Thoughts on Lying on My Back and Reading a Seed Catalogue

IT is snowing outside; the sky is leaden; no birds sing.

The winter wind howls.

And I have been lying on my back, reading a seed catalog, and laughing to myself at poor old winter.

He is my hereditary enemy. The English have not watched the reports of Germany's condition more intently than I have marked the various stages of his.

They are hoping that Germany will give in before next autumn. I do not have to hope. I know positively that I have winter beaten. I have even marked down on my calendar the date in April when I shall celebrate my victory by my annual triumphal march.

When the date arrive I pack my old corduroy trousers in a suit-case, with the two shirts I bought from the United States Army store for sixty-five cents each, my old curved pipe and a can of the mixture that my wife lets me use outdoors but not inside the house, and set forth for my little farm in Massachusetts.

People wonder why I have a farm in the rockiest spot in the world, when I might have selected one of the fertile countries of Massachusetts or Connecticut or New York.

The trouble with these fertile farms is that they constantly tempt one to grow something useful. One feels conscience-stricken not to be trying to make the place pay.

I know that my place can not possibly pay. I know that nothing will grow on it but pine trees and flowers. I can plan all the vacant places to poises without one single twinge of conscience. I have a magnificent alibi for my inherent laziness. Why work, I say to myself, when it's no use? Why try to fight against Nature? Why fly in the face of Providence?

Yet a little sleep, a little slumber
A little folding of the hands to sleep.

Sleep and flowers—what more can one ask of a farm?

It is hard for me to understand people who have even one foot of land and how do not raise any flowers.

Just as a back yard full of rubbish always seems to me to suggest a rubbishy soul, and a barren back yard a more or less desolate character, so a back yard running over with flowers seems to cry out that in this house dwell beauty and peace and content.

For myself, I have already planned out just where the pansies are to be this summer, and the hollyhocks, and the sweet-williams, and the nasturtiums, and the roses.

I get right out after breakfast, and by nine o'clock the sweat is pouring down every degree of the longitude. I rejoice. I say to my soul, "Surely, soul, every drop of this sweat that rolls out of your system lengthens you life." I feel my neck getting sunburned, and I do not care. It is as if health were being poured into me from the great source of all health, as power is poured into a storage battery.

And Sundays after church, I take a book and lie down in the midst of my flowers, and look at the marvel of their coloring, and wonder how it is that out of the little black seeds I planted could have come such yellows and reds and purples and greens.

And people go by and see me stretched there, and I hear them tell each other that I am a fellow from New York who is sort of crazy, and who much have married a rich wife, as he never does any work.

And then I turn over and listen to the much more satisfying conversation of the flowers, who bend their heads and whisper in my ear:

"Consider the lilies of the field, how they grow; they toil not, neither do they spin: And yet I say unto you, That even Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like one of these. Wherefore, if God so clothe the grass of the field, which to-day is, and to-morrow is cast into the oven, shall he not much more clothe you, O ye of little faith? . . . Take therefore no thought for the morrow: for the morrow shall take thought for the things of itself. Sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof."

Bruce Barton, Editor.

Hot Coals

By GERTRUDE BROOKE HAMILTON

Illustrations by W. C. Nims

LILY BELAIRE was dead—and through the room there shrilled the mysterious bleat of a newborn child.

In the kitchen of the house three spare, straight-backed women of Coventry sat around the glowing cook-stove.

"Lily died two months a day and six hours after Gus Belaire was lugged home from the saloon with a bullet in his head," tabulated Betsy Rathbun, wife of the Coventry baker.

Lucretia Goth, wife of the notary, folded her hands on her stomach and made a biblical commentary on the passing of Lily: ""Man is like to vanity; his days are as a shadow that passed away.'"

"Dear me suz!" sighed Thankful Meekes, the Coventry dressmaker. "I doan't know but as how things might hev be'n worse fer Lily."

Thankful pouched her mouth as if she were sticking pins into it.

Betsy gave Thankful a silencing retort:

"Nine sticks in the wood-shed—half sack o' flour, seven white potatoes, an onion, and a quarter-bag o' salt in the pantry—her man two months in the Nathan Hale cemetery—three cotton slips and one flannel barrow fer her girl child—and not enough money ter pay fer her own burying!"

"I know what Thankful means, Betsy," said Lucretia Goth, with relish. "Lily hed vain ways. Remember thet county-fair story about her and rich Prime Luxe? Yes, Thankful; things might hev be'n worse fer Lily."

Lucretia folded her hands on her stomach.

Abigail Felt, widow of the blacksmith, came into the room. She had the baby that Lily had died to give birth to, wrapped in a shawl, in the bond of her brawny arm.

The three women around the cook-stove eyed the human atom that had sprung from the union of Lily, beauty of Coventry, and Gus, drunkard of Coventry, with triumphant gloom.

With her free hand Abigail filled a tin basin with warm water from the kettle on the stove.

"Betsy," she said stolidly, "you and Thankful lay Lily Belaire out. Lucretia, you go down street and git the undertaker."

With no sign of emotion on her weather-beaten face, Abigail sat beside the stove to wash and dress the wizened atom squealing itself to life.

"I'm going ter riz up this child," Abigail announced impassively.

Betsy Rathbun adjusted her spectacles. "You're going ter riz up Lily Belaire's child?" she repeated.

"Dear me suz!" gasped Thankful Meekes, pouching her mouth.

"You're cracked, Abigail Felt!" snapped Lucretia Goth.

She departed to get the undertaker. Betsy and Thankful, lugubrious, took off their bonnets and went up the stairs.

ABIGAIL FELT, having washed and dried the baby, pinned it into a flannel barrow, and papoosed it in a horse blanket. Jogging the blanketed baby on one arm, she stalked from the kitchen out into the dank air of Coventry.

She went down the main street, swept by the bleak winds from Coventry Lake, to the blacksmith shop that she had managed since the death of Job Felt, her husband.

Hard of muscle, broad of back, silent unless the occasion demanded speech, Abigail, amazon widow of Job, specialized in the repairing of farm machinery. The farmers, who had at first guffawed at the idea of a woman blacksmith, were forced to admit that the jobs they reluctantly brought Abigail were well done. Any day in the week—unless she was acting as midwife to the poorer women of Coventry—Abigail might be seen standing at her forge, welding, riveting, and handling hot irons.

Abigail carried Lily Belaire's baby into the smithy and warmed it at the forge.

"Cyrus," she said to Lucretia Goth's little boy, who was diligently building with horseshoes at a wooden bench, "fetch me a pint o' milk from yer house."

Little Cyrus Goth started obediently on the errand. His round blue eyes fell on the wrinkled face incased in the horse blanket.

"What's that, Mis' Felt?" he asked, drawing near.

"A baby," said Abigail. "Ain't she purty?"

Cyrus came closer, and stood on tiptoe to inspect the baby.

"Is it got any name, Mis' Felt?" he questioned.

Abigail nodded. "I'm going ter call her Gentian," she said slowly. "Her mother hed a flower name. And there ain't no purtier nor rarer flower than the blue gentian. Run along, Cyrus, and git her milk."

COVENTRY, from the first, grimly anticipated the growing up of Gentian Belaire, foster-daughter of Abigail Felt.

When Gentian's head sprouted coppery black curls, the dressmaker pouched her mouth. When Gentian's eyes deepened to dusky brown, with the red lights of the forge fires in them, the baker's wife adjusted her spectacles and tabulated the vanities of Lily, who slumbered in the cemetery over Coventry Lake. When Gentian developed a taunting, wayward tongue, the wife of the notary, folding her hands on her stomach, emphatically quoted: "'Pride goeth before destruction, and a haughty spirit before a fall!'"

At fifteen Gentian left school—and galvanized Coventry by donning cap and apron of leather and serving an apprenticeship in the smithy. At eighteen Gentian—proficient in handling tongs and bellows—was a rare tidbit for the women's tongues; and the farm machinery in and around Coventry needed a deal of repairing.

One Saturday morning the blacksmith's shop was doing a thriving business. Phineas Dobbyn had brought an iron wheel to be rimmed. Leander Osgood had a harrow to be teethed. Rufus Topliff had a plow to be bladed. Joel Burpee wanted a mule shod.

Abigail Felt, a grisly giantess at sixty, worked at the flaming forge.

Gentian ably assisted her foster-mother—fetching and carrying tools, hardening and cooling the finished products by plunging them into a tub of water, and salting the fire to intensify the heat. While she ardently attended to these duties, her tongue played on the young farmers.

"Why so sad, Leander?" she inquired of Osgood, who stood afar, pulling his meager nose. "Are you thinking of the pennies you may have to spend for postals if I should chance to go away from Coventry?"

Her eyes alighted on Phineas Dobbyn, sheepishly licking his crooked front tooth.

"You might have danced with me the other day at the fair, Phineas. Were you afraid to ask me because I danced twice with the mighty Mr. Ambrose Luxe?"

Plucking nails from the box behind the door, she spoke to flap-eared Joel Burpee:

"The last posy you sent me is dead and dry—and Lillie Goth says she has a fresh one."

She tipped her leather cap to turnip-faced Rufus Topliff.

"How fine you look this morning, Rufus—have you oiled your hair with wagon grease for Sunday? If ever I leave Coventry, it will fall on Sunday!"

Laughing, she rolled Phineas Osgood's rimmed wheel along the baked earth floor to him.

Phineas paid for the rimming, shouldered his wheel, and, foolishly thrusting his tongue through his teeth, went away.

In turn, as harrow, plow, and mule were finished, Leander, Rufus, and Joel departed.

Abigail labored in silence at the forge. Gentian busied herself with the tongs. Outside, the morning clouded. The main street of Coventry wound like a skein of dark yarn to Coventry Lake, whipped to turbid blackness in the lowering weather. The wind blew showers of sparks down the forge chimney and scudded them through the shop.

Gentian, handling red-hot pieces of steel, sang:

"Let hammer on anvil ring!
And the forge fire brightly shine!
Let wars rage still,
While I work with a will
At this peaceful trade of mine!"

An impetuous hand wrenched open the smoke-stained window of the shop, and a resonant voice cried: "Stop singing, Gennie! Good news!"

"No news is good enough to interrupt my good music," retorted Gentian, without looking at the window.

"Clang! Clang! Clang!
Huzza for the anvil, the forge, and the sledge!
Huzza for the sparks that fly!"

"Will you hear the news, Mis' Fel?" shouted the vibrant masculine voice above

---

the clang. A long leg was flung over the smoke-stained sill, and Cyrus Goth—the wind in his cheeks and the rough touch of the wind on his hair—stepped into the smithy.

He crossed it. He seized the tongs from Gentian's hands, threw them aside, and brought the little brown hands together with a resounding smack.

"Listen to the news, Gennie!"

Alert, glowing, his face all but touched hers.

"I've had a promotion in the Luxe ammunition works! A bigger job!"

"No need to spoil my job," shrugged Gentian, her color fluctuating as she looked at the tongs on the floor.

Cyrus Goth dropped her hands.

"Little you care whether I'm promoted or not!" he said.

"Little I care!" she agreed. She picked up the tongs and pinched the piece of steel between them. "How big is the raise?" she asked, thrusting the steel into the forge.

"Five dollars," he answered shortly. "I'm making twenty a week now. And I've got my eye on the job of foreman in the small drill press-room. It pulls five thousand a year."

"I may be earning bigger money myself soon," she said airily.

His face grew good-humored.

"Quit your bragging, Gennie," he teased, pulling a burnished black curl.

"I mean what I say." She was intent on the quivering steel in the fire. "I may be going away soon."

His face became anxious. He looked at Abigail Felt.

"Gennie's fooling about this going-away stuff; isn't she, Mis' Felt?" he asked.

"No; I'm not fooling," said Gentian. "I mean it." She laid her hand on her heart. "How the males will blubber when I leave!" she joyously meditated.

"Oh, chuck your nonsense, Gennie!"

Cyrus Goth was tolerant again. Then his handsome face became serious.

"Gennie," he added, catching her slim, strong arm, "now that I'm making twenty a week, what do you say to getting married?"

She drew out the red-hot steel, so that it shone between them.

"Look out!" she warned. "You'll burn yourself!"

She carried the steel to the anvil—and listened with satisfaction to the clangor of Abigail's sledge hammer. Hands on her hips, color rushing up to her temples, she looked over her shoulder at Cyrus Goth. It was a reluctant look, that grew in sweetness and volume as his fine, steadfast eyes caught and held her eyes.

OUT on the main street, at the point where the blacksmith shop jutted to face the office of the notary, an automobile horn sounded.

Gentian Belaire's momentary gravity evaporated. A look of vanity sparkled over her features. She gave a slight laugh, straightened her leather apron, and went to the broad doors of the smithy.

In the honking automobile before the shop sat Ambrose Luxe, nephew of old Prime Luke, who owned the ammunition works in Coventry. Ambrose spent most Of his time in New York—running up to Coventry in the hunting and fishing seasons.

He took his hand from the automobile horn as Gentian appeared.

"I'm stalled, friend," he said, with an infectious laugh. "There's a cog loose somewhere. Can you fix me up?"

Gentian nodded, and ran back into the shop. Without noticing Cyrus Goth, who was keenly watching her, she caught up a tool-box, and flew with the box out to the automobile. She deposited the box on the ground, selected a monkey-wrench, and crawled under the car. Flat on her back, with her black head on the road and her hands busy with the wrench, she said:

"Some day you'll run over me, when you get me down like this, Mr. Ambrose Luxe."

"And send you to paradise while your soul is still white, child?" laughed Luxe.

"If ever I get to the other side of Jordan, according to Mis' Goth, there'll be joy over a scrubbed-up scarlet soul," said Gentian, with a fling at sophistry.

Ambrose Luxe laughed.

Gentian turned on her side under the car to investigate the bolts.

"Cyrus Goth has been promoted again," she said.

"Has he?" The lazy tone betrayed scant interest.

"He's going to be a big gun in your uncle's works," she boasted.

"Everybody's gunning these days," conceded Ambrose, without point.

"Somebody's going away," said Gentian, plying the wrench.

"I'm always going or coming," agreed Luxe serenely.

"I didn't mean you. I'm going away."

"So?" His tone was alive with interest. "Where are you going?'

She laughed before she answered: "To New York."

"Don't go there, child," quickly.

"Why not?"

"Because you want to stay good and happy."

"I want to make five thousand a year."

"Few make it in New York. You'll hear them talk in thousands—and you'll find that they live in pennies. But—you may get by if you open a blacksmith shop there."

Hot color stung her face. She was silent.

Ambrose Luxe sat quiescent at the steering wheel, looking ahead. He had attractive eyes of a volatile gray-green.

Around the bend of the windy street came Lucretia Goth, thin and erect in her late fifties. With Lucretia was her youngest daughter, Lulie—a little saint of seventeen with a timid air.

Ambrose Luxe spoke to theme as they approached. "How is your good health, Mrs. Goth?" he said pleasantly, taking off his hat.

Lucretia Goth stopped. "Middling, Mr. Luxe," she replied.

"How-do-you-do, Lulie?" said Luxe.

Lulie Goth dimpled and blushed.

"Has your machine broke down, Mr. Luxe?" sharply inquired Lucretia, looking at the tool-box and at the open doors of the smithy.

"It breaks down right often, Mis' Goth!" said Gentian Belaire, crawling from under the car.

Lucretia Goth folded her hands on her stomach. She chastened the colorful, tousled Gentian with a look of wrath. Righteously she drew Lulie on.

Gentian dusted her back with her cap, and waved it insolently after Cyrus Goth's mother.

"Stay in Coventry, friend," said Ambrose Luxe to Gentian, as he started his car. "Be good and you will he happy."

The glance he sent back was full of lazy laughter.

Gentian picked up her tool-box and went back into the smithy.

CYRUS was waiting for her.

"Gennie," he said impetuously, "I want things settled up. Will you marry me, or won't you?" His face was haggard in its anxiety. He caught her by the arms. "I'm going to make a big thing of life!" he cried impellingly. "And I want you to be part of it. I love you, Gennie—Mis' Felt knows how well I'll take care of you. Marry me. Now!"

His urgent hands shook on her shoulders.

"Not yet," evaded Gentian. Her words tripped in their eagerness. "I'm going away. If your brain is waking up to five thousand a year, so is mine. I want to make something of myself—something big! I'm going to New York."

Her shoulders slipped from his grasp. But in her upward look there was a hint of tears, and her lips trembled slightly as she conceded:

"We'll marry some day—maybe."

"You don't give a darn about me," said Cyrus Goth, with grim finality. "If you loved me you'd want to stay in Coventry. You'd be sweet to my mother. You'd understand your part in my life better—the woman's part. It's no smaller than the man's part: it's simply different."

He made a gesture that despaired of her.

"I am what I am," said Gentian Belaire flippantly.

"And that's why I love you!" admitted Cyrus, losing his anger. "Oh, Gennie!" he said in a muffled tone. Unconscious of old Abigail at the forge, he seized Gentian in his arms and kissed her. "Be true to me—be true to yourself," he implored her.

Her face, abloom with the kiss, showed no uncertainty.

"Be true to me—be true to yourself!" she flung back.

He kissed her again, with a broken breath. "You don't love me," he said.

He gave her a keen, unhappy look, and left the shop.

The glance she sent after him sobered her face. Then, like a cyclone, she whirled to Abigail and flung her arms around the gaunt, stolid figure.

"You must give me the money to go to New York and study music, Mother Abigail," she cried. "It will be a good investment. I believe in my voice! It has the ring of the anvil in it!" Her face began to sparkle. "Maybe I'll be one of the few in New York who make five thousand a year!"

GENTIAN left Coventry a week later, to go to New York. Cyrus Goth had remonstrated, commanded, and cajoled in vain. Abigail Felt was the only person at the station to wish Gentian God-speed.

Lucretia Goth, hands folded on her stomach, made a biblical commentary on the departure of Gentian: "'Can one go upon hot coals, and his feet not be burned?'"

Gentian herself was in high spirits. The hour's ride to Hartford, through wild, hilly scenery, swelled the singing in her blood. She had the address of a boarding-house on East Thirty-fourth Street in New York, kept by Miss Tabitha Rathbun, cousin of the Rathbuns who ran the Coventry bakery. Also she had the professional card of a vocal teacher, given her by Ambrose Luxe.

There was no limit to her soaring thoughts as she changed at Hartford to a New York express. Was she not daughter of the beauty of Coventry? Did not her vanity exceed her mother's? Had not the wild blood of her father colored her vividly? Was she not a personality, a unique, striking sort of young woman—the far-famed blacksmith of Coventry?

Her shapely feet, shod in stout leather, all but danced on the ungainly telescope bag in which Abigail had packed, among other things, heavy underclothing and knitted stockings, a red flannel petticoat trimmed with crocheted edging, and two blouses of pink and blue outing flannel.

Miss Tabitha Rathbun's four-story brownstone boarding-house on East Thirty-fourth Street impressed Gentian Belaire as palatial. The long, furniture-crowded parlor of the boarding-house also pleased her. And Miss Tabitha, with a false "front" and an air of condescending hospitality, impressed her as a personage. Even the smudgy, high-heeled maid who showed her to a fourth-floor back made Gentian feel pleasantly opulent. She wrote Cyrus Goth that she was delightfully fixed.

The next day Gentian Belaire caught sight of herself in the mirror of a Fifth Avenue shop-window, and discovered how countrified she looked. She immediately bought a fur-trimmed coat, a pair of champagne-colored boots, a turban

---

with a silver chin-strap, and a pair of kid gloves.

Attired in her new finery, she interviewed a vocal teacher. Without enthusiasm he tried her voice, and named terms that staggered her.

She returned to the boarding-house piqued. Wanting somebody to talk to that evening, she knocked on the door of the room next to hers.

THE occupant of the room—Mademoiselle Fantôme, a war-saddened Frenchwoman who presided over "La Petite Vanité," a little blouse shop—listened politely to Gentian Belaire's impulsive, egotistical confidences. She complimented Gentian prettily on her looks, lamenting that they should be devoured by carnivorous Manhattan, and she offered Gentian a position as blouse model in La Petite Vanite.

Gentian refused the offer—she had come to New York to queen, not to serve! She asked Mademoiselle Fantôme how to go about getting on the stage. The Frenchwoman discouraged her—talked extravagantly of art and Bernhardt.

"I have talent to burn!" bragged Gentian, feeling small.

"It is necessary to have genius, ma fille," sighed Mademoiselle Fantôme. "Then, too, we must have wit, originality."

"My witty tongue was rather well known in Coventry," boasted Gentian. "And as for originality—I think I have plenty of that!"

Flushed, piqued, she flouted back to her room.

Gentian Belaire was called to the telephone a few days later.

Ambrose Luxe's idle voice came over the wire:

"So you came to New York—foolish child! Are you making five thousand a year?"

"No; I'm spending five thousand," answered Gentian.

"That's good—the sooner you spend your money, the sooner you'll go back."

"I'll never go back."

"Don't say that. Have you started your singing lessons?"

"No."

"What are you doing?"

"Looking about."

"You'd better go home."

"You're like everybody else in this town—crying down endeavor."

"I'll take that up with you. To prove my helpful sympathy, I'll escort you to-night to the sort of musical show you must be seeing if you're going to sing. If you won't go back to Coventry—be ready at eight o'clock."

"I'll be ready," laughed Gentian.

Ambrose Luxe began, from that night, to show Gentian Belaire a good time in New York. And the good times, true in tempo, perfect in rhythm, with a spirit and swing that she could not resist, went to her head.

She put off her ambitions for a while—to drink her tipple of fun. And, because the weekly postal order for ten dollars that Abigail sent was next to nothing in New York, Gentian—as a temporary thing—accepted Mademoiselle Fantôme's offer and became a blouse model in La Petite Vanité.

At the end of three months Cyrus Goth came from Coventry to see her.

Gun-making was developing Cyrus. Where he had been loose iron in the foundry, he was now something to be reckoned with. His first words to her were:

"No more waiting. I'm making thirty a week; we can live on that. I've come for you, Gennie."

"I'm making thirty a week myself, Cyrus," said Gentian blithely.

Cyrus flushed. "I'm coming up fast to that five-thousand-a-year job," he tersely stated. "Work—that's my slogan. I'm getting there."

"Mademoiselle Fantôme, just over me, gets five thousand a year," flipped Gentian. "She sends four thousand to France."

The flush rose to his temples.

"Are you working up to her position?" he asked angrily.

"Maybe," she said gaily. "It takes a lot of money to live."

He looked at her beaded lace blouse.

"I don't like your clothes," he said, point-blank. "You've changed."

"I'm not smitten by the change in your

manners," she laughed. "You're as rude as your mother."

"We'll leave my mother out of the conversation." His eyes glinted. "Gennie," he said firmly, sitting beside her on Miss Tabitha's canary-colored divan, "it's 'yea' or 'nay.' I love you. There's never been another girl in my life. I want to take care of you—to shield you from yourself; for you need shielding. I want to halve my life with you. But I don't want you if you don't want me. If your ambitions are stronger than your love for me, I'll cut you out. If you're after five thousand a year on your own account, if you're that self-sufficient—why, you don't need me. And if a woman doesn't need a man she doesn't love him."

Though his voice sank and his handsome face paled, his manner brooked no subterfuges or evasions.

Gentian sat immobile, her eyes on the imitation Oriental rug under her well shod feet. His shoulder all but touched hers; and the impending sense of contact brought an involuntary tremble to her lips.

SHE stood up, with a shallow gesture.

"I think that we've drifted apart," she said. "It's fine that you're doing well, and I appreciate what you offer me." Her voice lagged slightly, her upward look verged close to earnestness. "But, Cyrus,"—trivial again,—"don't be hurt if I tell you that the men here spend thirty dollars a week on a girl, and ask nothing back for it. You want everything for it," quickly—"sole possession and my independence. I'm not the naive little blacksmith who left Coventry three months ago. I know how to dress, and order a meal, and wear orchids. Does it occur to you, in the conceit of your progress, that you bid a trifle low?"

She laughed, to steady her lips.

On his feet, close enough to strike or caress her, Cyrus Goth maintained his control.

"Good-by," he said, and left her.

HUMMING a fox-trot, Gentian Belaire went up to Mademoiselle Fantôme.

"I've passed a mile-stone," she said carelessly to the Frenchwoman. "Congratulate me."

She pulled aside the somber window curtain, and stared with brilliant eyes down at the Thirty-fourth Street traffic.

Mademoiselle Fantôme was tactfully silent.

"You've heard me speak of Cyrus Goth," said Gentian at length. "Well—he's come and gone." She laughed without depth.

"You are like Paris before the war, pauvrette," said the saddened Frenchwoman. "After the carnage how different you will be."

"There'll be no carnage in my life," said Gentian vapidly. "I have too little heart for that."

"Ah, ma pouponne!" sighed the French-woman: "You are all heart. You have no head. You refuse a fine, honorable husband like your Monsieur Goth you tell me of, for a camarade de jeu. Monsieur Luxe is playing the game with you." She lifted shadowy, expressive hands. "How soon it is over! How little it amounts to! A flower, a satin slipper, a kiss, a pang. Crêpe for the slaughtered youth!"

Hands on her slim hips, Gentian refuted these laments by dancing around the room.

"No man shall boast of my slaughtered youth!" she declared. She spun into her own room.

She dashed off a note to Ambrose Luxe:

It was two weeks before Ambrose Luxe answered her note by sending her some roses. Luxe was seldom ardently prompt. He was apt to give the impression of holding pleasure off to ripen it.

WHEN he came, he came in mellow mood.

"My, you're looking well," he said. "Fie on you, friend, for trying to make me believe that you've missed me."

"How's Coventry?" asked Gentian, her eyes shining.

"Fine. I've a dish of gossip for you. Thankful Meekes passed away last Thursday, and little Lulie Goth warbled quite touchingly at the funeral. Joel Burpee has wedded Lydia Rathbun. And your good foster-mother has had the blacksmith shop repainted."

He took her arm as they descended the steps of Miss Tabitha's boarding-house.

"What sort of party shall we have to-night?" he asked.

"You choose," said Gentian.

"I feel like dancing."

"I don't."

"I'm rather hungry."

"I'm not."

He laughed idly. "Getting tired of parties?"

"Maybe," she wilfully admitted.

His step suggested a loiter.

"What shall we do? Just walk?"

"Yes; let's hike." Purposeless steps carried her on.

He kept pace with her. Turning uptown at Fifth Avenue, they walked as far as Central Park in a silence unusual.

"Shall we turn back?" he asked.

"No." She was still walking without aim. "Let's go through the Park."

"Tired of the glitter?" His tone was a bit meditative.

She turned back abruptly.

He laughed. "Don't get mad," he said.

She spoke irrelevantly: "Cyrus Goth was down from Coventry two weeks ago."

Luxe gave her a side glance. His face changed.

She laughed. "Don't get mad!"

THE OTHER BROWN

By ADELE LUEHRMANN

Illustration by Lucius W. Hitchcock

AS Mrs. Gil's cab bore her away, Johansen, turning to reënter his house, lingered a moment to look up at it. Its aspect seemed to him to have changed. Certainly it was not the dull gray pile of stones to which he had come from his office only a few hours before—to which for years he had returned when the best hours of his days, the energy- and thought-absorbing ones of business, were over. He glanced down the avenue—it, too, seemed changed. And the park opposite—everything—the world was changed.

Carl's child alive! His grandchild! A young woman now, and his—his by the rights of blood, of nature. He could not realize it yet, hardly dared to let himself try. After all, the story might be untrue— But no; the woman herself had believed it—he could not doubt that—and as far as her story had gone it had been straightforward. Her mother had given the baby away—that, of course, was what had happened—for its own good, she had thought, when its young mother lay dying or dead. A secret exchange had been made, evidently—the live child for the dead one.

But such an exchange could hardly have been effected without the consent of the attending physician. Back to Johansen's mind sprang the name signed to the death certificate and to the report of the illness—P. Tierney. A curious idea flashed into his mind. Could it, by any possibility, be Dr. Percival Tierney, the New York man of whom he had often heard? Probably not; yet the point was worth investigating.

Yielding to an impulse as he reëntered the house, he turned aside for a moment and switched on the lights in the drawing-room. It was a room remarkable both for its beauty as a whole and for the beauty of its furnishings. He let his glance wander along from one to another of the familiar objects, some of them collected by his wife, from whom he had imbibed his interest in such things. Old, lovely, rare, each one—and dead. Life was what the room wanted—the whole house. And youth.

Now, at last, it was to see youth again, hear it, feel it! He tried to imagine the house with a young girl in it, flitting about it like a sprite, and laughing! He could still recall how it had seemed when Carl was there—the life and noise, the bang and rush. But a girl would be different. His fancy placed her here and there in the room. How would she look? he wondered. Was she tall? Carl had been tall. Would she be fair like him, or dark like her Italian mother?

A PANG of apprehension seized him.

There were others besides herself to be considered—the people who had cared for her all these years, whose claim could not be denied. Just how much had Mrs. Gil meant in promising to give her back to him? Was he to have her only as an interest in his life, or as a presence in his house? He sighed. He would thank God for either.

Leaving the drawing-room, he walked back to a small room adjoining the library, where there was a telephone, intending to call up the District Attorney and if possible see him that night.

As his hand reached the receiver, the bell rang, and to his surprise he recognized Miles Redding's voice.

"What I called you about, Mr. Johansen," the voice presently explained. "is to ask if you ever knew a family in Spitzen named McRae? They had a son called Roderick. Ever hear of them?"

"Yes," answered Johansen. "I didn't know them personally, however."

"Know anything about the son—afterwards—in England?" There was a hint of eagerness in the sharp stressing of the two words.

"Yes, I do—but I would rather not discuss the matter over the 'phone."

"Of course not," the District Attorney concurred. "I only wanted to find out if you knew anything. I wonder—" He hesitated. "You see, I don't like to leave here just now; may be called—"

"I'll come to you, then," Johansen said, glad to get the interview he wanted without seeking it. "You've heard from London, I take it."

"Yes—and Spitzen."

"Spitzen! What do you mean? There can't be a connection between the two cases—"

"Well—looks like it. But we want more facts. The cable was very brief."

"I see. That's very interesting. It didn't occur to me as possible, or I would have told you last night of Welles-Hewitt's part in the other case. You are at home now, are you? I can see you at once?"

"As soon as you like," said Redding. "And thank you for coming."

Johansen hung up, then called his garage for a car. He was ready and waiting for it when it arrived, and as he started on the short run to the Redding house he was frowning rather worriedly. Spitzen? What had the detective sent there found out? He had gone to discover, if possible, what the mysterious Brown had been doing in the place. Evidently he had succeeded. And what he had learned had to do with the ill-fated Roderick McRae. But how?

THIS question was answered by the detective himself, whom Johansen found with the District Attorney. At the latter's request, Scarborough repeated the report of his day in Spitzen. He had had no difficulty in tracing Brown's movements there, he said. The young man had registered at the main hotel, and had spent his time afterward in a house-to-house canvass of the older residents, the remnants of the Swedish settlement in which the town had had its origin. Most of these were quite old people, and, their lives being uneventful, they had willingly talked to the young man who had wanted to know what they knew, if anything, about a family named McRae, who had spent a year or two among them about thirty-five years before. There had been three McRaes—father, mother, and a son about twelve years old, named Roderick.

Very few of those questioned, Scarborough learned, had been able to give the inquirer any information; but here and there he had encountered some one who did remember such a family, though what had become of them after they left the place was not known. McRae had been a queer man, it appeared, shiftless and unreliable, never working at any job regularly, but wasting his time tinkering in his wood-house, trying to invent something to make his fortune. Sometimes he had stayed in the wood-house for days, even sleeping there, his wife carrying his meals to him and leaving them outside the door for fear of disturbing him.

This reminiscence Brown had carefully recorded on paper, with the signature of the narrator. Other things he had written down also: the addresses of men, now living elsewhere, who had been, he was told by their mothers, playmates of the boy Roderick; and one such former playmate he found still in Spitzen, a man of fifty, who worked in the Johansen mills.

To Scarborough this man had recounted his talk with Brown. He had told the latter, he said, what he remembered of Roddy McRae. They had played together. And Carlie Johansen, the son of Lars Johansen, had played with them. Queer, how things had turned out, wasn't it? There was he, living and well, with a

Continued on page 20

How I Built My Home

The Prize Story

ON faith, rabbits, and kodak pictures we built our home.

The moderate wages of ninety dollars a month earned by my husband as journeyman plumber, before the days of union labor prices in our town, were barely sufficient for daily necessities for a family of five. Yet we indulged in dreams of such luxury as owning our own home.

Dreams built on faith, and supported by hard work, often come true. This one did.

We decided to save every penny, and earn every penny we could, till we had saved $200 to buy a lot. Then we would get the Building and Loan Company to build a house, and would repay the cost at a certain price each month, just as if we were paying rent. By scheming, and watching the pantry to save every little dry onion, and by wearing clothes patched over and over, we could save about $8 each month on the regular income. Twice we saved $11, but sometimes it was only $5, so $8 was the average.

Sometimes it was saved at the expense of my own hunger. But the three children were happy. Patches meant nothing to them. My husband was happy. I was too. It became a passion to save. We found ourselves scheming to do without things with as great pleasure as a general must find in scheming for a campaign to conserve military forces.

My husband spent $4 for eight rabbits, and built them a roomy warren with underground chambers. When these rabbits began to multiply, we sold them to meat markets at twenty cents a pound. Each young rabbit brought a price of from forty to fifty cents. A near-by sanatorium bargained for as many as we could supply.

Four months after my husband started in the rabbit business he had $10 extra to put with the small monthly savings. The next month he had $14. There was no expense in keeping and killing and dressing the rabbits, excepting $2 a month for alfalfa and greens. He did the killing and dressing after working hours. Each month the rabbits brought more.

In the meantime, I was busy earning a few dollars for the home builders' fund. An advertisement in a motorcycle magazine for motorcycle and bicycle pictures caught my eye. I reveled in snapping things with my kodak, anyway. It was one my brother had given me two years before. With my kodak, and the two children who were too young to be in school, I haunted the park district and the University Heights district, where motorists could always be "shot" by a skilled kodak hunter any bright day. I developed the films myself. I did some foolish shooting that brought no return. But, at $1 each for pictures of motorists sold to the motorcycle magazines, I soon added considerable to our savings. Eighteen months from the time we started to save we had $250 saved for the home lot.

But before buying a lot, as we at first had planned, we saw a five-room house set in a garden of roses, that looked like paradise to us. The price was $1200. There was no bath-room; but, with its hundred feet of ground, and hundreds of roses, vines, and a kitchen orchard, it suited us. The owner was finally persuaded to accept a first payment of $250

and to carry a mortgage at 7 per cent. for the balance.

No bridal couple could have been more happy in their new home than we were, after eight years of married life, in this wonderful achievement of a house of our own! Of course it required more saving and earning and skimping to pay out. But we had gained so much confidence in the effort for the first hundred dollars that we knew we could easily pay for a $1200 house. Later my husband built a small room and installed bath-room fixtures.

Yes—the house was paid for some time ago; and later sold at double the price we originally paid. We are now living in a $5000 corner brick house in the park district. Yes, we owe about half that figure on the new home. But we know how to earn and how to save, and we have faith in the future.

A. W. S., Albuquerque. N. M.

They Kept Their Baby in a Tent

ONE evening I had just put the baby to bed when Fred came running up the steps.

"Florence," he cried, "if you will be a good sport we can have our own home."

And this is the story of how we did it.

We lived in San Francisco, in a modest little flat, on $80 a month, and we had one baby. We owned a little piece of property 18 by 50 feet, on the edge of a good neighborhood, which Fred, in his bachelor days, had bought cheaply on the instalment plan, and, try as hard as we might, we had never been able to sell it. By careful planning we lived nicely, and had managed to save $200 in the four years we had been married.

That night we did much planning and calculating. We decided to live in a tent on our lot, and to build our house nights, Sundays, and holidays. The one thing we were determined on was not to go into debt, so that if Fred wanted to change his position he could. He was working in a lawyer's office at that time.

We canvassed the wrecking and salvage companies, and bought second-hand plumbing and a patent chimney, with fittings and materials complete, for $51. We advertised, and bought a practically new waterproof tent, 14 by 24 feet, for $60. In the evenings we studied Starbuck's "Practical Plumbing," which we got from the public library, and on Sundays put theory into practice. At last we moved, and when we went to bed on the Fourth of July it was in our new tent house, and with $71 still in the bank.

People talked to us about the risk we ran in keeping a baby in a tent in the rainy season; but the stove kept us warm, and the room was really attractive, with its improvised painted furniture.

Fred built an entrance porch of posts and shingles, over which I

coaxed some obliging hop-vines in an incredibly short time. We were both young and strong, and the difficulties we faced seemed small beside the wonderful fact that we were to have our own home.

By careful marketing, to keep the same standard of good food at less cost; by walking instead of riding; and by taking our pleasures in picnic suppers in some corner of the city, on the water-front, or in the park, we managed to save $20 a month, with which we bought materials for our house.

Our house was simple in plan: a large living and dining room combined, 12 by 30 feet; a bedroom, 8½ by 12; a kitchen, 5 by 13½; and a bath-room, 5 by 7.

The bricks were furnished by some Italian boys, from the remnants of a building destroyed by the San Francisco fire. We paid $15 for them. The house cost $621. With the exception of two days for a carpenter to help in the heavy framing, we did the work ourselves, and I must add that this was the first work of the kind that either of us had ever done.

We paid for it in two years. The extra money came from some journalistic work that Fred did.

Our materials were almost without exception second-hand, bought chiefly from the salvage companies. The entire result was most attractive, and the proof of it is that we sold the house the following year for four times what it cost us—though not without regrets; for it had given us our first start.

F. H. S., San Francisco, California.

A School-Teacher's Story

MY friends said I was crazy for thinking of building a house, for I was an old-maid school-teacher on a salary of $780 a year, and how could I ever pay for it? But I was tired of boarding and of living in rented houses. So build I would.

I got my start by buying, for a very small sum, a mortgage which the holders did not consider worth foreclosing. To my surprise, the property increased rapidly in value, till in 1902 I sold it for $1400. With this money I paid a small college debt, and the next spring I bought a town lot at a forced sale, in a good neighborhood, for $750, and began to build a house of seven rooms and bath, which I planned in suites, so that I might have my own apartment, separate from the part which I intended to rent.

As soon as the framework was up, I mortgaged the place for $1600 at seven per cent. to go on with the building, the contract price being $2100. I paid the contractor $100 a week.

On October 9 the contractor announced that I might move in, but he needed $400 to finish paying the lumber bill. I gave him a check for that amount, and the next day I took possession, proud and happy, at last under my own vine and fig tree.

Two days later the contractor appeared with a receipted bill for lumber amounting to more than $900, and demanded the balance of the contract-price—something over $500. Following some instinct that I can not explain, I refused to settle. A strange fear seized me—a fear that all was not right; so I rushed to a telephone and called up the lumber company. Finding that not a penny had been paid on the lumber, I hurried to the bank and stopped payment on my $400 check.

Then I investigated, and found that the rascal still owed the hardware man, the plumber, the plasterer, the electrician, and the painter.

He again demanded the $900, and sent a lawyer to file a lien on the house. But when I explained the situation, the lawyer begged my pardon and declared that he was on the wrong side of the case. I told the contractor that if any part of the contract price remained after all these bills were paid, he should have it. But he did not wait to see. He disappeared.

Of course I could not pay all, for it required $300 more than the contract price; but my creditors were very courteous, and as fast as my salary was earned I paid it on these debts.

I had some furniture, but not enough to fit up apartments for rent; but secondhand stores were plentiful, and it is marvelous what sandpaper, combined with muscle and three coats of varnish, will do for a piece that once was good. In less than two months the apartment was occupied, and since then it has stood idle very little.

My rents have ranged from nothing to $50 a month, depending on how much of the house I have rented, and one month brought me $63.

At the same time I have had a home. My salary has been increased four times since I first thought of building. I now receive $960 a year. So, with careful planning, doing my own laundry work, and making most of my own clothes,—for I am an expert with both the washboard and the needle,—I have been able to save enough to lift the mortgage, build two sleeping-porches and an extra kitchen, and buy a new piano, besides making some investments, one of which is a ten-acre orchard that I am paying for by the month, and which is now bearing its first crop.

It has been my custom to set aside one tenth of my income for church or charitable purposes, so I trust this striving for a home has not made me miserly or narrow.

L. C., Colorado Springs, Col.

Times Change, but People Stay the Same

IN 1865 the war was coming to a close. Confederate money had almost no valuation; business was suspended, stores were empty; no supplies of any kind were to be had, except those made at home. My sister and I were soldiers' wives. We kept house together. Our husbands were under arms in a distant State.

Under all this heavy pressure of the war, our house was burned. It was our home by inheritance. We were homeless, each of us with a little three-year-old daughter. Our only monetary asset consisted of one thousand dollars in Confederate money.

We resolved to build a new house on the site. Labor was ten dollars a day and ox-teams twenty dollars a day. Mules were not to be had; they were all in the army. At this rate we went ahead.

There was an old frame residence in the country, used for storing cotton. It had five rooms. It belonged to an old friend of ours who made us welcome to it; but he did not think it possible for us to carry

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out our schemes. It was nine miles from where our house had stood. We had the old house carefully taken apart, saving doors and windows and every available hinge, screw, and bolt.

In the meantime every old man (they were the only men not under military service), woman, and child in the neighborhood was engaged to pick nails out of the ashes. For there were no nails to be had. Hardware stores were closed and empty, under war-time pressure.

Hauled by ox-teams, the sills laid and frame put up, weather boarding was nailed on. Lacking one man to hold one end while the other man held and nailed the other end of the weather boarding, I stood all of one day, and held the planks.

Another thing sister and I did was to sort over the picked up nails, throwing the bent ones away. We heated them red-hot in the kitchen stove, throwing them into cold water to harden. This helped some.

When the roof was put on, the house took shape.

The old shingles were useless. Two large cypress trees on our back lot were

felled and by hand labor made into shingles. When the inside ceiling was all put on, the walls, doors, and windows in place; and a block of wood laid at the front door for a step, we moved in, on a bright May morning just two months and a half after the burning of our home. By this time peace was declared and the army disbanded. We had just three dollars left of the now worthless money.

Our husbands walked in just as breakfast was ready on a morning in June.

Seldom, in this life, is such unalloyed happiness granted humanity as we experienced. High and holy resolutions filled each heart.

What has all this bygone experience to do with present-day conditions? It is simply an old truth in a new dress: Principles never change.

Know your own ground; use what material you have; draw on your best asset; pay as you go; and let nothing discourage you in your efforts to build a house, and the principle embodied is the same as it was half a century ago.

We did our best then. Let us do our best now. Angels can do no more.

MISSISSIPPIAN.

She Knew How to Save

I AM a teacher. In the period covered by this bit of narrative my salary grew from $1200 to $1700 a year. To this sum I added odd and varying bits by writing and lecturing and tutoring. On this I supported three people, not in a single economical family group, but each isolated—and one of them a college student for four years. My own personal expense account offered the only possible field for saving; so I set out to discover the margin of expenditure lying between the amount I was spending for what I wished to have, and the amount I should spend for what I really needed. I found that process of subtracting my needs from my desires totaled up something like this:

            

Apartment, with light and heat	$37.50
Cut down to		$20 or 17
Food	25	12 or 13
Clothes (average)	18	10 or 8
Books	10	1 or 2
Insurance, endowment premium	150
Cut itself automatically $8 a year
Theaters	$5	50 cents
Music	4	0
Carfare	8	1
Church and kindred interests	100	10
Clubs	10	0

These figures, except the insurance premium, measure monthly expenditures.

The process of adaptation to the change in schedule was not easy; I am not sure that it was wise. I am slow to admit that the heavy cut in church subscriptions caused less personal discomfort than the diminished supply of clothes. There is a big question of ethics involved in both. I learned to persuade myself that I preferred round steak to porterhouse. I do not defend my saving on amusements and recreation; there is no defense. I do not believe it was good for my esthetic taste to use a public library instead of using my own books. But I was not cultivating my soul: I was saving money to build a house in which I could foregather with those dependent on me; and I was determined to pay cash for it. It was a distinct loss to replace my five-cent morning paper with its one-cent rival; but the loss did not show on my bank account. I learned to do most of my week's laundry in the bath-room wash bowl, ironing it on Sunday, when I should have been at church. My bank account grew at a tremendous cost—but it grew.

I bought for $600 a lot in a conservative little suburb. I hired an honest carpenter to work by the day, doing my own "contracting and buying" and supervising. This I could do better than many, because my father had been a carpenter and builder. I was able to make my own plans to scale. With the help of my honest carpenter, I was able to buy cheaply and well.

The house—a six-room bungalow—was only well completed when rumors reached me of street paving to be done in front of my place. I looked up the street-work assessments in other parts of town, and computed that mine would amount to at least $300; it actually amounted to $264. An arroyo ran along the opposite edge of the block adjoining mine. A storm drain was being petitioned for. I looked into the assessments for various drains about town. I discovered that, though I could in no wise profit by the drain, I stood a good chance of being assessed $300 for it and a cement wall construction to protect it. I took another good look at my tax receipts for the year before on the bare lot. The total was $11.22. I counted the probable tax with improvements added.

Furthermore, the house was ugly. I had taken nothing into consideration but dollars and cents. Despite its ugliness, a man looked it over one day and sent me word by one of my neighbors that he would give me $3300 for it as it stood. I couldn't travel fast enough to accept his offer.

My money is in the bank. I shall buy a lot one of these days. On it I shall build another house. My first experience taught me much. I shall keep my eyes open in the following directions:

R. B., Los Angeles, California.

He Was a Bookkeeper

TO the Little Brown Wren, my life partner, belongs most of the credit for the building of our home.

To begin with, we were married five years ago. She had five dollars and I had five; and so, with ten dollars in cash, we started out on life's journey together. "A pair of fools," you are probably thinking, and that may be true; but we have never regretted it.

I was a bookkeeper in a local mercantile house,—a position that I still hold,—and, having no money with which to buy furniture, we settled down in a sunny three-room furnished flat, which was close to my place of business and which we considered a bargain at $26 a month.

Here we lived for two happy years, and gave no thought for the morrow. But gradually we began to realize that we were not getting anywhere. We dreamed of a little home of our own, and we used to walk along the street in the dusk, when the houses were lighted and the shades not yet drawn, picturing ourselves as occupants of those shining interiors.

And so we awakened at last and tried to save, but save we could not. There was no waste in the kitchen; clothing we must have, and a little amusement. My salary covered these, but there was nothing left. It seemed a hopeless task.

But in the early months of our third year of married life the great opportunity came. My wife was offered a position as teacher in a public night school—five nights a week—at $25 a month, and, in spite of my protests, she accepted it.

"Now," said I, after I had become accustomed to the idea, "I suppose there will be new dresses and new hats and—things coming our way."

"No more than usual," said my wife. "That money is going into a savings account for the purchase of a lot."

I laughed, but said no more, for I knew how fond she was of finery. I didn't believe she would do it; but she did. At the end of twelve months she had $300.

Out on the edge of town we bought a big lot, and on it our house is built. It is a shingled, vine-covered cottage, with a cement-floored, stone-pillared porch in front. It has a living-room, bedroom, kitchen, bath, closet, and sleeping-porch.

Its cost was exactly $850. But I did some of the work myself, such as digging the cellar. The $850 we borrowed from a building and loan association, paying back $9.35 a month.

The Little Brown Wren taught two years more, and paid $600 on the house. The difference between our monthly payments of $9.35 and our former rent, $26, has paid the balance of our debt.

Our home is our own. We have a lawn, garden, a few chickens and rabbits, a milch-goat, some fruit trees, vines, and berry bushes coming on The Little Brown Wren has quit her job, and sits before the fireplace, sewing on tiny garments. What more can a man want to be as happy as a king?

G. K. B., San Jose, Cal.

Mothers-in-Law Didn't Worry Them

AFTER a three-year engagement to Bob, my mother suffered a third stroke of paralysis, which left her speechless and otherwise in a pitiful state; so Bob left the University, took a position on a newspaper at $16.50 a week, and we were married.

Feeling his sacrifice keenly, I determined that he should lose nothing by it. His family were princely to me, making me proud to prove worthy. Eight months later my mother died. About this time Bob received a $1.50 raise. Our expenses monthly were: rent $20, on furniture $10, funeral bill $5, carfare and lunches, at ten cents each, $5, magazines and papers $1, telephone $2, gas $1.60, fuel $5.00, meat and groceries $15, church $1, laundered collars 80 cents—total $66.40. Our income was $75.

We saw a lot advertised for $100—$5 down and $5 a month. We looked at it, took it. Bob bought a $1.50 hat and I trimmed my own for ten cents, making our first payment possible.

Four months after my mother's death Bob's father was stricken with paralysis and brought to us. I mention these things as obstacles. Bob's mother came too. She taught school, and paid me $5 a week for board, room, and washing for both. He was in bed four years.

I hired nothing done, and took in sewing besides. Bob had been so sweet to my mother that nothing was too much to do for him, and the Lord never made a grander woman than his mother. We lived with strictest economy—no candy, only ten cents a week for tobacco, and often not using show passes because we wouldn't spend the carfare.

One day we sold our lot for $20 profit, and bought a better one for $450—$100 down and $10 a month.

Then I lost my excellent health. I took the tubercular test and responded to it. For three days I despaired. Then I decided to build a shack on our lot and rusticate. We bought lumber at $10 a month, and during Bob's vacation built our shack. We moved in before it was completed. The gables were not on, and a storm was coming.

I jumped into Bob's trousers, climbed a ladder, and boards and nails flew. But I beat the storm—also scandalized my neighbors.

Bob caponized seventy-five cockerels, and took ten hens as pay. I papered the house inside and out, for warmth, and painted it. By eating eggs, chasing chickens, banking the house, and other light occupations, I regained my vigor. In three years the lot and house were paid for. We then began our forty-five-hundred-dollar home. I drew floor-plans, Bob did the elevations, and together we did the blue-prints. We hired two carpenters, with myself as helper, carrying every board that went into the house. Together we back-papered, painted, varnished, sandpapered, and stained; and then I decorated, mixing my own colors.

We had already had a loan from the bank, but it was not enough. I went to the president of the bank where we had obtained the loan with fear. He heard me out; then, facing me, he said: "You have had forty per cent. already; that is all we are in the habit of lending." Knowing that if I stayed to plead, I would surely cry, I beat it for home. There was lots to do, so I began sweeping shavings. Suddenly I was startled to hear an automobile stop outside. I opened the door to the bank president. To my shame, I was overcome by the sight of him and his kind, fatherly manner. All he said was:

"Is it as bad as that?"—but it was enough. I showed our receipts and took him over the house again. He said: "I'll have to take it up with the Board, but don't worry; we'll fix it."

Bob and I have now been married eleven years, and have a seventy-five-hundred-dollar home. Our capital to start was determination, sacrifice, economy, no money, but much love.

E. L. D., Minneapolis, Minn.

WHAT ABOUT THAT 65 CENTS?

By WILLIAM G. SHEPHERD

A WHITE-HAIRED man, walking in the middle of the street because the sidewalks are blocked with wagons that are backed up to the doorways of commission houses, makes his way every week-day morning, through the market district of New York City, and settles himself in his office for his day's work—which is all fight.

His job is to straighten out the $800,000,000 food tangle in New York City. His name is John J. Dillon.

As he sits down to work in the morning, he knows that across the prairies and mountains thundering freight trains are bringing to New York the farm products that are necessary to its very life; that milk trains, on lightning express schedule, are hurrying to the great city with the milk that a third of a million babies must have to-day. He knows that lumbering ferry-boats are weaving their way across the rivers that make New York City an island with burdens of food that have come from every corner of the country, and further—burdens that New York will gulp down within the next few hours, and then call for more. He knows that in a million homes, this morning, housewives are asking, "Well, what shall we have for dinner to-day?" He knows that, before the day is much older, these housewives, in scores of thousands of grocery stores and meat shops, with the family purse carried tightly in one hand, will be looking over the supplies of food that the retail merchants have to offer, and after making their selections will, some patiently and some complainingly, pay out the money that the merchant demands.

A Dollar for 35 Cents' Worth

HE knows that on farms, plantations, ranches, and in dairies for thousands of miles around men are preparing food that will come to New York in the near tomorrows. He knows all the inextricable tangle of finance, transportation, and means of distribution in the great business of feeding New York. But, of all the facts he knows, there is one that stands out bigger than all the rest: one simple smashing fact that he sees clearly. It is a fact that has to do with the housewife who makes her purchases this morning, and with the farmer who produced the food that the housewife purchased.

It is the fact that:

The housewife has paid one dollar for thirty-five cents' worth of food.

And this is a fact that makes the clear-seeing Dillon see red. It is a fact that has sent him on the war-path. Being a State official, his war-pathing counts for something. He is the first food and market commissioner New York has ever had.

That sixty-five cents!

Out of all this complexity of living, out of all this tangle of economical argument by financiers and college professors, Dillon has snatched this one fact and drawn it out into the public gaze.

It costs sixty-five cents to get thirty-five cents' worth of food from the farmer to the consumer!

This sixty-five cents is to Dillon what a red rag is to a bull. When he thinks of it he narrows his circle of vision to the commission-house district and to the railroad offices and steamship offices, and says things—in a cool-headed, calculating sort of way, but always with a punch. And he's thinking of it all the time. You can't tangle Dillon up in all the vast complexity of the food problem; you can't ring in political economy on him; the Malthusian theory doesn't get his attention away from that sixty-five cents.

Above all the cyclone of talk and theory that has been set loose in New York about

the high cost of living, Dillon's cry has rung out, true, like a bell:

"We've got to cut down that sixty-five cents!"

This cry contains the only wisdom that New York has heard in all the high-cost-of-living talk. And one strange fact is that such wisdom should have come from a State official.

"Come and talk to us about that sixty-five cents," clubs and lodges and civic organizations are asking Dillon. He could talk three times a day before New York audiences if he could find the time. The newspaper reporters haunt him and put his words and ideas into print. He fills Cooper Union when he speaks there. A farmers' magazine, the Rural New Yorker, which he publishes, is growing in circulation because the city folk in New York want to see what Dillon is saying about that sixty-five cents. When you get a New Yorker to buying a farm magazine you may be sure there's something doing in that magazine. His enemies are growing by leaps and bounds. State politicians, even now, are after his scalp, as they were after Thomas Mott Osborne's at Sing Sing.

"If I wasn't making enemies I wouldn't think I was on the right track," says Dillon.

"Who are your enemies?" a friend once asked Dillon.

"They're the fellows who get that sixty-five cents," he answered.

What Started Dillon

IT was a little red calf that started Dillon on the food war-path.

It happened more than half a century ago. He told me the story in his office the other day.

"It was that little red calf that started me thinking," he said. "I was a farmer's boy up in Sullivan County, New York. We needed money in our home, and my father decided to fatten a calf and send it to New York to sell it. We watched that calf suck and grow fatter and fatter until it got as fat as a calf could be. Then we watched father ship it, and then we waited for the returns. They came at last from a commission man in New York.

"These returns showed that it had cost more to ship the calf and sell it than it was worth. Father, it seemed, still, owed the commission man $1.65, but the commission man was generous and didn't send the bill.

"Now, there were all those folks in New York City who had to eat in order to live; and here was my father, a farmer, running into debt because he was trying to feed 'em.

"I saw that something was wrong somewhere, and I've spent some of my best years, since then, trying to find out what it was. I've got my finger right on it now. It's a live nerve in the food distribution system, and I've got a lot of folks yelling because I'm hanging on to it; but they can't make me let go, even if they do drive me out of office, as they're trying to do. These fellows around here," he added, pointing through the window down at the commission houses, "are collecting their third boodle fund against me. That sixty-five cents out of every dollar which is spent for food in New York is too juicy a thing for them to drop without a fight.

"I began my fight," Dillon explained, "in trying to help the farmer get better prices. From my view-point as a farmer, I saw that if farmers didn't get more money they would have to go out of business. I saw the idea grow at Washington and in the States that farmers ought to be educated, so that they would stay on the farm and grow plenty of food for folks; but I discovered that as soon as you got a farmer boy educated he knew enough to see that the city was the best place for him. What the farmer has got to have is more money. Plenty of money, good high wages, is what will keep the farms going, and it's the only thing that will do it. The farms must be kept in cultivation if the city is to have food.

"Well, I started out to get more money for the farmer. I got a lot of dairymen together into an organization, and they turned over the milk of 300,000 cows to me, here in New York City. I got them one cent more a quart than they had been getting from the big milk corporations, but, gol hang it! the dealers in the city took this penny out of the consumers.

"I got to looking at things from the consumer's viewpoint, too. The consumer is the fellow that pays the farmer his money, and if he doesn't pay the farmer enough the farmer quits working, and the consumer has to go without things to eat. I discovered that if the farmer asked too much money from the consumer he didn't get any at all, because the consumer couldn't or wouldn't buy. The farmer, you see, keeps the consumer alive, and the consumer keeps the farmer cultivating.

"But, gol hang it! There's a hold-up man between the farmer and the consumer." Dillon's voice broke with his indignation into a falsetto. "There's a band of hold-up men. They say to the farmer, 'We won't let your produce go to the consumer unless you give us so much money.' They say to the consumer, 'We won't let the farmer's produce reach you until you give us so much money.' There's no law of supply and demand about the food business at all. It's the law of 'Your money or your life.'

"And don't you go away thinking that this is true in New York alone. It's true in every part of the United States where people eat. I know the food figures for all the great centers in the United States. Things are just as bad in Chicago, Baltimore, Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, and San Francisco as they are in New York."

"How much can you reduce this sixty-five cents?" I asked Dillon.

"I can knock about twenty cents off it if I get the right kind of law passed. I can make it cost only 45 cents to bring 55 cents' worth of food to the consumer. And the farmer and the consumer can divide up that twenty-cent saving fifty-fifty."

"What kind of a law do you want?" I asked.

"I want a law to strengthen the State Department of Foods and Markets, and a sufficient appropriation to make it efficient. I want the State to supervise all the distribution of food from the time it leaves the farmer's hands until it reaches the consumer's."

"Do you think you can get such a law passed?" I asked.

"Gol hang it!" exclaimed Dillon. "If I don't get it passed somebody else will, sometime, if I keep up the scrap. You bet it'll be passed sometime, not only here, but all over the United States. These middlemen have got to get out.

"Understand me, the man who takes the food from the farmer and delivers it efficiently and economically is just as important as the farmer, and just as much entitled to pay for his time and investment. He is a necessary and useful factor. But the men who inject and multiply themselves needlessly in the channel of distribution, each one adding new burdens to it for carting and profits and deteriorating the value of it in the handling, are the parasites of the trade. Their speculative and gambling profits, with all their wastes and extravagance, add a burden to the food that the consumer must ultimately pay. So long as we maintain them, there is no hope of cheaper food."

Last Year 19,000 Tons of Food Rotted in New York City

DILLON'S food vision goes back into history and forward into the future.

"Why, it was the American farmer who drove the Germans to form their cooperative societies that are the model of the world in that line. In the days when the American West was new, and when a man had only to lightly scratch the back of Mother Earth in order to raise a crop, the cost of food was so low in the United States that the markets of the world were jolted. German farmers had to get together to protect themselves."

Whether Dillon ever thinks of a single beef-steak or a single helping of potatoes, only his wife and sons and daughters know. To the outsider he thinks in terms of tons of food.

"Do you know," he said, "these commission men in New York City let 19,000 tons of good food rot right here in New York last year. Rot, while folks were straining their pockets to buy enough to eat, or were starving! And little children were running around hungry in these streets in the market district, with only a brick wall and the selfishness of these commission men between them and good food that was decaying because the commission men couldn't get as much gold out of it as they wanted."

Full stomachs, millions of them, full of tons of food, is Dillon's idea of public happiness.

"Folks have got to eat, and they've got to eat well, to be healthy and happy. The public will stand a lot of injustice, but when you hit it in the stomach you're going to have a fight. Most of the political revolutions in history were caused by flat stomachs."

Time Out for Joan

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by F. Vaux Wilson

I REMEMBER now of Sadie's readin' the headlines from the paper while I was toyin' with a few poached eggs and a platter of breakfast bacon. But I guess I wasn't takin' any special notice.

"Just think, Shorty," says she. "Fanueil Adams Winthrop! Why, it was his mother who was being entertained at the Twombley-Cranes' when we were there last fall."

"Eh?" says I. "Not the frosty old dame you wouldn't let me go near, for fear I'd make some break?"

Sadie nods.

"Even Twombley-Crane himself was a little afraid of her," says she. "They are the real thing in Back Bay patricians, those Boston Winthrops, you know. Ambassador to somewhere, her husband had been, hadn't he?"

"I expect so," says I. "Anyway, I was told he left her a bale of stock in more'n a hundred different electric-light and street-car companies scattered through the South and West. So he could afford to be 'most anything. What about the young chap, though?"

"Eloped," says Sadie. "Some Western girl. From a Washington sanitarium. Or, rather, he was kidnapped. It sounds more like that to me; for young Mr. Winthrop was in a sanitarium recovering from a nervous breakdown. The school was in the next block, and I suppose this young minx just captured him when he was off his guard. Some of them are quite equal to that sort of thing. But think how his poor mother must feel."

"Don't!" says I. "Lay off the sob stuff or you'll have me weepin' into the coffee."

It might have been a sad case, all right, but I had to catch the 8:03 to town. And, somehow, goin' down in the smoker, nobody mentioned that particular tragedy, so by the time I hits the Physical Culture Studio it had gone out of my mind completely.

I've no sooner hung up my coat and hat, though, than Swifty Joe points to a telegram that he's laid careful on top of the water-cooler. It's a night letter from Chicago, and reads like this:

"Whew!" says I. "Boiling Bill! And Joan must be that girl of his. But who is this—oh, Winthrop! Hey, Swifty! Chase out and get me the mornin' papers—all of 'em."

Say, that's what you get by havin' a past in which you've accumulated friends like Boiling Bill Dutton. I got to admit, though, that at the time I needed him most he was a friend worth havin'. Back in my early ring days that was; the year before I pulled down the big belt. It was one night in the old Coates House in Kansas City. Texy McKay was my manager then, and we'd come on to negotiate a finish affair with Spider Tracy, who was one of the two or three that stood between me and the championship.

We'd raked up a couple of thousand for a side bet, and thought we had quite a roll until the Spider's backers flashed theirs. Two thousand! Why, Spider wouldn't go into' trainin' for a mess of chicken feed like that. If we could make it five they might listen, but they was lookin' for some reg'lar guys that could hang up ten and go 70-30 on the gate receipts.

"All right," says Texy. "We'll bet you the Klondike against the Philadelphia mint, if you like."

But they was makin' us look like pikers just the same, and had us almost bluffed into hoppin' a freight train East, when this rugged-faced gent with the bristly red hair elbows to the front and announces that he's ready to cover for me anything up to twenty thousand. He had the certified checks on him too, and when he urges 'em to toss their contribution into the safe, all they could actually show was forty-five hundred. So we closed at that, and it was three days after I'd put Spider to sleep in the fifth round that this unknown shows up to pat me on the back and lug off his end of the winnin's.

By that time, though, I knew more or less about him. He was a big lumber operator, one of the yellow pine plungers from down Little Rock way, and I expect he'd skinned the government out of more stumpage than the land agents knew was on the maps. But he was always square as a brick with me, givin' me an even split on that forty-five, and never lettin' out a squeal when it come my turn to take the count. Instead, every time he gets on to New York he has to blow into the Studio here, drag me out for a Palm-Room luncheon, and afterwards load me up with an Eastern rug or a Sheffield platter, or something like that, as a souvenir of his visit.

SO, when he calls on me for a little return favor, you can bet I'm goin' to deliver as good as I've got in stock. Look after Joan? Well, I'd be a welcher if I didn't try, wouldn't I? And my first play is to post myself as to just what kind of a mix-up it is she's got into.

"Here's the lot," says Swifty, dumpin' an armful of papers on my desk. "All but a couple of Yiddisher sheets they don't carry."

"Wha-a-a-at!" says I, glancin' at the collection, which includes everything from the Tribune to Il Progressero and the Morgen Journal. "Swifty; you got a mind like a rubber stamp. When I said all the mornin' papers, did you think I—Ah, what's the use!"

And say, Miss Joan Dutton sure was figurin' some in the public prints. "Young Back Bay Heir Lured from Sanitarium," was one of the headlines. "Couldn't Resist Smiles of Super-Woman," was another.

One paper runs a two-column cut of Mrs. Pannell Adams Winthrop, Sr., and an insert of the Winthrop home on Beacon Street, showin' all the windows boarded up. Another splurges on a picture of Marmaduke Hall, which is the name of the school, and a long interview with the head of the joint where young Winthrop had been a patient.

Seems it was kind of a nerve-cure institution, and the Doc who ran it claimed to be a second or third cousin of the Winthrops. Accordin' to him, young Fanueil had been sufferin' from melancholia of the mind, brought on by too much postgraduate work at Harvard.

"Distinctly a shy young man," the Doc told the interviewer, "almost a recluse, and one who had particularly avoided young women."

NEAR as I could make out from the various accounts, Joan had stirred up quite a mess. There had been two other girls in it, but their names wasn't mentioned. Anyway, it was hinted that Joan had been the one who'd smuggled young Winthrop into the school gymnasium, and he was there with the three of 'em when a teacher who'd seen the place lighted up strolled in. Also it had been Joan who had disappeared, after having been locked in her room. Fanueil, too, was among the missin'.

"Zing-g-g!" says I, runnin' my fingers through my hair. "For a modest party like me, this is some proposition. I wonder how soon I've got to—"

"Say," cuts in Swifty, whisperin' husky, "there's a young lady at the front office door. What'll I do?"

"I wish we could nail it up, Swifty," says I. "But we can't. So tow her in."

Maybe you can guess what I was lookin' for—one of these baby-doll chickens with Theda Bara eyes and snaky motions. But Fay, the young female person that drifts in don't answer to any of them specifications. Not one. She's a slim, wispy young lady, to begin with, and no more of a dashin' beauty than I am. In fact, she's kind of plain—pale yellow hair, a perky nose with freckles on it, a narrow, tight-lipped little mouth, and sea-green eyes. Besides, she's gazin' around sort of timid.

Perhaps I'd been too hasty about concludin' that she was the one. She might be some stray from the music conservatory on the top floor, or a canvasser for the Belgian Fund.

"Well, Miss," says I, "did you get the wrong number?"

"I think not," says she. "You're Professor McCabe, aren't you?"

"I can't deny it," says I; "but who—"

"I am Joan Dutton," says she.

"Eh?" I gasps. "Well, blamed if you look it."

"Why not?" says she.

"Well," says I, "you don't, that's all. But you're runnin' on her schedule. I just had a wire from your father."

"I know," says she. "Dear old daddy! I had one, too. He said I was to come to you. So here I am."

"Ye-e-e-es," says I. "And where's the other half of the sketch—Fanueil?"

"Goodness knows," says she. "After he put me on the train last night I started him back to the sanitarium."

"Then—then you didn't elope?" says I.

"Of course not, you goose," says Joan. "Daddy hasn't seen him yet, so I couldn't tell whether he would do or not. But how did you know about Fanueil?"

"How?" says I. "Great Scott, young woman, ain't you seen the papers? Why, you and young Winthrop are on every front page. Take a look."

And I spreads out some of the headlines for her to inspect.

SHE sits down, takes the pile of papers in her lap, and begins runnin' through 'em casual. And I must say, for anybody that was workin' up a vampire rep, she's kind of a comfortable, easy-goin', chirky young party. She don't seem to be much disturbed by what she reads about herself. Most of the time she smiles, and now and then she lets out a giggle.

"Joan of Ark., am I?" says she. "That's rather clever, isn't it? But from some of these accounts one would think I was a most awful person, wouldn't they? You might think I'd stolen Fanueil, or cast a spell on him—while, as a matter of fact, here I am, and he is—"

"Say," breaks in Swifty, "there's a young gink out here askin' for Miss Dutton."

With that I gives him the nod, and in leaks a tall, solemn-faced young gent wearin' huge shell-rimmed glasses and luggin' a leather shoppin' bag, the kind you see on Tremont Street.

"Why, Fanueil!" exclaims Joan. "Didn't I tell you you mustn't come until after daddy got here?"

"But—but I couldn't stay there—without you, Joan," says he. "I simply couldn't."

"Then why not go home to mother?" she demands.

He shakes his head.

"Don't! Please!" says he.

"Then you'll just have to ask Professor McCabe," says Joan. "I'm in his charge now. Isn't that so, Professor?"

"I expect it is," says I. "But I suppose the young man can stick around for a while, now he's here. Swifty, fetch another chair. We'll make a reg'lar party of it. And maybe, between you, I can dope out what this is all about. You've seen the papers, ain't you, Winthrop?"

He drops his chin in his hands and groans.

"I trust you do not believe all those terrible things about—about Miss Dutton," says he.

"Oh, for goodness' sake, cheer up, Fanueil!" says Joan. "Certainly he doesn't. Do you, Professor?"

"Course," says I, "I don't fall for more'n half this sensational stuff. Still, I expect there must have been something in it. Just what, now? About you bein' lured from the sanitarium, for instance?"

Joan indulges in another giggle.

"I lost a ten-pound box of candy on that," says she. "You see, we used to

Continued on page 15

THEIR IDEALS

THE MOST HATED MEN IN HISTORY

---

THEY ARE KNOWN BY A DISH

Continued from page 10

pass the place every day on our way to the riding academy, and Fanueil was nearly always moping around outside. Such a gloomy face! Look at him. That's a sample. Isn't that doleful?"

It was. A sad mule lookin' for supper would have seemed chipper alongside of him; but I didn't feel like mentionin' the fact.

"So you bet you could chase the glooms, eh?" I asks.

"I said I could make him smile," says Joan. "Dorothea Mills said it couldn't be done, and I—I bet her. I was to have a week.

"I suppose it was rather a bold thing to do, but the very next day I just made him speak to me—dropped my riding-crop right in front of him, you know; and when I thanked him I asked him if he couldn't forget it. 'Forget what?' says he. 'That little kittens are born blind,' I says. 'Oh, I say!' says he. 'Why don't you, then?' says I. Then he blushed. 'Perhaps you will to-morrow,' says I. Remember, I'm the girl with the near-red hair.' But you didn't smile, did you, Fanueil?"

Fanueil shakes his head.

"His sense of humor is ingrowing," goes on Joan, "but otherwise he's quite human. Next day he was waiting for me, and walked clear to the riding academy. By the fourth day we were nicely acquainted. Never a smile, though. I'd talked a lot of rot to him, too. Hadn't I, Fanueil?

"Something desperate had to be done, so I asked him if he wouldn't like to join our little German band. Do you know that, Professor? It's a song in which each one of the chorus tries to imitate some instrument. When Roberta Marsh does it it's a scream. That's why I asked her to lead. Dorothea had agreed to help, too.

"WELL, Fanueil knew nothing about it, but he said he'd come, and I opened the back gate for him. We went right into the gym, and started telling Fanueil he was to do the boom-boom for the bass drum. It isn't so funny at first; but as the verses go on, and every one gets to doing his part—well, it gets to be simply too absurd for words.

"We were marching around the gym, all coming in on the chorus, and Fanueil was almost on the point of smiling, when in came that snoopy Miss Strickler. I tried to tell her, but she wouldn't listen. Then she brought the principal, and—oh, they raised no end of a row. You've no idea how catty these old-maid school-teachers can be. They locked me in my room and wired a lot of rubbish to daddy.

"That was when Fanueil proved himself a regular movie hero. He demanded that they let me out, and when they wouldn't he came around at night with a ladder.

"That was when he began proposing, too. Such a silly! As though I'd marry a graven image! Besides, there was daddy, who'd never seen him. But I wouldn't stay another night in that old school. So I sent a message to daddy, told him to meet me in New York, and climbed down the ladder. There! That's all there is to it. Isn't it, Fanueil?"

Young Winthrop nods.

"Except this," says he, indicatin' the heap of papers on the floor and sighin' deep.

"Pooh!" says Joan. "What do we care for that? Do cheer up, Fanueil, for goodness' sake. I'll tell you! Show me New York. I haven't been here since I was a little girl, and I'm just crazy to see the sights."

"Just a minute," I puts in. "You know, I'm supposed to be lookin' after you."

"Then you must come too, Professor," says Joan. "It's a gorgeous morning. Let's get a taxi and ride until luncheon-time."

"I have one waiting outside," says Fanueil.

She's a lively, snappy young person, and all that; but, as I sits there watchin' 'em from the extra taxi seat, I can't frame up why he's so dippy about her. For that's what it amounts to. Here he has chucked everything, his happy sanitarium home and so on, and now he sits gazin' at her soulful and sad, like a setter dog that's been told there'll be no quail shootin' to-day.

BUT then, it's about fifty-fifty between 'em, for Fanueil ain't any he charmer himself. Oh, he's no freak, understand, and of course there's no denyin' his Bunker Hill blood and the Winthrop investments. But that no-smile record of his would queer him with 'most any girl. Seems like it only makes him more interestin' to Joan, though.

"Oh, I know!" says she, after we've had a spin up Riverside Drive and are swingin' back through the park to Fifth Avenue. "Let's play zipp-whiskers."

"Beg pardon?" says Fanueil.

"It's a variation of roadside whist," explains Joan. "You count only whiskers, though."

"Whiskers?" echoes Fanueil, starin' vague.

"It's like this," goes on Joan. "When you see a person with an ordinary, close-cropped beard, you say, 'Zipp-for-ten.' When you find one with old-fashioned chop-whiskers and mustache—Chaunceys—you say,'Zipp-for-twenty.' A full flowing beard counts fifty, and you must shout, 'Keno!' And the one who calls first gets the count. When you call wrong, a twenty-zipp for a ten, that sets you back just so much. And we'll make the game one hundred. Now! Are you ready?"

"I—I think so," says Fanueil, kind of doubtful.

"And you'll keep count for us, won't you, Professor?" says Joan. "Good! Then we'll start. Either side of the street, you know. Only they must be in plain sight and— All! Zipp-for-ten! Zipp-for-ten!"

And Joan points to a sporty old boy strollin' down the sunny side of the avenue.

Sure enough, he's wearin' a Van Dyke.

"Don't the red tie score extra?" I asks.

"Of course not," says Joan, givin' me a merry flash from them sea-green eyes. "Nothing counts but— Oh, zipp-for-ten again! What's the matter, Fanueil? Can't you see them? That one went right past on your side."

"I know," says Fanueil; "but you said it first. I must be rather stupid."

"Then show a little pep," says Joan. "It isn't any fun unless we're both—"

"Oh, I say!" breaks in Fanueil. "Zipp-for—er—zipp-for-twenty."

"No count!" says Joan, glancin' out at a set of Deacons drivin' by in a limousine. "You must point, you know."

"Oh!" says Fanueil.

And say, Miss Joan sure does have a quick eye for whiskers. She had a game before Fanueil had even tallied ten.

"Now we'll play this one for fifty cents a side," suggests Joan, "and I'Il start you forty up. Come, now. Look sharp."

"By Jove!" says Fanueil, jabbin' his finger towards a store door. "Zip-for-ten!"

"Right!" says Joan. "You're catching on. Zipp-for-ten for me."

Well, this time it wasn't so one-sided. With his forty start, Fanueil had rolled up a score of eighty, and it looked like he stood to will the purse; but then Joan runs a string of tens, and all of a sudden spots a full set of white lambrequins crossin' Madison Square.

"Keno!" says she. "That puts me out."

"I say," says Fanueil, wipin' his glasses careful, "I'll just go you again—even this time. This—this is rather good sport, you know."

He's almost enthusiastic about it, and as we swings down through the cloak and suit district, where face herbage is more common, they was both sittin' on the edge of the seat cushions. I had all I could do to jot down the numbers on the back of an envelop, for they was callin' 'em out fast. Fanueil would have won out, too, if he hadn't miscalled a pair of butlers for Chaunceys and gone twenty in the hole. But now he has his sporting' blood stirred and is anxious to go on.

"Where next, sir?" asks the taxi driver of me, as we crosses Union Square.

"Canal and over through Allen and Hester streets," says I.

If they was lookin' for whiskers, I thought they might as well go where the huntin' was good. They'd made the

game five hundred by this time and doubled the stakes. And, believe me, when we gets down where we begun to see kosher signs on the windows, the sport is some excitin'. I believe Joan had something like three hundred and fifty to Fanueil's two hundred and forty when we crossed Third Avenue goin' East. Joan was somewhat twisted up tryin' to count three zipp-for-tens in a bunch, when all of a sudden I hears gurglin' sounds from young Winthrop. He's leanin' half way out the taxi window, stabbin' his finger frantic, and callin' out excited:

"Keno! Keno! Keno! I win, Joan. Look!"

WELL, you know what you can expect of a Saturday mornin' down on the corner of Canal and Second Avenue. Come to find out later on, it's a delegation goin' to inspect some new synagogue, but to Fanueil it's just an amazin' run of luck. And it busts up his long-standin' spell of melancholia like an ice jam goin' out with a spring freshet.

"Keno!" he sings out. "Ha-ha! Keno some more! Ho, ho! Ten kenos at once; no, twelve! Oh, my! Did any one ever see so many whiskers together? See them, Joan; see them?"

He's rockin' back and forth on the seat, laughin' like he would split a seam, and pointin' at the synagogue delegation. I'd begun to suspicion they wouldn't like it, for they're jabberin' among themselves and scowlin' our way; but I didn't look for 'em to get quite so hot over it. First thing we know, though, the taxi is surrounded, and half a dozen of 'em are statin' their opinions of us emphatic.

But Fanueil seems to be off the gloom stuff for keeps. He goes right on laughin'. Maybe it's because he ain't done it for so long that when he gets started he don't know how to stop. Anyway, the more whiskers he saw waggin' around him, the heartier he haw-haws. Honest, they had him almost pulled out of the taxi, and there was a fine young mob gatherin', when a cop breaks through and rescues us. He had his hands full, at that. First off he was for pinchin' all three of us; but when he found we hadn't run anybody down, and he's had a smile from Joan and a good look at Fanueil's new grin, he pilots us back to Third Avenue and turns us loose.

"Now listen," says I. "Nix on the keno business. You've overworked the game."

"But I won, you know," chuckles Fanueil. "I must have scored six hundred that time. I say, Joan, I don't know when I've had such a good time before. You're a wonder. Can't you think of something else we can—"

"Back up!" says I. "I ain't goin' to let her start anything new until after I turn her over to her daddy. Besides, it's time to eat."

It's a merry luncheon we had, too, with Joan sayin' funny things in that quiet way of hers, and Fanueil gazin' at her so steady that he almost forgets what's on his plate. And by takin' 'em to the matinee afterwards I manages to kill time until five o'clock without raisin' any more riots. Boiling Bill shows up on the five-fifteen though, and I was sure glad to see him. When I left 'em he was hammerin' Fanueil on the shoulder chummy, so I expect he'd passed favorable on the young gent.

AT first I thought I wouldn't say much about my day off when I got home; but that about the keno bunch was too good to keep, so I tells the whole tale.

"How silly!" says Sadie. "Were you in the game, too?"

"Sure I was," says I. "I was keepin' score. Never again, though. I'm off this zipp-whisker stuff for life. And if Fanueil takes his Joan on a honeymoon trip I'd advise an aeroplane tour at about two thousand feet elevation, where she can start anything she likes."

"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

A CHANCE FOR YOUR BOY

HAS your boy a mechanical bent? Would he like to be a railroad man? The Santa Fe Railroad will take him, if he is really in earnest, and put him through the mill from the bottom up. F. W. Thomas, superintendent of apprentices, explained the plan in a recent address quoted in Current Opinion.

The company must first of all he assured that the boy is really in earnest: he must pass an inspection by the shop instructors, who will find out "why he wants to be a machinist instead of a lawyer, or a boilermaker instead of a preacher." After the shop examination comes a physical examination.

"We are taking these young fellows in our service for life," says Mr. Andrews; and with our hospital system, our pension system, our insurance scheme, it is well that young men sound in body and mind should he selected."

Throughout the boy's four years' apprenticeship he is hourly watched by general and shop foremen, by shop and school instructors. His weak points are strengthened, his strong features emphasized. He is given individual instruction from the minute he enters the company's employ, and eight times during his apprenticeship a governing body passes on him. "If he is fit they pass him. If he is misfit he goes, and no power can save him."

BENJAMIN FRANKLIN'S EPITAPH

THIS is the famous epitaph that Benjamin Franklin wrote for himself at twenty-two. It was never used, the grave in the old cemetery in Philadelphia being marked by a simple stone giving the bare facts of his life.

THE BODY
OF
BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, PRINTER
(LIKE THE COVER OF AN OLD BOOK,
ITS CONTENTS TORN OUT,
AND STRIPT OF ITS LETTERING
AND GILDING,)
LIES HERE, FOOD FOR WORMS.
BUT THE WORK SHALL NOT BE
LOST,
FOR IT WILL (AS HE BELIEVED)
APPEAR ONCE MORE
IN A NEW AND MORE ELEGANT
EDITION
REVISED AND CORRECTED
BY
THE AUTHOR

(From Our Benjamin Franklin, by John Clyde Oswald—Doubleday, Page & Company.)

THE MYSTERY OF COLONEL HOUSE

A SLIGHT, gray-haired man with a gray mustache and gray eyes, who speaks with a still, modest voice. Mystery surrounds Colonel House. No one knows what he thinks or what he does. Yet the whole country is aware of him, and glad that he stands so close to the President.

The bare bones of his life are in Who's Who: Edward Mandell H.—born in Texas fifty-nine years ago; father a banker; graduated from Cornell at age of twenty-three; married; has two daughters. More than that we have only a vague remembrance that he compassed the election of several governors in Texas.

When he went to Europe in 1916, the newspapers guessed he was a secret emissary sent there to bring about a "cessation of hostilities." With breathless interest people heard of his successive visits to the foreign offices of Paris and Berlin and London; and when he came sailing home, reporters met him in tug-boats far out in the harbor. "Europe," said he, with a gentle smile,—and this is all he said,—"is always interesting, and I found the weather very mild."

When he was in London, young gentlemen with tweed caps and note-books gathered at his hotel, primed with questions. Were the German people starving? etc.

But for their newspapers they wrote: "The shade of Jefferson could not reproach Colonel House for lack of simplicity. Let us hope, for posterity's sake, he keeps a diary. He has seen everything, heard everything, while he has said as little as possible. And his glance covered a great deal of humor."

They didn't know the Texan proverb that runs: "A wise man says little and saws wood."

About eight years ago Colonel House predicted to the Democrats: "Woodrow Wilson is your next President," and plotted out his work accordingly.

One day Wilson stopped at the Hotel Gotham in New York, and heard that one Colonel House was also there. The two men met, and were in session for many hours. When Wilson got up to go, he said, "I feel that I have known you all my life."

"I felt that way long before I saw you," answered Colonel House.

And now, when the President leaves for New York on a half hour's notice, and disappears into Colonel House's quiet library, there is no longer any political jealousy. For Colonel House is a man without an ax to grind. He simply likes and believes in President Wilson.

CONFESSIONS OF A CONSCIENTIOUS PHYSICIAN

A YOUNG Russian graduated from the Petrograd University of Medicine. He passed his final examinations with high marks; his laboratory work was excellent. Yet when he went to a small town in the interior of Russia to practise, he hung out his plate with terrible misgivings.

In Memoirs of a Physician (published by Alfred A. Knopf, with notes by Henry Pleasants, Jr., M. D.) Vikenty Veressayev has confessed how much a doctor doesn't know.

"When I began to practise, I lacked that knowledge which every nurse possesses. I, who had artistically amputated a corpse's knee when passing my examinations, now studied the methods of lifting a weak patient up in bed."

At the end of the second year a thing happened that made him resolve to study under the guidance of older physicians.

A poor washerwoman begged him to save her only remaining child, a gaunt boy of eight, who had scarlet fever. His life hung in the balance; and the young doctor promised to do his best. At last the fever abated and the rash began to grow faint.

In a few days, however, it returned again, and a gland in the neck began to swell.

"I was afraid to make an incision in the neck, which contains a great number of veins and arteries. If I severed some important vessel by accident I should be unable to stop the hemorrhage. Hitherto I had never touched the living flesh with my knife. I was afraid of slitting an ordinary gathering."

The young doctor did the next best thing: he rubbed ointment on the swelling, and it seemed to cool the boy's fever. The next day he repeated his application of the salve, this time rubbing it in more vigorously.

"When I returned I found that an abrupt change for the worse had taken place. I went pale and began to examine my patient with throbbing heart. It was clear as day: my massage had driven the pus all over the boy's system, general blood-poisoning had set in, and he was doomed to a certainty. Things could not have been plainer if I had deliberately cut the boy's throat with my own hand."

Veressayev's nerves and conscience broke down under this harrowing experience, and he renounced the practice he had built up and returned to Petrograd to study further.

"These chapters," concludes the author, "may breed skepticism. I experienced this skepticism myself, and lived it down: How could my attitude be other, when every day of my life my training enables me to save my fellow creatures from death?"

BEFORE GOD CROSSED THE MISSOURI RIVER

"VICE of every kind flourished. Sixty saloons, besides gambling-houses and dance-halls, were the lodestones that drew the men from the plains and mountains to the new city. It merited its nickname, 'Hell-on-Wheels.'" So fifty years ago Cheyenne, in the pleasant and progressive State of Wyoming, needed missionaries. Davis, Soldier Missionary, by J. Merle Davis (the Pilgrim Press), describes the hardships of a pioneer Christian in the West.

"A few miles before reaching his destination, Colonel Davis read the following advertisement in the Cheyenne daily paper: 'I will fight my dog Jerry vs. the wildcat next Sunday afternoon at two o'clock in the theater. Admission, one dollar.' Within two weeks he was holding Sunday evening services in this theater.

"Soon after he set to work to build a church and a parsonage with lumber that he had brought from the East. He borrowed a team and hauled stones quarried with his own hands from the hills, and his wife did all the lighter carpentering—nailing the laths and shingles and plastering the walls. The swaggering, cursing citizens of Cheyenne watched him scornfully and said that no two-story frame house could stand against the winter gales. But he believed differently, and this house, built by a tenderfoot parson and his wife, is still standing.

"Cheyenne was made up of wild men in 1869—the majority of them fortune-hunters, few of whom expected to build permanent homes. When the parson tried to talk about the Christian life he was told again and again: 'God hasn't crossed the Missouri River yet.' The first eighty men who were buried in the miserable cemetery had died with their boots on, and the day Colonel Davis arrived in Cheyenne a self-appointed Vigilance Committee had left six ruffians hanging to the telegraph poles. Thanksgiving Day came, and although the church was still unfinished a meager congregation had gathered there, bringing gifts of potatoes and clothing to the parson and his wife. Many a rough man had said to the committee soliciting gifts, 'If it's for the man who is building his own house, I want to give. He's the kind of parson I believe in.'"

Four miles away at Fort Russell, the military post, an Indian was under sentence of death for having killed a white man who had attacked his wife. Colonel Davis walked to the fort to visit the Indian, talking with him by signs.

"On the morning of the execution Colonel Davis walked with him to the gallows. After the rope had been adjusted about his neck the condemned man spoke a few words in broken English. 'Me not afraid to die; me go up,'; and, pointing upward with his finger, the drop fell."

---

PUT YOUR CHILDREN ON THE PAY-ROLL

WHEN your boy's front tooth is loose, don't tell him you'll give him a nickel if he'll have it pulled—you may be taking the first fatal step in the production of a grafter. Anyway, that's what Professor E. A. Kirkpatrick says in his book, The Use of Money (Bobbs-Merrill Company).

Put your children on the pay-roll by all means, but pay them only for good, hard work. Beware of children who grow up with the idea that money comes from heaven. For a time it may please fond parents to play the rôle of providence; but the role of employer will be more permanently satisfactory. The children will like it, too; for children love to earn money.

But they must really earn it. And if Susie undertakes to clean the silver, but tires of her job after she's finished the teaspoons and puts the rest off till tomorrow, coolly remind her that delay in fulfilling a contract means that she forfeits part of the payment.

Be careful not to pay a child for doing things that are just his share in the general task of making home happy, or you'll turn him into a selfish little beast. Bradley's mother took him in time. One morning he handed her a bill:

      

Mother owes Bradley:
For running errands	$0.25
For being good	.10
For taking music lessons	.15
Extras	.05
Total	$0.55

At noon there was fifty-five cents by Bradley's plate. Also another bill:

      

Bradley owes mother:
For being good	$0.00
For nursing him through his long illness with scarlet fever	0.00
For clothes, shoes, gloves, and playthings	.00
For all his meals and his beautiful room	.00
Total that Bradley owes mother	$0.00

Of course there was just one thing for Bradley to do—and he did it.

HENRY FORD'S BOYHOOD

"UNDER his leadership, for he was very popular with other boys, the Greenfield country school saw strange things done," writes Rose Wilder Lane in Henry Ford's Own Story (Ellis 0. Jones).

"When about thirteen years old he constructed a forge in the school-yard, and he and his crowd spent every recess working at it. There, with the aid of a blow, they melted every bottle and bit of broken glass they could find, and recast them into strange shapes. It was Henry who devised the plan of damming the creek that ran near the schoolhouse, and, by organizing the boys into regular gangs with a sub-foreman for each, accomplished the task so thoroughly and quickly that he had flooded two acres of potatoes before an outraged farmer knew what was happening."

Two years later young Ford ran away from the pleasant prosperity of his father's farm, and went to Detroit, where he got a job in a machine-shop. He received only $2.50 a week for it, but that didn't interest him either one way or the other. Working eleven hours a day among steam engines kept him perfectly happy for months.

Then he began to be annoyed by the slipshod factory methods of those days.

"See here," he said one day to the man next him. "Nothing's ever made alike in this place. We waste a lot of time assembling these engines."

His mind full of pictures of smoothly running, exactly adjusted machines, he was growing dissatisfied with his job.

HOW TO LEARN EASILY

HAVE you any definite plan for your reading? Do you force yourself to read as much as possible at a time, to read "intensively," or do you simply

drift along? It is surprising how much more the average person can read and can remember if he really applies himself to it, says George Van Ness Dearborn in his new book, How to Learn Easily (Little, Brown & Company).

Twenty-six normal school girls were tested by Dr. G. C. Myers of the Brooklyn Training School for Teachers. They were given a list of unrelated words to learn. Half of the girls were allowed all the time they wanted in which to learn them: the other half were compelled to complete the study in nine minutes.

When the examination came, it was found that just as many girls made perfect records in one group as in the other. In other words, those who had forced themselves to "learn against time" learned much more quickly and just as accurately as those who had studied longer.

But is a subject learned under pressure remembered as long? Professor W. H. Pyle of the University of Missouri tested a group of pupils "for their rate of learning a passage of easy prose, and for their retention of the passage after twenty-four hours. The most rapid learners showed the highest percentage of retention."

AN ENGLISH PRISONER IN GERMANY

"SWINEHUND" and "Englanders, swiners," are the two bits of English familiar to all classes of the German population, according to Private Hutchinson, an English soldier whose experiences as a prisoner in Germany are related in the Atlantic Monthly.

He was wounded on the 21st of December, 1914, and taken prisoner. Cries of "Oh, Englander, swinehund," greeted his arrival behind the German trenches, accompanied by threatening gestures with the butt end of rifles. With other English and French prisoners, he was bundled into a cold freight-car, with a little straw in one end, and wet planks in the other. The French were given the straw and the English the water. With much jolting, they were carried a long, tiring journey—well men and wounded together—to the prison camp at Wittenberg. At each station the train would be stopped and the doors opened to allow the populace to crowd around and hurl their epithets.

Food in the camp consisted chiefly of a soup of "hot water with a little grease floating on top," and typhus soon broke out in the camp. At its appearance the Germans retreated, leaving the prisoners to the ravages of the disease. But for the magnificent work of six English physicians sent into the camp, not a man would have been left alive.

Meantime, from outside the corral the German guards amused themselves with frequent "alarms."

"The sentries would blow a whistle, and we were supposed to be allowed ten minutes to get inside the barrack-room. But if we were outside two minutes after the whistle blew there would be a shot sent after us, and if we looked through the window we would be shot . . . I think they rather liked to see us running like a lot of rabbits to our burrows, for they very often blew the alarm when we would least expect it; then there would be a race for it, as I do not think any of us wanted to be shot like that. But I am sorry to say some were, some fatally and some wounded."

WHAT COLOR IS MOST BECOMING TO YOU?

EVEN a mere man sees plenty of expensive costumes on women who ought to be good-looking, but are not, because the color of the costume runs somehow counter to their own complexions.

A famous portrait-painter, quoted by Belle Armstrong Whitney in What to Wear (Good Health Publishing Company), gives these rules:

"Brunettes with clear skin and color in their cheeks: red, yellow, orange, olive, and russet.

"Blondes with clear skin and bright eyes: blues, greens, and mauves.

"Colors that suit everybody: white, gray, and black.

"Two-color combinations that are good: black and warm brown: violet and pale green, chocolate and bright blue; deep red and gray; deep blue and pink; claret and buff.

"But any one may wear almost any color if it is far enough from the face, and so relieved with cream or ivory as to keep the skin of the neck and face from being thrown into sharp contrast with the color."

Says the author:

"The French say that unless a woman is in mourning she should not wear black after she is thirty, nor again till after she is sixty, and then only if she has to.

"Another portrait-painter has said: 'Every woman looks well in anything if you give her shadows enough.'

"Beware of a brimless hat unless you are a great beauty, because it does not cast any shadows. Instead, it throws your complexion into relentless high relief that is seldom flattering."

OUR WEEKLY LIST OF BOOKLETS WORTH SENDING FOR

Any of the following books may be secured by sending a money order to the Superintendent of Public Documents, Washington, D. C.

DISEASES OF THE HORSE. REVISED EDITION. 1916. Price, $1.

This is a revision and reprint, issued by special resolution of Congress, of the famous "Horse Book," one of the most popular works ever published by the Government. Every owner of horses should have a copy.

DIVING MANUAL. Price, 75 cents.

A study of the art of diving and its effects on the human body. Fully illustrated with pictures of apparatus used by divers, etc.

INDEX-CATALOGUE OF LIBRARY OF SURGEON-GENERAL'S OFFICE, UNITED STATES ARMY. Second Series. Volume 21. Price, $2.

This catalogue, which is the greatest medical bibliography in the world, has been in course of publication for many years. Volume 21, Waterworth-Zysman, completes the alphabet for the second time.

BEES. (Reprint.) Price, 5 cents.

New issue of a little manual on bee-keeping.

COMMERCIAL TRAVELERS IN LATIN AMERICA. Price, 10 cents.

Dealing especially with the documents the commercial traveler should take with him, customs treatment of his samples, duties levied on advertising matter, etc.

HARD TO KILL A NURSING BABY

EVERY mother who can possibly do so should nurse her child. This is old advice, and it has generally been taken to mean simply that mother's milk is much more wholesome and builds strength more readily than any substitute.

There is a more important reason, however, as Dr. Hibber Winslow Hill points out in The New Public Health (Macmillan). Nature puts into mother's milk some marvelous anti-toxin that makes the nursing infant practically immune from most of the common infectious diseases.

"This is so true of scarlet fever and measles," says Dr. Hill, "that in such diseases no great concern need be felt for the nursing infant, even though the mother herself have the disease. In diphtheria, a nursling to some extent shows a like immunity. In smallpox this is not true, and in tuberculosis it is, at the most, very doubtful.

"It has been suggested that the real explanation of this lies in the transmission to the child of actual immunity-producing bodies in mother's milk. If this be so, breast-feeding in infants combines in one operation three principles of defense: good nutrition, specific immunization, and the avoidance of infection. . . . Great skill and care and constant watchfulness may serve in artificial feeding partially to offset these dangers; breast-feeding automatically protects against them, almost without effort."

Is the Customer Always Right?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

A RAILROAD man started a little business selling watches. If any watch failed to satisfy a customer, he gave him another, without argument. One day a trolley conductor came in with a smashed, muddy watch.

"I'm not satisfied with this watch—will you replace it?"

"Give him another watch," said the proprietor instantly.

"Hey! Hold on!" protested the conductor. "It was my fault. I let it fall in a mud-puddle. I wanted to see what you'd say."

"We insure our watches against falling in mud-puddles," was the answer. "Give him another watch."

That story went around, and sold hundreds of watches; and the policy of replacing goods without question has since built up a business of more than a hundred million dollars yearly.

"The customer is always right," has become a rule in American business. But, like most rules, it has exceptions.

A laundry manager says that only 10 per cent. of his customers who make claims for shortage and damage are honest and right; 60 per cent. are honest, but mistaken; 30 per cent. are dishonest and unfair.

People had to buy things, once upon a time, without the privilege of return and exchange. The latter made buying easier, and increased sales by creating confidence. But to-day this privilege is being abused. Merchants all tell the same story of dishonest claims. These dishonest customers increase the expense of doing business, and so make honest folk pay more for goods. And, unless they can be weeded out, the return and exchange privilege may have to be limited.

The cost of doing business in big retail stores has increased 50 per cent. in the last fifteen years, and the return and exchange of goods has doubled. This increase in returned goods is due largely to unfair and dishonest customers. Garments are purchased, worn by the customer, and returned. Piece fabrics are cut off, taken home, and sent back soiled. Goods ordered on approval are thrown back on the store, and no purchase made. Everywhere there is the same story and the same problem—to separate the just claim from the unjust; to take a stand against abuse and dishonesty.

The first step is to decide which customers are honest and also right.

The second step is to reason with that large group of customers who are honestly mistaken. A woman claimed that a rug which she had bought only three months before was wearing out at a rate that indicated it was defective. Reference to the store books proved that she had had it two years! She was quite honest in her belief that it had been only a couple of months, and readily admitted that her claim was unreasonable. "My, how time flies!" was her comment.

This leaves the dishonest customers, and there are various ways of dealing with them. A woman brought back a delicate evening gown that had been altered to fit her, and insisted that she had not worn it—in fact, had never taken it from the box. But the saleswoman who sold that gown was one with a keen interest in her merchandise, outside the store as well as inside. Several nights before she had seen the customer wearing that gown at a theater. When she pointed out holes where flowers had been pinned, the woman kept the gown.

Dishonest customers are often not worth having, and their claims can be dismissed with the suggestion that they may find it best to shop elsewhere. Reference to records will show which customers constantly abuse return privileges. A laundry manager adopted a system whereby amounts paid in claims to each customer were compared with the profit on that customer's work. When the profit was less than claims, the driver forgot to call at that customer's house.

The retail stores are now very much awake to this problem, and are meeting it in various ways. Customers are kept tabs on by records, and the dishonest ones are eliminated. Goods are protected by labels and other devices that make it impossible for any one to use or wear them undetected. Sales-people keep their eyes open for signs of wear or use.

In wholesale trade, too, the customer is often wrong—to put it politely. A country merchant once complained that several hundred pounds of tobacco he had bought was defective. On being told to ship it back to the factory, he sent twice the quantity bought. Labels and stamps had been scratched off to conceal the date of manufacture; but the factory people recognized the tobacco as a lot made eight years before, and the stuff was traced to a fire sale, where the merchant had bought it for little or nothing.

Seven times in ten the customer is right. But the other three times he is wrong in about the same sense as a sneak-thief or burglar; and to-day American business begins to see that it must deal with him on about the same basis.

Six Months of Flowers

By F. F. ROCKWELL

THERE is not one person in a hundred who will not stop to admire a tastefully planted home—I use the term "home" advisedly, because the ground is as much a part of it as the house, and, at least during the summer, should be used almost as much as the house. Of people who do not attempt to grow any flowers, I think an equal percentage would like to: they are restrained because they think it would cost too much; or, being short on garden experience, fear their attempts would result in failure. But any one who is willing to take pains and do a little studying can, at least with a garden of annuals, count on a large degree of success from the beginning. The cost is little. An investment of from $1 to $1.50 a week, for four or five weeks in the spring, will supply the materials for a generous sized garden that will be beautiful all summer long—and incidentally furnish a continuous supply of cut flowers for the house.

Flowers should be chosen of so many different types that you will have (1) a long season of bloom—from May to hard frost; (2) plants of different heights and habit of growth, so that they can be arranged effectively—low, medium, and tall growing things that, when properly grouped, will make the best display possible in the limited amount of space available, and at the same time not cut each other off from the sun and the gardener; (3) a good proportion of varieties that are useful for cutting, as well as for decorating the garden where they grow.

For certain results and genuine satisfaction, you can not do better than pick out good up-to-date varieties of the following—any dozen and a half from this list will cover all the requirements mentioned. Where there are early and late flowering types of the same plant, as with asters, cosmos, and others, it is well to select at least one variety of each, to get a longer season of bloom. Here are the things which, though cheap, you can count on for excellent results: African Daisies, Sweet Alyssum, Antirrhinum,* Asters,* Calliopsis, Marguerite Carnations,* Centaurea, Annual Chrysanthemums Cosmos,* Kochia, Lobelia, Marigold, *Mignonette, Nasturtiums, Petunias, Poppies, Portulaca, Ricinus,* Salpiglossis, *Stocks,* Sunflowers, Sweet Peas, Verbenas,* and Zinnias.* Of this list those in italic type are especially good, and should be, if you have room, obtained in more than one variety. Those marked with an asterisk (*) can be with advantage started early in the house, or in a small frame.

If you must select flowers for a shady place, use Antirrhinum, Single Columbine, Bellis Perennis, Pansies, Schizanthus, and Torenia. For vines that will grow quickly from seed to cover a trellis, arbor, or fence, get Japanese Hop, Morning Glories, Dolichos, Cypress Vine, Balloon Vine, Fancy Gourds, or Tall Nasturtiums. Of, if you will start the plants early, indoors, Cardinal Climber, Moon Flower, or Coboea Scandes.

All of these things are healthy and easy to grow, but their effectiveness in the garden will depend largely on how you arrange them. Many people make a number of small beds, scattered all over the place. This not only gives the poorest results, but means a great deal more work. A far better way is to make a long, narrow, continuous "border," extending around the margin of the grounds, leaving a free open center. It may be of uniform width all the way, two to four feet. But a pleasing effect is to be had by giving it a natural curve or wave, so that it will vary in width from, say, two to six feet, producing numerous bays or recesses along the front edge, and showing off the flowers planted to the best advantage.

$5 Will Do It

      

Complete mixed fertilizer	$1.00
Humus	1.00
Bone meal	.50
Nitrate of soda	.50
Seeds—one packet to one ounce each of a dozen or more of the flowers men- tioned in this article	2.00
Six Months of Flowers	$5.00

You will notice in the estimate of costs given herewith that more money is allowed for fertilizers than for seeds. Unless your soil is very rich, you will have to put money as well as seed into the ground to get flowers out of it. "Don't let 'em tell ya different!" Mark your bed out carefully, dig it up as early in the spring as it is dry enough to break up nicely under the digging fork, then hoe and rake it until it is thoroughly pulverized and fine. The fertilizer and humus should be spread on the surface and worked in at the last raking. Get this work done just as soon as possible, even if you do not expect to plant for several weeks. The longer your ground can be prepared in advance of planting, the better.

All of the flowers mentioned above, except where noted, can be planted direct in the soil where they are to grow. But earlier and better results can be had by this simple method: Fork up a place where the soil can be made light and fine, in as sheltered a position as you can get.

Up against the house wall, facing the south and protected from the west, will be quite ideal. Here you can make either a small "seed bed" or a little forcing frame. A regular cold-frame is the best, but it is by no means necessary. A few pieces of board, six inches or more in width, and one or two old windows—winter storm windows from the house, which can be spared now—will do nicely. In this sheltered little bed, protected from frost, plant late in March or early in April part, at least, of your seeds of Alyssum, Antirrhinum, Asters, Cosmos, Kochia, Stocks, and Verbenas. The Ricinus and the vines mentioned can also be started in this frame, or in the house in small pots, using a light soil.

In this specially prepared bed mark out shallow furrows about four inches apart, and sow the seed thinly. The smallest seeds should be lightly pressed down and barely covered from sight. Asters and seeds of that size can be covered an eighth to a quarter of an inch. Tag each row carefully; labels can be bought for a few cents a dozen. Unless the soil is moist, water it thoroughly several hours before planting. After planting keep it covered for several days with newspaper, or better an old bag cut down the side to make it of single thickness.

After the fourth day watch closely. Remove the covering as soon as the seeds begin to come up. Thereafter water carefully with a very fine spray as often as may be necessary to keep the ground evenly moist. But when you do water, water thoroughly, and then do not water again until the surface of the soil begins to dry out.

As soon as the little plants are well started, thin them out, so that they will stand from two to four inches apart. Then, when they are large enough and weather conditions outside are favorable, they may be transplanted to the open. In transplanting, use a quarter of a handful or so of ground bone where each plant is to be set. Nitrate of soda should be applied to produce strong, vigorous growth as soon as the first buds begin to form. Dissolve it in water, at the rate of one ounce to a gallon, using an ordinary watering can. Put on the soil around the plant, preferably just before or after a rain.

For a nickel you may have Herbert Durand's book, "Seventy-five Dollars' Worth of Vegetables for Less than Ten Dollars." Address this office. If your interest in gardening is deep enough to justify a garden manual, "The Garden Month by Month," by Mabel C. Sedgwick (Frederick A. Stokes Company), is authoritative and complete.

Little Things You Ought to Know About Your Car

By ERNEST A. STEPHENS

NOWADAYS practically every motorist is a reasonably expert driver, possessing a good working knowledge of the various mechanical parts of his car, in the sense that he is usually capable of looking after lubrication and adjustment. He is also competent to keep his car in fair running order.

It can not be expected, however, that the average driver-owner should be acquainted with all the engineering terms that are, in many instances, scattered in profusion throughout car catalogs and which are also used with bewildering fluency by a majority of automobile salesmen. For these reasons it may not be out of place to endeavor to simplify a few of these expressions in such a way as to convey to the non-technical mind a practical illustration of the actual meaning.

What is the real horse-power of your engine? The official answer is that it is represented by D2N/2.5, a symbol which means that if you square the diameter of your engine cylinders in inches, multiply the result by the number of cylinders, and divide the product by 2.5, you get a figure representing the power developed by your engine.

As a matter of fact, you don't get anything of the kind, unless your engine delivers its rated horse-power at a piston speed of a thousand feet a minute. Ten years ago this speed probably represented a fair average; but to-day, with its high-speed engines, the case is very different, mid as a matter of fact your engine probably develops twenty per cent. or more horse-power in excess of that shown by its official rating.

DO you know what is meant by Hotchkiss drive? Very many cars are now fitted with a drive of this type. With it the torque arm, fitted to prevent the rear axle from twisting, has been eliminated, and such twist is taken up by the rear springs, through which the drive is transmitted. With this drive a universal joint is fitted at each end of the uninclosed propeller shaft, and it is of interest to observe that the popularity of the Hotchkiss drive is marked by the great increase in the use of nearly flat semi-elliptic rear springs on 1917 models. These springs are usually of special design, to stand the twisting strains to which they are subjected.

Is your car fitted with a spiral bevel final drive? This type is now fitted to practically all of the higher priced cars, taking the place of the ordinary straight bevel. It is quieter in operation, and possibly its greatest advantage lies in the fact that with it there is a greater amount of metal in actual contact at a given time than would be the case in a straight bevel. In the latter there is but one tooth in actual engagement, while in the spiral bevel there may be portions of three teeth in contact at a given moment. Spiral bevel gears permit of easy and accurate adjustment, wear is reduced, and damage through a sudden shock is not likely.

Eliminating the Cowl Tank

DO you know how the vacuum system of gasolene feed operates? This system, in one or another of its forms, is now standard equipment on about three of every four different models of American make. Its use eliminates the cowl tank, thus giving more room in the driving compartment, and enabling the retention of the rear main tank, without any of the complications entailed by the use of a pressure fed fuel system. In this system an auxiliary fuel tank is located between the main tank and the carburetor—usually in a convenient position under the hood.

This tank is so constructed that gasolene is automatically drawn to it from the rear tank by engine suction and furnished from it to the carburetor by gravity. This system permits of the use of an exceedingly short intake manifold or the fitting of the carburetor directly to the cylinder block, decided advantages when the present low grade of commercial gasolene is considered.

Has your engine a detachable cylinder head? If so, you have several things for which to be thankful, and there is but one in particular that you should watch. Take this possible drawback first—and if you take off the head to remove carbon deposits be careful in replacing it, making a point of tightening the holding down nuts just a little at a time and all around, so that all of them become actually tight at almost the same time. Otherwise you may have trouble, owing to the head not seating properly. The owner of a detachable head engine will find the process of carbon removal greatly simplified, and the fact that this method of construction facilitates accurate manufacture tends to produce a smooth running engine with equal compression in all cylinders.

Our Motor Service Department

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

Can you tell me why one cylinder misses when the throttle is opened up quickly from medium speed or when the load is thrown on quietly? This does not occur when the throttle is opened very gradually. M.R.L., Milwaukee.

When the throttle is abruptly opened the tendency is for the carburetor to give too lean or thin a mixture, and it is quite probable that one cylinder may get an even leaner mixture than the others, owing to unequal distribution, caused possibly by bends in the manifold or through leaks in the individual cylinder. Why open up so quickly—under normal conditions, at any rate?

I believe that the front wheels of my car are slightly out of line, but apart from this why does the left tire wear out more quickly than the right? Puzzled, Jackson.

Perhaps the spring on the left is weaker than the other, or possibly tire inflation may not be equal. The answer really is that the tire which is doing the actual work hasn't time to slip or skid and thus wear itself out. The fact that the crown or highest part of the road tends to throw the weight on the right wheel also has something to do with the matter.

I have been told that carbon deposits may be removed by the use of ordinary salt. Is this the case, and will salt cause any damage to the cylinders? L.P., Albany.

Better not use salt, even although it may remove the carbon. Salt is injurious to iron or to anything of which iron forms a part, and you may let some of it get into the crank-case. Think of the ocean liner, and remember that its fittings are brass, a manufactured metal that is not affected by salt water.

C. W., Elkhart, Ind.:

From the nature of your question it would seem as if you had removed the caps and were not quite sure as to how they should be replaced. You can not go wrong if you place the spark-plug cap over the intake valve. It may not be absolutely essential that you should do this; but it is the generally accepted practice, and is recommended.

F. W. B., Baltimore, Md.:

A great deal depends upon the amount of skill with which the operation is done. There is no actual data available, but it is not considered that an oxygen flame, properly applied, is likely to cause damage to aluminum pistons. By the way, one of the claims made by manufacturers of aluminum pistons is that they are practically free from carbon troubles, and it has been demonstrated that carbon does not stick to aluminum. If, therefore, the piston heads are free from deposit, you could probably protect them from the direct oxygen flame.

The Other Brown

Continued from page 6

family grown up—married, some of them; while Carlin was dead, killed in Mexico; and Roddy—well, it was awful to think what had become of Roddy McRae—hung for killing a man in England!

But what had interested Brown, it seemed, was not the terrible end, of which, it appeared, he was already aware. It was the boyhood of young McRae that he had asked about. What kind of boy was he? Like other boys, or different? There had been many questions of that kind put to the mill-worker.

"Now, that's what we got in Spitzen, Mr. Johansen," said the District Attorney, the instant Scarborough had finished. "I'd like to discuss it with you in a minute; but first I want you to hear this. It's the London cable."

He opened a paper taken from his desk and began to read:

"Lionel Welles-Hewitt, fifty-six years old, born England, good family, disinherited by father, drifted to Continent, lived by gambling. Returned to England and figured soon after as witness against Roderick McRae, American, convicted and hung for murder of Luis Yznaga, Spaniard. Went to Mexico, and later married Yznaga's widow. Returned to England, involved in gambling scandal, ordered out of country."

Redding turned to Johansen.

"When I read that I remembered your telling one last night that Miss Yznaga's father had been killed in a quarrel over a card game, and I thought it possible you knew some of the details of the case. If so, I'd like very much to hear them. What we need badly is facts."

Johansen nodded.

"I think I can give you a few," he said. "The only thing I shall say that I don't want to go farther is to tell you why I happen to know about the case at all," he explained. "That grew out of my son's acquaintance with Roderick McRae. They were friends as children in Spitzen. I can remember hearing the name; but I don't recall seeing the boy or his people. Those were very busy years for me. Later, when I had occasion to take an interest in the McRae family, I found that my wife knew as little as I about them. The boy's parents were considered eccentric. The truth was that the father was a genius in his way. He did finally achieve an invention, and a small fortune. That was how the son, Roderick, got his money. He had come into it just about the time my boy went away."

The speaker paused a moment.

"Of course," he presently went on, "you understand that what I am telling you I did not find out until later—after my son's death. Six months before that, when the McRae trial was going on in London, I read about it with no thought that it would ever remotely concern me, and I feel sure my son never heard of it. He was in the mountains at the time, and probably rarely saw a newspaper. Otherwise I believe he would have made an effort to save McRae—would have appealed to me.

"MY son was in McRae's debt for a considerable sum of money," Johansen went on. "I found the fact recorded in a note-book. He and McRae had prospected together, and the small mining claims that they had found were side by side. Whether they went to Mexico together or met there, I don't know. McRae did not stay on with Carl in Mexico. After he got the deed for his mining claim he married and went to Eng—"

"He was married!" exclaimed Redding.

Johansen nodded. He knew what had flashed into the District Attorney's mind.

"Yes; he was married and had a child," he answered. "A boy two years old or so."

"And that was how long ago?"

"Twenty-two years."

Redding threw a glance at Scarborough,

"There's not much more to tell you," said Johansen. "When I tried to find McRae's widow, in order to pay Carl's debt, I learned that she and the child had disappeared after the execution."

"And you never found them?"

"Never. But I have always had the feeling that some day I should run across them. That is why I tried so hard to buy the Rosalba mine. I wanted to give it back to them in payment of Carl's debt."

"THE Rosalba? The Yznaga mine was once McRae's?" asked Redding, surprised. "And he sold it to Yzanga?"

"Sold it? No; he lost it at cards. That was what led to the killing of the Spaniard."

"Oh—I see!"

"You didn't know that?"

"Know it? We don't know anything except what I read you in the cable and what you've told us," answered Redding.

"Well, I don't know much; but I did look into the case at the time I was hunting for Mrs. McRae. As I told you last night, Miles, Luis Yznaga ran a small select gambling place at his house. McRae played there a good deal, and was said to be infatuated with Mrs. Yznaga. When his losses to Yznaga got beyond him, he signed over the Rosalba. This seemed to prey on his mind. It was testified at the trial that on the night in question he had won a large sum, and demanded that Yznaga accept it and give him a quit claim deed for the mine. When the Spaniard refused there was a quarrel, and suddenly McRae, who had been drinking, struck Yznaga in the temple with a heavy cane—and killed him."

"In the temple—like Welles-Hewitt!" exclaimed Redding. "And Welles-Hewitt was a witness against him?"

"Yes; he had been an eye-witness."

For a minute there was silence in the room. At last Redding spoke:

"Mr. Johansen, has it occurred to you that this Brown may be McRae's son?"

Lars Johansen smiled faintly. "Well, I know it has occurred to you, Miles."

"Of course! Look at the evidence! There's the similarity of the blow. If the motive was revenge, that was intentional. Then there's Mrs. Gil's story of Brown's hatred of Welles-Hewitt. And Miss Yznaga's story of her meeting with Brown, his refusal to come to her home, for a reason he would not explain. If his father killed her father, wasn't that reason enough? And why should he go to Spitzen to look up the history of the McRaes if he is not the son?"

Here Scarborough spoke:

"The point I think important about that Spitzen inquiry is that Brown's interest seems to have been mainly in the mentality of the two McRaes—in their queerness. Isn't it possible that he may have been trying to trace some mental eccentricity of his own in his father and grand father?"

Redding looked puzzled.

"I don't believe I follow you quite."

"What I mean is this," said Scarborough. "I met Brown the other evening on the train, as I have told you—"

"And he acted queerly?" Redding put in.

"Well, not exactly that, but—"

Tim paused, glancing at his listeners. He was on the point of telling them of his talk with Brown about dual personality, and of Dozy's theory that Brown himself had a second personality: But suddenly he saw the idea as the two shrewd, practical men before him would see it. So, to cover his false start, he merely added:

"What I mean is that, having talked with Brown, I can't quite bring myself to believe he is the murderer."

"That's how I feel about Gil," said Johansen. "Absurd as his story of the signed papers seems to be, he sticks to it, and I am inclined to believe him."

"But where are his papers?" Redding demanded. "Welles-Hewitt didn't destroy them if, as Gil says, he meant to give them to him for his twenty thousand. And why steal them? They're no good."

"Oh, don't ask questions, Miles!" protested Johansen. "We can all do that."

They fell then into general talk about the case, reviewing it in its different aspects. The time passed rapidly. Ten o'clock struck unnoted. Johansen lingered, waiting for an opening, and when it suddenly came he took advantage of it.

"There's one thing sure," Redding said. "We're not likely to arrive anywhere until we get Brown."

"How about offering a reward?" asked Johansen.

Redding frowned.

"Rewards demoralize the service. Everybody wants to work on the case. And it's every man for himself—no team work.

"What about private detectives, thee?"

"Well—they're all right."

"If you think it would do any good to employ some, you can draw on me for the cost. You see," Johansen hastened to explain, "Brown is sure to be caught in the end, anyway. And if he turns out to be McRae's son,—I will see that he has every chance money can give him."

"Thanks for the offer," said Redding. "I'll consider it."

"And," Johansen continued, "I noticed that neither you nor Mr. Scarborough here mentioned the young man who took the message to Miss Yzanga front Brown—"

"What's that?" Redding sat up. "A message from Brown?"

Johansen repeated Mrs. Gil's story ending with the description of the messenger: "About nineteen, slim and not tall, has red hair and a Southern accent."

Scarborough gave an almost perceptible start, and Redding said crisply:

"Well, that is news! Heard anything of that before?" he inquired of Tim.

"Not a word," said Tim.

"We'll have to look into it."

Johansen rose.

"I'll say good night, Miles," he said, "If there is anything I can do, you'll call on me?"

"Yes, thanks; I'll think your offer over," said Redding. "Good night. You off too, Scarborough? All right. I'll see you in the morning. Good night."

It was raining, Tim found, as he emerged from the house. He buttoned his overcoat and raised the collar, then pulled his hat firmly over his forehead.

"Now for Dozy," he said to himself.

"YOU is wanted at de telephonic, Mister Dozy."

"Who is it?"

"I don' know, sah. I done ax him who is it, and he ain' answer me. He des say it's ve'y impo'tant."

Dozier Cullop frowned at his uncle's dusky major-domo. "Is it Mr. Scarborough?" he questioned.

"No, sah—I don' sca'cely think so."

"I'll bet it is."

Dozy's remark was to himself. Of course it was Tim! All afternoon—ever since he had known of Valentin Gil's arrest—Dozy had been expecting to hear from Scarborough.

Following his call on Miss Yznaga the

---

morning after the murder, he had been summoned to Police Headquarters to describe again his meeting with the suspected murderer; but since then he had been left alone, the inquest having been postponed. But Gil's arrest had worried him greatly. Until then his knowledge of Brown's secret had seemed to justify any help he could give the poor fellow. But now, with another man—innocent, perhaps—under suspicion, he was not sure.

He caught up the receiver.

"Well, what is it?" he said.

There was silence on the wire, a stillness that was like a tense waiting.

"Hello, there!" said Dozy.

"Hello," answered a voice. "Is that you, Cullop?"

Dozy jumped. Without his volition his lips replied.

"Do you know who I am?" came back.

"Ye-es, I—think so."

"Don't speak my name, please." A short wait; then, as if hesitantly: "You told me the other night that if anything came up that you could do for me you would do it. Does that still hold?"

"Why—yes."

"Quite sure?"

"Why—yes," Dozy faltered again.

"If not, I'd much prefer you'd say so," said the voice calmly, though with a note of disappointment.

"Of course I'll do it," Dozy answered at once. What was he hesitating for? Hadn't he given his word?

"Thanks," came the relieved response. "Could you meet me somewhere to-night?"

"Why—yes. Where?"

"Over by the park will he best, I think. If you leave your house in five minutes and walk north, I'll walk south. Undertand?"

"Yes."

You won't fail me?”

"No; I'll come."

"Thanks."

The word was followed by a disconnecting click, and mechanically Dozy put up his own receiver.

What was he in for now? He looked at the time. Ten-forty. Thank heaven it was raining and there would be no one out, and with rain-coat collar up and his hat-brim down he would hardly be recognized if he were seen.

He was ready to start in two minutes, and spent the next three in such disquieting conjectures that it was a relief to his mind to get out and use his legs.

He noticed, in passing that the Welles-Hewitt house was dark. The body of the dead man had been removed and, according to Mose, the belongings of the late occupants had all been taken away. But to Dozy the place still presented a glowering, sinister aspect, which increased his sense of the seriousness of his errand.

Turning northward along the park wall, he gazed sharply ahead. Several blocks away a figure could be seen coming rapidly toward him. Was it Brown? Probably; for there was no one else coming that way.

But behind himself there was somebody—he could hear the heel-taps; and after a moment, looking back, he saw a man with his hat over his eyes, walking briskly. Dozy slowed down a little, thinking it might be better to let the man pass him before he met Brown. But no, he instantly reconsidered, that might attract attention. To dawdle along on such a night would look queer. The thing to do was to act naturally, and when he met Brown to pretend to be surprised.

The meeting occurred near a lamp-post, to Dozy's disgust. But at sight of Brown's face, so haggard and gray and strange that, under other conditions he would hardly have known it for Brown's, he forgot his plans for caution and silently reached out an eager, sympathetic hand, which the other silently gripped.

FOR a dozen paces neither spoke; then Brown broke the pause.

"I felt sure you'd come, Cullop," he said gratefully; "but before I ask you to do anything more I want to tell you something. I can imagine that you haven't had a very comfortable time of it these last two days—especially since the arrest to-day. I know how you must feel about that. So—I want to tell you that I didn't kill Welles-Hewitt.

"Oh," said Dozy faintly, taken aback by the calmness of the announcement. "You—know now?" he added, with sudden interest"

"Yes," Brown replied, staring straight ahead.

"Oh," murmured Dozy again; then: "Who did kill him?" he asked"

"I—don't know."

"Think it could have been Gil?"

"Yes—it could have been."

The emphasis of the reply was so enigmatic that questions sprang to Dozy's lips; but they stopped there—he could hardly have told why.

And now he became again abruptly conscious of the man behind them. He fancied that the heel-taps were louder than before—that the man was nearer, much nearer. He wanted to look around to see, but was afraid—he did not know why. Without reason he felt nervous.

"I saw Miss Yznaga," Dozy said abruptly, forced by his nervousness to speak.

"Thank you. I gathered that you had, from the papers."

"And she told me to tell you that she—trusts you."

"Thanks," said Brown again. "I don't want to keep you. What I want to ask you to do for me is this: I have some papers that I would like to have put in a safe place. They're private papers, and I should hate to have the police or the newspapers get them if—I should be arrested—or give myself up."

He waited for a moment, but, getting no response, went on again falteringly:

"I thought yo—might be willing to put them away for me somewhere—where they would be safe and—I could get them—later."

HE stopped again. The word "papers" had startled Dozy. It was ominous, with all Gil's talk about his papers.

"I can give you my word of honor that the papers are mine," Brown said.

"Of course!" Dozy exclaimed, embarrassed, yet relieved. "I—I guess I can do that all right," he added.

At once Brown's hand went into an inner pocket and brought out a thin white package, and held it out to Dozy, who took it from him and placed it in a pocket of his own.

"It's no use my trying to thank you, Cullop," Brown began, speaking in a firmer, somewhat louder tone, which Dozy instantly hushed with a warning whisper:

"Sh! Don't talk so loud! That man's right behind us."

"What!"

Involuntarily Brown turned his head, and the next moment they had both wheeled and sprung back; for from the man following them there came a sharp order:

"Hands up!"

It was Tim! Even the two quick words were enough to tell Dozy that. Tim! What did it mean?

"Hands up!" Scarborough repeated.

But nothing was farther from Dozy's thoughts than to obey. Almost automatically he turned and ran.

"Stop!" Scarborough called. "Or I'II shoot!""

But Dozy did not stop; he knew Tim would not fire at him. And, even had he not been sure of it, he would have kept on. For the horrible fear had come to him that Brown must think he had betrayed him. What else could he think? And the one way to prove himself was to save those papers from the police. That he would do at any cost.

To his consternation, Scarborough's threat was followed by a whistled call for help. Good heavens! If Tim meant to set the police on him, he might as well have fired! Dozy sprang for the park wall, vaulted it, and dashed for a black clump of evergreens. There he stopped to listen. A trolley car clanged by, then another; but even their racket, he knew would not have drowned a police call, had there been a second one. And there had not. Tim's first whistle must have been on Brown's account, not his. Good old

---

Tim! But poor Brown—poor devil! What would become of him now?

With the receding of the trolley cars Dozy could hear now a jumble of several voices above him, then steps that gradually died away.

He was safe—that was clear; but what was he to do with the papers? He felt sure that Tim had seen Brown give them to him; and, though the police had not been set on his track, it was possible that some one would be waiting for him when he got home—Tim himself, perhaps. No, he would not dare go home with the papers; nor ought he, he thought, to keep them in his possession overnight.

Striking out across the soggy lawn toward the nearest path, he took the precaution of leaving the park by a somewhat distant exit, turning over in his mind, as he went, schemes for the disposal of Brown's papers; and, as he discarded one idea after another, it seemed to him for a time that there was no place within his reach where he could hide them. But at last the chance sight of a postman collecting the mail from a street-box suggested the thought that the post-office was as secret and as safe a guardian as he was likely to find that night. And, inclosing the papers in an envelop purchased at a small stationer's, he wrote his own name upon it.

At the address he hesitated. His first idea was to send the package to himself in care of a relative in Alaska. Then a better plan occurred to him, and he addressed it to Columbia University. For he knew from experience that it would lie there until doomsday unless he went and got it.

When the slide of the mail-box fell shut upon the papers, Dozy breathed a sigh of relief and turned his steps toward home.

ALBA awoke with a frightened start; but, even before regaining consciousness, she recognized the touch that had roused her as Mrs. Martinez's, and murmured "Naña" drowsily, as if reassured, her eyes still closed. When she opened them, however, on coming fully to herself, the sight of the figure by her bed startled her anew and she sprang up in alarm.

"Naña! What's the matter? What has happened?" she cried.

"Sh!" The old woman raised a warning hand. "Be quiet. I want to talk to you—to tell you something."

She glanced apprehensively toward the door of the narrow, cell-like room, listening intently; after which, satisfied apparently that no one had been awakened, she turned again to the girl, who sat crouched upon the edge of the bed, watching her.

In one hand Juaña Martinez carried a lighted candle in a candlestick, and her first action now was to set this down on a table, after which she herself sank heavily down beside Alba on the bed, which creaked under her weight.

She wore over her night-dress a faded flannel wrapper, her coarse gray hair hanging loose about her face, which too seemed gray in the shadowy light—all but the eyes, which had never been so black: at least, so Alba thought. In the face—the most familiar to her in the world—Alba found something awesome, something strange. And unconsciously she drew back a little.

But Juaña Martinez did not notice her movement. She was staring past her at nothing. And Alba, mastering her momentary revulsion, did not stir again. She waited breathlessly, not daring to speak. What was it Naña had come to tell her? And why did she look like that—as if she saw things that were not there? Was she out of her mind from fever? Or did she really know something about the murder that she had refused to tell, as the police believed? Until now she had denied that. "Who is Señor Brown? I do not know him. I saw nobody. I saw nothing." Those had been the only replies Alba had been able to get from her, when, arriving at the convent from Mrs. Gil's, she had pleaded with her to tell whatever she might be keeping back.

"The señor is dead," mumbled the old woman, still gazing at space. "He is dead, and soon I shall be dead."

"Naña! You must not say that!" cried Alba. "You are better—you are not going to die."

"Yes. He will come for me too. It is the will of God," Mrs. Martinez answered, and crossed herself.

Alba caught her breath. Who would come? What did Naña mean? From her vacant eyes it was plain that she had spoken unwittingly. Hesitating a moment, Alba risked a question.

"Who will come?" she asked softly.

There was no reply. The old woman seemed not to hear.

"Who will come?" Alba repeated, after another pause. "Who was it that came before?" she ventured. "Whom did you see?"

At that, as if the last question, by its very familiarity, had stirred her dormant sense of caution and brought her back to a sense of her surroundings, Juaña's eyes regained focus and narrowed a little.

"I saw nobody—I saw nothing," she declared, reverting to her exasperating formula.

Alba heaved a sigh of disappointment. "What do you want to tell me, then?" she demanded wearily.

"I want to tell you what you must do when I am dead," was the answer; and there was no doubt now that the speaker knew what she said, and that every word was uttered with intention. "Are you listening?" she questioned, fixing her black eyes sharply on the girl's face, and adding, after an answering nod: "You must not sell the mine."

"But it is sold, Naña—I told you that!"

"No. He did not sell it. You must not believe what they tell you. He did not sell it. I know that."

"But he did, Naña dear," Alba insisted, with a shade of .

"No," the old woman repeated; "he did not sell it. I know! He was afraid."

"Afraid!" Alba stared. This was something new. "Afraid of whom?"

"Of me."

"Of you?"

Juaña, Martinez nodded her head solemnly.

"You must not sell it. You must not keep it, either," she said. "It is not yours—it never was yours."

"Not mine!" exclaimed the girl, starting up. "Naña, what are you talking about? The Rosalba was mine! My father left it to me and my mother—"

"Sh!"

IN her surprise and excitement Alba had raised her voice above the subdued tone they had both been using, and after stopping her Mrs. Martinez rose and hurried to the door to listen there, fearful lest some one might come to see what was the matter. Then, reassured, after a moment she returned to the bed. But she did not again sit down. Pressing her hand against her thigh, she glanced down at it, then at Alba.

"The paper is here," she said in a cautious whisper. "I have carried it on me for twenty years. But when I am dead you must take it to a judge and let him read it, and he will tell you what you must do. And—" She paused and, leaned closer to the girl. "You must never leave me again. Wherever I go, you must go with me—or I might die and the paper would be lost. And now," she sighed heavily, "I have told you. Go back to sleep."

"To sleep!" Alba sprang out of bed and caught at Juaña's arm as the latter turned away as if to leave her. "Naña, what does it all mean? You must tell me!" she insisted excitedly. "What paper is this? I don't understand. What is it about? Let me see it."

"No," said the old woman, pulling herself away. "No one shall see it until I am dead. Then you will know." She made a low moaning sound and crossed herself once more. "It will not be long," she said heavily. "He will come. It is the will of God."

Then, opening the door, she went out, leaving Alba standing wild-eyed in the middle of the room.

To be continued next week

Continued from page 5

As his look remained on her, she became effervescent, elated, careless. "I do feel like dancing, and I am hungry. Let's have the party." Her face sparkled.

"Fine," applauded Ambrose Luxe, turning her toward the Great White Way.

In a showy trottery, they danced a one-step, a fox-trot, and three Hawaiian waltzes. They drank and ate frothy concoctions. They enjoyed the usual surface exhilaration.

On the battered brownstone steps of Miss Tabitha's boarding-house, they said good night.

"I'm glad you liked the party," he laughed as he went off.

"I adored it," she sent giddily after him.

She fitted her latch-key, and ran into the boarding-house.

WHEN she opened the door of her room, a slight little figure rose from a chair by the window.

"Of all people!" she said amazedly. "Why—Lulie!"

Lulie, trembling with excitement, seized Gentian's hand.

"I've been waiting for you hours and hours!" she stammered. "I've run away from home. Nobody knows. I got your address from Mis' Felt. I've run away from Coventry."

Gentian put her arm about Cyrus Goth's little sister. She led Lulie across the room to her couch-bed, and made her sit down.

"Why have you run away?" she asked.

"Because!" panted Lulie. "Because—Oh, Gennie, my mother and Cyrus are very angry with me!"

"What about?" asked Gentian.

"All I did was to meet him once or twice in the Nathan Hale cemetery. We only talked. Only once or twice he kissed me. He's my friend!"

The violet eyes brimmed with tears.

"I've run away from my mother and Cyrus," whimpered Lulie. "They don't understand." She dashed her tears away, and her piquant face lighted up. "Oh, Gentian, I sang so sweetly at Thankful Meekes's funeral!" she rhapsodized. "He came to hear me! Gennie, I want to become a choir singer in New York. Do you know where—Mr. Ambrose Luxe goes to church?"

Gentian, her face scarlet, put out her hands and took Lulie by the shoulders.

"You must go back to Coventry, Lulie."

A stubborn look locked the saintly little face. Lulie cast a vindictive glance at Gentian—slimly resplendent in her gown of gold and silver tissue.

"Look at you, all dressed up!" she pouted. "And you won't help me a bit!"

"Go to bed, Lulie," Gentian said quietly. "To-morrow you must go back."

Lulie cried again. Miserably she took down her hair and unbuttoned her childish body from her prim and proper clothes. In her white cotton night-gown, she crept between the covers of Gentian's bed.

Gentian slowly undressed. Every now and then she looked at Lulie, with her tremulous mouth, saintly brow, and a touch of Cyrus in her sun-shot hair.

The discovery that, while Ambrose Luxe had played with her, he had beckoned little Lulie Goth to come and play with him, weakened and dulled Gentian's spirit.

She sat at her window, and put her elbows on the grime-flecked sill. Outside, dawn revealed the ugly magnitude of the city. Suddenly she became afraid. She wondered—in terror—how many vain girls those house-tops roofed!

"Dear God," she sobbed, "I am simply a fool!"

Next day Gentian gave up her place in La Petite Vanité and took Lulie home. The village was buzzing with Lulie's disappearance when the two girls stepped from the train. Followed by eyes and tongues, they walked along the main street to the Goths' house.

"You open the door," Lulie begged. "I'm scared to death!"

Gentian turned the cleanly door-knob.

Lucretia Goth sat on the horsehair sofa in the parlor, holding a plush-framed photograph of Lulie between her hands.

Like a bird that has flown too soon, Lulie fluttered toward her mother.

Lucretia stood up, and cradled her youngest daughter in her spare arms. Her eyes focused on Gentian.

"Cyrus found out ter-day from Abigail Felt thet Lulie hed gone ter you," she said. "He tuk a train ter fetch her."

"I guess we crossed trains," said Gentian. Unostentatiously she left.

Abigail Felt, repairing a hay-tedder, laid down her tools and held out fire-bronzed hands to Gentian.

"How fine the shop looks re-painted, Mother Abigail," said Gentian, taking the hands. She laid them for a moment against her cheeks. Then she went to the forge and warmed herself at it.

Sh saw Cyrus Goth that evening. He stopped her on the main street.

"I want to thank you for bringing Lulie home," he said in a terse voice. "Mother thanks you, too."

Eyes down, Gentian was silent.

"When are you going back to New York?" he asked coldly.

She made a confused gesture—and hurried on.

The next day Gentian Belaire took up her trade in the smithy. But when Leander Osgood, Phineas Dobbyn, Joel Burpee, and Rufus Topliff gathered in the shop, she was apt to leave it. She took lonely tramps through the hills.

She longed—yet feared—to go to Cyrus Goth and tell him she loved him.

ONE afternoon, when Gentian was sorting nails on the bench in the shadow of the smithy door, and Abigail was feeding the forge fire, Cyrus Goth came in.

With no sign of emotion on her gaunt, weather-beaten face, Abigail stood the coal-shovel against the chimney.

"You done right ter come, Cyrus," she said stolidly. "Gentian, here's Cyrus."

Impassively Abigail Felt strode from the blacksmith shop to her house beside it. Cyrus Goth looked at Gentian Belaire, and Gentian Belaire looked at Cyrus Goth.

"I'm making forty a week," Cyrus said evenly. "Is the bid high enough?"

Her face blanched.

With a low exclamation, he crossed the shop. He lifted the nail-box from her lap.

"Gennie!" he cried. "Forgive me!"

He drew her to her feet, put a strong hand under her chin, and tilted back her face till her eyes lifted.

"Do you love me?" he asked.

"Maybe," she stammered.

He flushed. "Tell me you love me!"

She was breathless. "I'm ashamed to."

He grew grim. "You'd rather wait till I'm making five thousand a year?"

She whitened again.

Again he was indulgent.

"My darling!" he said, cupping her white face with his warm hands. "Don't think that I mean these harsh things. I love you."

"I know," she said humbly.

"I've loved you ever since you were born, Gennie."

"I know."

He seized her in his arms. His handsome face, glowing, ardent, all but touched hers.

"I was the first man to see you!" he triumphed. "You were just a few hours old when Mis' Felt brought you into this shop where I was building horseshoes!" Possessive, his arms caught her closer. "I fetched your first meal for you, honey!"

"I know." She was pliant.

He quieted, became potent.

"You must let me fetch your meals now—whether you love me or not."

Her reply was almost inaudible:

"I love you, Cyrus."

With the admission, difficult to frame, diffident in its new-born modesty, she lifted her face for his kisses.