Music Is Not Merely Entertainment: It Is Also Medicine

I LIKE grand opera music, and dislike grand opera.

In the first place, grand opera costs too much.

In the second place, it seems to me a hybrid art. Acting and singing no more belong together—for me—than reading and dancing. The acting of a play or the action of a story carries me along with it. I can surrender myself to the illusion: identify myself with the characters and forget everything in my interest in their affairs.

But it is simply beyond me to feel any illusion concerning a love scene between two supposedly passionate young lovers, when the parts are sung by a burly Italian man and a burly Italian woman, both over forty years old and more than forty stone in weight.

The only way I can enjoy the acting of opera is to close my eyes.

Furthermore, I like to be able to start my opera and stop it when I want to; to smoke if I like, or lie down if I like; and, finally, to be able to leave when I get ready, without feeling that I am losing any money by doing so.

In other words, I like my opera on a machine.

Music is not merely entertainment: it is medicine.

Pythagoras, who lived many hundred years ago, discovered that. He was able to work wonders in cases of violent insanity with no other remedy than soothing music.

Esquirol, the celebrated French alienist, said: "Music acts most powerfully on the physical and moral nature, and I use it constantly in mental disease. It soothes and calms the patient's mind, and, though it may not cure, it is a most precious agent and ought not to be neglected."

Gladstone, attacked by his occasional periods of nervous exhaustion, would have his favorite hymns sung to him.

Herbert Spencer, when neuralgia laid him low, would lie down and order soft music played, and invariably obtained relief.

And I, in my humble fashion, have the same experience.

I like to go home in the evening before dinner, and lie down for half an hour and listen to my favorite music.

If I need stimulation, there are stimulating pieces; if relaxation, there are selections that relax; if sleep, there are songs that carry one over pleasant pastures and lay him down under fragrant apple trees to peaceful slumber.

Music is a mental and spiritual massage, or a bracing cold shower bath, according to what you select. I personally do not care to take my spiritual massage in the Metropolitan Opera House, any more than I would care to have my hair cut in Madison Square Garden.

Every child should grow up in a home where music is constantly played. Every experience of a happy youth should have some particular song bound up with it, so that the playing of that song in after life will re-awaken that experience and cause it to be lived again.

I can never hear Handel's "Largo" without living over one of the quiet Sundays of my boyhood, because it was played in our house almost every Sunday.

"Sweet Alice, Ben Bolt," brings back a memory to me that is peculiarly intimate and peculiarly sweet. There are a hundred favorites—each calling its own particular bit of grand opera back into my memory—a fragment of the opera of my own life.

Do not deny your child the blessed ministry of music. It is one of the rarest gifts of God.

Sweeten his soul with it. Perhaps you may even be able to teach him to love opera. If not, you can at least teach him to love music in his own home.

And he will be in good company. That is the way the prophet Elisha liked his music. Of him it is written that, when driven to utter weariness by the perplexities of his business, he would cry:

"But now bring me a minstrel.

"And it came to pass, when the minstrel played, that the hand of the Lord came upon him."

Bruce Barton, Editor.

Time—and the Wind-Up

By MARY SYNON

Illustrations by Lucius W. Hitchcock

THERE is a place, even outside heaven, where down-and-outers return. Not in the flowing white robes of regeneration, but in the festive raiment of older and gayer years, redolent of memories and of moth-balls, men and women who were left at the post in bygone runnings come back to the grand-stands of the race meets. Out of the God-knows-where country of oblivion they slip in once in a while to haunts that knew them in the days of their glory.

Sometimes, if the years of their absence be too many, they saunter through the paddock in solitary loneliness, specters of the past, traditional and aloof as days of Maud S. and the Picket; but there are other times when they flash on the scene with the flare of famous comets, blazing for a moment in the firmament of their universe. That was the way Sally Gates came to Hawthorne.

Brilliant in a cerise gown of a seven years gone vintage, with her over-trimmed, tawdry hat tilted at an angle of a past season's fashion, with carmined cheeks and flaunting steps, she strode down an aisle of the stand on the Saturday after the Derby had put back Hawthorne on a map from which a reform wave had once removed it. Indifferent to the glances from the nondescript crowd, scornful of the swift recognition of women in the boxes, defiant of the quick whisper that followed her passing of the press tables, she clove her way past the hand and down into the old betting ring.

As well as if she heard the comments, Sally Gates knew the trail of gossip that surged in her wake, recollections of the Washington Park days when she had been Sally Wells of the extravaganzas, Sally of the lilting songs, Sally of the splendid gowns and the many jewels, Sally of the traps and drags, Sally of the smiles, with a retinue of admirers as long as a thoroughbred's pedigree. All too surely, as she ran the gauntlet, she sensed the whirl of reminiscence that rose in the lee of her passing—remembrances of her elopement with Joe Gates on the night after he had fought Young Wickam and won the middle-weight championship title, remembrances of their daring escapades, of their reckless exploits, of their mad gamblings, of their rows and reconciliations, and of the ultimate crash that tore them asunder and made Violet King the second Mrs. Gates.

SHE knew that men were asking one another what had become of Joe Gates. She knew that women whom she had entertained at Joe's far-famed parties were questioning what her life had been in the years since they had eaten of her salt. She knew that her very appearance was a question-mark against the blazing glare of the July sunshine. But, with the old instinct for the up-stage center, Sally Gates, none the less flamboyant for her fashionless isolation, faced the paddock crowd.

Her eyes, ringed by circles of weariness and worry, stared out over groups of men whose tense inaction hinted of stakes outside the law. An old sense of observation, long dormant in her brain, awoke to reveal to her that, for all the Illinois statutes, betting was going on. Her gaze, focusing upon a quartet of men near the rail, lighted as she recognized among them a man taller, keener of eye than his companions—Pat Mangan of the Williams books.

To him, through a crowd that parted before the urgency of her speed, Sally Gates went.

For an instant she had to meet his straight look. Then his eyes softened and he held out his hand.

"You're good luck, Sally," he said, with a smile that blurred the sharpness from his ferrety face.

Under its sudden friendliness Sally Gates gulped down an emotion that the mere sight of the old game had not aroused in her. She mumbled a word of thanks, and, conscious of the scrutiny of the other men, drew Mangan aside.

"Will you do something for me?" she asked him.

"Go ahead," he bade her.

"I've got to bet, Pat." Her hands tightened on her shabby purse. "I've got to win a stake right away quick. I know you're all playing out here, but I don't know the ropes, and I've a tip, a good tip, on the Merchant's. I want to put up forty on Lenox."

"Why Lenox?"

"He's going to win—and I must win to-day. Do you suppose I'd come here, in front of all the old crowd, in these rags, if I didn't need the money?"

"I'll be glad to lend you—"

"I don't want loans. I never borrowed, did I? I can take care of myself most of the time; but I must have a bunch of money to-night."

"What have you been doing, Sally? I've looked for you every meet, all the way from Sheepshead to Oakland. Somebody told me you'd gone to England after Joe lost the Baker City mill."

"England?" She laughed—not as Sally Wells had been wont to laugh, but with a strangled, twisted sound that voiced long bitterness. "I had a fat chance. Somebody must have thought I'd been salting my alimony while Joe was holding the championship. Do you know what I've been doing, Pat?" She held up her hands till he saw how gnarled and coarsened they were. "Not like the hands that wore Joe's diamonds, are they? I've washed and ironed and scrubbed with those hands since I met you last. I'm keeping a

rooming-house over on Dearborn Avenue for my living."

"I can't take your money," Mangan said. "I'll take money from the sports and the suckers and the wise guys; but I won't take it from women who have to work like that to earn it."

"You've got to!" Her voice rang in desperation. "I can't put it up myself. I don't know the new boys, and they don't know me. And I must win!"

"But, Sally—"

"Wouldn't you do it for Joe?"

"You know that—"

"You're doing it for Joe if you do it for me. Listen to me, Pat. You know Joe's ways. You knew him when he came here from Indiana, a raw little country kid, with his big eyes and his funny smile, and his rumpled hair. Do you remember the night when Big Jack Freeman brought him to the party at the Richelieu, and he paid the bill with his last cent because I was there? That was Joe all the time. Nobody else could pay for anything while he had a cent. And you know that Violet King never helped any man to save."

"He shouldn't have married her, Sally. You shouldn't have let him go."

"Don't you suppose I know that? I was a fool—a silly, mad, crazy fool to fling him over just because he happened to look twice at her. I threw him at her, and I know it. It serves me right. But that don't help anything."

"I met him at Saratoga five years ago."

"Were you talking to him?"

"Sure. He was talking about you."

"What'd he say?"

"Nothing much. He was saying that he'd lost the fight with Kinnaire because he hadn't trained, and he said that he'd have had to train if you'd been running the show."

"Did he say that?" Her eyes moistened. "He's had an awful time, Pat. She never knew how to take care of him, even when he had money. And, now that he's broke, and sick, how do you suppose that yellow-haired, white-faced doll baby can look after him?"

"Where is he, Sally?"

"He's been out in Arizona for three years."

"Sick?"

She looked around at the groups in the

---

ring, then brought back her stare to Pat Mangan.

"You know as well as I do, Pat," she said slowly, "that there never was one of the boys who thought of the rainy day. Joe never saved any money. He didn't know how to save, and I never taught him, any more'n she's taught him. Do you remember the fight in Virginia three years ago? Well, Joe smashed that night. They told him that he had one chance—Arizona. She wrote me after every one else turned them down cold. I sent her the money to take them there, and I've been sending them the money to keep him out there in the sunshine. But, he's coming back to-night. They've called time on him, and he's coming back to—to die. There's no hope. The doctors gave him two weeks, and he asked them to send him back East. He'll be in to-night at eight.

"I sent her—that viper who took him from me—the money to bring him. It's all I had then, but I've got this now, and I'm going to double it twice, so that I'll have enough to keep them with me. That's all I want—just the wind-up. But I must have that, and I must have him! I'll hire somebody to take care of the house, so's I can be with him all the time. It's such a little while, Pat, and you know I've never had any one else. Ain't you going to be my friend—for the sake of the old times?"

"Sure." His keen eyes shifted away from her face, overflushed beneath the rouge, and stealthily viewed the ring. "Give me your program," he told her. "I'll set it down." But, with his pencil over the name of her choice, he hesitated. "What makes you thimk Lenox is a straight tip?"

"Ellis told me. I met him on the train."

Mangan's eyebrows lifted. "He ought to know," he said shortly. "He owns the dark horse in the Merchant's. Nose, back, or tail?"

"Nose. He's a sure thing, Pat."

"Maybe," said Pat Mangan.

The doubt in his tone struck her for an instant, but under cover of her purse she slipped her money into his hand.

"Here goes for luck," she tried to laugh, but the laugh quavered perilously near to a sob.

THERE was a sagging in the shoulders of the cerise gown as she went up the stairs to the grand-stand seats. For there had come to her the poignant memory of the last time she had wagered with Pat, the May-time afternoon at Churchill Downs when Joe, victorious from his New Orleans encounter with O'Malley, had played like a boy out of school. The thought of Joe Gates as the vivid, eager, restless champion of that time—the man whom she had loved in spite of all his faults, perhaps because of some of them—blotted out the newer picture of him that she had been striving to draw from her knowledge of his weakness and his weariness. The memory filmed Sally's eyes with hot tears of sorrow. Lest any one might glimpse her emotion, she slipped into the nearest seat to the stairway and gazed outward over the track.

Like an ochre ribbon it girdled the green, an oval of promise that set her heart beating faster and dried her brimming tears as she stared upon its smooth surface. Dimly she grew aware of the thrill of excitement that permeated the crowd. Bit by bit she began to pick out the familiar spots and the familiar faces. Motor-cars purred now where gay equipages had been wont to stand; but, scattered among boxes and rows of chairs, remembered figures arose.

There was Williston of the Oakdale stables, and Courtney of the Belcourt. Panama Peggy, resplendent in white and yellow silk, with a leghorn hat that concealed her years, was sauntering across the track with Fenimore, who had once been Joe's mamager. Letty Frankau, married now to Bragdon, and hardened into a curious caricature of her one-time beauty, scanned the stand with upraised lorgnette. Around Big Lester Kelso of the Benedict stud and Frank Wakely of Saratoga stood a group of women, with Doris Elton among them.

Every one of them brought back to Sally Gates some memory of happier days, some thought of the time when she and Joe had led the riotous crowd of youthful dare-devils. Her very nearness to them, beyond the gulf of failure and poverty that she might not bridge, emphasized her misery and kept her oblivious of the races before the Merchant's.

The raucous cry of a vender of ginger pop, pausing in front of her, roused her from her memories. She looked up to deny his plea, then laughed sharply.

"Well, of all things!" she gave him greeting. "If it ain't Kennedy!"

The vender touched his cap with a gesture that suggested the touch of a whip against a tall hat.

"I thought it was you, Mis' Gates," he said. "It's fifteen years since I used to drive you out to Washington Park, but I ain't forgot you. I told Mis' Durgan I thought it was you. She's coming."

FROM one of the upper rows a stout woman waddled down toward them. At her coming the ginger-pop vender departed with another lifting of his forefinger to his cap-brim.

The stout woman, panting a little from her haste, held out her hands to Sally, and kissed her on both cheeks before she spoke. Her worldly-wise eyes appraised Sally swiftly, then smiled with a flash of something like fun.

"You must have come out of the attic closet," she said.

For a moment Sally could not speak.

Then, "May Durgan," she said, and patted the stout woman's bejeweled hand as if to assure herself of the reality.

She moved over to give the other place, staring at her the while as if she feared her disappearance should she let her go from sight. The stout woman gave her a one-sided grin.

"How's the luck, Sally?" she asked, with an odd inflection of kindliness.

"Rotten," said Sally.

"That's what I was afraid of when I didn't see you anywhere," May Durgan said. "Why didn't you look me up? John's done pretty well, you know, and I don't forget my old friends."

"I wasn't hungry, May."

"Food ain't all we get hungry for, dearie."

"You bet it ain't!"

"Married again, Sally?"

"No."

"You and me are one-man women, I guess."

"I guess so. John all right?"

"Gets sick whenever there's racing at Hot Springs. Fit as a fiddle other times. How's Joe, Sally?"

"Sick."

"So I heard. Is she with him yet?"

"Yes.

"I never thought she'd stick."

"What else could she do? She ain't even a good waitress."

"That's so." The womam's middle-aged eyes glinted with swift curiosity. "Who's putting up for them?"

"I've been."

"I thought so. You were always that kind of a fool. What's going to be the last act, Sally?"

"Whatever it is, it's coming quick. They'll be in Chicago to-night."

"You don't tell me! Where'll they stay? With you?"

"Where else?"

OVER at the post, for the six-furlong start, the ribbon fell for the first race. But Sally Gates paid no heed to the drop nor to the dash of the horses. For May Durgan, out of the store of the wisdom for which she had given youth and comelimess and happiness, was saying:

"I guess there's a God in Israel, Sally, when you're given a chance like this. It's sure comimg to you. Many's the time I've said to John, 'If Joe Gates don't come back to Sally before he dies, I'll not believe in justice.' For he always cared for you, Sally. Violet King just caught him when he was mad and sore and hurt at you. She was always a cheap little cat. I never saw how you could stand having her around. The rest of us knew she was trying to come between you; but she was always telling you her poor yarns, and you were always believing the little liar. Ugh! When I think of her, I feel as if I was rubbing satin the wrong way." May Durgan shivered dramatically: "And so they're coming back to you?"

"To-night."

"Well, advice never did you much good. Do you remember the day I told you not to get a divorce because you'd just be playing Joe into her hands? But I'm going to give you some more, whether or not you'll take it. The game's in your hands, Sally. Even if a man marries half a dozen women, there's something in his heart that belongs to the first one. Don't I know? There's a dead womam out in Calvary who's stood between me and John for nearly twenty years. And that old feeling's somewhere down in Joe, waiting for you. Win it back, Sally. Even if it can't be for long,—even if it ain't for more than it day, for an hour,—get it back, if you want to be happy at all for the rest of your life. For if he goes from you without your being sure that he's really and truly yours in spite of everything, you ain't going to have even a memory you'll want to cherish. Take it from me, it's true!"

"I know it is, May." Her hand closed over May Dorgan's. "That's why I'm bringing him."

"How're you fixed, dearie?"

"Oh, I'm all right."

She strove to make her tone gay, but the query flung her back into the nervous tension that May Durgan's coming had relaxed. Even as May talked on, ladling out advice with the exactness of a chef dispensing soups, Sally gripped her program with a fierceness of fear lest her wagering betray her trust in it. Through the intermissions and the second and third races she gave back brief monosyllables to her companion's comments; but just before the Merchant's she interrupted the other woman.

"You don't thimk there's any chance they'll scratch Lenox, do you?" she asked her.

"Oh, no," said May Durgan. "You ain't betting on him, though?" Her tone grew anxious.

"Why not?"

"Sir John's due to win. Kane's riding."

"Not a chance, May. I've a tip on Lenox."

"Who told you?"

"Ellis."

"He's entered Burnaby, hasm't he?"

"Yes; but he told me Lenox to win, amd Wickiup for place."

"Well—"

"It's a sure thing."

BUT, in spite of her assurances, she grew cold with fear as the moments sped toward the hour set for the Merchant's on the white clock beside the track. What if Lenox should be scratched? What if Ellis had not been sure?

A great sigh of relief rushed from her as she saw Lenox's mame go on the board between Sir John's amd Wickiup's. Burnaby's came last. She felt an impulse to wring May Durgan's neck when she heard her yell for Kane and Sir John. "Lenox, Lenox!" she found herself shouting, as the bunch of thoroughbreds ambled out to the ribbon for the start.

With a quiver of overdrawn tension the crowd came to its feet. Sally, moving past May Durgan and out into the aisle for better vision, glimpsed the grouping of the four horses, picking Lenox by Tenner's black and green. "Kane wears the blue," she heard May Durgan say. "That's Wickiup's boy in the orange," a man near them cried.

She studied the three racers frowningly, discounting Burnaby, with his jockey gay in the cherry and white of the Cedarwood stables, because of Ellis's tip. On Lenox of the chestnut hue, Lenox of the high-arched neck, Lenox of the glossy beauty, Sally Gates set her gaze as she had wagered her hopes.

They made the start at the post back of the judges' stand with a clean dash that took the four abreast and kept them there almost to the turn. Then, inch by inch, the black and green of Tenner's coat went forward. "Lenox!" cried the crowd; but in Sally's throat a tightening muscle silenced her. Her hands clutched at her purse until her knuckles stood out white against the redness of the skin. Her eyes, straining over the field, grew dark as the blue of Sir John's rider crept up on the darker colors of Lenox's boy. At the quarter-mile they were abreast.

"Sir John—oh, Sir John!" May Durgan gasped.

"For God's sake, shut up!" Sally snapped at her.

Over beyond the green swept the horses, so close together that no one on the stand might distinguish the leader until the turn suddenly disclosed Lenox near the fence, with Sir John and Wickiup crowding beside him. Outside them a bay horse, with a rider in cherry and white, took a swift spurt that turned the screws on the breathless waiting of the watchers.

"Burnaby!" some one on the stand shouted. "Come on, Burnaby!"

"Oh, no, no, no!" Sally moaned. Her lips moved voicelessly as the cherry and white spurred up toward the blue amd orange, toward the green and black. A long-forgotten phrase of Joe's about Ellis—"He'd steer his own mother crooked"—came to her, dragging with it a gnawing fear of the treachery of the man's advice. Under its presence her need of success became a whip that beat upon her brain. Sharpened by May Durgan's words, by all the old recollections of Joe Gates, her desire for the man who had been her own through the days of her youth became a physical pain. "I must win," her spirit groaned. "I must win for Joe." From some long-locked closet of her heart she lifted a prayer: "Oh, God, let me win, and I'll be good!"

DOWN the last stretch came the riders, the blue just ahead of the black and green, the orange of Wickiup abreast Tenner, and a little away from them, and just before them, the cherry and white of Burnaby. Confused cries smote Sally's ears. A roar of anger, sweeping over the crowd, caught her on its crest, only to leave her stranded on a coast of fear. Blank terror rose like a wall before her vision as the riders went by. Blindly she strove to see the finish, sighting nothing but straining backs and flying heels. But she heard the cry of the crowd, "Burnaby!" and went down under it, not knowing or caring that she sobbed like a child.

"Sally!" May Durgan's sharp call brought her back to realization. "How much did you lose?"

"Oh, not so very much," she lied bravely, intuition and experience informing her that May Dorgan would insist upon trying to lend her money unless she forced her to believe she didn't need it. "I'm all right now."

She braced herself to meet May's insistent questions, holding up beneath the trying good-bys the stout woman forced upon her. But her carmined face was drawn with the pain of despair as she went down the steps, stumbling through the betting-ring toward the train-shed. Once she thought that she heard some one say her name; but she hastened from possible speech with any one who knew her.

Underneath the sign that proclaimed the evening's dance she saw Ellis, gloating in his victory and the six-to-one odds he had manoeuvered for Burnaby. An impulse to confront him with his treachery, to berate him for his forgetfulness of Joe Gates's kindnesses to him, halted Sally's steps; but even as she paused, her judgmemt told her the folly and futility of her accusation. A hand came down on her shoulder, and she turned in furtive fright, to meet Pat Mangan's smile.

"Well," he said, "don't you want your money?"

"What's the use of rubbing it in?" she demanded of him. "I've lost, and I can take my medicine. Losing's nothing new to me."

"Who said you lost?" He reached out for her program, shoving it down into his pocket. "Didn't you see Burnaby win?"

---

"Didn't I give you the forty? I don't owe you any more, do I?"

"No; we owe you. You see, I know a little bit more about this game than you do, and when you told me that Ellis said to play Lenox, I figured Burnaby to win, and I played your forty on him in the Varley books. Here's your roll."

He handed her a roll sandwich of the sort the venders had been peddling, but with greenbacks substituted for its original frankfurter. The sight of the money stuffed within the cover designed to disguise the transaction from official vigilance, and the realization that chance had brought her a consummation of her desire, swept Sally Gates into hysterical laughter. With the roll grasped in her trembling hands, she stood shaken by a mirth that was sorrow's sister. Then, just as swiftly, she began to cry.

"I can't take it, Pat," she said. "You're just giving me this. I didn't win it."

Pat Mangan looked her squarely in the eyes.

"You won it," he told her.

"Honest to God, Pat?"

"Honest to God, Sally."

For a moment she stared back into his keen blue eyes, then took the greenbacks from the sandwich and dropped them into her purse.

"Some day," she said, "when people forget what I am now and remember what I used to be, you can tell the pikers that you're the only man besides Joe that Sally Gates ever kissed."

She lifted her lips to him with a pride that flashed her old daring.

Pat Mangan, with the knowledge that a thousand men were watching, swung off his straw hat and took her kiss as he might have taken a grateful child's salute. There surged about them the laughter of a misunderstanding mob; but

through it Pat Mangan stood, with a glint in his eyes that raised barriers against question, while Sally Gates went through the turnstile to the waiting train.

ALL the way back to the city, as the train crawled alongside the winding canals, Sally Gates built her air castles out of the substance of the green bills. Over and over she counted the cost of luxuries that Joe would need. Laboriously, with a stubby pencil, upon the back of the envelop that had brought her Violet's message, she listed the delicacies that had once been Joe's delight. Mushrooms and cantaloupes, chicken and porterhouse steak, artichokes and Edam cheese rioted through her fancy. "And a little champagne," she decided. She put aside her recollections for the urgency of the present, rejoicing in her ability to be able to provide for Joe through the brief time fate was allotting to her.

"Two weeks," she kept saying—"only two weeks. But I married him two weeks after I met him."

In a glow of hope as roseate as the sky before sunrise, she set out on her mission of making ready for Joe Gates' return. With the recklessness of a winner in war-brides, she ordered from a Michigan Avenue commissary gourmand's delights that forced her to summon a cab to bear her and her purchases to the shabby North Side rooming-house.

Once in the house, she went through the rooms in a flutter of excitement, dusting here and there, shifting linens, bringing out a few treasured bits of silver, telephoning an employment agency for a cook and a housemaid, dragging every presentable piece of furniture in the place to the suite she had chosen for Joe. For Violet she had set aside a room on an upper floor.

"She's got to do as I say," she muttered, as she reviewed the contingency of rebellion in the yellow-haired woman. "She ain't got any money. I'm paying the bills."

Downstairs she let Saunders, the derelict lodger of her constant dunning, go by without question, although his very assumption of jauntiness told her of his persistent penury. She knocked at the door of Mrs. Willetts' room to leave a sun-kissed peach for the child whose mother dragged her through the precarious listlessness of a furnished-room existence.

"That's for Jenny," she said. "She's a pretty good little kid."

"You've never had any children, have you?" lackadaisical Mrs. Willetts inquired.

"No, thank God," Sally started to say; but a new-born thought stopped her usual answer. What if she had a child with Joe's eyes and Joe's smile and Joe's rumpled hair? Might not the dragging years have held some food for her hungering heart? "No," she told herself; "not even a kid like Joe would fill the bill. It's Joe for me, and nobody else."

SHE went upstairs again to her own room, a hot, bare space under the roof, lightened only by a silver-framed photograph and a singing canary. The bird was warbling trillingly as Sally opened the door.

"I'm not so bad at that myself," she said, and began to sing the scale in a competition almost gay. The canary fell into silence, but Sally went into song.

"Baby dear, listen here,
I'm afraid to go home in the dark,"
she sang.

She turned the photograph toward the waning light from the window. It was a picture of Joe, taken just before he had fought O'Malley, and the one token of the past to which Sally Gates had held. She studied it now consideringly, asking herself if her love for Joe could have been but a shadow of her vanity in his power. But something within her cried out against the treason, telling her over and over again that the old bond between Joe and herself had been something deeper and surer than the circumstance of health or strength or prosperity or pride.

THE knowledge that the man whom she had loved for his power and his glory was now a weak, helpless, almost forgotten shell of what he had been, endeared him to her as no other circumstance of life could have done. Gazing upon the man of blither times, Sally Gates came to know herself as she had not done when he had been with her; but with realization came dread lest he might have found in the other woman, through those days and nights in the Western desert, all that he sought from womankind.

"You can't care for her that way," she told the man of the picture. "It wouldn't be square." But she set down the frame tremblingly.

With a last jerk at her tawdry hat, she went out of the house, hastening to the railway station, only to find herself twenty minutes early. In an agony of doubt and dread, radiated sometimes by streaks of hopefulness, she paced the platform until the roar of the engine of the east-bound overland thundered into the train-shed, and left her shaken with terror.

"Get together," she urged herself. "You're like a fighter who's afraid of the fight."

As if to steady herself by a concrete realization, she clutched her purse frantically as the train slowed to a standstill. There, on the platform's edge, a forlorn, flaunting figure out of the yesterdays, she waited while the tide of incoming passengers went by. The tide thinned at last to a trickling stream, and Sally Gates was giving up hope that the two for whom she waited were to come, when she sensed, rather than sighted, a little commotion down at the last car. Toward it, driven by instinct, she hastened.

From the car platform the conductor and the brakeman were lifting a stretcher. Beneath its blanket lay something slight and still. Sally Gates, seeing the covered form, felt within her the surge of a mighty yearning, the tidal wave of a mothering desire to take in her arms the man who lay so quiet, so utterly helpless. Not with the fire of her old love, with all its flaring passions and thrilling glories, but with the bursting ache of a new love that transcended the other in its power and its strength,—a love that had in it nothing of self, but only an immolating splendor of sacrifice,—she waited breathlessly for sight of the man whose image she had cherished through anger and neglect and the knowledge that he had set another woman in her place. But, even as she waited, she saw Violet Gates.

YELLOW-haired, her white face haggard beneath a heavily plumed purple hat, she was watching Sally with a fearful, tremulous glance that quivered with a hatred she could not conceal. With slow scorn Sally gave back her stare, flinging into her gaze all the cumulative contempt that time had taught her to feel toward the shallow, treacherous, petty-souled creature who had stolen from her that thing in life she had most desired.

Under the searing iron of that look, Violet Gates faltered until the woman she had wronged felt rising within her the swift knowledge that her rival had failed. Within her shifting eyes Sally Gates read the truth the yellow-haired woman strove to conceal—the knowledge that, whatever else Violet Gates had won from life, she had not found what she sought.

The yellow-haired woman seemed to draw herself up with an actual physical effort as she spoke:

"I've got to talk to you before we take him anywhere."

The trainmen were bearing the stretcher toward the gates. Sally fell in after them, driven by desire to keep as near as she

---

might to that motionless form. The yellow-haired woman fell into step beside her. She minced along with nervous steps, watching Sally furtively. Suddenly she broke out.

"It's all up to you," she said. "I've been telling him that it was what you said, not what he wanted. But he's been saying you'd do what he asked you. I'll have to tell you quick, for the other train goes in fifteen minutes. Joe wants to go home to his mother, down in Indiana. Are you going to let him go?"

SALLY stared at her stupidly. "To his mother?"

"Yes, to his mother. You don't think I want to go there, do you? I've had trouble enough without wishing myself on the old lady. Maybe you know the psalm-singing stuff we'll have? I don't want it, I tell you! But he's talked about nothing else for weeks. He's crazy for the green fields and the trees and the sky."

"Well?

"It's up to you, ain't it? We've no money. If you want to keep us here, you can do it."

"It's a trick," Sally said. She glared at Violet Gates with an anger that sent a shiver over the yellow-haired woman. "You know that his mother will let you go there, because you're his legal wife now, and I'm not. And you've got him wanting to go, so that you can be with him without me. You always were tricky, Violet. That's how you got Joe. And now you're afraid to let him be with me. You know that, away down deep, he cares for me yet more than he ever cared for you. You know that, and you're trying to keep us apart."

"It's no trick," said the other woman dully. "What would it matter now? He ain't got long. What difference would it make?"

"What difference?" She towered over Violet. "What difference? You little fool, don't you know the difference? Don't you know that—"

She clenched her hands in a rage that drove Violet Gates to speech.

"Maybe you think I had a good time down there in the desert?" she demanded. "It was hell—plain hell. But I stuck, because I knew that if I didn't you'd publish it all over the country that I was a quitter. That's why I stayed. And now do you suppose I want to go down to a dead town in Indiana, with an old woman who'll tell me what a devil I am? I should say not! But he's wild to go. Ask him yourself, if you don't believe me!"

She paused before the stretcher that the trainmen had set down on a truck beside the gates. There she stood, insolently indifferent, as Sally came beside the place where Joe Gates lay. But she turned away as Sally Gates reached over and pulled down the blankets.

For the cry that Sally had striven to hold back when she had seen the stretcher borne along, the cry of her love and her fidelity, of her hope and her fear, of her sorrow and of her yearning, came from her lips at last. All the old love and the new fused into white flame as Joe Gates, the one man whom she had loved through her stormy life, opened his eyes and smiled at her with a flicker of the old fondness lighting his ghastly face. Forgetful of the place, of time and change, of the yellow-haired woman, she bent over him.

"Oh, Joe!" was all she said; but into his name she put all the tenderness of forgiving womankind.

From the pillow that was no whiter than his face he smiled up at her.

"I'm glad to see you, Sally," he said weakly. His eyes traveled over her bright raiment. "Some clothes!" he murmured. "You always looked all right." He lifted his hand from beneath the covers and reached for hers. "How's the world treating you?"

"Fine," she said chokingly.

"You've been good to me, Sally," he went on, "and you hadn't much reason to be. I'd have gone under, but for you."

"It wasn't anything."

"And I've wanted to see you. We're going down to mother's. Violet didn't want to go, but I must go there. Mother's been waiting for me to come home."

OVER the head of the dying man the two women faced each other. For an instant of time that throbbed into an eon, Sally Gates strove to read the shallow soul of the yellow-haired woman, seeking to discover whether Violet were tricking her out of her desire. Then her eyes fell upon Joe's drawn face.

"You know I always meant to go back to mother some day, Sally," he said.

With the tower of her hopes toppled in ruin, Sally Gates spoke to Joe's wife.

"You go down and buy the tickets," she said, thrusting upon her all that was left of the money she had won from Pat Mangan. "It's for him," she said fiercely.

As the yellow-haired woman went beyond their vision, Joe Gates spoke again:

"We had a pretty good time while it lasted, didn't we, Sally?"

"Yes," she said.

"We might have made it last longer."

"Perhaps."

He watched her wistfully, as if he tried to gather strength to say something that eluded his power.

"I've always had a hunch," he said slowly, "that sometime you and I were going to get together again. Somehow, Violet doesn't count. You've been my only real girl, Sally. I used to think, out there on the desert, of the time when we'd patch it all up, and be happy in the way we used to be. But they've rung the gong on me. Sally, do you believe in an afterwards?"

"I don't know, Joe."

"I wonder." His eyes, luminous in the nearness of death, considered her. "That's why I'm going home," he said. "I want to get back to the faith I had when I was a kid down there. I want to go out believing that there'll be a come-back some day, that there's a place where we can't make all these fool passes. Don't you understand, Sally? I want to go down in the wind-up knowing that I'll be waiting for you—somewhere. Can't you know it, too?"

"Oh, Joe, Joe!" she sobbed.

But her eyes made promise that through time and eternity her spirit would wing its way to his. With her hand in his, he sank back on his pillow, closing his eyes as if to bar all other vision. The yellow-haired woman, coming back, found them silent.

They said no good-bys. But, as the train slid out from the terminal toward the moonlit fields of Indiana, Sally Gates, alone on the platform, looked after it with the gaze of those who descry, beyond the ropes of earthly limitations, that hope of eternity's reward with which they will live and die.

Then, with the step of a conqueror, she faced the city's night.

The Triflers

By FREDERICK ORIN BARTLETT

Illustration by George E. Wolfe

PETER rose and helped Marjory back to a chair as if she, in her turn, had suddenly become blind.

"If I frighten you like this I—I must not look at you," he faltered.

Still she trembled; still she covered her face.

"See!" he cried. "I have closed them again."

She looked up in amazement. He was standing with his eyes tight shut. He who had been in darkness all these long months had dared, to save her from her own shame, to return again to the pit. For a second it stopped her heart from beating. Then, springing to his side, she seized his hands.

"Peter," she commanded, "open your eyes!"

He was pale—ghastly pale.

"Not if it hurts you."

Swiftly leaning toward him, she kissed the closed lids.

"Will you open them—now?"

She was in terror lest he should find it impossible again—as if that had been some temporary miracle which, having been scorned, would not be repeated.

Then once again she saw his eyes flutter open. This time she faced them with her fists clenched by her side. What a difference those eyes made in him. Closed, he was like a helpless child; open, he was a man. He grew taller, bigger, older, while she who had been leading him about shrank into insignificance. She felt pettier, plainer, less worthy than ever she had in her life. By sheer force of will power she held up her head and faced him as if she were facing the sun.

FOR a moment his eyes feasted upon her. To see her hair, when for months he had been forced to content himself with memories of it; to see her white forehead, her big, deep eyes and straight nose; to see the lips which he had only felt—all that held him silent.

But he saw something else there, too. Something had been added. Before she had the features of a girl; now she had the features of a woman. Something had since been added to the eyes and mouth

—something he knew nothing about.

"Marjory," he said slowly, "I think there is a great deal you have left untold."

She tightened her lips. There was no further use of evasion. If he pressed her with his eyes open, he must know the truth.

"Yes, Peter," she answered.

"I can't decide," he went on slowly, "whether it has to do with a great grief or a great joy."

"The two so often come together," she trembled.

"Yes," he nodded; "I think that is true. Perhaps they belong together."

"I have only just learned that," she said.

"And you've been left with the grief?"

"I can't tell, Peter. Sometimes I think so, and then again I see the justice of it, and it seems beautiful. All I'm sure of is that I'm left alone."

"Even with me?"

"Even with you, Peter."

HE passed his hand over his eyes. "This other—do I know him?" he asked finally.

"Yes."

"It—it is Covington?"

"Yes."

She spoke almost mechanically.

"I—I should have guessed it before. Had I been able to see, I should have known."

"That is why I didn't wish you to see me—so soon," Marjory said.

"Covington!" he repeated. "But what of the other woman?"

She took a long breath.

"I—I'm the other woman," she answered.

"Marjory!" he cried. "Not she you told me of?"

"Yes."

"His wife!"

"No—not that. Merely Mrs. Covington."

"I don't understand. You don't mean you're not his wife!" He checked himself abruptly.

"We were married in Paris," she hastened to explain. "But—but we agreed the marriage was to be only a form. He was to come down here with me as a companion de voyage. He wished only to give me the protection of his name, and that—that was all I wished. It was not until I met you, Peter, that I realized what I had done."

"It was not until then you realized you really loved him?"

"Not until then," she moaned.

"But, knowing that, you allowed me to talk as I did; to hope—"

"Peter—dear Peter!" she broke in. "It was not then. It was only after I knew he had gone out of my life forever that I allowed that. You see, he has gone. He has gone to England, and from there he is going home. You know what he is going for. He is never coming back. So it is as if he died, isn't it? I allowed you to talk because I knew you were telling the truth. And I did not promise much. When you asked me never to go from you, all I said was that I'd try. You remember that? And I have tried, and I was going to keep on trying—ever so hard. I had ruined my own life and his life, and—and I didn't want to hurt you any more. I wanted to do what I could to undo some of the harm I'd already done. I thought that perhaps if we went on like this long enough I might forget a little of the past and look forward only to the future. Some day I meant to tell you. You know that, Peter. You know I wouldn't be dishonest with you."

She was talking hysterically, anxious only to relieve the tenseness of his lips. She was not sure that he heard her. He was looking at her with a curious detachment.

"Peter—say something!" she begged.

"It's extraordinary that I should ever have dared hope you were for me," he said.

"You mean you—you don't want me, Peter?"

"Want you?" he cried hoarsely. "I'd go through hell to get you. I'd stay mole-blind the rest of my life to get you! Want you?"

He stepped toward her with his hands outstretched as if to seize her. In spite of herself, she shrank away.

"You see," he ran on. "What difference does it make if I want you? You belong to Covington. You haven't anything to do with yourself any more. You haven't yourself to give. You're his."

WITH her hand above her eyes as if to ward off his blows, she gasped:

"You mustn't say such things, Peter."

"I'm only telling the truth, and there's no harm in that. I'm telling you what you haven't dared tell yourself."

"Things I mustn't tell myself!" she cried. "Things I mustn't hear."

"What I don't understand," he said, "is why Covington didn't tell you all this. He must have known."

"He knew nothing," she broke in. "I was a mere incident in his life. We met in Paris quite by accident when he happened to have an idle week. He was alone and I was alone, and he saved me from a disagreeable situation. Then, because he still had nothing in particular to do and I had nothing in particular to do, he suggested this further arrangement. We were each considering nothing but our own comfort. We wanted nothing more. It was to escape just such complications as this to escape responsibility, as I told you that we—we married. He was only a boy, Peter, and knew no better. But I was a woman, and should have known. And I came to know! That was my punishment."

"He came to know, too," said Peter.

"He might have come to know," she corrected breathlessly. "There were moments when I dared think so. If I had kept myself true—oh, Peter, these are terrible things to say!"

She buried her face in her hands again—a picture of total and abject misery.

---

Peter placed his hand gently upon her shoulder.

"There, little woman," he tried to comfort. "Cry a minute. It will do you good."

"I haven't even the right to cry," she sobbed.

You must cry," he said. "You haven't let yourself go enough. That's been the whole trouble."

HE was silent a moment.

"You haven't let yourself go enough," he repeated, almost like a seer. "You have tried to force your destiny from its appointed course. You have, and Covington has, and I have. We have tried to force things that were not meant to be, and to balk things that were meant to be. That's because we've been selfish—all three of us. We've each thought of ourself alone—of our own petty little happiness of the moment. That's deadly. It warps the vision. It—it makes people stone-blind.

"I understand now. When you went away from me, it was myself alone I considered. I was hurt and worried, and made a martyr of myself. If I had thought more of you, all would have been well. This time I think I—I have thought a little more of you. It was to get at you and not myself that I wanted to see again. So I saw again. I let go of myself and reached out for you. So now—why, everything is quite clear."

She raised her head.

"Clear, Peter?"

"Quite clear. I'm to go back to my work, and to use my eyes less and my head and heart more. I'm to deal less with statutes and more with people. Instead of quoting precedents, perhaps I'm going to try to establish precedents. There's work enough to be done, God knows, of a sort that is born of just such a year as this I've lived through. I must let go of myself and let myself go. I must think less of my own ambitions and more of the ambitions of others. So I shall live in others. Perhaps I may even be able to live a little through you two."

"Peter!" she cried.

"For Covington must come back to you as fast as ever he can."

"No! No! No!"

"You don't understand how much he loves his wife."

"Please!"

"And he, poor devil, doesn't understand how much his wife loves him."

"You—you"—she trembled aghast—"you wouldn't dare repeat what I've told you!"

"You don't want to stagger on in the dark any longer. You'll let me tell him."

She rose to her feet, her face white.

"Peter," she said slowly, "if ever you told him that, I'd never forgive you. If ever you told him, I'd deny it. You'd only force me into more lies. You'd only crush me lower."

"Steady, Marjory," he said.

"You're wonderful, Peter!" she exclaimed. "You've—you've been seeing visions. But when you speak of telling him what I've told you, you don't understand how terrible that would be. Peter—you'll promise me you won't do that?"

SHE was pleading, with panic in her eyes.

"Yet, if he knew, he'd come racing to you."

"He'd do that because he's a gentleman and four-square. He'd come to me and pretend. He'd feel himself at fault, and pity me. Do you know how it hurts a woman to be pitied? I'd rather he'd hate me. I'd rather he'd forget me altogether."

"But what of the talks I had with him in the dark?" he questioned. "When he talked to me of you then, it was not in pity."

"Because," she choked, "because he doesn't know himself as I know him. He—he doesn't like changes—dear Monte. It disturbed him to go because it would have been so much easier to have stayed. So, for the moment, he may have been—a bit sentimental."

"You don't think as little of him as that!" he cried.

"He—he is the man who married me," she answered unsteadily. "It was—just Monte who married me—honest, easy-going, care-free Monte, who is willing to do a woman a favor even to the extent of marrying her. He is very honest and very gallant and very normal. He likes one day to be as another. He doesn't wish to be stirred up. He asked me this, Peter: 'Isn't it possible to care without caring too much?' And I said, 'Yes.' That was why he married me. He had seen others who cared a great deal, and they frightened him. They cared so much that they made themselves uncomfortable, and he feared that."

"Good Lord, you call that man Covington?" exclaimed Peter.

"No—just Monte," Marjory answered quickly. "It's just the outside of him. The man you call Covington—the man inside—is another man."

"It's the real man," declared Peter.

"Yes," she nodded, with a catch in her voice. "That's the real man. But—don't you understand?—it wasn't that man who married me. It was Monte who married me to escape Covington. He trusted me not to disturb the real man, just as I trusted him not to disturb the real me."

PETER leaned forward with a new hope in his eyes. "Then," he said, "perhaps, after all, he didn't get to the real you."

Quite simply she replied:

"He did, Peter. He does not know it, but he did."

"You are sure?"

She knew the pain she was causing him, but she answered:

"Yes. I couldn't admit that to any one else in the world but you—and it hurts you, Peter."

"It hurts like the devil," he said.

She placed her hand upon his.

"Poor Peter," she said gently.

"It hurts like the devil, but it's nothing for you to pity me for," he put in quickly. "I'd rather have the hurt from you than nothing."

"You feel like that?" she asked earnestly.

"Yes."

"Then," she said, "you must understand how, even with me, the joy and the grief are one?"

"Yes, I understand that. Only if he knew—"

"He'd come back to me, you're going to say again. And I tell you again, I won't have him come back, kind and gentle and smiling. If he came back now,—if it were possible for him really to come to me,—I'd want him to ache with love. I'd want him to be hurt with love."

She was talking fiercely, with a wild, unrestrained passion such as Peter had never seen in any woman.

"I'd want," she hurried on, out of all control of herself—"I'd want everything I don't want him to give—everything I've no right to ask. I'd want him to live on tiptoe from one morning through to the next. I'd begrudge him every minute he was just comfortable. I'd want him always eager, always worried, because I'd be always looking for him to do great things. I'd have him always ready for great sacrifices—not for me alone, but for himself. I'd be so proud of him I think I—I could with a smile see him sacrifice even his life for another. For I should know that, after a little waiting, I should meet him again, a finer and nobler man. And all those things I should

Continued on page 21

How I Helped My Husband

Weathering Hard Times Together

I WAS an Easterner in the West, and five years the senior of the man who later became my husband. When I first met him he was well-to-do, had a good business and splendid prospects. But when the question of marriage arose, I insisted that if I was to be his wife he would have to come to my beloved East. He sold out his business, came, and upon his arrival we were married.

I have stated that he was a Westerner. The East and its ways were a closed book to him. In less than a month after we were married I realized my great mistake and his sacrifice.

All too rapidly our little nest-egg was disappearing. It seemed impossible for him to get work of any sort that would bring in enough for our support. A dozen things that he could have turned his hand to in the West were not possible here.

He said he believed he could succeed in forestry if he could get a start. He had lived and grown up among the big trees of the West; as a young lad had been in the lumber camps and there had learned trees as few learn them. However, it would take time to enter this field. What was to be done while he was establishing himself?

Believing that I had done him a great injury by insisting on his coming East, I told him that I would do all I could, and for him to make a start, for I felt sure we would get along some way.

With our last fifty dollars we took a house in a good neighborhood, and, as we did not have much furniture, I advertised "unfurnished rooms." Within a week I had filled my house. A widow and small daughter took my second floor, and a widow and son the third. It was the first step, and we were now assured a roof over our heads. It was spring, so we did not have to worry about coal.

Then my husband started off to seek his fortune, and while he was gone I advertised, and in that way secured enough orders to do small bits of upholstering and covering of pillows, etc., to pay my running expenses. When the work was beyond my strength, my husband would help me when he came home at night. Often we would work until two or three in the morning to finish an order, and then he would get up early to deliver the articles before he began his own day's work.

It was not very long before he came home with his first contract. The owner of a house wanted the trees on her lawn trimmed and the dead wood taken out. She would pay twelve dollars for the work.

But to do this work a saw and pruners would he needed, and such things cost money. There was nothing to do but to confide our predicament to the widow with the son and ask her if she could advance some rent money. I went to her, and she was just as nice about it as she could he. Of course she would. So the saw and pruners were bought, and two days later the work was satisfactorily finished and my husband brought home the twelve dollars. It looked like a gold-mine to us.

He continued to get work, and his work was good, so he was recommended from one to another. He began to make money, and it looked as if daylight were coming at last.

Then the unexpected happened. An aunt of mine whom I had not seen in ten years, and whom I had never known very well, wrote and said she had lost all her money, and that she, her sister, and her brother were about to be turned out of doors. I kept the letter over a day, not knowing what to do, and then read it to my husband. After a few seconds of silence, instead of hearing him say, "It is too bad; I am mighty sorry," or some such remark, he said: "Write to them at once and tell them if they can get enough money together to get to us, to come and we will take care of them." I gasped! My husband was willing to take in three very old people whom he had never seen, and work that much harder. And already he had sacrificed much, struggled much, for my sake!

But what could I do? It was not to be thought of to let those old people go to the poorhouse, yet there was nothing else to be done unless they came to us.

Three weeks later they arrived with all their belongings, and two of them are still with us. One sister died after a long sickness.

My husband kept hopefully on, but it was getting into cold weather by this time and work grew scarce. How we ever pulled through that winter I do not know. As I look back on it, I know we never could have, had it not been for his constant cheer and courage. The old people were most difficult; yet, he never lost his temper, never complained.

One he came in and said: "I could get along so much better and faster if I knew something about flowers and gardens and planting. So many people would give me tree work if I could also do the landscape part."

Now all my life I had loved flowers; at eight years of age I was taking botany at school. As a girl I had traveled in Europe, and there I studied and absorbed everything about gardens I could, just for the pure love of it. Later I had planned and made gardens for my friends.

So I never hesitated one minute. The very next morning I hired a good gardener to do the heavy work, secured necessary tools, and was in readiness when, a week later, my husband brought me in my first contract—for he had approved my plan at once.

I was to make fourteen small gardens and the work took just a week. When all my expenses had been met I found I had cleared $42.80. Two days before I had finished this contract another came in, and after I had finished that I secured, all by myself, a large country place to do over entirely. Then I put ten men to work, hired two expert gardeners, and, barring the bad weather, we worked every day for three and a half months. I was always personally on the job, and often did some of the planting myself.

After that I was as much established as was my husband, and we have worked together ever since.

Now after six years of struggle the future looks bright. We have weathered the storm, and are able to plan on soon buying a home. Then a little later we shall have greenhouses and a nursery.

Need I add that I am proud of my husband? But when I tell him so, he always responds: "I could not have done what I have, nor could I be what I am to-day, if you had not helped me."

C.W.S.

Now They Own Their Own Home

AS I look back on those strenuous days it seems more like a joke than stern money-making business, for I enjoyed every minute of the time, busy and exciting as it was.

I met my husband at law school, it being my first and his final year. We married soon after his graduation, and I did not complete my law studies. The close, confining duties of an office lawyer did not agree with his health, and after a couple of years we moved to one of the city suburbs and my husband went into the real estate business.

We were getting along nicely, my husband attending to the outside business, and Jim, a local young man and law student, acting as office assistant.

Then a boom hit the village. A munitions plant was established on the outskirts, and land soared. My husband had got wind of the project early, and had taken a ninety-day option on a desirable piece of ground. Things seemed coming our way, when Jim, the assistant, quit cold. The munitions plant offered big wages, and Jim couldn't resist.

Losing Jim at that critical time was indeed a heavy blow. Time was precious, and my husband couldn't get another man. The factory gobbled them up as fast as they came. He was in despair. There is where I arose to the occasion. My year in law school had not been in vain. I knew something about deeds, notes, mortgages, acknowledgments, etc., and told my husband I would be office assistant. He stared at me stupidly, but I insisted, and finally induced him to let me try it, at least.

Next day, with my little girl and negro "mammy," we opened up shop in our little home, and I wrote up several deeds and took deposits on the sale of five lots. In the meantime I had sent in a hurry call for a commission as notary public. The business fever got into my blood. I thought of nothing, talked of nothing, but "our lots." I had photographs made of every desirable view-point; and, with these to aid me, I made it good many sales.

I became agent for a portable house company, and sold those temporary homes like hot cakes. My husband took up his option within the stipulated time, and paid a substantial sum besides. Within ten months we had sold every lot we possessed.

My husband says he would never have pulled through if it had not been for my unexpected assistance.

J.L.O.

She Kept Her Husband's Secret

IT is thirty years now since I, a girl of eighteen years, left the old Bay State and went "out West," where I had relatives, to teach school. I went into a rural district, and secured board with a family who lived near the school-house. In this family was a young man who a few months later became my husband. I respected him for his long self-denial of all that goes to make a young man's life happy. When he was only sixteen, his mother had been left a widow with eight children. He had been his mother's right-hand aid and support from that time to the time I met him, when he was twenty-four years old.

His mother gave him full credit for all the years in which he had given her all his earnings and had been the mainstay of the family. He was handsome, self-reliant, and we became mutually attracted to each other.

Well, we married. Those who understand the New England temperament and its devotion to learning can understand the almost paralyzing shock with which the knowledge imparted itself to me that my dear and loved husband did not know how to read and write. It seemed to me, reared in environments where the smallest child learns these things, almost a disgrace. I remembered, however, that one of the presidents of the United States, Andrew Johnson, did not know his letters when he was married, and that they were taught him by his wife. So I began to give my husband lessons. He never advanced a great way, because the children came and I had so much to do that my strength would not permit me to give enough time to it. But he imbibed enough to hold his own in most of the places in which we have lived.

We came East. I have never mentioned his disability to a living human being, and have covered up such unintentional errors as he has made as adroitly as possible. I have kept his books, helped him make out his estimates, made out all bills, and, in fact, done all the mathematical work that, in almost thirty years, his business has made necessary. Without my help it would have been impossible for him to have carried on business; for, with a naturally trusting nature, he would have been fleeced and duped. His own children, one a college graduate, have never known their father's lack of education. Naturally, they have understood that he was not as well educated as I; but I have always said, and always shall, that it was his early sacrifices for his brothers and sisters that prevented him from advancing, and later his sacrifices for his own children, to whom he is devoted. His never-failing faithfulness to those he loves would make any one admire his character.

For him I have felt sorrow, as he has been debarred from much that I have been able to enjoy in the way of books and lectures. But I have come to understand that plain, unfailing loyally and love are worth as much as education, and that a native refinement often atones for that, attained through schools and books. I would not change my life of thirty years with my husband if I could. Only I could wish that mothers would see that, no matter what their circumstances, they are cutting their sons off from much that is good in life when they fail to give them the wonderful advantages of education.

S.W.

When Her Husband Lost His Business

WHEN I was married my husband had established a good business.

He had two partners, to whom he had practically given shares, thinking it would be advantageous in the end. His business was one that required a great deal of capital, increasingly so as it grew. So he told me that economy was as necessary as if he were a clerk with a small salary.

I resolved to be a real helpmate. I knew little of housekeeping and nothing of cooking. However, I coaxed my mother's Spanish cook to show me how to make several of her delicious national dishes. I also began a scientific study of cooking. In time I became an accomplished cook. I learned to take care of every bone, piece of fat, or square inch of meat, and used it in making some delectable dish. All this time the partners and their wives were extravagant in every way. While my husband was straining every nerve to keep the debts of the firm paid up, they thought only of spending.

One of the terms of the partnership was that none of the members should engage in any outside enterprise without the knowledge and consent of all. A chance word of the older partner led me to suspect that he was about to violate this agreement. When I called my husband's attention to it he seemed grieved that I should be suspicious of his partner.

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Within a month this man had verified my predictions and involved the firm in a debt that took all that my husband and I had saved to pay.

When we were recovering from that blow, the younger partner, aided and abetted by the older one, but without the consent of my husband, entered into a scheme that finally wrecked the whole business.

This culmination of the trouble came about Christmas-time. Our Christmas dinner consisted of dry bread and oatmeal. But we turned a smiling face to the world, even my own family not knowing the depths of our poverty. For the rest of that winter bread continued to be our staple, but I showed my little children how to carve it into the shape of the things they liked best, after the fashion of the little Italian, John Baptist. My whole idea was to brace my husband up and keep him in good spirits.

I mortgaged the house, which, fortunately, I owned, and with that money my husband started over again. Now we could not even afford to have the washing done. So I would wash the clothes myself, and when my husband came home at noon we would make merry over rinsing them, he turning the wringer, which was too hard for me, and feeding the clothes in. Never once did I allow myself to fret over our trouble; so my husband came through that battle with no scars, but with a great deal of experience; while his older partner, whose mournful wife never helped him to laugh, succumbed to the blow and died in a few years.

Mrs. J. W. B.

A Leap in the Dark

FIFTEEN years ago, there toiled in W——— one of those martyrs to printer's ink, the publisher of a religious weekly. Being radical, its circulation was limited, so the income derived was small, and permitted the labor of but two men to carry it on. The work was hard, the hours long, and the knowledge that he was waging a losing fight not only discouraged but gradually undermined the health of the publisher. But the fascination for his work held him stubbornly at it; so he slaved through the days and the nights, and his wife and child seldom saw him, and there was no family life.

This man was my husband. He was a very well meaning man, but his efforts were spent in a mistaken and unprofitable direction. Finally the paper failed to support us, and then, when the finances became low, I decided to start a boarding-house. However, this proved little relief. After all the toil and trouble we scarcely made a living. I was fast becoming discouraged. If we could make no headway when young, what would old age hold in store for us?

So about this time I visited my brother, a successful merchant in S———. I told him my troubles, and he appreciated my difficulties. He said, "F——— will never willingly give up his work, so you must surprise him." He told me of a vacant store at P———, a neighboring village, and suggested we start a confectionery shop and restaurant, as I was a good cook and had some experience in the restaurant line. He wished to finance the project, but I had one hundred and thirty-two dollars, and I said this amount must do.

That night I told my husband I had bought a business in P——— and that in two weeks I would move. Words can not express his consternation; but our discussion ended in my favor, and two weeks later found us on our way to P———, with a lot of debts to pay, broken health, and one hundred and thirty-two dollars.

The first week we were very much left alone, and my husband assumed an "I told you so" expression. The following Monday I grew desperate. I vowed I would make a stir or bust. The town did not boast of a bakery, but existed on factory-made delicacies. "Here's where I show 'em," I thought. Tuesday morning P——— discovered a whole show-window full of the biggest sugar doughnuts that ever existed. That day we, as successful merchants, arrived in P———.

Then my husband woke up, and his training came into good use. He was well liked at once, and made many friends.

In a few months the air, prosperity, and lack of worry had put new vim in him. And so we lived and worked hard for five years. Then we sold and came to L———.

At this place my husband has had many stores; sometimes two at a time. I have retired. We now own a house of our own, several lots, a farm, and property in Minneapolis. But, best of all, we can also enjoy life, be together, and plan for our children's education. And we are happy, and my husband does not regret the change.

G. W. S.

Pulled Themselves Out of Debt

WHEN I married my husband, who already had four children by another marriage, his income seemed fairly adequate to our needs, for I was blessed with thrift and the ability to "manage"; but when I learned that this same husband was also possessed of two thousand dollars indebtedness—to the doctor, druggist, grocer, baker, and butcher—I caught my breath. He explained how he had hoped to clear up the debts "in some way," since they had not to do with my history; but love had made him optimistic even to uttermost recklessness.

It had been his custom to pay by the month, or, at least, to make an attempt to pay periodically wherever money was most expected or required. This seemed disgraceful to my New England pride, and I reasoned that the only probable way of getting straight with the creditors was to budget out the income, pay cash for what we bought, and go without what we could not pay for.

Even with one's own children it is not always easy to conduct the affairs of a household without criticism; but the wish for a complete understanding led me to talk with the children, who ranged in ages from twelve to eighteen, and to explain the condition of affairs and our plans for improving them. Possibly the novelty of being considered a part of the firm made them willing to listen, or possibly the justice of our outlined methods carried the day; but we were all agreed that a new routine was essential, even if not altogether agreeable. Half the salary was to be mine for food, clothes, and shelter for the family; the other half my husband's for insurance, personal expenses, fuel, and debts.

Heretofore the bread had been bought ready made, and the family had lived largely on canned goods. We now began to purchase from downtown stores that were large enough to make bargain sales possible. We obtained winter vegetables from a farmer. We had a variety of properly cooked food, entirely home-made, and the whole family throve most wonderfully upon it.

My husband worked evenings and extra time before office hours in the morning. He knew no holidays, and often went without lunch to accomplish his almost impossible part. But six years after our marriage—a long, hard, but wonderful six years—he paid the last dollar, and we were free to begin life without a creditor to face or dread.

With honor and liberty regained, he had the confidence to ask for the salary that his ability and experience merited, but that, as a harassed, debt-burdened man, he had not been able to do before. Now, years from those times, he is so loyal as to say that all he has is due to me.

Mrs. H. F. W.

DOGS OF WAR

The Female Bandit of Burro Flats

By AUSTIN GILL

Illustrations by Frank Tenney Johnson

EVERY day in the army may be something like Sunday on the farm; but to the militia on the border there are a good many days that seem to drag. Old-timers of this cactus-studded country who will sit whole afternoons in a tent, drinking two per cent. and spinning stories of a lurid Western past, furnish a welcomed diversion, unless they take advantage of Eastern credulity—mistaking it for greenness instead of boredom—and impose upon it to unpardonable and implausible extents. These latter eventually become branded as fakes.

Uncle Jack Willer was not of these blunderers. Daily his fame as an entertainer spread through the camps, and there was never a sign of hesitation in the steady supply of liquid with which he lubricated his stories. Consequently, when I saw him enter the fourth section tent after a creditable Sunday dinner of beef, beans, rice, and prunes, I hastened over to secure a seat before the rush started.

This, as near as I can write it, is what I heard when Uncle Jack unlimbered:

SPEAKING of this Villa now, there are bandits and bandits, the same as there are lawyers and horse-thieves; and some are mighty different from others, and some are a good deal alike. I've seen plenty in my day, and assisted at a few funerals and preliminaries to funerals, and know from experience that the varieties are as numerous as you'll find in any profession. And once, about twenty years ago, I had a distressing experience with a female bandit, while I was running the saloon at Burro Flats.

It's a sixty-mile stage ride from the Santa Fé to the Latuna Mines in the Black Range, and Burro Flats is a half-way station for rest and refreshment. Its location is the small circle of green land irrigated by the final expiring effort of Burro Creek.

The population of Burro Flats, when Ed Tobey was there, numbered ninety-six, of which ninety was Mex and six was white, counting Ed Tobey. The rest were Tom Pratt, the sheriff; Doc Lawry, who ran the hotel and store, Pete Peters and Waco Nelson, joint owners of the Bar B horse ranch, and me, running the saloon. There not being any competition in the hotel and saloon business, the Doc and I never troubled to designate our places by fancy names, such as are necessary in towns that hold more than one each of said emporiums.

Ed Tobey drove the stage from the railroad to the mines, and it was Ed who first met up with this here female bandit I'm telling you about. Ed never was very effusive in his account of exactly what happened, about all the information he'd give being contained in his official report that he'd been held up by a white woman two miles below the Pass and relieved of the month's pay-roll he happened to be carrying up to the Latuna Mines at the time.

It wasn't anything very unusual to have the Latuna stage held up in those days, but the nature of the present bandit, and Ed's desire to forget all the unpleasant details of the robbery, gave this case a certain peculiar interest. Of course we understood Ed's natural embarrassment over the affair, and he had our secret sympathy; but we couldn't help joking him a bit, and those white men at Burro Flats were about the worst joshers I've met up with anywhere at any time. Ed's being so sensitive about women, he being afraid of 'em from never having had any advantages of meeting many, made it worse. Yet there wasn't any of us who didn't imagine he knew pretty closely what Ed had done under the circumstances, and we wondered if we wouldn't

have done the same if we'd been caught in his fix.

The sheriff was the only man who acted worried. And, when you think of it, he had cause to be.

"Do you think she'll shoot?" he asks Ed, and you could see he was anxious.

"Shoot?" says Ed. "Of course she'll shoot. She's got two guns now, and is apt to keep shooting when she begins. Man, you don't suppose that just because she's in skirts she'll let you walk up and take her to the pen peaceable, do you?"

It seemed reasonable to suppose not, and the matter began to look more serious. The best way to tame a shooting man is to shoot back; but that, somehow, didn't sound like etiquette when it came to a woman. There wasn't anybody there anxious to get known as a woman-fighter, leastwise Sheriff Tom Pratt, who had quite a reputation in that county for being polite in his work. And here it was his sworn duty to go out and bring in that mail robber, who was a female. It kind of cheered Ed up a bit to see how dismayed he looked over the deal.

BUT the sheriff perked up a little after a few drinks, and organized a posse, consisting of Doc Lawry, to go out and hunt the banditress. This had a sudden dampening effect on Doc's hilarity, which up to then had been going strong, and he did what he could to excuse himself on account of rush of business and a sore toe. But he couldn't make it stick, because there wasn't any business, and his toe looked all right when we got him down and examined it, and besides he wouldn't have to walk. So they had a few more drinks, and started.

Waco Nelson was in the saloon at the time, and as they passed out he offered to bet a day's beer that they'd never find that robberess, especially if they happened to see her first. I thought it over a while, and decided not to take him up. Then he suddenly remembered that Pete Peters was riding in that afternoon from the railroad with the proceeds from the sale of a bunch of colts, and would unsuspectingly pass right along that stage road. Pete's an old gun-and-knife man from the Brazos River, and Waco wouldn't have worried under ordinary circumstances, there being only one bandit reported. But now, Pete not being any more used to women than Ed Tobey, the situation struck him as critical, and he started off in a hurry to warn Pete away from the danger zone with all that dinero.

THAT left me with the prospects of a quiet afternoon all to myself, since Ed Tobey had changed horses and pulled out for Latuna. For a while I amused myself by trying to imagine just how the sheriff and Doc would go about making the arrest should they happen to meet up with this here wild prairie rose, and figuring how they'd have to be mighty tactful if they didn't want to pick up a little lead somewhere in their persons. I tried putting myself in their positions and wondering how I'd act; and I couldn't come to any definite solution of the difficulty, in spite of the fact that I'd been married and divorced back in Missouri before I came to this country, and was considered quite an authority on the customs and habits of the fair sex on that account.

I got to thinking that it would be mighty awkward if she'd happen to drop into Burro Flats while I was there all alone and ask for the contents of the cash drawer. Not that I'd mind handing over the cash, for I was wise enough to women to know it doesn't pay to refuse 'em anything in reason, on the grounds of ordinary masculine courtesy and peace and health. But there was mighty little cash on hand, and it would sure go hard with me if she thought I was holding out on her any. I'd been accused of holding out a little cash before, back in Missouri, and I didn't want any repetition of the trouble, especially from a banditress packing two guns.

These pleasing thoughts worried me so that at last I went over to Doc's hotel and went through his cash register with the help of a hammer and a screw-driver. I found five dollars and six bits, and this I carried over and combined with my holdings, making a little over eight dollars in all. This relieved me some; for, though it wasn't much, I could plead that business was slack on account of a certain stoppage that had suddenly developed in the pay-roll at the Latuna Mines—which of course she wouldn't be able to deny, under the circumstances.

'Long about three o'clock in came Pete Peters, looking hot and excited and calling for hard liquor. I didn't have to ask him to know what had happened, but I let him talk to relieve his feelings. Waco never had met up with him to warn him, and he'd been held up by a lone female down by the Pass and relieved of his gun and the wad of money he was bringing in from the sale of those colts.

"What the hell could I do?" he says. "You wouldn't have me shoot her, would you?"

I smiled at him in a sympathetic, superior way.

"The trouble is," says I, "you don't understand women. You should have jollied her along a little with a few compliments, till you got her off her guard, and then roped and hog-tied her and put your handkerchief in her mouth and made her listen to reason."

"I did think of that," says Pete, "but somehow it didn't seem polite. Then, besides, some one might have come along and seen me."

ABOUT an hour after that the sheriff came looking considerably ruffled and trying not to show it. I set out the drinks without asking any questions, thinking maybe from his looks he might not be in a very good humor. But Pete didn't hesitate any in bringing up the subject.

"Say, sheriff," he begins right off, "you didn't happen to see anything of a young lady who just borrowed my gun and colt money out there in the hills, did you?"

"Huh?" says the sheriff, beginning to

Continued on page 15

RICH GIRL, POOR GIRL, BEGGAR GIRL, THIEF

BEAUTIFUL MEN

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HOW THEY STARTED

Continued from page 10

brighten a bit, "So you've met her too, have you? Pshaw, Pete, I never thought you'd lose your head over any girl enough to make her a big present like that on such short acquaintance. She must have been some attractive."

"She was," says Pete. "I blush to admit it, but I'd done 'most anything for that woman. She had some of the most taking ways I've seen, and she sure used 'em. There was something just naturally irresistible about those big blue eyes over the muzzle of that big blue gun, and it struck me that presents would be mighty acceptable. Wouldn't you have felt that way yourself, sheriff?"

"Yes," says the sheriff; "I did."

And beyond that he wouldn't say much about the matter, except that he and the Doc had separated in order to cover more ground, and he didn't know what had become of Doc since, and didn't give a tarnation. He was 'most as sensitive about it as Ed Tobey, and got real ugly when I suggested that probably he didn't understand women, and how they'd ought to have stuck together, so one could grab her while the other was interesting her in pleasing conversation.

THAT girl was sure spending a busy little afternoon, for just before dark in came Doc, and he'd also succeeded in finding the lady without accomplishing anything much to be proud about. It looked as if she wasn't attempting very hard to keep under cover, and willing to accommodate 'most anybody who happened to come out hunting for her. I could have done a big business that night with the local talent over the bar, if I hadn't been possessed with a sort of irrepressible sense of humor. The sight of all those big men who had been held up in one day by one poor little defenseless woman bandit just naturally struck me as funny, and remarks to that effect kept slipping into my conversation, no matter how hard I tried to be sympathetic for the sake of trade. Then little things I'd learned about women through my marriage-and-divorce experience kept coming into my mind, and often, before I'd thought, I'd found I'd mentioned 'em. I could see it wasn't improving their tempers any, but somehow I couldn't stop.

I carried the thing too far at last, and they rose up and combined against me and broke three chairs putting me out of my own saloon—after which they proceeded to lock and bolt me out permanent. Then, being as there seemed nothing else to do, I went over to Doc's room at the hotel and went to bed. I was good and sore myself by that time, for it didn't seem reasonable one little girl bandit should make such a lot of trouble, and cause the destruction of three good chairs.

But in the morning I found the saloon in a reasonable state of preservation, with a more or less accurate account of the liquor consumed pinned to the bar, which was as it should be. And pretty quick the crowd called on me in a body, which was also expected.

"Look here," says the sheriff. "Bygones is bygones, but certain aspersions which you have cast upon our reputations continue to rankle. Moreover, there was, as we recollect, a few boasts as to how you, with your superior knowledge of things feminine, could have handled matters, a little better from what we was doing yesterday. We don't aim to be impulsive, but we've called in a committee to request you to go out and make those words good. If you want to hold your reputation as the only original woman-tamer that ever hit Burro Flats, now's your chance. And we don't want to hurry you any, but we think it might be healthier for you to start pretty pronto."

Far from being surprised at this harangue, it was just about what I had figured might be expected.

"My friends," says I in injured tones, "it grieves me to see you have considered it necessary to come to me with this request. You should have realized that I intended to stand by you in this hour of affliction, and would not hesitate to go out and do battle for your protection. I would have saved you yesterday, but did not want to interfere with your own sweet self-confidence. All I need now is a bit of breakfast before I start. And I earnestly ask you all to keep together while I'm gone, and if possible find some safe place and hide out in it, so that I can have the satisfaction of knowing that you'll be all right in case she doubles back on me on the trail and comes to town hunting for you. Of course it ain't likely, but I might miss her in the hills, and she might take advantage of my absence to raid the town."

"You needn't worry any about missing her says Doc. "Old Tomas came in just now, and says she camped right by Eagle Rock, and is there yet. I don't know how long she'll stay, but I guess you'll have time to eat a little before you start, if you hurry up about it."

This information that she was still on the job kind of flustered me for a minute; for one of the principal reasons of my brave line of conversation was the hunch that, since she'd cleaned up so well yesterday, she'd probably be hunting new fields of activity by the time I got out looking for her. I'd had quite an appetite for breakfast before, but now somehow didn't seem to care for it. But I did manage to eat a bit, for it meant delay; and besides, being in no hurry, I felt that all hope of missing her wasn't gone yet. There's lots of room to roam around all day in the hills without going anywhere near Eagle Rock.

I dragged breakfast out as long as I could without seeming to do it intentional; but it came to an end at last, as all things will, and there remained nothing to do but start. So I got on my horse and started.

FROM Burro Flats the road is visible for a mile and a half, so I kept strictly to the road for that distance. Just out of sight of the town the trail to Eagle Rock branches off to the right, and right there was where I turned sharp to the left. And I hadn't gone five hundred yards in that direction when a woman on horseback appeared suddenly in the trail, with a handkerchief mask all over her face, and a gun that looked as big as a twelve-bore pointed at my stomach, and requested me to halt and hold up may hands.

So I halted and put up my hands. And I gave a sigh of relief, for it had come at last, as I had been dreading it would, and I was glad to get over the uncertainty of it, which was making me a nervous wreck. Now it had happened, it would soon end, the same as breakfast.

Her next command was to lower my left hand and drop off my gun-belt, and ride away ten yards. I did so, and she rode up and collected the gun. I then was made to get off my horse and turn all my pockets inside out, emptying the contents in a pile on a rock. They didn't make much of a show, and I was tempted to apologize a little.

"You see, ma'am," I says, "I'm on my way to the station, and there's such a mighty tough outfit hangs out there I always leave most of my jewelry locked up in the safe at the saloon."

I wanted to get in this allusion to the safe in the saloon, hoping it might deter her if she thought of paying Burro Flats a visit; but right after I'd mentioned the danger to valuables from a tough outfit, I knew I'd made a mistake.

"That is," I adds, "the men are a tough outfit. There isn't a woman in these parts I wouldn't do anything for."

And then I felt, I must be getting a little red as to the face, my actions not making such a remark necessary.

"Can the chatter," says the lady behind the gun, "and take off your boots."

This command seemed so out of the ordinary that I didn't hasten to obey it, as I had the others, but tried to argue her out of it. I hadn't been particular in my choice of socks that morning, and likely as not they were chock-full of holes.

"I swear to you, ma'am," says I, "on may honor as a gentleman, that every cent I've got with me is right there on that rock. I've never carried money in my boot yet, and I haven't tried to slip any in while you've been pointing that gun at me. Be reasonable."

"Perhaps you didn't hear me," she says softly, passing the aim of her gun carelessly over my body. "I says to take off your boots."

"Yes, ma'am," says I. And I sat down and pulled 'em off.

"That's better," says she, "Now slip behind that bunch of scrub oak and take off all your clothes, and toss them out to me."

"What?" says I, and I knew I'd just been pretending to blush before. "Take off all my clothes?"

"You heard me right," says she, "And hurry up about it, I ain't got all day."

"But," says I, without moving, "I'm a married man, and—"

"Well?" she snaps, "what's that got to do with it? I need those clothes of yours, and I need 'em quick. Jump!"

I jumped this time. But she stopped me.

"Wait a minute," says she. "Take your watch with you."

"It's a good watch," says I. "You can have it. I don't want it."

"You take that watch!" she commands. There was a certain tone to that voice I recognized from old Missouri days, and I took the watch with me, just as she said.

I WAS pretty well out of sight behind the bushes, and I might have sneaked off if it hadn't been for all the sharp rocks and stickers. I realized now why she had made me leave my shoes before I disappeared.

"Don't try to pike," she yells at me from the other side. So I didn't. I took off everything, and did 'em up in a bundle, and tossed 'em over to her.

"Now," says she, when she got the clothes, "there's another clump of bushes a hundred yards due north of here. You count off thirty minutes on that watch of yours, and not a second less, and then you travel over to that clump. You may find your shoes. But be kind of particular you don't start for half an hour."

I opened my watch and waited there in the sun, as she said, naked as a skinned eel. I gave her thirty-two minutes for good measure, to make sure I wasn't erring any on the other side, and then I peeked out.

She wasn't anywhere around, and neither was my horse. But her horse was still standing there, saddled, and I was thankful to see that at least I wouldn't have to walk back to camp. She'd told me where I might find my shoes, and I picked my way over there. I figured she'd pulled out.

I FOUND my shoes all right. And beside em I found a whole woman's outfit of clothes, a handkerchief mask, and an imitation gun roughly cut out of a mesquite root and blackened with fire, which I recognized as the article that had rendered me so docile a short time before. The sight of it made me pretty hot—not only to be held up by a woman, but a woman with a wooden gun.

The sun was raising particular 'ell with my skin by this time, not being accustomed to travel in it with such little personal adornment, and if I didn't get under cover soon I knew I'd blister. Being as how the only practical cover at hand was that pile of woman's clothes, and as the effect on my feelings couldn't be much worse than going naked, I sorted 'em out the best I could and got into 'em.

They fitted better than I expected. I knew the woman had looked large, but I'd sort of blamed it to the magnifying effect of fear, knowing how the human eye is apt to exaggerate when you're feeling timid. There weren't but two or three places where the buttons wouldn't meet, and I felt pretty tolerably well covered.

But I certainly was up against it when it came to deciding what I'd do next. The only thing I couldn't

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do was to ride back to Burro Flats in full daylight looking the way I did. Life with that bunch of would-be humorists was hard enough under ordinary circumstances, and if I came in wearing the clothes of the young lady I'd started out to capture it was doubtful if they would ever get over it. One glimpse of me in my new outfit would give them material for about three years of conversation. I was acquainted with that crowd, and knew that nothing short of death would shut them up; and I hated to kill that many.

There not being any other place I could go, I decided I'd have to stay out there in the hills till dark, and then make a run for it. The handkerchief mask would help conceal my identity in case anybody should come near enough to recognize me, so I took it along. I also took that imitation wooden gun, for I knew it looked mean enough to afford considerable protection.

I WAS heading for more secluded country, keeping a sharp lookout from every rise, when 'way off behind me I saw a lone man on a horse. I didn't think he'd seen me, but I couldn't be sure; and I was worrying a little over it, when all of a sudden I got an idea.

It wouldn't be any fun waiting out there all day without even tobacco, and then I ran a big risk of being discovered when I came in, Burro Flats being accustomed to occasional all-night poker sessions in the saloon. So why not change suits with that fellow on the horse, and let him do the worrying? Of course it might be one of the same crowd who'd already been held up; but that wasn't likely, it being reasonable to expect that they'd had enough for a while and wouldn't be traveling this vicinity to-day.

But, even if it was, and they knew by my voice and build I wasn't the same lady they'd met before, there'd been nothing to prove there weren't two woman bandits on the job, and I might get away with it.

I was pretty desperate, and decided from the way the play came up to take a chance anyhow.

I noticed which way he was going, and started down the bed of an arroyo that would intersect his line of travel, and put on the handkerchief mask. I met him as I expected, though a little sudden, happening to come on him as I rounded a bend.

It was Sheriff Tom Pratt. I'd rather it wouldn't have been the sheriff, but it was too late to lie down now.

"Halt!" says I, speaking in the front of my mouth in a feminine tone. "Throw up your hands!"

He naturally noticed the gun, and obeyed orders, I went ahead with the lesson:

"Lower your left hand and drop off your gun!"

"Sorry, ma'am," says he, "but I ain't got any gun. Maybe you don't remember how you collected it as a little souvenir."

"That's so," says I, playing the part, "but I didn't recognize you till just now. Pile off that horse and take off your boots."

"My boots?" says he, looking surprised. "You don't really want my boots? I never saw a girl with a daintier-looking foot and ankle than yours, so what in thunder can you want with my boots?"

"Never mind my feet and ankles," says I, trying to hide them under my skirt. "You get off that horse and take off your boots. I don't want to have to ask you again."

"Oh, very well," says he, and started to do it.

HE'D got one off, when a rope from behind settled gently over my shoulders and pinned my arms to my side, 'most jerking me out of the saddle and jarring the female bandit's imitation gun out of my hand.

I looked round, and there was Doc, and coming up was Waco and Pete.

"Fine work, Doc," says the sheriff. "Old Uncle Jack was sure right this time. Attract her attention with some pleasing compliments and tie her from behind. How about it, sister?"

"Don't sister me!" says I, mad as they make 'em. "You let that rope off of me, Doc, for there's going to be one hell of a fight right here!"

"That's funny," says the sheriff, "If she didn't sound just like old Uncle Jack, I never heard him speaking."

And over he comes and pulls off my mask.

"Well, look here, will you just! It is Uncle Jack!"

The others gathered around and began looking at me in a sort of sorrowful silence.

I was so mad I couldn't speak—just choked.

"I've been suspecting for some time," says Doc, at last, "that Uncle Jack's been leading a double life. That there's my horse he took from me yesterday."

"It's too bad," says Pete, "I always kind of liked Uncle Jack personally."

"It's his knowledge of women that's probably led him astray," says the sheriff. "Knowing them so well must have got him in the habit of imitating them. I'll bet those clothes he's got on used to belong to the trousseau of Mrs. Willer back in Missouri."

"He's sure a sly one," says Waco; "but it's funny he should give us the tip as to how to catch him. He's probably got his pants rolled up under that skirt full of money and guns. We'd better frisk him."

THEY frisked me, and there was more conversation when they didn't find my pants.

They wanted to know where I'd hid my clothes and loot, and just looked sad when all I could do was sputter. They tied me on my horse and led me back to Burro Flats complimenting me on the way I'd fooled them when they thought I was in the saloon all the time, and otherwise entertaining me during the journey.

It was some trip.

They sat me down in my saloon, and Waco went behind the bar and set out the glasses.

"Shall we give her a drink?" says he, "She looks a little bit as if she was needing one."

"I don't mind myself what you do," says the sheriff, "It was sure low down the way he put on skirts so's not to run any danger of being shot at while he was gathering the grapes. And at first he pretended not to know me this second time he got the drop on me, though he admitted it later. Yet give him a drink if you want to."

They discussed it a while, and finally poured me out a good jolt. I knocked it on the floor with my chin when they passed it to me, though I certainly wanted that drink. That shows you how mad I was.

RIGHT after that in walked Ed Tobey.

"We got your girl, Ed," says the sheriff. "She was Uncle Jack. Go over and take a look at her."

Ed looked at me, and scratched his head as if he was puzzled.

"He isn't the one," says he at last, "though it's certainly the same looking dress. They caught the one who'd held me up over at Chato this morning, with my clothes and the goods on him, she having been a disguised man likewise. How'd you come to be wearing that outfit, Uncle Jack? I passed it on to Pete Peters."

"That's so," says Pete, as if he'd just remembered something, "You did that little thing. Then the sheriff came along and said he'd wear 'em a while for me, so I let him have them. What'd you do with them, sheriff?"

"He must have handed 'em on to me," says Doc, as the sheriff blushed. "But I didn't have any use for 'em, so I passed the buck to Waco, who happened to be needing 'em when I left. Isn't that so, Waco?"

"I guess it is," says Waco, "though I didn't recognize you at the time. But they felt kind of queer on me; so when Uncle Jack came out this morning I let him have 'em, on account of his understanding so much about women."

I looked at Waco, and saw it was so. The dress had gone the rounds, and I'd come at the end of the list, and failed to pass it on to the sheriff because he wouldn't stand for repeating.

Whereupon [concluded Uncle Jack Willer] the drinks for the rest of the evening were just naturally on the house.

When France Saved America

"THE French," said the old First Readers, "are a pleasure-loving people, fond of dancing and light wines."

For two years the French have been proving to us that they are the most substantial, most earnest people in Europe, capable of a nobler consecration than any other.

Yet how many Americans have consciously revised their old unreasoning conception of the French? How many, if asked after the war to picture a Frenchman, would think immediately of a sort of animated fashion-plate? So difficult it is to remove a misconception from men's minds, once it becomes firmly established there!

Our misunderstanding of the French dates back away beyond the Revolution. When the French troops landed at Newport, bringing to Washington the aid that turned the balance in his favor, they were regarded with great suspicion by the people they had come to help.

Strange Ideas About the French

"THE old-time prejudice kept up by the English," wrote Matthieu Dumas in his "Souvenirs," "was so strong that, at the beginning of the Revolution, the most ardent minds, and several among those who most desired independence, rejected the idea of an alliance with France."

"It is difficult to imagine," said Abbé Robin, "the idea Americans entertained about the French before the war. They considered them as groaning under the yoke of despotism, a prey to superstition and prejudices, almost idolatrous in their religion, and as a kind of light, brittle, queer-shaped mechanisms, only busy frizzling their hair and painting their faces, without faith or morals."

William Channing, father of the philanthropist, and one of the most cultured men in the colonies, confides to the president of Yale University his surprise, after visiting the French, in finding them to be real life-sized men.

"They are a fine body of men and appear to be well officered," he writes. "Neither the officers nor men are the effeminate beings we were heretofore taught to believe them."

A Debt We Haven't Paid

EVEN Washington, needing help so terribly as he did, received the French with many misgivings. He had fought against them with the British in the French and Indian wars, and it was not until many months had passed, in close contact with them in camp, that he came to refer to them in his diary as "our generous allies."

Few Americans realize that it was really France's aid that won the Revolution for America; and we as a nation have never made any adequate avowal of our debt.

In all history there is no more fascinating reading than the story of Beaumarchais, the brilliant French writer and ardent friend of liberty.

The government of France could not openly aid England's rebels; so Beaumarchais, under the name of a mythical firm, "Hortalez & Company," busied himself with shipping arms and ammunition to us, fitting out one ship after another.

Many of the cannon and other supplies bore the stamp of the French government and were actually slipped out of French arsenals; but whenever the English Ambassador protested, the Prime Minister would solemnly respond that the government had no knowledge whatever of these pernicious activities. Beaumarchais would be summoned on to the carpet and roundly censured—with a wink. Whereupon he would hasten away, to fit out another ship.

The colonists agreed to send the ships back to France loaded with tobacco and other products, so that Beaumarchais might be reimbursed and enabled to continue the shipments. To our lasting shame, we not only did not send the tobacco we had promised, but we never paid Beaumarchais in any way. He died a bankrupt, having spent his entire fortune in our cause. Only after many years did his heirs receive from a grudging Congress a partial payment of the huge sums Beaumarchais had spent for our help.

Getting Recruits for the Revolution

WASHINGTON realized, even if his colleagues did not, that the Revolution could never be won except by the aid of sea power. It was the French fleet, as well as the aid of the French armies, that forced the surrender at Yorktown.

Incidentally it is interesting to note that recruits to the army were not much more easily scoured in the Revolution than they are to-day. Here is a recruiting poster much used to lure men into Washington's ill clothed and half starved army:

WHAT SCIENCE IS DOING

To Roll This Old World Along

THE MAKING OF A MOTORMAN ROOKIE

THE good old days when a motorman was taught his trade—or profession or art or whatever term is applied to the job of running a street car—by manipulating the levers on the front platform under the guidance of a veteran, are about over. With the increasing motor-truck traffic in downtown streets, the danger of accident was too great.

In order to teach the motorman rookie the various tricks of his trade, with equipment that

would avoid accidents of all types, large rooms, fitted with a variety of mechanical appliances, have been set aside in many of the central car barns. Here the novice has explained to him the mysterious inner workings of the street car which he will navigate through the congested heart of his city speedily, safely, and economically. Real street cars are not necessary for this. Sectional models, full sized, are used.

Brooklyn, New York, has the most elaborately equipped motormen's school in America, which means in the world. The installation was made under the personal direction of E. C. Clark, and the task of supervision and instruction has been placed in his charge. Since Mr. Clark's regime in the large central car barn was inaugurated, the number of street car accidents has fallen off remarkably. He puts his motormen students through a severe course of technical instruction, theoretical and practical. Before they step on the front platform of a real car they know a great deal about its complicated inner workings. They are taught to regard their cars as valuable units of mechanism to be handled with expert care. Eventually, when they are put in charge of street cars, they run them intelligently.

Mr. Clark's latest instruction device makes use of the motion picture screen. A camera was mounted on the front platform of a moving street car. Pedestrians started across the tracks, then retraced their steps; an automobile crowded closer and closer to the track; and other things of a similar nature happened. Altogether, the picture shows the various contingencies that will beset the path of a car and tax the nerve and nerves of its motorman.

When the picture was made, an expert motorman handled the controller and the air-brake, and both of these made records on a narrow ribbon of paper.

When the motorman aspirant is tested, he watches the moving picture on a screen set before him. His hands are on dummy controller and air-brake handles, which make marks on a similar paper ribbon as the picture on the screen progresses. When the test is completed his record is compared with the original expert record; if he has manipulated his levers correctly the charts will tally. This critical test quickly weeds out incompetents. If the candidate is slow-witted, his chart shoots wide of the mark, and he is released before he has an opportunity to commit homicide with the aid of a runaway street car.

THE HORSE THAT CAME BACK

IF Black Beauty went to the happy grazing grounds, where all good horses go when they die, then Old Faithful, who has cured more children of diphtheria than you could count on all of your fingers and toes, even if you were a centipede,

deserves a large, grassy plot in the center of that heavenly pasture.

Old Faithful is a sleek black horse that was taken off the pay-roll of the New York Street Cleaning Department when she began to manifest certain signs of advancing age. She went into the discard, for better or for worse, on January 26, 1911. She grazed in sunny pastures, and her years dropped from her shoulders. Thereupon she went to Otisville, where she became a member of the Department of Health. A horse became a member of the Department of Health? Ridiculous? Wait just a minute.

Old Faithful went to work manufacturing a sure cure for diphtheria. This is the manner in which she was employed: First of all, the diphtheria germs are cultivated. They thrive best in broth, and millions of them grow within a week. Then they are all killed by the pouring in of a few drops of carbolic acid. The dead germs settle on the bottom, and the clear broth is filtered off.

Horses are injected with enough of this liquid to kill five thousand guinea-pigs. They are given injections at intervals for two months, at the end of which time their blood is tested. Some blood is better than others, and Old Faithful is especially blessed. She works only nine months in the year as an anti-toxin producer; the other three she may while away as her fancy dictates.

PUTTING THE SUN TO WORK

OUT in the heart of Death Valley, California, if you possess enough patience, you can bake an egg on the sand. You can do more than that: with a clean stone, you can fry bacon. With a little more patience and a sun-glass, you can brew for yourself it cup of steaming tea. In any clime, with sunlight and a convex lens, a boy can burn his initials on a wooden bench.

If the sun can do all of these things, why then, asks Waldemar Kaempffert in the Popular Science Monthly, is it not possible to make the sun boil water, generate steam, and drive an engine?

The idea of putting the sun to work is not new. John Ericsson, the inventor of the Monitor, tried more than once to harness the sun. After toiling for thirteen years trying to perfect a solar engine, he declared that "the scheme is impracticable on account of the high cost of the necessary apparatus." Ericsson was ridiculed then, just as the men who are trying to harness the sun are being ridiculed now.

On the banks of the Nile, where the Sahara comes down to meet the river, an

American, Frank Schuman, has erected a queer looking apparatus that is the latest word in science upon the equally queer task of extracting work from the sun's rays. He has pumped water for irrigation purposes. The strangest part of his invention is that he runs a steam engine with hot water. To be exact, he employs the sun to heat water nearly to the boiling point.

The principle he uses is different from that of Ericsson. He heats the water in great iron troughs which are surrounded by window-glass. When the water has nearly reached the boiling point, it is drawn off into another part of the apparatus. He makes use of the physical law that water will boil and steam will form at lower temperatures if the air pressure is reduced. Water that will not quite boil at sea-level will boil merrily on a near-by hill-top. Mr, Schuman, instead of going to the hill-top, uses an air-exhausting pump, which decreases the pressure upon the water exactly as if it were carried to higher elevation. Steam at low pressure leaves the collecting tank and is used to drive a specially designed engine.

WANT TO BUY A CHUNK OF MILK?

THE markets of Irkutsk, in Siberia, are an interesting sight, for the products offered for sale are, in most cases, frozen solid. Fish are piled up in stacks like so much cord wood, and meat likewise. All kinds of fowl are similarly frozen and piled up. Some animals brought into the market are propped up on their legs, and have the appearance of being actually alive, and as one goes through the markets one seems to be surrounded by living pigs, sheep, oxen, and fowls standing up.

But, stranger yet, even the liquids are frozen solid and sold in blocks. Milk is frozen into a block in this way, with a string or stick frozen into and projecting from it. This, it is said, is for the convenience of the purchaser, who is thus enabled to carry his milk by the string or stick handle.

SHORT AND INTERESTING

AN international airship corporation in Berlin wishes, after the war, to establish an aerial post service between Berlin and Constantinople. If that proves successful a passenger line will be established. A capital of $6,000,000 is estimated as necessary.

Railway Age Gazette.

IF the plans of the Cuban Telephone Company mature, telephoning to Cuba will become a reality in the near future. The company has just sold $2,500,000 of its convertible bonds to defray the expenses of cable-laying from Key West to Havana.

Commerce and Finance.

WITH good roads an automobile puts a farm ten miles out of town practically as near as a farm two miles out. Electricity is helping, also, to make farm life more agreeable. Complete gasolene power units, able to light thirty 25-watt bulbs, are now sold for $250.

Machinery.

HER DAD IS THE CHAUFFEUR

ALICE NEUMAN, aged six, has not yet arrived at that luxurious point in her artistic career where one's salary makes it possible for one to roll around in a $10,000 car, but she has a limousine all of her own, and her dad acts as chauffeur.

Alice is probably the youngest member of the Metropolitan ballet, and, as befits such a dainty-toed young creature, her father designed for her a town car. What difference does it make if it was made out of a motorcycle? No prima donna or princess of blue blood ever rode in greater pomp. It boasts such refinements as ivory-tinted upholstering, electric lights, and plate-glass windows. Alice can climb in or out through either door, for both of them are real and work.

"I HAVE NO TIME TO READ"

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

WHY WOMEN TALK MORE THAN MEN

WHY is it that a woman with a high, thin voice can talk a deep-chested man into exhaustion? Because such women, we used to think, have a peculiar zest for conversational endurance tests.

Wrong, says an article in the New York Sun. A German professor has discovered this simple explanation: "The vocal cords of a high-voiced person are near together; so that, in speaking, only the edges are vibrated. On the other hand, the vocal cords of a man with a deep voice have wide spaces between them, and when he speaks the air from his lungs must vibrate a great deal more of the membrane."

Therefore when you hear Auntie Louise coming up to tell you how badly she slept last night, and how she's one raw bunch of nerves, try to resign yourself. Remember, she isn't talking to annoy. It just comes easy to her.

SWIM IN YOUR OWN BATH-TUB

TAKING a bath used to be a Saturday-night dread; it has become a morning habit. But it should be an indoor sport, says H. Hewitt Griffin in London Answers. And, as he is a famous swimmer and a founder of the Royal Life-Saving Society, we are struck respectful.

"The ordinary house-bath has pleasures and possibilities beyond your imagination. To begin with, the water should be six inches from the brim. The average man sits in a shallow puddle, and at a boarding-house where I recently stayed the kindly landlady had provided a half cocoanut for the hardy ones to pour water over their heads.

"Reader, do you go under? It's the only way to get in these wretched affairs. Slide along the bath bottom, lean back, hold your nose, and sink to the bottom, at the same time expelling your breath. Then, by natural flotation, you will come to the surface. Don't be nervous. The head will go under, but the water will encircle the face, leaving mouth, eyes, and nose out. There you can float forever."

But here is the most sensational of all bath tricks:

"When floating, elbows pressed to the sides, very gently touch the side of the bath with the elbow, and push. Keeping the eyes shut so as not to destroy the illusion, you slowly float across the tub. It will take only a few seconds, but it seems minutes, and you feel as though you were traveling yards. Ah!" mourns the great swimmer, "how few enjoy this most delightful of all bathing feats!"

NO DINING-CARS IN CHINA

IN China, railroad officials, prospective passengers, and benevolent bystanders unite to explain that no self-respecting American rides third-class. When you persist, they take the money for your ticket with scorn, with scorn point out the proper car, with scorn make room for you on your bench.

How he scandalized the natives by riding third-class from Hankow to Peking is told by Carroll K. Michener in Travel. In spite of the primitive box car, with openings for windows and benches for seats, he was repaid for his fall in social status by those differences from America that make the charm of foreign travel.

In America, Weary Willy risks his life on the brake-beams, and when he is caught is kicked off without compunction. The Weary Wing Lee, on the other hand, is a "cringing, helpless, resourceless dog," who sits on the steps of the car and gets under the feet of alighting passengers. The guard curses and whacks him, for the sake of appearances, but seldom puts him off. He is regarded as "an evil not to be eradicated, any more than flies or hunger."

In America, the woman traveler addicted to tobacco must snatch a lone and rapid puff in the dressing-room. In China, the third-class woman traveler smokes in open comfort—a pipe if she be old, a cigarette if she be young.

In America, "first call for dinner" means snowy linen, bright silver, a little food, a big bill. In China there is no dining-car. At each station little boys clad only in their tea-caddies sell you hot water, so you may make your own tea. From other venders you purchase hot sweetened dough balls with a surprise of sausages inside, boiled eggs, a fifteen-inch cucumber, green and cool, rice cakes, apricots, baked melon seeds, and tea—all for the sum of seven cents.

It pays to ride third-class.

WHAT A RUSSIAN THINKS OF CHARLIE CHAPLIN

THIS is why we laugh at Charlie Chaplin's antics. Says a Russian critic in the Chicago Daily News: "American life is more primitive and simple than life in Europe. American character is not complicated. There is a lot of childishness in it. Americans laugh a lot. They enjoy simple jokes and simple games."

And then the Russian goes on to say that Charlie would not be half so runty any place else in the world, just because he is everything that Americans are not.

"The law of Americanism is rapidity. Charlie Chaplin's principle is slow, deliberative movement. America takes everything very seriously. America laughs, but does not know how to smile, does not know irony. Charlie, on the contrary, is all subdued smiles, all irony. When other people are noisy and excited and lose their heads, Charlie maintains a supernatural gravity. Any one can understand his humor. It is clean and clear."

But the Russian is chiefly impressed with Charlie's prodigious salary.

SCULPTURING LIVING FACES

MAKING new faces is one of the remarkable accomplishments of the war surgeons. At least a million soldiers in the war have received disfiguring wounds in the head and face—some so terrible that the men no longer look like human beings. The frequency of this kind of wound is due to trench fighting, where the head is exposed, and to the use of shells and shrapnel, which make ragged wounds instead of clean bullet holes.

Every part of the face has been restored, from forehead to chin, by these sculptor-surgeons, and an unlimited variety of materials is used, among them human and animal tissue, aluminum, copper, rubber, wax, and celluloid.

The Chicago Tribune describes a successful case of face restoration at Talence:

"A soldier had the whole side of his face from eye to neck torn away; cheek-bone, cheek, jaw-bone, and other parts were lost.

"The missing jaw was supplied by a piece of bone from the soldier's arm. A cut was made in the arm, the bone exposed, cut half way through, and a section of it lifted up. This was riveted to the ends of the jaw-bone in place of the missing section. The arm was bound in position, and left there until the union took place. Then the section of the arm was sawed away and the arm wound closed. A flap of tissue was raised from the neck and stretched over the new jaw-bone.

"The missing part of the cheek-bone was so large that a light aluminum frame-work had to be inserted. This was riveted by pegs to the remaining bones of the man's head. A cheek was molded out of wax and a nose grafted on by using a small section of the patient's rib.

"When he is quite well, further improvements will be made by the use of spectacles and a beard."

Lieutenant Derwent Wood is the inventor of counterfeit faces which are made for the wounded when the upper part of the face is gone. With the help of photographs of what the patient looked like before being wounded, Lieutenant Wood constructs the missing features out of silvered copper, and then skilfully paints the mask to match the surrounding complexion.

The number of amputations in war hospitals grows less with this development of human carpentry among surgeons. Legs are lengthened and shortened; bullet holes are plugged with the patient's own flesh; paralyzed nerves have been supplanted with the healthy nerves from the amputated leg of another patient. "Everything's worth saving," to these surgeons. Among four thousand patients at Herbert Hospital in London, there have been only twenty-five primary amputations.

ARE THERE NO MORE STARVING POETS?

WHAT is the matter with authors nowadays? Why aren't they doing inspired work any more?

"They have become commercialized," says Charles Hanson Towne in the New York Times. "They think of nothing but money. If I find a young writer whose work is promising and offer him a hundred and fifty dollars for a short story, he becomes violently indignant. 'How can you offer me a hundred and fifty dollars for a story?' he asks, 'when Irvin Cobb gets $1500?' He forgets that Irvin Cobb did not always get $1500."

Mr. Towne blames the moving pictures. You find producing companies, he says, offering a thousand dollars for a two-page scenario. Immediately the young author sets out to write a two-thousand-dollar scenario, and anything less than that sum seems below his dignity. The moving picture has succeeded in substituting commercial instead of artistic ideals in the minds of most magazine writers.

"This commercialism has extended even to poets," Mr. Towne goes on. "They write too much, and think too much about what they are going to get for their poems. There is a theory that that school of Imagiste poets who chop their poems up into lines of two or three words each, irrespective of the sense, owes much to a certain very modern magazine's custom of paying at the rate of fifty cents a line."

Perhaps poets have to resort to these tricks because magazines do not pay enough for verse. But Mr. Towne says editors pay all they can. "I'd love to pay $100 for every poem I print—but what is an editor to do? The editor bucks up against the business office. The business manager says: 'What! Fifty dollars for this sonnet by William Shakespeare? Nonsense!' And the editor must give in.

"No one can make a living out of his poetry. This talk about Masefield and Noyes making a living by their poetry is nonsense. They make a living by reading poetry aloud, and talking about poetry, not writing it."

Mr. Towne suggests that some of our great financiers establish a fund from which all recognized talent shall be paid an annuity. The question is, who will do the recognizing?

---

IS VENUS INHABITED?

VENUS is inhabited, and her inhabitants have an easy time. Lying so deeply in the sun's electric field as the planet does, her inhabitants are as highly charged as storage batteries. Man on Venus is a whole Edison plant. He can press the top button of his vest, and toast the bread in his hand to a delicate brown. The second button will turn on the electric fan of his hair. The third button will switch on the lights.

Because the air is denser on Venus than it is on earth, flying life would be larger than it is with us, and man probably adds a pair of wings to his equipment.

All this is the speculation of Garrett P. Serviss, who, in the New York American, approves the theory that Venus is inhabited, as advanced by C. H. Housden in a pamphlet for the British Astronomical Society. The two scientists reason as follows:

Venus turns one face always toward the sun, just as the moon turns one face always to the earth. Therefore the sunlit face of Venus must be an arid desert, while the face turned toward dark space must be intensely cold. Hot and cold air must circulate in such a way as to remove all moisture from the sunlit face and deposit it as ice on the dark hemisphere. Under the laws of gravity and the hot currents of descending air, the glaciers at the edge of this great ice-field would flow down the glacial valleys as water. On the strip of land next the melting ice, the temperature would be such that life would be possible. The water would evaporate too rapidly to flow far into the arid land, but it could be carried in pipes and pumped from the valleys into the higher desert lands. The marks on Venus, which scientists used to think were cracks caused by the sun, might be a gigantic pumping system, just as the marks on Mars are now supposed to be canals.

Assuming, then, as Professor Housden does, that these marks are parts of an irrigation system, you must believe in human minds back of the project; and, as Venus lies deeper in the sun's electric field, you must believe with Professor Serviss that their electric force is far greater than that of man on earth.

THE MOST COMFORTABLE ANIMAL

"OF all woodland animals it is the daintiest and yet the most reposeful looking," says Frances Pitt of the dormouse in the London Contemporary Review. "There is something so round, soft, and comfortable about a well fed dormouse that it is a joy to gaze upon it."

No wonder the dormouse looks comfortable. The modern curses of insomnia and high cost of living never trouble this fluffy yellow ball with its big black eyes. When the day turns cold or the winter comes on with its scarcity of food, the dormouse disposes of the heat-and-eat problem by going to sleep until times are better. As soon as the atmosphere grows warmer, it awakens, rounds up some live stock of insects for its dinner, with an occasional stolen bird egg from a neighbor's coop, and finishes its repast with freshly garnered nuts. Then it crawls into its bungalow, which, about the size of a tennis ball, it has built in a bush with the soft linings of honeysuckle bark, closes all the doors and windows by pulling the top together over itself, and takes a snooze of a day or a month.

"It is said to be fatal to warm and wake them suddenly," says the author, who has captured a number in their nests for pets; "but I have never had the heart to try the experiment."

ARE YOUR TELEPHONE MANNERS GOOD?

ARE you a gentleman over the telephone or an underbred boor? The Ford Times declares it is time to comment on the frightful telephone manners of "you men who sit in offices, you managers, you higher-ups.

"It is you we want to hear answer the telephone as if you were talking to a human being and not a yellow dog. There is just a possibility, you know, that some of the people calling you up are not doing it to waste your time or to make you mad. They may wish to do something for you."

So many men seem to feel that affability and courtesy and efficiency are only for office boys and switchboard girls who learned telephone etiquette at the start.

"I used to wonder," goes on the writer, "how a young lawyer I knew had made such rapid rise in the world. But, one day, talking to him over the telephone, a probable reason occurred to me. He does a great deal of business over the telephone, and he has the perfect telephone voice and manner. When he says 'Hello' you feel as if the sun had just come out."

Minding your telephone p's and q's is easy. When your bell rings, try to believe it's your favorite brother who has arrived in town after five years' absence.

THE MAN WHO MESMERIZED EUROPE

NEVER let your husband persuade you to gaze fixedly at the neck of a bottle or the top of a sugar-bowl. James Brand, a Manchester physician, put his wife to sleep by this very simple method, one night after he had seen a man magnetized at a public performance.

It was Dr. Brand who discovered that a patient in this state of induced somnambulism could be induced to do almost anything. But it was not until twenty years later, in France, that Dr. Charcot brought the science of hypnotism to the place it occupies to-day.

Hypnotism, in one form or another, is as old as the Pyramids. But it remained for Frederic-Antoine Mesmer, that tall, distinguished wizard of the eighteenth century, to popularize the science. Mesmer read a paper in which he explained how the sun, moon, and stars acted on the human body by means of a subtle fluid called animal magnetism. Paris was suffering with ennui at that moment; and Mesmer, with his mysterious new theory and his engaging personality, swept the capital off its French heels. In no time he was moving among the "best circles," adorned in lavender silks and uncanny magic.

He invented a remarkable magic tub, says the Philadelphia Ledger—a sort of inclosed cylinder, into which rich clients entered after depositing a generous admission fee. The patients sat in tiers, and each held a tube with which he touched the part of his body that he wished to treat. In the center stood Mesmer, an imposing figure in his wonderful robes.

When Mesmer became the idol of the

hour all over the Continent, he asked Queen Marie Antoinette to give him a chateau and $100,000, so he could treat patients free of charge. Her ministers offered to pay him $4000 a year and make him a knight. But Mesmer scorned the offer. He accumulated a fortune of more than 300,000 francs; but luxury corrupted him, and he died a charlatan at the age of eighty-one.

NEWARK HAS FOUND HER POET

NEWARK is in New Jersey and the fourteenth largest city in the United States. It is famous for its manufactures of leather novelties, pearl buttons, celluloid calendars, patent garters, stove platforms, beer, and Vote for Hughes buttons. That you will find in the almanac.

But you hear most about Newark in New York vaudeville; for instance, the story of the two Irishmen who died and, Terence going to heaven, they were separated. Getting permission from St. Peter to visit his friend, Terence found himself in Newark.

"But, Shamus, this is Newark!"

"That's the hell of it," said Shamus.

As for Newark Bay, it's hard to find, even on the map. Only the engineers who built the railroad trestles across it, a few tug-boat captains, and electric sign advertisers have really noticed it. It's "one of those places which, once seen, you never remember."

On the west and north of it are the Flats—miles of blowing marsh grass, broken by an occasional bleak isolated factory; on the south, the Standard Oil chimneys blow out soot and sulphur; and on the east is the industrial tag end of Jersey City—coal-yards, signal-houses, and freight terminals.

Yet this is how H. G. Dwight writes about it in the Atlantic Monthly.

I have stood on the bluffs of Scutari
and watched the morning mists smoke
    out of the Golden Horn—

full of fairy ships and iridescent sails,
he begins dreamily.

I have wandered among the lonely pillars
    of the Parthenon, . . .

I have sat in the ruined theater of Taor-
    mina,

where a scene is set immortal in the world
of the jewel-blue Ionian Sea,
and the far-off opal mountains of Calabria.
But I like Newark Bay,
says the author suddenly.

You don't know where it is unless you are a Jersey commuter!
And no cliffs encircle it. . . .
No typhoon ever tore it out of its bed.
Nor is the color of it very wonderful.
Never mind.
It has a wonderful way of catching color
    from the sun.

And you should see the gold that twinkles
    around it in the dark,

that spatters it when the batteries are
    alight. .

I like the black bridges that wade across it,
and the trains that slide so smoothly over
    them,

all day and all night, in a blur of black or
    gold—

and the sense of its loneliness,
and of so many million interwoven des-
    tinies that shuttle to and fro

and leave it lonely again.
I like those great beds of reeds that border it,
humble and green and alive to every whim
    of the air.

I like those little straggling wooden piers
and flat-bottomed boats at leash under a
    certain factory.

They always make me think of a certain
    palace on the Grand Canal,

a palace of delicate marbles carved long
    before factories or bridges came to
    Newark Bay,

in which a princess lives.
But she would not be a princess,
nor would she live in that palace,
if it were not for that factory on Newark
    Bay. . . .

I like a certain corner . . .
where a little inlet runs out beside a
    bridge.

On the shore some signboards make a fan-
    tastic splash of color

as you flash past them on the train.
Through the water marches a file of piles,
with restless green reflections fastened to
    them.

And shore and water meet each other so in-
    timately,

in such an undulating line!
I will stand up for that line, even after the
    coast of Sicily.

I wish I could etch the grace and the humor
    and the subtlety of that line.

And beyond it the bay open under the sky,
wide and pale as a Venetian lagoon.
And far away, high and white and incredible
    as the other world,

glimmers a tower in New York.

"Accidents"

—by Frank C. Bostock

THE big tent is packed with men and women and children. Lights flame about the walls and a great cluster over the cage of iron bars in the center, where a slender woman stands surrounded by a dozen lions. Quietly the crowd watches as she puts the huge monsters through their accustomed tricks. Applause follows each one, but only perfunctory applause. People have grown accustomed to the courage of circus folk. The lions are tame, you hear them say to one another; their spirits are broken.

Suddenly, while they look, the little woman in the cage starts back: a startled cry breaks from those nearest her. One of the lions has refused to go on with his part. He throws himself back on his haunches, snarling; he creeps forward; he springs. The little woman leaps back just in time to save her life, but not in time to prevent a jagged tear in her arm.

A Slight Accident

KEEPERS rush in: the great beast is hurled back, and the little woman hurried forth. The manager steps forward and waves for silence: If the audience will remain seated, he says, the show will proceed. There is nothing to be alarmed about—nothing at all: just a slight accident.

Just a slight accident. The most experienced animal trainer can not tell when it will come, says Frank C. Bostock, the famous wild-animal trainer, in his book, "The Training of Wild Animals" (Century Co.).

"One night at Buffalo an admirer had sent Mme. Pianka a bouquet of red roses, which, in place of her heavy riding-whip, she carried into the arena for her performance with the lions. At first glance the lions mistook the red roses for red meat. One lion sprang forward, and, in the wide sweep of his paw to get the supposed meat, struck her cheek. The blow, glancing to her arm and chest, tore her dress and flesh.

"Instantly Mme. Pianka tossed the flowers from her. She was just in time; for every one of the lions pounced upon them, sniffed them with disgusted surprise, and finally, remounting their pedestals, waited passively for their act. Although her face, neck, and arms were bleeding profusely, Mme. Pianka put them through their act. Then, as she left the arena, she fainted.

"The most perilous thing a man can do is to lose his footing; for, the moment he falls, the animals will spring upon him.

"The tiger of an English trainer once slipped, and in trying to save himself got one of his claws entangled in his master's leg. The tiger was innocent, but his keen claws had penetrated through the stiff leather boot, and in the effort to extricate them the animal threw his master. In a flash the other two tigers in the cage were on the prostrate trainer, and, but for the prompt bravery of an assistant who sprang into the cage and beat back the tigers, the trainer would never have risen.

"A trainer once accidentally caught a lion on the tip of his nose with the exercise whip. The animal paused, rubbed his nose reflectively, and seemed to be trying to think what it meant. The trainer, who had grown rigid with fear, kept a careful eye on him; but, as he seemed quiet and only puzzled, the trainer decided that was the end of it. But that same evening, when the trainer flicked his whip toward the lion, the beast, instead of taking his cue, gathered himself together and sprang full at the trainer.

"Fortunately, the man had seen the danger signals—for, while a tiger never gives warning, a lion always does—and had leaped aside with such agility that the lion landed a little to the right, and this time received a stinging blow that sent him back for a moment, giving the trainer time to escape. But from that time it was found impossible to make the lion perform. He would go into the arena, would even mount his pedestal; but at the first flick of the whip in his direction he would prepare to spring.

Dangerous Playfulness

"SOMETIMES accidents occur through the playfulness of the animals. I was once in the training school with a group of lions at Indianapolis. Young Wallace, a fierce lion with whom I was very good friends, jumped from his pedestal for a piece of meat. I stood watching him eat it and thoughtlessly tapping my boot with my whip.

"Wallace had been accustomed to playing with the whip. He struck at me playfully. His claws fastened deep into the fleshy part of my leg, through boots and underclothing, and there they stuck. A lion's claws have a sharp curve and go in like a cant-hook. He has not the sense to withdraw them as they go in, by the curving process, but pulls them straight out.

"Wallace found his claws farther in than he intended, and, slightly frightened, promptly drew them out, not backward, but forward. With them came a good-sized piece of flesh. Painful as it was, I dared not move lest I give the signal for an attack. But when Wallace had returned to his meat I ordered the animals back to their cages, and Wallace was safely out of the way without realizing that he had hurt his trainer or drawn blood—two things which always have bad effects on animals."

The Triflers

Continued from page 7

want to do for him. I'd like to lay down my own life for him."

She stopped as abruptly as she had begun, staring about like some one suddenly awakened to find herself in a strange country.

"Peter," she cried, "you shouldn't have listened!"

She shrank back toward the door.

"And I," said Peter slowly—"I thought just kisses on the eyes stood for love."

"You must forget all I said," she moaned. "I was mad—for a moment!"

"You were wonderful," he told her.

She was backing toward the door.

"I'm going off to hide," she said piteously.

"Not that," he called after her.

But the door closed in front of him. With his lips clenched, Peter Noyes walked back to the Hôtel des Roses.

WHEN Peter stepped into his sister's room he had forgotten that his eyes were open.

"Beatrice," he said, "we must start back for New York as soon as possible."

She sprang from her chair.

"Peter!" she cried.

"What's the trouble?"

"Your eyes!"

"They came back this morning."

"Then I was right! Marjory—Marjory worked the miracle!"

He smiled a little. "Yes."

"It's wonderful. But, Peter—"

"Well?"

"You look so strange—so pale!"

"It's been—well, rather an exciting experience."

She put her arms around his neck and kissed him.

"You should have brought the miracle-worker with you," she smiled.

"And instead of that I'm leaving her."

"Leaving Marjory—after this?"

"Sit down, little sister," he begged. "A great deal has happened this morning—a great deal that I'm afraid it's going to be hard for you to understand. It was hard for me to understand at first. You see, you—both of us—made an extraordinary mistake. We—we assumed that Marjory was free."

"Free? Of course she's free!"

"Only she's not," Peter informed her. "As a matter of fact, she's married."

"Marjory—married!"

"To Covington. She's Covington's wife. They were married a few weeks ago in Paris. You understand? She's Covington's wife."

His voice had risen a trifle. "Peter—you're sure of that?"

"She told me so herself—less than an hour ago."

"That's impossible. Why, she listened to me when—"

"When what?" he cut in.

Frightened, she clasped her hands beneath her chin. His eyes demanded a reply.

"I—I told her what the doctors told me. Don't look at me so, Peter!"

"You tried to win her sympathy for me?"

"They told me if you stopped worrying your sight would come back. I told her that, Peter."

"You told her more?"

"That if she could love you— Oh, I couldn't help it!"

"So that is why she listened to you; why she listened to me. You begged for her pity, and—she gave it. I thought at least I could leave her with my head up."

Peter's head was bowed. He looked crushed. Throwing herself upon her knees in front of him, Beatrice reached for his clasped hands.

"I did the best I knew!" she moaned.

"Yes," he answered dully; "you did that. Every one has done that. Only—nothing should have been done at all. Nothing can ever be done."

"You—you forgive me, Peter?"

"Yes."

But his voice had no meaning.

"It may all be for the best," she ran on anxious to revive him. "We'll go back to New York, Peter—you and I. Perhaps you'll let me stay with you there. We'll get a little apartment together, so that I can care for you. I'll do that all the days of my life, if you'll let me."

"I want a better fate than that for you, little sister," he answered.

Rising, he helped her to her feet.

"If I can believe there is something still left in life for me, I must believe there is a great deal more left for you. Only we must get away from here."

"You have your eyes, Peter," she exclaimed exultingly. "She can't take those away from you again!"

"Hush," he warned. "You must never blame her for anything."

"You mean you still—"

"Still and forever, little sister," he answered. "But we must not talk of that."

"Poor Peter," she trembled.

"Rich Peter!" he corrected, with a wan smile. "There are so many who haven't as much as that."

He went back to his room. The next thing to do was to write some sort of explanation to Covington. His ears burned as he thought of the other letter he had sent. How it must have bored into the man! How it must have hurt! But Covington was not the only one hurt by it.

He could not recant his love. That would be false. But he had no right to it: that was what he must make Covington understand—and without violating any of Marjory's confidences.

WITH the departure of Peter and his sister—Peter had made his leave-taking easy by securing an earlier train than she expected and sending her a brief note of farewell—Marjory found herself near that ideal state of perfect freedom she had craved. There was now no outside influence to check her movements. If she remained where she was, there was no one to interrupt her in the solitary pursuit of her own pleasure. Safe from any possibility of intrusion, she was at liberty to remain in the seclusion of her room; but, if she preferred, she could walk the quay without the slightest prospect in the world of being forced to recognize the friendly greeting of any one.

Peter was gone; Beatrice was gone; and Monte was gone. There was no one else—unless by some chance poor Teddy Hamilton should turn up, which was so unlikely that she did not even consider it. Yet there were moments when, if she had met Teddy, she would have smiled a welcome. She would not have feared him. There was only one person in the world now of whom she stood in fear, and he was somewhere along the English coast, playing a poor game of golf.

She was free beyond her most extravagant dreams—absolutely free. She was so free that it seemed aimless to rise in the morning, because there was nothing awaiting her attention. She was so free that there was no object in breakfasting, because there was no obligation demanding her strength. She was so free that whether she should go out or remain indoors depended merely upon the whim of the moment. There was for her nothing either without or within.

FOR the first twenty-four hours she sat in a sort of stupor. Marie became anxious.

"Madame is not well?" she asked.

"Perfectly well," answered Marjory dully.

"Madame's cheeks are very white," Marie ventured further.

Madame shrugged her shoulders.

"Is there any harm in that?" she demanded.

"It is such a beautiful day to walk," suggested Marie.

Marjory turned slowly.

"What do you mean by beautiful?"

"Ma foi, the sky is blue, the sun is shining, the birds singing," explained Marie.

"Do those things make a beautiful day?"

"What else, madame?" inquired the maid, in astonishment.

"I do not know," sighed madame. "All I know is that for me those things do not count at all."

"Then," declared Marie, "it is time to call a doctor."

"For what?"

"To make madame see the blue sky again and hear the birds."

"But I do not care whether I see them or not," concluded madame, turning away from the subject.

Here was the whole thing in a nutshell. There were some who might consider this to be an ideal state. Not to care about anything at all was not to have anything at all to worry about. Certain philosophies were based upon this state of mind. In part, Monte's own philosophy was so based. If not to care too much were well, then not to care at all should be better. It should leave one utterly and sublimely free. But should it also leave one utterly miserable?

There was something inconsistent in that—something unfair. To be free, and yet to feel like a prisoner bound and gagged; not to care, and yet to feel one's vitals eaten with caring; to obtain one's objective, and then to be marooned there like a forsaken sailor on a desert island—this was unjust.

AH, but she did care! It was as if some portion of her refused absolutely to obey her will in this matter. In silence she might declare her determination not to care, or through tense lips she might mutter the same thing in spoken words; but this made no difference. She was a free agent, to be sure. She had the right to dictate terms to herself. She had the sole right to be arbiter of her destiny. It was to that end she had craved freedom.

It was for her alone to decide about what she should care and should not care. She was no longer a school-girl to be controlled by others. She was both judge and jury for herself, and she had passed sentence to the effect that, since she had chosen not to care when to care had been her privilege, it was no longer her privilege to care when she chose to care. Nothing since then had developed to give her the right, to alter that verdict. If anything, it held truer after Peter's departure than before. She must add to her indictment the harm she had done him.

Still, she cared. Staring out of her window upon the quay, she caught her breath at sight of every new passer-by, in fearful hope that it might prove to be Monte. She did this when she knew that Monte was hundreds of miles away. She did this in face of the fact that, if his coming depended upon her consent, she would have withheld that consent. If in truth he had suddenly appeared, she would have fled in terror. He must not come; he should not come—but, oh God, if he would come!

Sometimes this thought held her for a moment before she realized it. Then for a space the sun appeared in the blue sky and the birds set up such a singing as Marie had never heard in all her life. Perhaps for a step or two she saw him striding toward her with his face aglow, his clear blue eyes smiling, his tender man-mouth open to greet her. So her heart leaped to her throat and her arms trembled. Then—the fall into the abyss as she caught herself. Then her head drooping upon her arm and the racking dry sobs.

How she did care! It was as if everything she had ever hungered for in the past—all her beautiful, timid girlhood dreams; all that good part of her later hunger for freedom; all of to-day and all that was worth while of the days to come been gathered together, like jewels in a single jewel casket, and handed over to him. He had them all. None had been left her. She had none left.

She had always known that if ever she loved it was so she must love. It was this she had feared. She had known that if she gave at all she must give utterly—all that she ever had or hoped to have. Suddenly she recalled Mrs. Chic. It was with a new emotion. The latter had always been to her the symbol of complete self-sacrifice. It centered around the night Chic, Jr., was born. That night she had been paler than Mrs. Chic herself; she had whimpered more than Mrs. Chic. Outside, waiting, she had feared more than the wife within who was wrestling with death for a new life. She had sat alone, with her hands over her ears, in an agony of fear and horror. She had marveled that any woman would consent to face such a crisis. It had seemed wrong that love—an affair of orange blossoms and music and laughter—should lead to that. Wide-eyed, she had sobbed in terror until it was over. It was with awe and wonder that a few days later she had seen Mrs. Chic lying in her big white bed so crooningly happy and jubilant.

Now she understood. The fear and horror had vanished. Had she been in the next room to-day, her heart would have leaped with joy in tune with her who was fighting her grim fight. Because the aches and the pains are but an incident of preparation. Not only that, but one can so love that pain, physical pain, may in the end be the only means for an adequate expression of that love. The two may be one, so blended as to lead, in the end, to perfect joy. Even mental pains such as she herself now suffered can do that. For all she was undergoing she would not have given up one second to be back again where she was a month before.

SOMETHING comes with love. It is that more than love itself which is the greatest thing in the world. Sitting by her window, watching the shadows pass, Marjory was sensing this. The knowledge was coming slowly, imperceptibly; but it was bringing her strength. It was steadying her nerves. It was preparing her for the supreme test.

Because that very day, toward sunset time, as she still sat by her window, she saw a shadow that looked like Monte. She smiled a little, because she knew it would soon dissolve. Rapidly the shadow strode along the quay until opposite the hotel. Then, instead of vanishing, it came on—straight toward her. She sprang to her feet, leaning back against the wall, not daring to look again. So she stood, counting her heart-beats; for she was still certain that when a hundred or so of them had passed the illusion also would have faded.

To be continued next week

Why Has My Stock Declined?

By ALBERT W. ATWOOD

If one glances at the record of prices of this well known railroad stock since 1905, the showing is most astonishing. The high prices, by years to date, have been (leaving out fractions) 345, 189, 148, 157, 143, 140, 143, 132, 134, 128, and 127. The low prices have been 175, 107, 113, 136, 115, 119, 126, 115, 111, 112, and 116. Where will the decline stop?

The Great Northern Railway is one of the best managed and one of the richer railroads of this country. All the genius of James J. Hill was lavished upon the property, and he took a closer, more personal interest in it than in any other railroad with which he was connected. It runs through a rich and growing country, possessing opportunities for development beyond the dreams of avarice. The management of the company has been able, both in the technical railroad sense and also in its financial acumen, honesty, and conservatism. The railroad has never been run from Wall Street, and regular dividends have been paid for many years, 7 per cent. since 1898. Few railroads have a more moderate bonded debt ahead of the stock, or a simpler financial structure. It has been a common saying that no one treated stockholders better than Jim Hill. Why, then, has the stock fallen?

To avoid possible misunderstandings it should be pointed out that there is only one class of stock, preferred (not first preferred) by name, but in reality common stock.

Just why the stock has fallen is not an easy or simple question to solve. One

---

reason has to do with the fact that all railroads, and especially Great Northern, paid various extra dividends, either in the form of stock in other companies or "rights" to new stock, about ten years ago, and that conditions are no longer favorable for distributing large extra profits. But most railroad stocks have fallen, and perhaps for more general reasons. Ten years ago was the boom period for railroad stocks, just as the present is the great boom period for copper, zinc, munition, shipping, oil, automobile, and many other industrial and mining issues. Railroad shares seemed to have the same speculative possibilities in 1905 and 1906 as the happiest of the war-brides have to-day.

Hill and Harriman were engaged in mortal combat. One could never tell how high or how low they would drive the price of a stock. Once they sent Northern Pacific up to $1000 a share. There were other great railroad kings, and all of them were fighting one another and either boosting or depressing their own and others' stock.

It was the day of "stock" dividends, extra "melons" of all sorts, mergers, excitement, and change in general in the railroad field. Speculators fed on dreams of giant mergers. Hill and Harriman both put through several great deals; but finally Harriman killed himself from over-work and Hill grew old.

Day of Railroad Kings Past

NOW the day of giant railroad mergers and railroad kings like Harriman is over. Hill himself is dead. Giants of finance no longer play with railroads. The Interstate Commerce Commission and about fifty State railroad commissions won't let them. Gradually men see ahead, perhaps far and nearly all reluctantly, the specter of government ownership. Gradually, through government regulation at least, private opportunity for big speculative profits, almost private ownership itself, is being squeezed out of railroads. Bonds and stocks of these concerns are becoming simply uninteresting investments, perhaps later on to become a form of government-guaranteed obligation with decidedly limited profits. At present railroad profits are limited by government; but they are not guaranteed against loss.

This, in the main, is the reason why Great Northern and other railroad stocks have fallen. Speculation has practically ceased. All the railroad stocks have moved upward in the last year because of increased earnings, and they may go higher; but no one expects that Great Northern will ever go to nearly 400 again.

Perhaps Great Northern has dropped more than some others because it was pushed abnormally high in the mad speculative era of 1906. There is no space in this article to describe just why that happened; but any one who remembers the inflated period of which I speak will recall the many reasons that then seemed so good for pushing up these railroad stocks, and especially the Hill issues, to absurd heights—just as many arguments seem so convincing now for expecting a continued rise in certain "war" stocks, the popular counters of speculation of ten years later.

Great Northern Stock To-Day

THE decline in Great Northern reflects little, if at all, upon the inherent merit of that property, both ten years ago and to-day. Its net earnings this year have increased about $7,000,000. Its dividend of 7 per cent. is much more than earned. Whether the man in Washington, D. C., who made the inquiry, should sell his stock depends upon why he still owns it. Does he want speculative opportunities or a regular dividend? He already has had 7 per cent. in dividends upon his investment, and the rate of return has been just short of 6 per cent. a year on the purchase price, which is excellent for a period of ten years, especially considering the fact that he could have many, many times sold the stock for more than he paid for it and could to-day sell it for almost exactly the price he paid.

Certainly no reasonable person could ask for a better investment than that! I do not know how much Great Northern will rise or fall in the future. If the present abnormal prosperity continues, it may go up quite a little. But big speculative profits, such as existed in railroads ten years ago or as exist in other classes of stocks to-day, seem out of the question. On the other hand, Great Northern should be able to pay fair-sized dividends about as long as any railroad in the country.

Free Booklets that You May Have for the Asking

Arrangements have been made by which any reader mentioning this magazine may have any or all of the following booklets on request.

Write Slattery & Co., 40 Exchange Place, New York, for current issue of their fortnightly publication, Investment Opportunities, which describes many sound and attractive investments. Ask for 31-E, including booklet explaining the Twenty-Payment Plan.

The popularity of a partial-payment plan by which you can "buy as few shares as you wish" of stocks or bonds, and "pay when you are able," is steadily growing. Write Sheldon-Morgan & Co., members of the New York Stock Exchange, 42 Broadway, New York, for Booklet L-2, entitled the "Partial-Payment Plan."

The Citizens Savings & Trust Co., of Cleveland, Ohio, will furnish to our readers, upon request, Booklet P, which contains some very interesting information on banking by mail.

The Odd Lot Review, a weekly financial paper for small and large investors, sums in terse, readable form, financial developments from week to week. It can be read in fifteen minutes, and is edited with a view to keeping the business man in touch with investment opportunities. Sample copies will be sent on request to 61 Broadway, New York City.

The Bache Review has become most valuable to bankers and business men on the financial situation, because it condenses in a graphic manner the most comprehensive, reliable, and able views of current events as they affect business, finance, and investments. It is issued weekly by J. S. Bache & Company, 42 Broadway, New York. Sent on application.

Several interesting books describing public utility investments yielding from 6 to 7 per cent., and showing the stability of utility earnings, may be obtained upon request from H. M. Byllesby & Company, Engineers and Managers, 218 South La Salle Street, Chicago, and 1219 Trinity Building, New York.

Attractive investment opportunities are now to be had through the purchase of Foreign Government Bonds. Write Baruch Brothers, 60 Broadway, New York, members of New York Stock Exchange, for booklet giving full description.

Any one interested in the security market should send to L. R. Latrobe & Co., No. 111 Broadway, New York, for their statistical books on Copper Stocks, Motor Stocks, Standard Oil Stocks, Investor's Guide (270 pages), or Weekly Market Letter. This firm will mail you any one of these books free on request. Partial Payment Plan.

Williams, Troth & Coleman, Investment Securities, CO Wall Street, New York, offer public utility preferred stocks, yielding 5 to 8 per cent., and common stocks with enhancement possibilities. This offering is outlined in special current letter B, a copy of which will be supplied by the above-named firm on written request.

Every one interested in securities should have a copy of The Investor's Guide. It discusses all classes of bonds thoroughly and intelligently, and is adapted to the purposes of the large or small investor. E. F. Coombs & Co., 122 Broadway, New York City, will send you a copy on request.

First mortgage buyers will be interested in the Investor's Guide, published monthly by the National Bond & Mortgage Trust Company, 2940 Lincoln Avenue, Chicago,, Illinois. The Guide is sent free. Write and ask them to put you on the mailing list.

"$100 Bonds," Booklet C 33, is issued by John Muir & Co., 61 Broadway, New York City. This firm has specialized for years in 8100 bonds, and the booklet is a summary of the opportunities that this form of investment offers to the average man, with a comprehensive list of issues available in $100 form.

Investors desiring to acquire $100 bonds of the best known issues, and of a class that are legal for investment by Trustees and Savings Banks, should send for the special list E that has been prepared by Merrill, Lynch & Co., members of the New York Stock Exchange, 7 Wall Street, New York City.

The booklet, "Odd Lot Buying," issued by Hartshorne & Picabia, members of the New York Stock Exchange, 7 Wall Street, New York City, differs to a great extent from those issued by most firms doing business in odd lots of stock. The firm offers special inducements in the way of advice to small investors. Copies of this Booklet O-2 on request.

Mr. Atwood has written a financial booklet, "Making Your Money Work for You," especially for our readers. Write him at 95 Madison Avenue, New York, inclosing four cents in stamps, if you want a copy.