When and How Will the War End?

EVERYBODY has made a prophecy but me: and I ought, by this time, to have learned better.

Think of all the things that were going to end the war.

England's entrance will do it—just wait a month or so, said H. G. Wells. And so we waited hopefully.

Then it was the "Russian hordes." Any one with half an eye could see that they would turn the trick. The end was right in sight.

While England and France held the western front, the ceaseless tide of Russians pouring over Poland would sweep through to Berlin: Even the Germans themselves seem to have felt some apprehension—all of them except von Hindenburg, who calmly led the Russians into a swamp and let them drown.

Then it was the Dardanelles.

Then the Great Spring Drive; then Salonica; and then Rumania.

And still the prophecies continue.

Only the other morning a man coming up from Washington advised me to warn my readers to prepare for a five years' war.

And on that same afternoon a British captain of artillery told me that our boys will be whistling "Yankee Doodle" through the streets of Berlin on Christmas Day.

Where wise men disagree so greatly, surely anybody's guess is good.

And my guess is that the war will end sometime in 1918.

Those who talk of a five years' war seem to me to have allowed their judgment to be buried far too deep in maps and figures. They have forgotten one very important factor—human nature.

There is a limit to the amount that men and women can or will stand. Any one who has lived in one of those sections of the West where the wind blows hard every day for months at a time will know what I mean. There comes, at length, a day when one either has to pack up and get out of that wind for a while, or go crazy.

There will come a day when the constant pounding of artillery in men's ears, the constant wrenching of women's hearts before the casualty lists, the constant strain of insufficient food and fuel, will be too much. I believe the signs are plentiful that a large part of the men and women of Europe are on the threshold of that day even now.

Assuming that we in America are reasonably efficient, we ought a year from now to be able to accomplish two things:

First, so to strengthen the fight against the submarine by our destroyers and sea-planes and so to add to the world's tonnage by our building that it will be apparent to all the world, including the German people, that the submarine can not win the war.

Second, so to increase the number of Allied air-planes on the western front that it will be apparent to the German people that the air belongs to the Allies, with all the tremendous advantage that entails.

If this double demonstration can be made, it seems to me that it would then be possible for President Wilson and Lloyd-George to unite in a peace proclamation that could not be refused.

"The war can go on for years, if necessary," they could say, "but to what end? You can not win by the submarine: you can not win on land. You are business men: will you take your loss as it stands, or follow your stock to the bottom?"

Statesmanship did not particularly distinguish itself at the beginning of the war: it will have its splendid opportunity at the end.

Belgium and Serbia and Rumania must be restored: and Germany must contribute to their restoration. But I would have the Allies contribute also. I would make such peace as would leave no rankling bitterness to be the seed of future wars.

A peace which, while it fixed the far greater and more hideous blame of Germany, would recognize that no nation has been blameless—that staggering armament and secret diplomacy and the greed for trade have had their perfect fruit in this awful war, and must, with the war, be swept forever from the face of the world.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

WHEN THE PRUSSIANS CAME TO POLAND

"THE great lords have quarreled, and we must pay for it with our blood, our wives, and our children."

He was a Pole, a bookkeeper twenty-six years old, who said this, one of the men caught in that first fierce invasion of Poland. Just as Belgium lay in the road of the Prussians on their march to Paris, so Poland stretched between them and Russia. The marshy lowlands, covered with forests, and aided by the fortresses on the west bank of the Vistula, can well hold back an invasion from the front, but through East Prussia these strongholds can be attacked from the rear.

The first day of August, 1914, rumors of war spread through all the districts of Poland. Within a week soldiers were marched through to East Prussia. Only a few days later the wounded began to stream into the hospitals of Central Poland.

Madame Turczynowicz, an American girl who married a Pole,. describes the arrival of the first train of wounded men in her book, "When the Prussians Came to Poland":

"We heard the cars stop—motor-trucks packed full of groaning, coughing humanity. They had been transported a long distance, and were on the verge of exhaustion. The next day we had over five hundred in our hospital."

The Poland of the days before the war was covered with great forests of oak and beech and lime. Even when the Tartars swept over its plains in the earliest centuries it was famous for its grain. The revolution of 1863 meant the first step of modernization. In the next ten years the area of cultivated soil increased by 1,350,000 acres. Rye and oats and wheat and potatoes would have made that country rich in a few more years. Its mines and factories were growing. The "century of progress" had its great promise too for this country which had so long been the scene of the wrangling of Russia and eastern Europe. But "progress" had another destiny, for this one of the small nations.

A month of war and Poland was so altered that refugees returning to their homes were confused, and thought they must have lost their way, because well known landmarks had disappeared. Woods were gone—"graves, myriads of graves instead."

And near the battle-fields one found children, "wandering, left alone, their parents driven into East Prussia: one child of four, carried a baby of six months. They had eaten earth in the extremity of their hunger. Every hut was burned down. Many times we saw dead men. Going through the woods at night we heard a child cry, but could not locate the sound."

So Kultur was carried to Poland.

MRS. MARTIN'S DAUGHTER-IN-LAW

By ELIZABETH GAINES WILCOXSON

Illustrations by William Berger

"HARRY! Bertha! Inez! Louise! Maud! How many times have I got to screech up these back stairs? It's a'ready five minits of, an' breakfast waiting on the table, an' nary one of you—"

A scurry of feet in the upper hall, and down the stairs hastily backed Mrs. Martin to the range to pour coffee.

Harry was the last one down. He stalked to his place at the foot of the table with an air of defiant glumness, and settled in his chair with a gruff "Good morning." He was not at present on good terms with his family, and it was, of course, all their fault. He was one against five; but the obstinacy bristling from the crest of his stiff blond pompadour—worn upright to add a longed-for inch to his five feet ten—down to the bottomest tap of his boot-heels emphatically proclaimed that Harry could hold his own, even if he could do no more in the numerically unequal contest. He was a handsome fair boy with a stubborn mouth and chin, and he took himself with tremendous seriousness, which contributed his mien of heavy tragedy when there was a clash of wills between him and his family, which usually meant that he found himself resisting the combined feminine effort to discipline him.

He was no sooner seated than Louise shot a meaning glance at her mother, which Mrs. Martin correctly interpreted to say: "Get to it, mother; you haven't much time."

Answering the summons was easy to Mrs. Martin. She was bursting with the subject that was charging the air about them like a tangible presence. She was very fat, and her voice was thin and plaintive.

"I suppose you are goin' to the dance to-night, Harry?" she began, introducing what, in the nature of things, was bound to become a painful conversation.

Harry's blue-gray eyes instantly darkened and flashed a hostile glance around the table.

"I suppose I am," he replied, in a tone that challenged Mrs. Martin to bridge skirmishes and cut right into battle.

He helped himself to two extra pieces of toast, though one yet remained on his plate, merely by way of announcing that he was ready to stay with it till the last dog was shot. But Mrs. Martin ignored the larger opening, and continued to skirt the battle-ground according to her own method.

"I suppose you are not goin' with none of your sisters nor with Delie Greene," she surmised dolefully.

The storm in Harry's eyes gathered ominously.

"That's another correct supposition," he replied tensely, and waited, on springs, for his sisters to prance into the ring.

Inez sniffed scornfully. She addressed her mother with elaborate detachment: "You know, mother, Harry doesn't admire blondes."

"Not with pop-eyes and a flat nose," averred Harry, promptly answering her.

"He admires colored people, you know, mother," put in Bertha.

"Not when they buy the color at a drugstore," taunted Harry, a dangerous red beginning to tinge his vision. Bertha dabbed consciously at the suspicion of rouge on her lips.

"He likes Dagos," piped Maud, the youngest, aged nine.

"If I hear another word from you—"

He did not complete the threat, but the tone was significant. Maud subsided with a scared look at her mother.

"Harry! It's bad enough—" struck in Louise.

"This isn't your butt-in, either," reminded Harry, with intimidating ferocity, and Louise also subsided.

She cast her expressive eyes at her mother. Harry's temper, when provoked, was such that the girls had long ago learned better than to cross swords with him, except when en masse and with Mrs. Martin at hand for heavy reinforcement.

It was true that in ordinary he behaved with a sweetness of disposition, an amiable indulgence,—even long-suffering patience,—that made him a model elder child and only brother in a family of five; but the rare occasions to the contrary had been unforgettable. Mrs. Martin dared to go a little farther; therefore the girls fell back upon her to force Harry to listen to arguments he would not hear from them. So, now perceiving her daughters effectively backed against the wall, Mrs. Martin took up the protest:

"Harry, haven't you got no feelings for your sisters? Oh, that I should have suffered and raised up an only son, and him with such lovely sisters as he has got, and then go off and disgrace us all by marrying a Turk or whatever it is, with a name nobody can pronounce, set'n' in a winder right out on the street all day rollin' cigarettes to be looked at, instead of that nice girl, Delie Greene, all brought up so careful, with a little fortune all her own and the only child of a mother ownin' one of the finest houses in this neighborhood! It's a shame!"

Mrs. Martin's voice reached a gasp, and she regained it with a sob.

HARRY'S face had grown pale; he dashed his cup down with a sharp crack, and stood up. The girls were a little frightened—in extreme anger Harry was so elemental. He had a distressing way of declining from that restraint that the young female Martins were trying to cultivate as good form. When lashed to a finish, Harry was given to passionate utterances, such as twenty-five years before had made his immediate forebear a terror along the water-front, where he ably stevedored with the best of them. What Harry said now, though, was shocking only in context and vehemence of delivery.

"I've listened to the last word of that talk I'm ever goin' to. Eerice Cardemarteroi is as good as my sisters or any other girl. I am going to marry her. Now you've got it straight, and won't have to do any more guessin'."

THERE was a concerted gasp of dismay around the table, and Louise broke into quiet weeping.

"With such a name!" sputtered Mrs. Martin, hardly knowing what she said.

"Well, her name won't be Cardemarteroi when she marries me, though I can't see that Martin's a better one. I notice the girls are doin' all they can to shake it!"

"Harry!" quavered Mrs. Martin, whose wits worked haltingly in a panic. "It was your father's name!"

"I should hope so!" retorted Harry. "As for Eerice's job, I'd like to know if Louise isn't spending all her time, and twenty dollars a month besides, learnin' to kick her legs all over a stage, so's she can be looked at!"

"Very well, Harry," Bertha ventured to interpose; "we'll leave out the point of what she does. But, since you've announced positively that she is to be one of the family, will you kindly tell us what she really is—if you know? You say she's Italian. I took a good look at her the other day, and she's certainly the darkest complexioned Italian I ever knew. We presume, of course, that you know; but, since she's to marry into the family—"

"You've got the wrong hunch," Harry interrupted, his voice like snapping icicles. "She isn't marrying the family. We aren't coming here to live, and none of you have been invited to visit us. Yes, she's Italian. Her father was an Italian and her mother part Italian."

"What was the other part, Harry?" insinuated Inez smoothly—at which Harry's hold on himself broke again.

"I don't know, and I don't give a hang!" he raged furiously. "You every one make me sick! The next yap I hear from any of You about Eerice, I leave this house for good. Try it if' you want to find out I mean what I say. There comes that darn car!"

THERE was a wild dash from Bertha and Inez as well. Both were teachers in the public schools, and were obliged to catch that car in order to be on time. An accommodating conductor waited for them while they ran a block with coats and gloves in hand. They scrambled on in physical as well as mental turmoil. In addition to her distress of mind, Inez had a headache and was wretched to the brink of tears.

"You'd better go back, Iny, and telephone you're sick," advised Bertha.

"Oh, mercy, no," objected Inez petulantly, pressing a wadded handkerchief to her temple. "I'd rather work all day than have to listen to ma take on about Harry. It's fierce, though. We have a right to expect something from him; instead he's doing all he can to drag us down. Think of his marrying that greasy gypsy creature with her fantastic dress and long earrings!"

"Your head won't get better if you keep on thinking of the worst side of it," admonished Bertha. "I hope something will break it up before they actually marry. Harry gets good wages, but I don't believe he has saved much."

"Don't you think it," contradicted Inez. "He pays mother only eight a week, and he doesn't blow his money. He's so close-mouthed you can't tell what he's up to."

"Well, anyway," pointed out Bertha grudgingly; "she isn't really greasy. We've all got into the habit of saying exaggerated things about her. And she doesn't wear that crazy dress on the street either. It's just an advertisement, like a demonstrator's costume."

"I don't care! Why couldn't he take up with some one we'd be proud of? The girls in school were all crazy about him, but he didn't care a rap about any of them. Now he falls in love with this creature! Delia Greene hasn't any sense, but she's nice; and he was always so good-natured about taking her around, I imagined they might marry sometime."

"I guess she imagined it, too," replied Bertha, with a faint grin; "but she can't accuse him of putting the notion into her head. All he ever did was to take her when we girls handed her out to him— Oh, here's my street—send out for some headache tablets, Iny—"

Bertha hurriedly left the car, and Inez sat angrily watching Harry's sturdy back as he stood on the rear platform. Presently he swung off without looking around.

AFTER Maud had left for school, and Louise, more leisurely, for her work at the dancing school where she assisted, paid in part with lessons in stage dancing, Mrs. Martin remained at her deserted breakfast table, a sad sketch of adipose woe. Her cheerless reflections were interrupted but not diverted by Mrs. Greene, who trotted intimately in the back door.

"Good morning, Sally. I've brought you a sample of Delie's orange

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marmalade. How are you? You don't look none too well at all."

"My looks don't belie me, Viny," returned Mrs. Martin mournfully. "Set the marmalade on the table and take a chair for yourself. I'm much obliged to Delie. She's a fine little housekeeper. It's a pity there ain't more like her. I'm glad you've come over, for I have just got to talk my troubles to somebody, Viny, or die. You and me has neighbored together since both of us burrowed in out here when this part o' town was a wilderness of [?] and fir. For twelve year we've lived here side by each, and brought up our fam'lies through sickness and death, and lived to see our hill the high-tonedest part of Seattle.

"Our fortunes has been pretty much alike, Viny. We both lost our husbands early and sold off our acres, lot by lot, as values riz, and built ourselves fine houses, and brought up our children with the best! We are a credit to ourselves, Viny, if I do say it; and I guess we've got as much to be thankful for as most has. I. ain't kickin' about what has been, but it seems to me right now as if bad luck has went out of its way to give me a clout! You'll never know the trouble and sorror a child can be, Viny, because you've got a only daughter that's a comfort and joy to you!"

MRS. MARTIN'S voice broke and her tears overflowed. Mrs. Greene sucked in her breath sympathetically.

"Yes," she condoled, "it does look as if folks work like slaves sometimes to bring up their children the way they'd orter go, and when they are up they go the way they please."

"That's true as gospel," concurred Mrs. Martin bitterly; "but I never thought to have my only son grow up to marry a mulatter!"

"Ma— oh, it ain't that bad, is it?" faltered Mrs. Greene. Then she rallied to give her friend such solace as she might. "Oh, she ain't no mulatto, Sally. You know, some of the biggest bugs in Seattle is dark foreigners of all kinds of nationalities. I ain't prejudiced against persons account of the country they was unlucky enough to be born in, Sally. God made us all out o' the same earth!"

"There's differences in dirt, though, Viny. You can't know how you'd feel till you're put to trial. With goldfish flyin' around his head, I ask you, in the name o' mercy, why my only son should go hook up with this here crab!"

Mrs. Martin waved her hands wildly, and her tears gushed afresh.

Mrs. Greene, feeling scarcely more cheerful, again essayed comfort:

"It's hard, Sally; I know it is hard. But young men will get married."

"I wanted he should marry!" gulped Mrs. Martin. "But why couldn't he 'ov done well by hisself instead of takin' up with a snake-charmer? That's what she is—a snake-charmer—charmin' my son with them great black eyes o' hern, as big as saucers!"

"I know!" tremulously sighed Mrs. Greene.

"I went and stood for a solid half hour in the drivin' rain yesterday, catchin' my death of cold, lookin' at her set'n' there in the winder right out on the street, rollin' cigarettes, with everybody crowdin' around agape at her!" continued Mrs. Martin shrilly. "It's disgraceful! No good will come of his marryin' her, Viny. Oil and water won't mix."

"I know," agreed Mrs. Greene, half in tears. "I says the same to Delie."

SHE intended no ambiguous hint of application. Indeed, she had hungrily caught at Mrs. Martin's delicate allusions to her choice of a daughter-in-law. Mrs. Greene may have been well blessed in a dutiful daughter, but her life had been well-nigh insupportable for the space of several weeks; for dutiful Sidelia—two years Harry's senior, soft, mealy-skinned, with pale freckles and pale, prominent eyes—had long lavished upon him her whole heart's adoration.

Harry's lack of response would have blighted a less deeply rooted passion. To do him justice, not being a conceited youth, he was not even aware of it. He often felt bored and imposed upon when his sisters paired him off with Delia; but he took rather an altruistic view of it. She was so dull and plain, nobody else would go with her; therefore it was a charity to escort her about. His eyes were just open to the significance of those maneuvers, and it filled him with resentful wrath at his sisters. About Sidelia he thought nothing at all.

When his love affair with Eerie became known—and he was so far gone in his infatuation from the start as to make no pretense of hiding it—it caused no less consternation and grief in one household than in the other; and this morning Mrs. Greene had been literally washed over to the Martin premises on the flood of Sidelia's tears, to learn the best or the worst there was to know; and the worst was so had that she dreaded to go home and tell it, and lingered on, letting the evil moment wait upon her.

They sat together in moist, gloomy silence for a few moments, each occupied with her own painful reflections; then Mrs. Greene once more tried to cheer her friend conversationally.

"As I come over I saw another trunk goin' in," she remarked.

"Which one? The coffin-lookin' thing?"

"No; the brown one this time. And yesterday we saw that Eyetalian doctor goin' in again. The sick-bed is downstairs now. It's in the big livin'-room; we could see in when the winders was raised up once, and the curtains put back like as if to let in all the air they could for a minit. Maybe the old man has some kind o' spells."

"I dunno," said Mrs. Martin lugubriously. "Harry spends every evenin' of his life over there, listenin' to that snake-charmer play on Mrs. Dilse's fine pianner,—her livin' in houses occupied by men only, and them outlaws!—but we can't get a breath out o' him, except the old man is her uncle. I don't believe it. She looks more like the little feller. More'n likely, neither one's any kin."

THE house they were talking of stood between the home of Mrs. Greene and that of Mrs. Martin. A certain rich man named Dilse had bought the corner from Mrs. Martin for a sum that enabled her to build for herself a fine new house. Dilse built an expensive house, and furnished it at a great cost. Then fortune turned for him. He lost heavily in speculation, and within the year died by his own hand. The widow closed the house, left it in charge of a caretaker, and went away. At the end of the year the caretaker, a surly, uncommunicative man, performed a final act of malice by quitting the place, leaving the neighbors uninformed concerning the incoming caretakers, who were moving in with a scant handful of shabby belongings.

The newcomers were three—a little dark man with black, protuberant eyes and oily black hair, who, without being either dirty or ill dressed, appeared to be both in his wrinkled, untidy clothes. The older man was tall, emaciated, dark, and sickly-looking. From out his thin face peeped two dots of black, sunken eyes. Except on the pleasantest days, he was never seen out of the house; then it was to sit huddled in a chair on the upper porch, his bent form hugged in an overcoat, the tip of his hooked yellow nose showing between the high throat muffler and his low-pulled wide hat-brim. Then there was the girl—Eerice: a slim, dark beauty, who carried herself with a serene, composed air and spoke English perfectly. She said she was the niece of the older man, and kept house for them. They did not occupy the basement rooms, as had the old caretaker, but apparently lived all over the big house, as suited them. And they pointedly shunned their neighbors.

Now, to the mysterious conduct of living alone and avoiding their neighbors was added a procedure so inexplicable that it was nothing short of sensational. It was this:

About three weeks after they took possession of the Dilse house, a mean little cart drove up one morning and delivered a long, flat, iron-bound chest. Three days later the same cart, driven by a disreputable-looking person in appearance very like the dark little man, came and took the chest away, and at the same time delivered a squat tin trunk with rope handles. The very next day the cart came again, bringing a long, uncanny, iron-riveted box, disagreeably like a coffin, and took away the squat trunk. Thereafter the performance was repeated at irregular intervals—the odious coffin thing putting in appearance most frequently.

Harry Martin fell in love with the girl. There were no intermediate steps: it was love at first sight. Expostulation, scorn, tears, and contempt, seasoning a systematic nagging from his family, had no effect except to set his obstinate temper and beget a surly reticence.

The week following his breakfast-table announcement was filled with mute protest of pink-rimmed eyes from the girls and gusty sighs and dismal groans and venturesome allusions from Mrs. Martin.

"Oh me," she sighed plaintively at the dinner-table one night, crumbling a cracker fragment into her cup of tea, "There's no comfort in havin' children these days, when they get too old to spank and put to bed when they don't behave like they'd ought to. I'm losing all the appertite I ever did have."

As usual, Harry lunged straight.

"That's all right, mother," he said, with cruel hardness of heart. "It will do you good not to eat so much; you won't be so fat. And any time you want one of the girls licked and put to bed, I'm able and willin' to do it. I get sick myself nights listening to Bertha tellin' that long Tom of hers good-by on the door-steps. I was takin' aim at his head with my shoe last night, when he broke loose and beat it for the car."

"Such doin's!" floundered Mrs. Martin, bogging down at once. "What with the goin's on in my own house and over to the Dilse place, I've no peace of life. Another trunk went in to-day."

"Say," flashed Harry, with a dangerous look, "haven't you got troubles enough of your own without snakin' any over the fence? Better leave those two Dagoes mind their own business."

As the word "Dago" slipped out, he saw Bertha and Louise exchange a glance that scuttled to cover under the powder-flash from his eyes. He was so angry that he got up and stalked out of the room. At the door he wheeled for a parting shot:

"Eerice and I are going to be married two weeks from to-day."

Nobody spoke, so he stalked on into the living-room, turned on a blaze of light, and ostentatiously crackled the evening paper.

LEAVING the girls to clear the dinner-table, Mrs. Martin wrapped a shawl about her head and started through the drizzling darkness to ease her perturbation by sharing it with Mrs. Greene and Sidelia.

As she was about to pass the Dilse place, the door opened, the porch was suddenly flooded with light from the two large globes, and Mrs. Martin saw Eerice come out on the porch with a man, who embraced and kissed her lingeringly before he came down the steps. Then the porch light was switched off, the heavy metal-bound door closed, and Mrs. Martin reversed her steps, returning home as fast as her weight and the slippery pavement would allow—only to find that Harry had but the moment before left the house across the back lawn, as was his custom.

With breathless excitement Mrs. Martin narrated to the girls the scandalous scene she had just witnessed.

"And her engaged to my son! Huggin' and kissin' strangers out in plain sight. Now I'll find out if he's lost to reason! I won't wait till to-morrow, neither. I'll set up."

"Don't do that, mother," advised Bertha uneasily. "He's so unstrung, he's liable to do anything."

"Sha'n't I tell him what I see that gypsy doin'? Hugged and kissed by strange men right out in sight?" demanded Mrs. Martin shrilly.

"Yes, certainly, tell him; but wait till morning, unless you want him dashing out of the house at midnight. Who do you suppose it was, anyway?"

"Nobody decent! Her livin' with men only, and bein' hugged and kissed by every stranger that comes along!"

HARRY came down to breakfast the next morning in such good spirits that Mrs. Martin nearly choked on what she had to tell before she could get it out.

"I seen last night what would freeze your blood, Harry," she began, in a flutter, as soon as she sat down.

Harry was not, of course, aware of what she had seen, but a swift comprehensive glance around the table informed him that it had direct bearing upon his own case. It did not, however, ignite the usual instantaneous fireworks. He merely smiled tantalizingly.

"Then why ice me up before breakfast?"

This was too much for Mrs. Martin. The egg-spoon trembled in her hand.

"Aha!" she scored. "What I seen was the young woman my only son has stood up before us all and said he was going to marry, huggin' and kissin' strangers all

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over the Dilse porch, last night when I was goin' over to see that nice girl Delie Greene right after dinner."

Harry flinched inwardly. His anger at their eagerness to think evil of Eerice made him nearly hate them all. He grew pale in his savage wrath.

"That was Eerice's brother—not that it makes any difference whether you know it or not. Her uncle died last night, and she has gone to stay in her brother's house till we are married. If Eerice was what you want to believe her, I'd marry her anyway. Now think that over a while, will you?"

Presumably they were thinking it over, for they said nothing. After a deliberate moment and a mocking smile, Harry added:

"Finish your breakfast, girls; it's getting late. I've got your tag this time. Guess I might as well clear up the mystery of those trunks, now the old man's dead and the other one's going to beat it for far countries. They were partners in a rug store downtown, and had their fine rugs brought up here to air and sun in the big light upstairs rooms. I know it's simply awful to have these hair-lifting mysteries go up in smoke right under your eyes, but it can't be helped. Tag!"

YES, Harry had their tag, and he didn't let them forget it. He went about with an insufferable cock-of-the-barnyard air, and the days telescoped until but five remained before Harry would presumably carry out his threat and marry Eerice—who, wherever she lived, still occupied the street window in fantastic costume and rolled cigarettes, though she was no longer seen in the Martin vicinity, and the Dilse place was closed and untenanted.

It was as if Harry were in the shadow of a foredoom—as if a day of execution were about to cut him off from them forever. This feeling insidiously worked reaction in them all; but Mrs. Martin's mood was the first to change visibly. She became depressed and lachrymose. Harry was her one and beautiful son. Deep down in her heart she adored him beyond the love she had for any daughter.

All day Friday she sat thinking of this, and what it would mean to lose him, and in her misery she sobbed heartbrokenly. In the course of the day a tailor's boy delivered a new suit. Had it been a shroud it would have brought forth no more disconsolate weeping. Her grief was overflowing noisily when the girls began to arrive. Louise came in first. As she stepped inside the door, she grew limp with unnamable fear.

"What is it, mother?" she cried. And Inez, just behind her, clutched the hall stair balustrade for support.

"L-look on your b-brother's bed! To think it should all end so!"

She moaned and covered her face.

"Is Harry—oh, mother!" half shrieked Louise, and flung herself upstairs.

Inez, chalky and trembling, and her mother's bowed, sobbing form, were the first things Bertha saw as she came in that moment with Maud. Maud, sensing grief and disaster, without waiting for detail, ran screaming to her mother, and threw herself in Mrs. Martin's lap, crying aloud.

After the confusion had partially subsided, the clothes—which Mrs. Martin had spread lengthwise on Harry's bed—continued to exude an infection of hysteria as each sister in turn went to take a look at them. It was true that they all worshiped Harry, and none the less that they had tried to discipline him and had been beaten.

Bertha remained dry-eyed, but she grew very pale. She was the eldest sister. Her influence held strong sway over them all—with Harry too, except in the matter of Eerice. It had been to Bertha that he appealed in the beginning to "get acquainted" with Eerice. He said she was an American by birth and had been educated in the public schools. He launched a pent-up heartful of things. But Bertha cut him off by simply walking disdainfully away.

That ended it, as far as Harry was concerned. Another syllable could not have been strangled out of him. Now she wished with all her heart that she had acted differently. Rather than lose Harry, she was ready to swallow Eerice, ear-rings and all—if only Harry would permit it at this late date. She had tasted of his unrelenting stubbornness in less vital matters. She abruptly closed the door and ran downstairs. The lump in her throat made her voice thick; but she issued the manifest for the family:

"We might as well make up our minds right here to take her in, unless we want to lose Harry altogether. It means one thing or the other."

"It ain't by no means certain she'll be took in, after the way you girls has carried on."

Mrs. Martin lowered her damp apron from her inflamed eyes, and uttered this reproach in bitterest accents.

"We carried on—my goodness!" began Inez; but Bertha silenced her peremptorily.

"Don't waste time in bickering, Iny, but listen to me. We are all in it. Looking at it one way, we were justified. Mother has slaved all her life to give us advantages and help us be somebody; and it looks as if Harry didn't care. It can't be helped, though. People do anything when they fall in love; and he loves her, or thinks he does, and that's all anybody can tell about it till afterward. But, since we can't stop it, it's all the more reason we ought to stand by him. I guess we all think more of him than we do of each other; so here's where we knuckle under. There are still five days left. I'm for wheeling in and giving them a wedding here at home. He's so proud we'll have to eat humble pie like our souls depend on it. A splash like that is about the only thing now that will— Here he comes."

MINDFUL of the unstarted dinner, Inez darted out to the kitchen as Harry came whistling up on the porch. As he opened the door, the sight of the moist-eyed, stricken group around his mother stopped him on the threshold.

"What's happened—where's Inez?"

"Y-your cl-clothes came home to-day, Harry!" choked Louise.

Harry looked blank for an instant. "Is that what this funeral's about?" he exclaimed incredulously. "They must look sad," he added, with a chagrined expression, and turned up the stairs.

"Wait, Harry," entreated Bertha, starting toward him. "We want to talk with you. It's ourselves we are crying for. We are awfully sorry we've acted so contrary and ugly about—about Eerice. We beg you to forgive us and—let us give you a wedding at home."

Harry stopped stock-still, dumfounded, but by no means melted. The defiant, implacable uplift of his chin was more expressive than any words could have been.

In the tense silence, Mrs. Martin lowered her apron from her tearful eyes and raised her arms. "Son!" she invited piteously.

Harry hesitated a long moment, then stooped stiffly and kissed her. He did not surrender; he was too proud and hurt for that. But after the symposium of penitent and remorseful apology that followed—Inez coming from the kitchen to contribute her part—he did partially relent: only partially.

"If you folks only had got to know Eerice, you'd know she was no different from the rest of you, except prettier and sweeter," he thrust.

They accepted the distinctions humbly, even grovelingly.

"Will you let us go and call on her now, brother? Will you let us give you a wedding here? We'll all stay home and work night and day to get ready. We'll help Eerice get a dress—"

Bertha stopped suddenly and caught her breath, impaled on the look in Harry's eyes.

"Thanks," he said dryly. "Eerice has her dress."

"Of course; I wasn't thinking, Harry," meekly amended Bertha. "But will you let us give you a wedding, brother?"

"No," refused Harry bluntly. "Of course we will be married at her brother's. There'll be no wedding, on account of her uncle's death. Possibly she may invite you to be there, being members of the family. I don't know how she'll feel about it; but she's sweet enough to do it, even after the way you've treated her."

"May we go with you to call this evening, Harry?" pleaded Inez.

Harry's eyes were hard. "Certainly not, till I ask her first."

"Well, Harry dear, will you try to make her understand how mean and sorry we feel? Will you try to get her to let us be friends?"

In the strained minute of silence that

ensued, Mrs. Martin implored quaveringly: "Will you, son?"

"Yes," said Harry rather ungraciously, and stooped again to Mrs. Martin's inviting arms and let himself be kissed.

With a gasp of relief, the girls dispersed. Dinner that evening was served with a sort of hysterical vivacity. Harry submitted to being hugged and kissed by them all before he left, and promised, in a better humor, to smooth things over with Eerice.

MAUD was the only one in the house asleep when he came home at a late hour. He lifted the weight by telling them that Eerice would be glad to be friends and wished them all to be present at the marriage.

"I think," said Bertha the next morning after breakfast, "we are really getting off too easy. We ought to be punished in some way for making Harry miserable so long."

"You do!" retorted Mrs. Martin sarcastically. "I'd like to know if he's bin any miserabler than we have. And like enough she's as sweet a little body as ever was. Only," she sighed and looked pensively at a corner of the big white Greene house just visible beyond the Dilse place, "Delie is so well fixed."

TIME: two weeks later. Scene: Mrs. Martin's parlor. Present Mrs. Greene. Enter Mrs. Martin.

"Oh, Viny! I've been expectin' you every minit since daybreak. I knew you'd be perishin' to learn how them two blessed childern comes to be livin' in the Dilse house. I'll cut 'cross lots and fill in after'ds. Eerice's uncle deeded it to 'em with his dyin' breath. Yes, he owned it all hisself. He had mints of money he'd made in a big fact'ry in New York. Here he made fine imported rugs and sold 'em in all the big cities. Well, he give the fact'ry to Eerice's brother and this here Dilse place to Harry and Eerice. You see, his lawyer loaned Dilse money, and when the place warn't redeemed he come here to live, knowin' he warn't going to live anyhow, and so it wasn't any use to sell, as he couldn't use the money.

"W'y, Viny, when I think of it all, includin' the grand furnishin's inside that house, it seems to me I'm in a dream. I don't know what I've ever done, that good luck should have went out of its way to give me such a stroke!

"And the aristocrats that girl's folks was in the old country ain't to be duplicated in this town. I wish you could lay eyes on the dress my daughter-in-law wore to be married in—with no one there but just our two fam'lies, and most of them Martins. It was one her own mother stood up in to get married, and the richness of it, and lace and all, I can't describe to you, Viny, so's you'd understand. I'll get my daughter-in-law to let me take you over some day and see it. It'll be a real treat for you. And the fine linen and things that girl's got handed down from the old country—well, Viny, it would take me a whole week to tell you about.

"Excuse me a minit till I answer that telephone. I shouldn't be surprised if it was my daughter-in-law."

THE MELTING POT

In Which the New Books and Magazines are Boiled Down to Give You Fifteen Minutes of Health, Efficiency, Travel, Biography, and Adventure

THE UNEXPLORED LIFE OF MAN

THERE is a deeper, mightier life in all living things than we are aware of. In shipwrecks, for instance, frail human beings have gone without food for a period of time that is miraculous. A man in a trance, with his slim body stretched rigid between two chairs, has sustained the weight of many men and heavy objects which, according to all laws of physics, ought to break down his body. There are authentic cases of people, and even animals, seeing apparitions.

Certainly life has strange reserve powers and forces that are still unexplained; and at last scientists, who have always been skeptical about anything tinged with mysticism or the supernatural, are beginning to investigate these fields.

In Psychic Phenomena (Sherman French & Company) Henry Frank cites many stories like the following:

"In the cemetery of Ahrensburg the horses of the country people visiting the cemetery were often so alarmed and excited that they became covered with sweat and foam. Sometimes they threw themselves on the ground in apparent agony, and several died within a day or two."

Incidents like this, it seems to him, are answered in accordance with discovered scientific laws. A thought is molded in the brain. It is projected from the brain by an energy of the cells that is still mysterious to us (as was wireless telegraphy not long ago).

These subtle forms of thought, actually substantial, but imperceptible to the sense of most men, permeate the ether sent out from myriad minds. Now and then a human being comes along so peculiarly organized that he can really see these floating forms of thought.

There is nothing mysterious about this power, when we recall that Le Bon said: "There is nothing invisible in nature; all we lack is proper eyes." Instruments have been invented which give us a means of seeing things in the air we never knew existed before, and animals constructed with eyes different from ours often see things we do not. Many of them see more clearly in the dark than we do in the day.

The forms, then, that linger in so-called haunted houses may be actual forms, though in no sense "spirits"—a phantom form of thought.

THE CRUELTY OF PLANTS

PLANTS, in protecting themselves from insects and in capturing insects, as many of them do, in order to supply themselves with nitrogenous food, practise a fiendish cruelty that we thought was found only among very inventive professional hangmen and torturers.

"Among the desert plants," writes Nels Quevli in Cell Intelligence the Cause of Evolution, "an array of spines is an admirable means of preventing an attack; but many species have carried the matter a good deal farther. In some kinds of prickly-pear they have minute barbs on their spines, and if any animal should even brush up against them, the spines hold on firmly when driven into the flesh. They are loosely attached, so that the unhappy creature takes away a large number of spines when he withdraws. These remain to produce festering wounds. Another cactus, which adds singular hooked spines to the straight variety, is called the 'wait-a-bit plant.' The hook holds the clothes or flesh, and meanwhile the sharp spines do deadly work."

Those plants that catch insects for food rarely kill them outright, but subject them to a lingering death. The Darlingtonia, for instance: "The flies are lured by a honey secretion to enter the hooded process at the top of the pitcher-like leaf. This they do by means of an opening in the under side.

"The whole of the upper portion of the hood is covered with transparent patches, like so many windows. Now, when the fly wishes to leave, he naturally flies upward toward the light, which streams down through these windows. The real opening is hidden in the shade, and passes unnoticed. Thus the flies simply beat themselves to death.

"This proceeding may extend over hours, but it always has one ending. The fly falls exhausted into the fluid at the bottom of the pitcher, and is drowned."

Many flies meet with a peculiarly brutal death in connection with the Venus flytrap. The insect is captured by its legs and held fast; meanwhile it beats its life away in vain endeavors to escape.

The author concludes:

"One can not get away from the idea that most of the suffering involved appears to be unnecessary."

Personally, we don't care what the plants do to flies.

CARLYLE'S DESCRIPTIONS OF PEOPLE

ONE of Thomas Carlyle's most remarkable powers was his ability to visualize a scene or a person, and then to present that picture with startling vividness and high color.

"His nicknaming skill is matched by his ability to hit off a character with a volley of unexpected adjectives," writes Bliss Perry in Carlyle—How to Know Him (Bobbs, Merrill).

"Coleridge, a puffy, anxious, obstructed-looking, fattish old man."

"Southey's complexion is still healthy mahogany brown, with a fleece of white hair, and eyes that seem running at a gallop."

Here is a portrait of Alfred Tennyson:

"One of the finest-looking men in the world. A great shock of rough, dusty-dark hair; bright, laughing hazel eyes; massive, aquiline face, most massive yet delicate; of sallow-brown complexion, almost Indian-looking; clothes cynically loose, free and easy; smokes infinite tobacco."

Of de Quincey he wrote:

"He was a pretty little creature, with the finest silver-toned voice and most elaborate, gently winding courtesies and ingenuities in conversation. One of the smallest man figures I ever saw. When he sate, you would have taken him by candle-light for the beautifullest little child, blue-eyed, sparkling face, had there not been a something, too, which said 'Eccovi—this child has been in hell.'"

TEACH YOUR CHILD BEAUTIFUL SONGS

YOU can't begin at forty to love beauty, any more than you can begin at forty to become an athlete or a millionaire. If you are ever to get any pleasure out of art or literature, you must begin young. "For," says Thomas Whitney Surette in Music and Life (Houghton, Mifflin Company), "the capacity for understanding and loving great books and paintings and music has to grow with our own growth, and can not be postponed to another season." And he recalls Darwin's pathetic statement in which lie describes his early love for poetry and music, and the final complete loss of those capabilities through neglect.

The love of beauty must be cultivated in childhood, if it is ever to play a very real part in life: and music is the only form of beauty by means of which very young children can be educated. A child of five can be taught beautiful songs; and singing—rather than piano-playing—is the way a child should first learn music.

"The most common fallacy in our teaching consists in putting theory before practice. Children are taught about music before they have had sufficient experience of it. They are taught, for example, to pin pasteboard notes on a make-belief staff; they are told that one note is the father-note and another the mother-note.

"But even these artificial and false methods are less harmful to children than are the poor, vapid, and false songs by means of which their taste is slowly and surely disintegrated. In the music-books provided for kindergarten and home singing there is an endless series of poor, vapid, over-sweet melodies, which children, hungry for music, will sing readily for lack of better.

"I do not advocate the abolishment of piano-forte teaching to children," writes Mr. Surette, "but I insist that it should not be begun until the child has sung beautiful songs for several years. In the first place, it lacks the intimacy of singing; and in the second place, the playing itself demands the greater part of a child's attention, so that it hardly hears the music at all. My own observation leads me to believe that talent for pianoforte playing is quite rare, and that the average child is more likely to be able to play the violin."

REMODELING AN OLD HOUSE

OLD houses, a hundred years old or more, built by the hands of our farmer ancestors, have a way of looking as if they grew out of the ground. Like woods and gray hills, they seem to be a part of the world. Perhaps that is why an old house seems so desirable as a home for our old age.

We learn from Success in the Suburbs (G. P. Putnam's Sons), by John R. McMahon, that "it is easier to patch the old than create the new.

"To determine whether an antique is worth fixing up, we should start with a study of the foundations. If the stone has quite fallen away, it will be expensive to replace it with new foundations; but if the walls stand true and merely superficial mortar is out, the job is easy. Portland cement was not known in the old days. Lime mortar was the best they had.

"After looking over the foundations we should examine the woodwork. Begin in the cellar, and see if the floor beams are sound or have been affected by dry-rot. These timbers may be tested with a gimlet or a pocket-knife. If the interior substance is punky, you will know that the 'heart of oak' has perished."

The only thing the author asks of you, when you remodel your house, is: "Profane not any house, old or new, with jigsaw lace-work, didos in porch railings, roosters on the roof, or iron dogs on the lawn."

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BRINGING UP THE OFFICE-BOY

IN most business concerns a new office-boy is turned loose without any training, or any recognition of the fact that he is only a boy and consequently must be expected to act as a boy. Rarely is he made to feel that there is a future in the house for him.

If some person in authority will only take an interest in him, says an article in System, it is possible to excite real enthusiasm in the youngest and rawest employee.

An executive at the head of a large distributing concern in a Western city always held that the office-boy is the real beginning of things. Consequently the department manager who has the office-boys in charge makes it his personal affair to superintend their business education.

When a boy comes into the house, this manager takes him around and shows him where to deliver mail and where to collect it, and tells him why it is necessary to do this at set times.

He impresses on the boy the importance of getting the habit of punctuality early in life. If the boy is late the manager has a little interview with him to find out why. He does not "jump on" the boy and scare him to death every time he is late.

He even tries to help the boys in their reading, if they have had only a grammar school education, and makes them feel that knowledge will be a great help to them in their business life.

Every now and then he gives a dinner at some club. Only the boys with good records are allowed to attend this dinner. Here they say just what they think, ask questions, make suggestions.

This may seem to involve a lot of time and trouble, but it is worth it. It means that the house is fitting a lot of boys for higher positions, who, when they grow up, will become a natural part of the house and will embody its spirit.

PÉTAIN, THE PREPARED

WHEN the war broke out, Philippe Pétain was a retired colonel. He had risen to this position from common soldier in the ranks. He was over sixty years old. He was unknown. But for forty years Pétain had been preparing, as if in his inmost consciousness he had a secret premonition that one day France would need him, and need him badly. From the moment that the crisis struck in France, Pétain began to display the qualities that he had all his life been sharpening and perfecting—a marvelous intuitive faculty for sizing up situations, lightning power of decision, combined with great endurance, both mental and physical.

"During the battle of the Marne, General Pétain displayed such marvelous military qualities," writes Stephane Lauzanne, editor of the Paris Matin, "that he was promoted successively to the rank of general of brigade and general of division. When the great offensive of the spring of 1915 was launched, he was commanding an army corps.

"The greatest of all General Pétain's qualities is what the French call the coup d'œil—grasp of situation. He has a marvelous intuition of war and battle. He sees accurately and far."

When the great German assault on Verdun was launched in February, 1916, Pétain was decided on as the man to defend the fortress that has cost more than any other one prize in the war. From Verdun he was sent to reorganize the Rumanian army and arrest the German offensive in Rumania. In April, 1917, he was made chief of staff of the Ministry of War. On May 15, 1917, he was appointed commander-in-chief of all the French armies operating on the French front.

"Among his troops I have found he is generally feared," said a Rumanian journalist, who is quoted by E. E. Purinton in his book, Pétain, the Prepared (Fleming H. Revell Company). "His rigor, his discipline, is inexorable. He criticizes with a severity which the unfit deplore, but which the energetic and efficient approve as if it were a creed."

BEHIND THE SCENES IN A RESTAURANT

THERE is a certain excitement in the work of a restaurant waitress. that appeals to young girls. She sees and talks to a great many people; she likes the bustle and cheerful atmosphere of the dining-room. But, says a Consumers' League Bulletin, in all other respects a girl working in a restaurant has the most nerve-racking, wearing, underpaid lot to be found among women's occupations.

Most of these girls are foreigners, because their ignorance of America makes it easy for employers to demand long hours and low wages that American girls are not so apt to submit to.

A waitress must not only remember a multitude of orders and fill them quickly, but she must keep her temper under the surliness of the meanest customer. The kitchen girl must be everywhere at once with a helping hand, and the dish-washer's very job depends upon her quickness. One of these said that she washes seven thousand articles in an hour and a half.

As for their working day, it is never less than twelve hours, except for one-meal girls, who do not earn enough to live on. Instead of a half-hour lunch, a waitress grabs her meals when she can. In wages, the waitresses receive about ten dollars a week: but most of the kitchen hands get less than six dollars. Besides that, the girls must provide their own uniforms and pay for their own laundry. There are also many fines—for being late, for breakage, and for mistakes in adding up checks.

Tipping presents a more subtle danger. The girls need the tips, so they deliberately work for them. This leads, naturally, to familiarity on the part of men.

The report of the United States Labor Bureau says: "Many girls, if they speak sharply to a customer or offend him, are likely to be reprimanded by the head waitress, and may even lose their jobs."

WHAT ONE YOUNG RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONIST DID

SHE was thrown into a moist prison cell when she was sixteen, for distributing socialist literature, and stayed there for nearly three years. Then they sent her to Siberia. But she escaped hack to Russia to continue the work of the revolutionists. She it was who assassinated Governor Khvostoff.

"Sitting at my window, I studied the governor's daily routine," she writes in The Life-Story of a Russian Exile (Century Company). "I learned when he received, and whom. I even knew his dinner hour.

"For a whole week he did not leave his house except for a walk in his garden.

"It was New Year's Eve. I sat near the window and looked at the snow-covered road.

"There was only one thought in my mind: he must die. Finally it became positively known that the governor would drive on New Year's Day at twelve o'clock, and we would assassinate him on his way back."

"In the morning there was a knock at the door.

"I slipped on a morning gown and looked out the window. A group of masked children stood at the door. I understood that they must have come, according to the custom, to throw millet-seeds all over the house.

"I admitted them. An uncontrollable desire to remain a little longer with these innocent children seized me, and I begged them to take off their masks and have tea with me. They hesitated; but when one of the elder boys took off his mask, all followed his example.

"The samovar was steaming merrily on the table, the children laughing noisily, the sun shone brightly in my window. Suddenly a Cossack galloped past, followed by a carriage. I recognized the carriage.

The children continued to laugh, but I no longer heard them.

"'Go! go! It is time!' I exclaimed.

"They looked at me in surprise. Their cheerful little faces clouded with regret and their thin, unwashed hands extended to me.

"'Don't forget me, children,' I said.

"They made the sign of the cross, wished me a happy New Year, and went quietly away.

"I dressed hastily, took my hand-bag, and went into the street.

A few minutes later I saw from afar Comrade Nicholai walking toward me. In his hand he held a box tied with red ribbon: that was a bomb. He overtook me, and whispered while passing:

"'Remember, keep farther away from me, lest an accident should happen to your bomb when mine explodes,' and quickly went to his former place.

"Suddenly a Cossack appeared, and behind him a carriage. Comrade Nicholai stepped down from the curb, raised his hand, and threw the bomb under the carriage. The bomb fell softly on the snow, and did not explode. The carriage stopped for an instant: but, evidently taking in the situation, the coachman began to whip the horses, and drove at full gallop straight in my direction.

"I stepped into the middle of the road, and with all my might hurled the bomb against the carriage window. A terrific force instantly stunned me. I felt that I was lifted in the air."

That was how the governor who had ordered the hungry peasants, petitioning at his gates, to be shot—who had inspired massacres of the Jews—was killed.

HOW TO BEHAVE IN AN EMERGENCY

A MAN once said that in an accident the best thing is "presence of mind and absence of body."

Every emergency will collect its crowd of curious onlookers, hysterical sympathizers, and meddlesome advisers. The first-aid administrator must have enough force to do two things: to dominate these people made stupid by their curiosity, and to control the patient.

The crowd should be kept at a distance, or, better yet, the patient moved to a more secluded spot. As for the sufferer, the first thing to do is to calm him, to assure him that he is not dangerously hurt—even if you don't believe it.

A man's success as a first-aid surgeon depends on his own inventiveness.

In the International Journal of Surgery Dr. J. A. Hofheimer, to illustrate what can be done to save life and relieve suffering, tells some of his own experiences. One of these was of a boy who fell from a tree and fractured both bones in his right forearm. The village doctor said he could do nothing until the next day, when he would send to another town ten miles away for bandages and splints. In the meantime the boy was in great suffering.

"We procured an empty cigar box, an old sheet, and a section of old stuffed quilt, and improvised a good fracture box by knocking out the ends of the cigar box and lining it thickly with the wadding from the quilt. This was adjusted to the arm by bandages made from strips of the sheet. A small dose of paregoric quieted the boy's nerves. Later, the boy's own physician wrote that he had not removed the emergency dressing for two weeks, and that the results were excellent."

A question that always arises in an emergency is:

"What kind of antiseptic can we use?" There is no better way of cleansing a wound than with boiled fresh water.

How to Be Young at Four-Score

By LYMAN ABBOTT

SINCE accepting the invitation of the editor, I have been wondering whether I had any experience to give the readers of this magazine that would be of interest and value to them. It is true that as a little child I was so feeble that my parents doubted whether I should ever come to manhood; that as a boy at school I was unable to take any considerable part even in such simple athletics as were known seventy years ago; as a college boy I had to leave college every year before the close of the term; and now, at eighty-one, I am still in active life, editor-in-chief of a weekly paper, and speaking from either the platform or the pulpit nearly every week.

And yet, looking back on my life, I can not discover any remarkable precautions taken, any specific followed, any unusual experiences enjoyed, like those of Mr. Roosevelt in his ranch life. Nor can I truly answer your question without speaking of my religious experience, since that religious experience has been a principal factor in making possible for an almost invalid boy a long, happy, active, and healthful life.

I came to New York to enter the New York University at thirteen years of age, an anemic, unvigorous youth with a broken arm. That broken arm was a good fortune; for it put me at once under the charge of Dr. Willard Parker, an excellent physician and an earnest Christian, who proved a wise adviser and a sympathetic friend. During the four years of my college course he hammered into a non-resistant but not especially welcoming mind the truth that the laws of health are as truly the laws of God as are the ten commandments, and that to break the one is as truly a sin as to break the other. He put my New England conscience on the side of health, and demanded that I make my body obedient to it. That was the foundation on which the subsequent superstructure of health was built.

There are very few men who would treat a fine-blooded horse as most men treat their bodies. No! No! When the horse comes in from a long drive, hot and tired, the owner has him rubbed down, cooled off gradually, and given neither oats nor water until the creature is rested. But the owner will rush from his office to a lunch-counter, bolt in the shortest possible time the most unhygienic of luncheons, with all his nervous energy at work in his brain and no nervous power to spare for his stomach, and then either pity himself or piously attribute his ill health to providence.

IN order to obey the laws of health, it is not necessary to study physiology and hygiene, to know about what makes bone and what makes blood and what makes nerves. It is not necessary to keep one's self under one's own medical examination—a perpetual student of one's symptoms. But every man ought by twenty-one to know by experience something of the effects of various foods upon his body and to govern his appetite accordingly. Eating, sleeping, recreating, good fellowship are sacred duties. The body is a divine gift; it is an essential instrument in a useful life. In my correspondence with Henry Ward Beecher I once wrote him, as an apology for some apparent neglect or some delay, that I had rheumatism. His reply lies before me now:

My dear Mr. Abbott:

Rheumatism is a sin. Repent.

He lunched with me once, at my invitation, at a restaurant. I proposed a beefsteak. "Beef," he replied, "makes blood; and I have too much blood already." So we substituted chicken. But I have too little blood. The beef which was innutritious to him is nutritious to me.

To obey the laws of health, it is not necessary to know what they are. But one must either know them or follow the directions of one who does know them. I ride in an automobile safely, not because I understand its mechanism, but because I ride with a chauffeur who does understand its mechanism. And I do not interfere with his management.

Upon my marriage, my wife persuaded me to go with her for consultation to her physician. He advised for me, first, a year at sea. That I declined. Then he advised a year on a farm. That I also declined. Then he gave me certain counsels to be followed in the care of my health, and my wife saw that I followed them. Thus began a first condition of preserving and promoting physical vigor. Throughout my life my physicians have been employed, not merely when I was sick to get me well, but to keep me well when I was not sick.

If I could have the custom of society changed, I would have every family employ a physician on salary as their health counselor, supplementing that salary by special payments in case of special disease of a serious character. As a pastor I have had the advantage of medical attendance at little or no expense, so that I have been able to carry out my theory of the relation between doctor and household without the payment of a salary. And I had the good fortune to have a wife who, greatly as she was interested in all that was going on in the great world, was interested in nothing so much as in the welfare and happiness of her own home. She never assumed the functions of a physician; but she always supplemented them with the painstaking care of one who by her experience became almost a professional nurse.

And I have obeyed the directions of my doctor implicitly. He who tries to be his own physician ends by having a hypochondriac for a patient. The doctors do not know everything; but they know more than I know. And I have never tried to mend their ignorance by my ignorance.

The human body is like a modern American city; it is always undergoing repairs. Nature is continually at work pulling part of it down and carrying off the debris, and accumulating new materials with which to build it up anew. To keep the right balance between these two processes of destruction and rebuilding is the secret of health. Cleanliness within and without is necessary to carry off the debris; food, not to please the palate, but to build up the tissue, is necessary for the rebuilding. And for both, fresh air to aerate the blood, exercise sufficient to keep the bodily functions in healthful activity, and sleep, rest, and recreation to repair the nervous energy which is physiologically the secret of life, are indispensable. But every man must learn by his own experience, with such wise counsel as he can get, what are the conditions of food, exercise, and rest needed to make his own body new. For this is the secret of health—to keep the body always new by a skilfully balanced process of destruction and repair.

NO two bodies are identical. Therefore the method that is advantageous to one may be disadvantageous to another. I had a friend who, not feeling up to the mark, concluded that he ought to take more exercise. He took it in the form of long bicycle rides, and fell dead without warning in his house, one day, from heart disease. The doctor said that every ride he took had shortened his life. Another friend can not eat strawberries: they poison him. But all fruits seem to be useful to me. Another friend can not drink coffee: it unnerves him. I drink it habitually twice and occasionally three times a day, and am better for it. He furnishes no standard for me; I furnish no standard for him. General principles are important; but beware of the specific rules prescribed by faddists.

Speaking in general terms, for cleanliness within I have depended on a glass of hot water half an hour before breakfast; for cleanliness without, on a daily bath, or in earlier years, in the summer a frequent swim; for food, selecting, not what pleases the palate, but what agrees with the digestive organs; for fresh air, living in the country; for exercise, walking, horseback riding and later driving, and at times simple home gymnastic exercises.

Health is, however, something "more than a condition of the body: it is a condition of the whole man. Joy in one's work makes work recreative. "My meat," said Jesus, "is to do the will of my Father." Work may itself be nutritive.

When, in 1859, I left the law for the ministry, it was not because I thought the work of a minister more sacred than the work of the lawyer, but because it was to me more congenial. Since that time my work has been my greatest enjoyment. I have rarely had to drive myself to my task; I have habitually had to drive myself away from it. I have sometimes heard a minister say, "I must get up a sermon for next Sunday." If he had said, "I must get up a congregation," I could better understand him. I rarely go into a church, that I do not envy the minister in the pulpit his opportunity. The friend who told me that he believed I would rather preach than eat interpreted my inclinations correctly. And yet, I am no ascetic.

I have more sermons budding in my brain than I ever preach, more editorials than I ever write. I get more pleasure from a pen, in my hand at a library table than from a golf-stick on a putting green. Work by compulsion from without is very different from work by impulse from within. I heard Edward Everett Hale once draw a distinction between work and labor in a comment on the text, "They rest from their labors, and their works do follow them." It is not work that wearies—it is labor.

YOUNG college men have often come to consult me on the choice of a profession. My word of counsel has always been, Select a work that is itself enjoyable. And I have added a sentence borrowed from a wise friend: "If you can not do what you like, then like what you do." Our wishes are more under the control of our will than we are accustomed to think. There is drudgery in all lives; but it ceases to be drudgery when it is seen as part of a great work to which one has devoted his life.

But, while I have always been interested in my work, I do not think that my work has absorbed my interest. A friend who understands me better than I understand myself tells me that one secret of my youth is the fact that I have preserved at eighty- one the intellectual curiosity of eighteen. While at college I read what I could find in print about experiments in flying; and about 1860 I delivered an address in which I expressed the belief that the time would

Continued on page 22

TO ESCAPING CRIMINALS

FATHERS AND SONS

---

THEY SAID SOMETHING

The Abandoned Room

By WADSWORTH CAMP

Illustrations by Robert McCaig

(Continued)

HELLO, Katy! Hello, Bobby! You shown your face at last? I hope you've come sober."

The thin, querulous voice of Silas Blackburn echoed in the moldy court. The stout, bent figure in the candle-light studied them suspiciously. Katherine clung to Bobby, terrified beyond speech by the apparition. Why should the spirit of Silas Blackburn have escaped?

Then they noticed smoke curling from the blackened briar pipe. Moreover, Silas Blackburn had spoken.

"Let us walk past," Katherine whispered.

But Silas Blackburn stepped out, blocking their way.

"What's the matter with you two? You might 'a' seen a ghost. Or maybe you're sorry to have me back. Reckon you hoped I was dead, Bobby."

Then Bobby answered:

"Why have you come? That is what you are to us—dead."

Silas Blackburn chuckled. He took the pipe from his mouth.

"I'll show you how dead I am! Trying to be funny, ain't you? It's cold here. I'm going in."

The same voice, the same manner! The old man jerked his thumb toward the dimly lighted windows of the wing.

"What you got the old room lighted up for? What's going on there? I tried to sleep there the other night—"

BOBBY'S laugh was dazed:

"They're trying to account for your murder there."

His grandfather looked at him in blank amazement.

"You out of your head?"

"No," Katherine cried. "We saw you lying there; cold and still. I—I found you!"

"You've not forgotten, Katherine," Bobby said breathlessly, "that he moved afterward!"

"Trying to scare me? What's the matter with you? Some scheme to get my money?"

"You slept in the old room the other night?" Bobby asked helplessly.

"No, I didn't sleep there," his grandfather whined. "I went in and lay down; but I didn't sleep. I defy anybody to sleep in that room. What you talking about? It's cold here—this court was always damp. I want to go in. Is there a fire in the hall? We'll light one, while you tell me what's ailin' you."

He turned, and grasped the door-knob. They followed him into the hall.

Paredes sat by the fire, languidly engaged in his solitaire. It wasn't until Bobby called out that he moved:

"Carlos!"

Bobby's tone must have suggested something abnormal, for Paredes sprang to his feet, knocking over the table; the cards fell lightly to the floor. His hands caught at the back of his chair. White-faced, he stared at the newcomer.

"I told you all," he whispered, "that the court was full of ghosts."

Silas Blackburn walked to the fire, and stood with his back to the smoldering logs. In this light he had the pallor of death.

"Why do you talk of ghosts?" he whined. "I—I wish I hadn't waked up."

Paredes sank back in his chair.

"Waked up!" he echoed.

His voice rose:

"At what time? Do you remember the time?"

"Not exactly. Sometime after noon."

Bobby knew it had been about noon when they had seen the coffin covered in the restless, wind-swept cemetery.

"You were asleep a long time?"

Blackburn's voice rose complainingly:

"How did you guess that? I never slept so. But I'm tired now—as tired as if I hadn't slept at all."

"Your idea is madness, Carlos," Bobby whispered.

Katherine, who hadn't spoken since entering, kept her eyes fixed on her uncle. Her lips were slightly parted.

The old man glanced inquiringly through the stair-well.

"Who's that up there?"

"The district attorney," Bobby answered, "and a detective, and probably Hartley Graham."

"What they doing here?"

He indicated Paredes.

"What's this fellow doing here? I never liked him."

Katherine answered:

"They've all come because I thought I saw you dead, lying in the old room."

"We all saw," Bobby cried angrily.

Blackburn shrank away from them.

THE three men descended the stairs. Half way down, they stopped.

"Who is that?" Robinson cried.

"Next time, Mr. District Attorney," Paredes said, "you'll believe me when I say the court is full of ghosts. He walked in from the court. I tell you, they found him in the court."

Silas Blackburn's voice rose angrily:

"What's the matter with you all? Why do you talk of ghosts and my being dead? What you afraid of? Haven't I a right to come in my own house?"

"We are afraid."

Robinson walked close to Silas Blackburn and gazed at the gray face.

"Yes," he said; "you are Silas Blackburn. You came to my office in Smithtown the other day, and asked for a detective, because you were afraid of something out here."

"There's no question," Graham cried. "Of course it is Mr. Blackburn. Yet it can't be!"

"What you all talking about? Why do you say I was dead?"

They gathered in a group at some distance from him. They unconsciously ignored this central figure—as if he were, in fact, a ghost. Bobby and Katherine told how they had found the old man, a black shadow against the wall of the wing. Paredes repeated the questions he had asked and the old man's strange answers.

---

Afterward Robinson turned to Silas Blackburn, who waited, trembling.

"Then you did go to the old room to sleep. You lay down on the bed. But you say you didn't stay. You must tell us why not, and how you got out, and where you've been during this prolonged sleep. I want everything that happened, from the moment you entered the old bedroom until you awakened."

"That's simple," Silas Blackburn mouthed. "I went there along about ten o'clock, wasn't it, Katy?"

"Nearly half past," she said.

"He must tell us why he went—why he was afraid to sleep in his own room," Graham began.

Robinson held up his hand.

"One question at a time, Mr. Graham. The important thing now is to learn what happened in the room. You're not forgetting Howells, are you?"

Silas Blackburn glanced at the floor. He moved his feet restlessly. With shaking fingers he refilled his pipe.

"Except for Bobby and Katherine," he quavered, "you don't know what that room means to Blackburns. Don't know how I'm going to tell you—"

"You needn't hesitate," Robinson encouraged him. "We've all experienced something of the peculiarities of the Cedars. Your return alone is enough to keep us from laughter."

"All right," the old man stumbled on "I was raised on stories of that room—even before my father shot himself there. Later on I saw Katherine's father die in the big bed. And after that I never cared to go near the place unless I had to. The other night, when I made up my mind to sleep there, I tried to tell myself all this talk was tommy-rot. So I went in and locked the door and raised the window and lay down."

"You're sure you locked the door?"

"Yes. I remember turning the key in both doors."

The tensity of the little group increased, but no one spoke.

"When I got in bed," Silas Blackburn said, "I thought I'd let the candle burn for company's sake; but there was a wind, and it came in the open window, and it made the queerest black shadows dance all over the walls. So I blew the candle out and lay back in the dark."

HE drew harshly on his cold pipe. He looked at it with an air of surprise, and slipped it in his pocket.

"Some moonlight came in. After a little it seemed alive, and I wouldn't look at it any more. The only way I could stop myself was to shut my eyes; and that was worse, for it made me recollect my father the way I saw him lying there when I was a boy. Then I seemed to see Katy's father, too. I seemed to see those dead people all around me."

He broke off. He raised his hand slowly and pointed in the direction of the overgrown cemetery.

"I—I thought I heard them say that things were all broken out there, and—and awful—so awful they couldn't stay."

His voice became defiant.

"I—I was afraid they'd take me back with them underneath those broken stones. And you—you stand there trying to tell me that they did!"

He paused again, looking around with a more defiant glare in his bloodshot eyes.

"Go on," Robinson urged. "What happened then? What did you do?"

As Blackburn spoke he glanced about slyly, suspiciously.

"I realized I had to get out, if they would let me. So I left the bed. I went."

He ceased, intimating that he had told everything.

"I know," Robinson said. "But tell us bow you got out of the room. For when you—when the murder was discovered—both doors were locked on the inside."

"I tell you," Katherine said hysterically, "it was his body in the bed."

Bobby motioned her to silence.

Silas Blackburn ran his knotted fingers through his hair. He shook his head.

"That's what I don't understand my-self. I recollect telling myself I must go. I seem to remember leaving the bed all right, but I don't seem to remember walking on the floor or going through the door. Seems to me that I was in the private staircase; but did I walk downstairs? First thing I see clearly is the road through the woods, not far from the station."

"What did you wear?" Robinson asked.

"I'd had my trousers and jacket on under my dressing gown," the old man answered, "because I knew the bed wasn't made up. That's what I wore, except for the dressing gown. I reckon I must have left that in the room. I wanted to get away from the Cedars, so I thought I'd go on into Smithtown, and in the morning see this detective.

"I went to Robert Waters' house. I've known him for a long time. I guess you know who he is. He's such a bookworm, I figured he might be up, and he wouldn't ask a lot of silly questions. He came to the door, and I told him I wanted to spend the night. He offered to shake hands. That's funny, too. I didn't feel like shaking hands with anybody. I recollect that, because I'd felt sort of queer ever since going in the old room."

PAREDES looked up, wide-eyed. The cards slipped from his fingers.

"Do you realize, Mr. District Attorney, what this man is saying?"

But Robinson motioned him to silence.

"Let him go on. What happened then?"

"That's all," Blackburn answered, "except this long sleep I can't make out. Old Waters didn't get mad at my not shaking hands. I told him I was sleepy and didn't want to be bothered; and he nodded to the spare room off the main hall, and I tumbled into bed and was off almost before I knew it."

Paredes sprang to his feet and began to walk about the hall.

"Tell us," he said, "when you first woke up."

"I guess it was late the next afternoon," Silas Blackburn quavered. "But it was only for a minute."

Paredes stopped in front of Robinson. "When he turned! You see!"

"It was Waters knocking on the door," Blackburn went on. "I guess he wanted to know what was the matter, and he talked about some food. But I didn't want to be bothered, so I called to him through the door to go away, and turned over and went to sleep again."

"He turned over and went to sleep again!" Katherine said breathlessly. "And it was about that time that I heard the turning in the old bedroom."

"Katherine!" Graham called. "What are you talking about? What are you thinking about?"

"What else is there?" she asked.

"She's thinking about the truth," Paredes said tensely. "I've always heard of such things. So have you. You've read of them, if you read at all. India is full of it. It goes back to ancient Egypt—the same person simultaneously in two places: The projection of something that retains reason after an apparent death.

"You heard him. He didn't seem to walk. He doesn't remember leaving the room, which was locked on the inside. His descent of the stairs was without motion as we know it. He had gone some distance before his mind consciously directed the movement of this active image of Silas Blackburn, while the double from which it had sprung lay apparently dead in the old room. You notice he shrank from shaking hands, and he slept until we hid away the shell."

"You've a fine imagination, Mr. Paredes," Robinson said dryly.

His fat face, nevertheless, was bewildered.

"I wish Groom were here," Paredes was saying. "He would agree with me."

Robinson turned to Rawlins.

"Telephone this man Waters," he directed. "Then get in communication with the office and put them on that end."

RAWLINS walked away.

Graham cleared his throat:

"Now perhaps we may ask that very important question. The day Mr. Black-burn called at your office in Smithtown,

---

he told Howells he was afraid of being murdered. And that night, when he went to the old room, he was terrified at something he wouldn't explain."

"He warned me not to mention he'd gone there," Katherine put in. "He told me he was afraid—afraid to sleep in his own room any longer."

Robinson turned.

"What about that, Mr. Blackburn?"

"No use," the old man mumbled, "going into that."

"A good deal of use," Robinson insisted.

Blackburn shifted his feet. He gazed at his pipe doubtfully.

"I don't see why. That didn't come, and seems it wasn't what I ought to have been afraid of, after all. All along I ought to have been afraid only of the Cedars and the old room. I've been accused of being unjust. I don't want to do an injustice now."

"Please answer," Robinson said impatiently.

"I don't see that it makes the slightest difference," Paredes drawled. "What has it got to do with the case as it stands to-night?"

Robinson snapped at him:

"You keep out of it. Don't forget there's a lot you haven't answered yet."

SILAS BLACKBURN looked straight at Bobby. Slowly he raised his hand, pointing an accusing finger at his grandson.

"If you want to know, I was afraid of that young rascal."

Katherine started impulsively forward in an effort to stop him. Blackburn waved her away.

"Evidently," Robinson commented to Graham, "Howells wasn't as dull as we thought him. Go on, Mr. Blackburn. Why were you afraid of your grandson?"

"Maybe he can tell you better than I can," the old man answered. "Maybe I'd been pretty harsh with him. Anyway, I knew he hated the ground I walked on, and would be glad enough to see me drop in my tracks."

"That isn't so," Bobby said.

"Go on," Robinson urged.

"I'd always been a hard worker," Blackburn whined, "and he was a waster. Naturally, we didn't get along. I'd decided to make a new will, leaving my money to the Bedford Foundation; and I wrote him that, thinking it would bring him hot-foot to make it up with me. I'd been nervous about him before, because I didn't know what might come into his head when he was on these wild parties. So I'd spoken to Howells, thinking I'd trip him if he tried any funny business.

"When he didn't come that night, I got scared. Suppose, I thought, he should come out here drunk when I was sound asleep? I knew he had a latch-key, and he might sneak up to my room before I could even get to the telephone. Or I was afraid he might hire somebody—you can buy men for that sort of work in New York. I tell you, the more I thought of it, the more I was sure he'd do something. You'd understand if you lived in this lonely place with all that money and nobody you wanted to will it to. I nearly sent for Howells right then. But if nothing had happened I'd have looked a fool."

"I wanted you to send for somebody," Katherine cried.

Bobby leaned against the wall, repeating to himself the words of Maria's note, which accused him of having made the very threat his grandfather had feared.

"So," Blackburn rambled on, "I decided I wouldn't sleep in my room that night, and I picked out the least likely place for anybody to find me. I was more afraid of him than I was of the old room. But, as I've told you, the old room made me forget Master Robert."

Robinson stepped to Bobby's side.

"Howells was right. Tell me what you did with that evidence."

Bobby turned away. Katherine tried to laugh. Graham beckoned to Robinson.

"What's the use of bothering with evidence against a suspected murderer, when the murdered man stands talking to you?"

Robinson frowned helplessly. Paredes sprang to his feet.

"You're taking too much for granted,

Graham. There was a murder. Black-burn was killed. We've as many witnesses to that fact as we have that he's come hack. This man who talks with us, accusing Bobby, may not stay. Have you thought of that? I have noticed something that makes me think it possible. I have been afraid to speak of it. But it makes me hesitate to say that this man is alive, as we understand life. We have to learn the nature of the forces we are dealing with—exactly how dangerous they are."

They started at a sharp rap on the front door.

"Now who?" the old man whined. "I wish you wouldn't look at me so. It makes me feel queer. You're all crazy."

"It's probably Dr. Groom," Bobby said, and went to the door, opening it.

IT was Groom. The huge man walked in, struggling out of his coat. At first the others screened Silas Blackburn from him; but he took in their strained attitudes, the excitement that still animated Paredes' face.

"What's the matter with you?" he asked. "Found something, Mr. District Attorney?"

Robinson moved to one side, jerking his thumb at Silas Blackburn. The coat and hat slipped from Dr. Groom's hand. His mouth opened. His great body crept slowly back until the shoulders rested against the wall. He placed the palms of his hands against the wall as if to push it away in order to assure further retreat. Always the little infused eyes remained fixed on the man who had been his friend. Such terror was arresting chiefly because of the great figure conquered by it.

Blackburn thrust his pipe in his mouth. He laughed shakily.

"That fellow Groom will have a stroke."

The doctor's greeting had the difficult quality of a masculine sob:

"Silas Blackburn!"

"Who do you think?" the other whined. "You going to try to frighten me out of my skin, too? These people are trying to say I've been lying dead in the old room. hoped you'd have enough sense to set them right and tell me what it's all about."

The doctor straightened.

"You did lie dead in the old room."

His harsh, amazed tones held an unqualified conviction.

"I saw you there. I helped the coroner make the examination. You had been dead for many hours. And I saw you bolted in your coffin. I saw you buried in the graveyard you'd let go to pieces."

The others had, as far as possible, recovered from the first shock, had done their best to fathom the mystery. But Groom's fear increased. His reddish eyes grew more alarmed. Silas Blackburn turned with a quick, frightened gesture, facing the fire. Paredes took a deep breath.

"Now you'll see," he said.

Dr. Groom shrank against the wall again. After a moment, with the motions of one drawn by an outside will, he approached the figure at the fireplace. Then Bobby saw, and he heard Katherine's choked scream. For, now that his grand-father's back was turned, there was plainly visible on the white of the collar, near the base of the brain, a scarlet stain. And the hair above it was matted.

"That's what I meant," Paredes whispered.

Graham moved back.

"Good God!"

Robinson stared. The fear had found him, too.

Dr. Groom touched Blackburn's shoulder tentatively.

"What's the matter with the back of your neck?"

Blackburn drew away fearfully. He raised his hand and fumbled at the top of his collar. He held his fingers to the firelight.

"Why," he said blankly, "I been bleeding back there."

TO an extent, the doctor controlled himself.

"Sit down here, Silas Blackburn," he said. "I want to get the lamplight on your head."

"I ain't hurt bad?" Blackburn whined.

"I don't know," the doctor answered—"heaven knows!"

Blackburn sat down. The light shone full on the stained collar and the dark patch of hair at the base of the brain. Dr. Groom examined the wound minutely. He straightened. He spoke unsteadily:

"It is a healed wound. It was made by something sharp."

Robinson thrust his hands into his pockets.

"You're getting beyond my depths, doctor. Bring him up to the old bed-room. I want him to see that pillow."

But Blackburn cowered in his chair.

"I won't go to that room again. They don't want me there. I'll have work started in the cemetery to-morrow."

"Mr. Blackburn," Robinson said, "the man we buried in the cemetery to-day—the man these members of your family identify as yourself—died of just such a wound as the doctor says has healed in your head."

Blackburn cowered farther in his chair.

"You're making fun of me," he whimpered. "You're trying to scare an old man."

"No," Robinson said. "How was that wound made?"

The crouched figure wagged its head from side to side.

"I don't know. Nothing's touched me there. I remember I had a headache when I woke up. Why doesn't Groom tell me why I slept so long?"

"I only know," Groom rumbled, "that the wound I examined upstairs must have caused instant death."

Paredes whispered to him. The doctor nodded reluctantly.

"What do you mean?" Blackburn cried. "You trying to tell me I can't stay with you?"

He pointed to Paredes.

"That's what he said—that I might have to go back. But I never heard of such a thing! I'm all right. My neck doesn't hurt. I'm alive—I tell you, I'm alive! I'll teach you—"

RAWLINS returned from the telephone.

"His story's straight," he said in his crisp manner. "I've been talking to Waters himself. Says Mr. Blackburn turned up about three-thirty, looking queer and acting queer. Wouldn't shake hands, just as he says. He went to the spare room, and slept practically all the time until this afternoon. No food. Waters couldn't rouse him. Mr. Blackburn wouldn't answer at all, or else seemed half asleep. He'd made up his mind to call in a doctor this afternoon. But Mr. Blackburn seemed all right again, and started home."

Robinson gazed at the fire.

"What's to be done now, sir?" Rawlins asked.

"Find the answer—if we can," Robinson said.

Paredes spoke as softly as he had done

---

---

the other night while reciting his sensitive reaction to the Cedars' gloomy atmosphere. Only now his voice wasn't groping:

"Call me a dreamer if you want, Mr. District Attorney, but I have given you the only answer. This man's soul has dwelt in two places."

Robinson grinned.

"I'm going slow on calling anybody names, but I haven't forgotten that there's been another crime in this house. Howells was killed in that room, too. I would like to believe he could return as Mr. Blackburn has."

Blackburn looked up.

"What's that? Who's Howells?"

And as Robinson told him of the second crime he sank back in his chair again, whimpering from time to time.

"Might I suggest," Graham said, "that Howells isn't out of the case yet? It would be worth looking into."

"By all means," Robinson agreed.

Rawlins coughed apologetically.

"I asked them about that at the office. Howells' body was taken to his home in Boston to-day. The funeral's to be to-morrow."

"Then," Robinson said, "we're confined, for the present, to this end of the case. The facts I have tell me that two murders have been committed in this house. It is still my first duty to convict the guilty man."

Graham indicated the huddled, frightened figure in the chair.

"You are going against the evidence of your own eyes."

"I shall do what I can," Robinson said sternly. "We buried one of those men this noon. His grandson, his niece, and those who saw him frequently swear it was this living being who has such a wound as the one that caused the death of that man. There is only one thing to do—see who we buried."

"The permits?" Graham suggested.

"I shall telephone the judge," Robinson answered, "and he can send them out. But I sha'n't wait for hours, doing nothing. I am going to the grave at once."

"A waste of time," Paredes murmured.

"I don't understand," Silas Blackburn whined. "You say the doors were locked. Then how could anybody have got in that room to be murdered? How did I get out?"

Robinson turned on Paredes angrily.

"I'm not through with you yet. Before I am, I'll get what I want from you."

He stormed away to the telephone. No one spoke. The doctor's rumpled head was still bent over the back of Silas Blackburn's chair. The infused eyes didn't waver from the crimson stain and the healed wound. Blackburn remained huddled among the cushions, his shoulders twitching. Paredes was gathering up his cards. Katherine watched him out of expressionless eyes. Graham walked to the girl's side. Rawlins, phlegmatic as always, remained motionless, waiting for his superior.

BOBBY threw off his numbness. Ile realized the disturbing parallel in the actions of his grandfather and himself. He had come to the Cedars unconsciously, perhaps directed by an evil external influence, on the night of the first murder. Now, it appeared, the man lie was accused of killing had also wandered under an unknown impulse that night. Was the same subtle control responsible in both cases? Was there at the Cedars a force that defied physical laws, moving its inhabitants like puppets for special aims of its own? Yet, he recalled, there was something here friendly to him. After the movement of Howells' body and the disappearance of the evidence, the return of Silas Black-burn stripped Robinson's threats of power and seemed to place the solution beyond the district attorney's trivial reach.

The silence and the delay increased their weight upon the little group. Silas Blackburn, huddled in his chair, was grayer, more haggard than he had been at first. He appeared attentive to an expected summons. He seemed to be fighting the idea of going back.

Robinson reappeared. Anxiety had replaced the anger in his round face.

"Jenkins will have to help," he said.

Silas Blackburn arose unsteadily.

"I'm coming with you. You're not going to leave me here. I won't stay here alone!"

"He should come, by all means, " Paredes said, "in case anything should happen—"

The old man put his hands to his ears.

"You keep quiet. I'm not going back, I tell you!"

Bobby didn't want to hear any more. He went to the kitchen and called Jenkins. He let the butler go to the hall ahead of him, in order that he might not have to witness this new greeting. But Jenkins' cry came back to him, and when he reached the hall he saw that the man's terror had not diminished.

They went through the court and around the house to the stable, where they found spades and shovels. Their grim purpose holding them silent, they crossed the clearing and entered the path-way that had been freshly blazed that day for the passage of the men in black.

THE snow was quite deep. It still drifted down. It filled the woods with a wan, unnatural radiance. Without really illuminating the sooty masses of the trees, it made the night white.

Silas Blackburn stumbled in the van with Paredes and Robinson. The doctor and Rawlins followed. Graham was with Katherine behind them. Bobby walked last, fighting an instinct to linger, to avoid whatever they might find beneath the white blanket of the little burial-ground.

Groom turned and spoke to Graham. Katherine waited for Bobby, and the white night closed swiftly about them, whispering until the shuffling of the others became inaudible.

Was she glad of this solitude? Had she sought it? Her extraordinary request in that earlier solitude came to him, and he spoke of it while he tried to control his emotions, while he sought to mold the next few minutes reasonably and justly.

"Why did you tell me to make no attempt to find the guilty person?"

"Because," she answered, "you were too sure it was yourself. Why, Bobby, did you think I was the—the woman in black? That has hurt me."

"I didn't mean to hurt you," he said; "but there is something I must tell you now that may hurt you a little."

And he explained how Graham had awakened him at the head of the stairs.

"You're right," he said. "I was sure then that it was myself, in spite of Howells' movement. It followed so neatly the handkerchief and the foot-marks. But now he has come back, and it changes everything. So I can tell you."

He couldn't be sure whether it was the cold, white loneliness through which they paced, or what he had just said, that made her tremble.

"Perhaps I shouldn't have told you that."

"I am glad," she answered. "You must never close your confidence to me again. Why have you done it these last few months? I want to know."

"Then you shall know."

Through the white night his hands reached for her, found her, drew her close.

"I couldn't stay," he said, "and see you give yourself to Hartley."

She raised her hands to his shoulders.

---

He barely caught her whisper: "I am glad; but why didn't you say so then?"

The intoxication faded. The enterprise ahead gave to their joy a fugitive quality. Moreover, with her very surrender came to him a great misgiving.

"But you and Hartley? I've watched; it's been forced on me."

"Then you have misunderstood," she told him. "You put me too completely out of your life after our quarrel about Hartley."

"Hartley," he asked, "spoke about that time?"

"Yes; and I told him he was a very dear friend, and he was kind enough to accept that and not to go away."

"He has always made me think," Bobby said, "that he had your love. You're sure he guessed that you cared for me?"

"I think every one must have guessed it except you, Bobby."

He raised her head and touched her lips. They could speak no more of love. But Bobby, hand in hand with her as they hurried after the others, received a new strength.

THEY stood with the others in the burial-ground, close to the mound that had been made that day.

"They haven't begun," Bobby whispered. Katherine freed her hand.

A white flame sprang across the mound. The trees, from formless masses, took on individual shapes. Robinson swung his lamp toward the mound.

"The snow isn't heavy," he said, "and the ground isn't frozen. It oughtn't to take long."

With a spade Jenkins scraped the snow from the mound. Rawlins joined him. They threw to one side, staining the white carpet, spadefuls of earth.

Silas Blackburn watched them with an unconquerable fascination. He continued to shake.

"I'm cold; I'll never be warm again," he whined. "If anything happens to me, Bobby, try to forget I've been hard, and don't let them bury me. Suppose I should be buried alive?"

"Suppose," Paredes said, "you were buried alive to-day? That also is possible. You remember the old theories, that have never been disproved, of the disintegration of matter into its atoms, of its passage through solid substances, of its reassembling in a far place? I wouldn't have to ask an East Indian that."

Jenkins broke into torrential speech:

"Mr. Robinson! I can't work with the light. It makes the stones seem to move. It throws too many shadows."

Nothing aggressive survived in Rawlins' voice:

"We can work well enough without it, Mr. Robinson."

Robinson snapped off the light. The darkness descended upon them quickly.

Suddenly Bobby grew rigid.

"There it is again," Graham breathed.

A low keening came from the thicket.

It wasn't the wind. It was like the moaning that Bobby had heard at the stagnant lake that afternoon—like the cries that Graham and he had heard in the old room.

Bobby turned to Katherine. He couldn't see her for the darkness.

"Katherine," he called softly.

Her hand stole into his. He had been afraid that the forest had taken her. Under the reassurance of her hand-clasp, he tried to make himself believe there was actually a woman near by—if not Maria, some one who had a definite purpose.

Robinson flashed on his light. Old Blackburn whimpered:

"The Cedars is at its tricks again—and there's nothing we can do."

"It was like a lost soul," Katherine sighed.

The light showed Bobby that the detective and Jenkins had nearly finished. He shrank from the first hard sound of metal against metal.

It came. After a moment the light shone on the dull face of the casket.

Jenkins rested on his spade. He groaned. It occurred to Bobby that the man couldn't have worked hard enough in this cold air to have started the perspiration that streamed down his wrinkled face.

"It would be a tough job to lift it out," Rawlins said.

"No need," Robinson answered. "Get the soil away from the edges."

He bent over, passing a screw-driver to the detective.

"Take off the top plate. That will let us see all we want."

JENKINS climbed out.

"I sha'n't look—I don't dare look!"

Silas Blackburn touched Bobby's arm.

"I've been a hard man, Bobby—"

He broke off, his lips twitching.

The grating of the screws tore through the silence. Rawlins glanced up.

"Lend a hand, somebody."

Groom spoke hoarsely:

"It isn't too late to let the dead rest."

Robinson gestured him away. Graham, Paredes, and he knelt in the snow and helped the detective to raise the heavy lid. They placed it at the side of the grave.

They all forced themselves to glance down.

Katherine screamed. Silas Blackburn leaned on Bobby's arm, shaking with sobs. Paredes shrugged his shoulders. The light wavered in Robinson's hand. They continued to stare. There was nothing else to do.

The coffin was empty.

To be continued next week

How to be Young at Four-Score

—Continued from page 10

come when we should out fly the birds, as we then could outrun the deer and outswim the fish.

A few weeks ago I read Ruth Law's account of her flight from Chicago to New York, and was inspired by an eager desire to take a trip with her—though I know that such an experiment is not for me.

The peril from joy in one's work is temptation to overwork. If one would overcome this subtle temptation, he must be temperate in his ambitions as well as in his appetites; must accept without grumbling the limitations imposed by his body, and attempt no more work than his body is fitted to undertake.

REST is as sacred a duty as work—a truth that especially needs to be preached to preachers. How many of them, I wonder, observe the Fourth Commandment—do all their work in six days and rest on the seventh? They can not rest when their parishioners rest, for Sunday is their busiest work day; nor as their parishioners rest, for the rest from secular employment which their parishioners get by religious services the minister must get from religious service by some kind of secular employment.

During the eleven years I was in Plymouth Church I observed my Saturday day of rest, I think, as conscientiously as most laymen observe their Sunday. The library, the picture gallery, the concert-hall, furnished my chief Saturday recreations. When I was editing a religious newspaper and living at Cornwall-on-Hudson, I put all religious newspapers I away on Saturday night, and would look at none of them on Sunday.

But it is not only one day of rest in the weeks which health demands: at least one hour of rest in every day is equally demanded. Dr. Willard Parker taught me that. For an hour after dinner every evening he was out of the world—would see no patients, make no visits, answer no calls. A friend of mine had nervous dyspepsia. The doctor advised a mild cigar after every meal. It cured him. But my friend told me afterward that it was not the cigar—it was the compulsory rest after eating. One can take that rest without a cigar.

During my Plymouth pastorate, when I was even more actively engaged in editorship than now, I kept one hour every day after a noon dinner for repose in my library, with the instruction that I was not to be disturbed unless the house was on fire and the fire had reached the second story. For many years I have taken a half hour of rest before and after every meal. It has proved a great saving of time.

The duty of rest is a universal duty; the method of getting it must depend on the temperament of the individual. I early learned to make it a rule to take rest before work as a preparation for it, not after work as a recovery from it. For this reason, Saturday, not Monday, was my rest day in the pastorate. For the same reason, the morning hours have always been my working hours. For many years I went to bed before nine, rose about five, made myself a cup of coffee, and, with that and a roll for an ante-breakfast, worked for three hours before a family breakfast at eight. No work was permitted in the evening. To-day my creative work is done by one o'clock. For brain workers hard work for a few hours is more profitable than lazy work for many hours. I believe that statistics show this to be true also for hand workers.

One other application of the duty of rest is, I think, more than a rule: it is a universal principle. That I may not shirk responsibilities that belong to me, I absolutely refuse to take responsibilities that do not belong to me. Worry is the most exhausting kind of brain works, and worry is generally due to taking up the responsibilities of other persons. He was a wise man who said, "There are two things one ought not to worry about: the things he can cure and the things he can not cure." If he can, then cure them; if he can not, then forget them.

I continually meet men and women who are worrying because the President is doing what he ought not to do or is not doing what he ought to do. It is well to form a judgment that will help us in voting at the next election. But more than that is folly. What most tires a conscientious person is not the things he does, but the things he wants to do and can not do. Why endure that criminally useless fatigue?

I meet other men and women who are trying to carry God's responsibilities, and the load is too much for them. Why does God permit this terrible war? Why? Suppose God is mismanaging the universe, you can not help it. The man who puts the whole of bloodstained Europe on his own back will only get himself crushed. Shoulder your rifle and enlist, or send your cheek to the Red Cross, or knit a soldier's sweater, or make your speech or write your article. But do not try to solve God's problems or do any more of His work than He has assigned to you to do. Put this charm in your heart—it will banish needless cares:

"I do the little I can do, and leave the rest to God."

MANY years ago I heard an unlettered man in a prayer meeting comment on the verse, "Take my yoke upon you." "To take Christ's yoke," he said, "is to be yoked to Him and pull life's load together." A mind divided between self and service is a mind fretted by perpetual anxieties and worries. A mind wholly devoted to doing the will of Another is a mind at rest—rest, not from work, but in work. To be yoked to an invisible Power, to live in comradeship with an invisible Companion, is the secret of perpetual youth. This truth I learned from my father in my boyhood; the art I have been trying to practise ever since. But not yet has the practice made perfect.

Digging Up a College Education

WARREN G. FERREN wanted to attend Harvard. "You'll have to dig up the price," said his folks; and that's just what he is doing.

With a spade and bucket, Warren went to the Wellington Gun Club's range and scooped up three tons of spent bullets. As club officials estimate that 315 tons of lead have been poured across the marsh, Warren's mine bids fair to solve his problem of an education and leave him a margin.

Beware of Shipbuilding Stocks

By CHARLES R. BROWN

CRUEL losses in numerous forms—national as well as individual—will, as a result of the war, be inevitable. What we can and should do is to avoid unnecessary losses—of sayings, for instance. Unless proper precaution is exercised, these can easily become serious. I have in mind particularly the newer classes of war stocks—the second edition, we may say, that are appealing for public support.

The World War already has been productive of more humbuggery than ever has thrived before. Conditions are auspicious for this sort of work, and just now hopes and dreams and credulity are being capitalized on the ground that the war requirements of our government furnish unexampled opportunities.

The need of the hour is ships, and more ships. Thus shipbuilding and ship-operating plants are springing up on both coasts; and shipbuilding stocks of all sorts are being offered to the public.

We must fight the German dragon in the air: therefore airplane companies also are springing into existence everywhere.

The war has cut down importations of drugs and chemicals; hence hundreds of millions of new capital are asked by people who think they can manufacture chemicals over here.

The war's added demands for gasolene have resulted in the formation of new companies for the development of the oil and gas resources of the country, amounting during the war period to more than a round billion dollars in their capital requirements. In the short period since our own entrance into the contest the number of such new companies has increased enormously—no fewer than 302, with a share capital of very close to $500,000,000, having been started.

Do not misunderstand me. By no means are all these enterprises visionary or designedly fraudulent. Mr. James Stillman, chairman of the National City Bank, is responsible for some very shrewd sayings during his long life in the banking world—none, however, more forceful than that "Any fool can turn down a loan."

He was speaking of the qualifications of bank executives for making a bank pay. His argument was that an officer who could grasp the extent of a risk, and see far enough ahead to know that a profitable transaction could with reasonable safety be undertaken, was the man needed in a bank.

So in the new enterprises that owe their being so completely to the war. There are sound as well as unsound ones. All must admit that it is extremely difficult to separate the chaff from the wheat. And too broad a generalization of criticism obviously must prove unfair.

Some of us in the financial district, for instance, can remember when telephone securities were being hawked around and greeted with incredulous smiles. To-day the same thing is happening with airplane securities.

The shipping boom, from the individual standpoint, is presenting signs of having reached its zenith. Our government is taking control of the industry, following in this respect in the footsteps of Britain, France, and Italy. Ocean carrying charges will be arbitrarily established, and ships that are now on the ways will be taken over.

In a word, opportunities for private enterprise concededly are dwindling. We are to have government control of our shipping on a stupendous scale. And where there is government control fair prospects may be expected, but no fortunes, no great stock booms.

Some remarkable results have attended an investigation just completed by the Journal of Commerce of the amount of new capital that has been involved in new shipping enterprises since the war began. For the first five months of the war (August—December, 1914) the authorized capital of the new American shipping concerns was only $1,844,000. For the next full year (1915) the amount was $37,660,000. In 1916 it had risen to $69,466,000, while for the first seven months of 1917 the huge total of $226,155,000 was reached, though the July total indicated, as I have already intimated, a reaction to only $19,020,000, from $84,025,000 in June, and at this writing it appears that the August total will be as low if not lower than in July.

The figures, divided as to shipbuilding and slip-operating concerns, follow:

CAPITAL STOCK AUTHORIZED

          

	Total Shipbuilding		Other Shipping
January	$2,475,000	225,000	$2,250,000
February	30,525,000	18,050,000	12,475,000
March	13,225,000	3,125,000	10,100,000
April	29,295,000	15,500,000	13,895,000
May	47,490,000	42,840,000	4,650,000
June	84,025,000	75,525,000	8,500,000
July	19,020,000	11,700,000	7,280,000
	———	———	———
	$226,155,000	$166,965,000	$59,150,000

Some most alluring and entertaining literature has been prepared to sell shipping securities. But, with government control and with excess profits taxation, and, what is of more importance, with government capital straining to place itself in ship production, there is even today opportunity for many to congratulate themselves that they have not invested their savings in mushroom shipping enterprises.

Free Booklets You May Have for the Asking

Partial-Payment Combinations, a circular which gives definite suggestions for the purchase of time-tested stocks on the partial-payment plan, has been issued by John Muir & Co. Copies may be had on application to the main office of the firm, 61 Broadway, New York City.

Bond Messenger, an unusually interesting and "meaty" magazine, and "Systematic Saving," a timely and valuable booklet for large and small investors—both sent on request by writing Liggett & Drexel, members New York Stock Exchange, 61 Broadway, New York City. Ask for booklet E-16.

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

Information of value for the average investor on $100 bonds and other securities yielding 3 to 7 per cent. is supplied by Coleman & Reitze, 50 Broad Street, New York, through their weekly market letter, the Financial Review, which will be supplied if requested. Address Department E. W.

Events of the time have more significance for the investor than for the general reader of news, for they often seriously affect financial interests. The meaning of what is happening is made clear in the Bache Review, the widely known publication, which also presents investment suggestions. Copies mailed free on application to J. S. Bache & Co., members of the New York Stock Exchange, 42 Broadway, New York.

The Odd Lot Review, published every Saturday, aims to reflect in brief and comprehensive style the principal developments affecting values in standard securities. Sample copies will be sent on application to the offices of the publication, 61 Broadway, New York City.

Their booklet, "We're Right on the Ground," outlining in a comprehensive way the advantage of farm mortgages as a safe investment, won for E. J Lander & Co., Grand Forks, North Dakota, third prize in the contest at the recent St. Louis Convention of the Associated Advertising Clubs of the world. Offered free to readers of this magazine.

Perkins & Company, of Lawrence, Kansas, make their loans upon personal examination of security, and guarantee titles perfect. They mail their interest drafts to their investors to reach them the first of the month, so that there are no delays in interest payments. Write for circular No. 721.

High-grade farm mortgages are growing more and more popular among investors. The Oklahoma Farm Mortgage Company of Oklahoma City has issued a booklet on 6 per cent. first farm mortgages in Oklahoma, Texas, Arkansas, and Louisiana. Free copies will be furnished on request. Ask for list No. 201.