept changing from one thing to another, and seemed nervously eager to be on the move. This clearly demonstrated that she lacked power of concentration; and when she did not put the games back in their proper receptacles, Mrs. Scott knew at once that she had no sense of order and responsibility.

Finally, when she came to the game of ring toss, she kept steadily at it until it was time for her to go home. She did not once succeed in getting a ring on the stake,

but the mere pleasure of running after the rings seemed to give her enjoyment. Mrs. Scott concluded that the child's predominating virtue was physical energy, which had to have some legitimate outlet or become perverted into temper and irritability.

After a careful study of this child, Mrs. Scott concluded that Mary was not meant to become a colorless little girl who always kept her clothes clean and said "How do you do" at the proper time. Instead she was a child of distinct personality, keen intelligence, and marvelous energy. Vigorous and unsuppressed play that would stimulate her, and pastimes that would train her in better control of her hands and feet and her whole body, were some of the recommendations made by Mrs. Scott.

She suggested that, for a time, only Mary's most grievous faults be noticed or corrected, since constant nagging tends to produce irritation; and that she be encouraged to care for herself and assume definite responsibilities.

To accomplish results required months of patient endeavor; but at the end of a year the mother wrote: "I can hardly believe Mary is the same child. She is happy, and gives no trouble."

John, according to his distracted mother, was incorrigibly mischievous. "He simply takes the house apart. He meddles with every lock, clock, and screw, and we never know what awful thing is going to happen."

For instance, when the heat was first turned on in the fall, steam in great volumes began to escape from every radiator. Young John volunteered the information that he had unscrewed certain valves to see what would happen, and that he would fix them, which he did.

Mrs. Scott advised that John be encouraged to join a mechanics class in a near-by club-house, and that a shop be fitted up for him in which he could expend his energies and satisfy his curiosity as to the why and how of things.

Ten-year-old Billy was unsocial, nervous, and irritable. He was constantly being urged to respond to the polite overtures of other people, and steadily became more stubborn and more sullen. The child diagnostician found in Billy a naturally shy, reserved, sensitive nature. He was a keen thinker, but was slow to express his thoughts, and no one had sufficiently understood him to draw him out. Consequently he was charged with being stubborn and sullen. Taken out of' his home for a time, and placed in an environment in which practically no demands were made upon him, he gradually began to "find himself," and to respond to the overtures of his instructors.

Out of the last hundred cases entered on the records of the child diagnostician, the shortcomings of ninety-eight could be directly traced to mismanagement and misunderstanding on the part of the parents. For this reason, in the treatment of every case, a frank self-diagnosis by fathers and mothers is as essential as diagnosis of the child himself.

The Professors Tuck Them In

By EDWIN TENNEY BREWSTER

A COLONY of woodchucks has entered Cornell University. They are not, to be sure, quite students. Rather are they teachers, since their mission is to prove to science how they manage their winter sleep. Instead, therefore, of attending classes, they are packed in straw and put out on the campus in the cold, stored in shallow pits underground like so many sacks of potatoes kept over winter. Then, from time to time, some of them are unwrapped, their weights and temperatures noted, and samples taken of their blood. Sometimes, also, they are brought into a warm room and allowed to wake up, to show how they are getting on.

Our "ground-hog," in his unschooled state, sleeps from four to six months, rousing occasionally on warm days, and then dozing off again when the thermometer drops. But his sleep is not at all like the nightly slumber of such creatures as ourselves.

To begin with, his lungs work so imperfectly that the amount of carbon dioxid in the blood rises to nearly twice the waking amount. It is this, apparently, that makes him sluggish and stupid, like a human being in bad air.

In addition, the body temperature, which during waking times holds always close to 98º, as in ourselves and all warm-blooded animals, drops in the hibernating woodchuck to 43º.

A human being, that is to say, suffering from a severe chill, sometimes cools down four or five degrees. If he goes lower, he commonly dies. But the woodchuck is built to cool off more than fifty degrees without harm.

In short, our "little brother to the bear" is two sorts of animal. Six months or more of the year he is warm-blooded, as any fur-clad thing. The rest of the time he is half-and-half cold-blooded, like a fish or a frog.

Such really cold-blooded animals not only stand being ice-cold: they even freeze up solid, so that their bodies can lie broken, like icicles. And yet, they thaw out as lively as ever. The woodchuck can not, of course, do this. But he does cool his blood five sixths on the way down toward freezing, without, it seems, so much as feeling chilly.

The Story of a City Worker Who Went West

I HAD been working indoors for ten years as a clothing cutter in Chicago, and, as my health had become undermined, my physician urged me to seek work out of doors. I had saved about $2000, and, taking a friend's advice, I decided to go to Mission, Texas. After a very interesting trip I finally arrived at my destination. At that time the place was nothing but a vast tract of uncleared land, full of mesquit, cactus, sage-brush, and prickly pear. There was one hotel, one store, and the railroad depot.

I bought ten acres of land one mile from town, paying $125 an acre, one half down and the balance in two payments, and went back North to work another year.

In July, 1910, my brother and I quit our positions in Chicago and started for Mission, to cultivate our ten acres. Traveling south from Forth Worth in the summer months is actually a torture. We found the temperature in the car 104º, and all the way hot sand and alkali dust blew in our eyes and nostrils.

We finally arrived at Mission, and I certainly was surprised at the growth of the town. From a vast tract of uncleared land, with but 200 population, half of which were Mexicans, it had sprung up to a pretty little town of 2000. There were now several stores, a lumber yard, cotton gin, bank, two drug stores, and three hotels. We put up at one of the hotels, and immediately began to get our land in readiness for a crop of pink beans. I had had the land cleared, while I was still up North, at a cost of $12 an acre, thus bringing the original cost of the land up to $137 an acre.

We harrowed the land ourselves. At the same time we began building our house. This cost us exactly $140. We then bought a horse for $115, a wagon for $66, harness for plow and wagon, $23, and various farming implements for $20.

We moved in six weeks from the time we started to build. We were terribly annoyed by the flies at meal-time, as we could not get any screens then for our doors or windows. To this, and to the drinking water, I lay the cause for my sickness of typhoid. We did not have drinking water on our land for ourselves or horse, and we had to hitch up and ride a mile to fill our barrels from a neighbor's well. About ten days after moving into our new house, I suddenly woke up one morning with chills and fever—the beginning of a two months' illness of typhoid. I had to go to Brownsville for medical aid and nursing. In the meantime, my brother was unable to keep up the farm and look after me at the saute time; so he rented our place out to a farmer, who put in our beans, which he bought from us.

I want to say right here that the majority of Northern people who come to farm down South have not the least idea what it actually costs to maintain a good crop. It costs hundreds of dollars to buy fertilizers to help keep up the chemical energies in the soil, in order to produce the most remunerative crops. And, after putting in a crop of cabbages or beans, one may lose every single plant by a frost in one night.

It was these conditions, mainly, also the insufficient supply of water, that caused us to sell out in 1911, taking one acre of land near Venice, California, and part cash in exchange for our ten acres of land in Mission.

We have done so well that we now own five acres, two in oranges, one in walnuts and olives, and the remaining two we devote to poultry and vegetable growing.

Although the start in Mission was a failure, it proved the incentive for continued activities in the same line, with the result that I have finally made good in the kind of work that I love and feel perfectly satisfied and contented in.

Their Pullman Home

YOU have slept in an upper berth, with its superb aloofness, its neatly fixed electric light that won't light, and its somber draperies that get tangled up in the bed-clothes, not to mention the pleasing consciousness you have of your lower neighbor, who won't let you forget that he is sleeping heartily. You know how much you felt like work and bettering our happy civilization next day. Now take a glimmer at what the youngest generation are doing.

Their grandpapas dodged tomahawks on their way to school, but had no conception of the hardships their descendants would cheerfully face. The students, as we are trying to say, of Blackburn College, Carlinville, Illinois, not only do two hours' manual labor each day, but they live in sleeping-cars.

Blackburn College offers a regular college education, board, tuition, room, and everything else necessary for the development of the forty-three centers of the brain, for $100 a year. And the proposition seemed so popular that the college couldn't provide dormitory room. But,

fortunately, at this stage in the development two Pullman cars, discarded by the railroads because they were not strong enough for passenger service, were procured and dragged to the college campus. Then a few practicable essentials were added, foundations of brick, sewage and electric lights and hot water installed, and the earnest student could hope for no additional comforts in this world.

Forty earnest young students (male) moved into one and thirty more earnest students (female) ensconced themselves in the other, which has the advantages of a large observation room. Both cars have two bath-rooms each, and two large drawing-rooms, where the students keep their clothes.

They have certainly enough light and air, and doubtless the Pullman cars are cozy enough; but we should like to know if all the freshmen are put in the upper berths.

The Triflers

Continued from page 9

that was before I knew what love is. That was before you touched me with the magic wand.

Some day happiness will come to you through some other. That is what I tell myself over and over again. She will give you all she has,—all honest women will do that,—but it will not be all I would have given. You may think so, and so be happy; but it will not be true. I shall always know.

I'm getting wild. I must stop. My head is spinning. Soon it will be dawn, and I am to ride again with Peter to-morrow. I told you I would ride every fair day with him, and I am hoping it will rain. But it will not rain. It will be clear, and I shall ride with him, as I promised, and I shall kiss him upon his eyes. But if you were with me—

Here and here and here I throw them out into the dark.

Good night, soul of my soul.

DAY by day Peter's eyes grew stronger, because day by day he was thinking less about himself and more about Marjory. From his own ambitions, hopes, and dreams he turned more and more to hers. Now that he had succeeded in making her a prisoner, however slender the thread by which he held her, he seemed intent upon filling in all the past as fully as possible. Up to a certain point that was easy enough. She was willing to talk of her girlhood; of her father, whom she adored; and even of Aunt Kitty. She was even eager. It afforded her a safe topic in which she found relief. It gave her an opportunity also to justify, in a fashion, or at least to explain both to herself and Peter, the frame of mind that led her up to later events.

"I ran away from you, Peter," she admitted.

"I know," he answered.

"Only it was not so much from you as from what you stood for," she hurried on. "I was thinking of myself alone, and of the present alone. I had been a prisoner so long, I wanted to be free a little."

"Free?" he broke in quickly, with a frown. "I don't like to hear you use that word. That's the way Covington's wife talked, isn't it?"

"Yes," she murmured.

"It's the way so many women are talking to-day—and so many men, too. Freedom is such a big word that a lot of people seem to think it will cloak anything they care to do. They lose sight of the fact that the freer a person is, the more responsibility he assumes. The free are put upon their honor to fulfil the obligations that are exacted by force from the irresponsible. So those who abuse this privilege are doubly treacherous—treacherous to themselves, and treacherous to society, which trusted them."

"I—I didn't mean any harm, Peter," she said.

"Of course you didn't. I don't suppose Mrs. Covington did, either; did she?"

"No, Peter, I'm sure she didn't. She—she was just selfish."

"Besides, if you only come through safe, and learn—"

"At least, I've learned," she answered.

"Since you went away from me?"

"Yes."

"You haven't told me very much about that."

She caught her breath.

"Is—is it dishonest to keep to oneself how one learns?" she asked.

"No, little woman; only, I'd like to feel that there wasn't a nook or cranny in your mind that wasn't open to me."

"Peter!"

"Is that asking too much?"

"Some day you must know, but not now."

"If Mrs. Covington—"

"Must we talk any more about her?" she exclaimed.

"I didn't know it hurt you."

"It does—more than you realize."

"I'm sorry," he said quickly.

He fumbled about for her hand. She allowed him to take it.

"Have you heard from Covington since he left?"

He felt her fingers twitch.

"Does it hurt, too, to talk about him?" he asked.

"It's impossible to talk about Monte without talking about his—his—about Mrs. Covington," Marjory explained feebly.

She withdrew her hand and leaned back on the seat a little away from him. Sensitive to every movement of hers, he glanced up at this.

"Somehow," he said, with a strained expression, "somehow I feel the need of seeing your eyes to-day. There's something I'm missing. There's something here I don't understand."

"Don't try to understand, Peter," she cried. "It's better that you shouldn't."

"It's best always to know the truth," he said.

"Not always."

"Always," he insisted.

"Sometimes it doesn't do any good to know the truth. It only hurts."

"Even then, it's best. When I get my eyes—"

IT was this possibility which from that point on added a new terror to these daily drives. Marjory had told Monte that it was something to which she looked forward; but when she said that she had been sitting alone and pouring out her heart to him. She had not then been facing this fact by the side of Peter. It was one thing to dream boldly, with all her thoughts of Monte, and quite another to confront the same facts actually and alone. The next day she decided she would not kiss his eyes. He came to her in the morning, and stood before her, waiting.

"Peter," she said as gently as she could, "I do not think I shall kiss you again for a little while."

She saw his lips tighten; but, to her surprise, he made no protest.

"No, dear heart," he answered.

"It isn't because I wish to be unkind," she said. "Only, until you know the whole truth, I don't feel honest with you."

"Come over by the window and sit down in the light," he requested.

With a start she glanced nervously at his eyes. They were closed. She took a chair in the sun, and he sat opposite.

FOR a moment they sat so, in silence. With her chin in her hand, she stared out across the blue waters of the Mediterranean, across the quay where Monte used to walk. It looked so desolate out there without him! How many hours since he left she had watched people pass back and forth along the broad path, as if hoping against hope that by some chance he might suddenly appear among them. But he never did, and she knew that she might sit here watching year after year and he would not come.

By this time he was probably in England—probably, on such a day as this, out upon the links. She smiled a little. "Damn golf!" he had said.

She thought for a moment she heard his voice repeating it. It was only Peter's voice.

"You have grown even more beautiful than I thought," Peter was saying.

She sprang to her feet. He was looking at her—shading his opened eyes with one hand.

"Peter!" she cried, falling back a step.

"More beautiful," he repeated. "But your eyes are sadder."

"Peter," she said again, "your eyes are open!"

"Yes," he said. "It became necessary for me to see—so they opened."

Before them, she felt ashamed—almost like one naked. She began to tremble. Then, with her cheeks scarlet, she covered her face with her hands.

To be continued next week