HOW A FOREST RANGER'S WIFE HELPED HER HUSBAND TO SUCCEED

SEVERAL years ago, when we were first married, we lived in a Western lumber-camp. My husband was in the employ of the lumber company. We were on the borders of one of the large national forests.

My husband desired to become a forest ranger. He was an experienced lumber and timber worker, but, in addition to his experience, considerable study was necessary in preparation for the civil service examination for national foresters. As his time belonged to the lumber company ten hours a day, his study had to be done at night.

Ten long hours daily in the open air, and the crisp, keen air of the Northwest at that, has its effect on a man when he sits down at night in a warm room after a hearty supper. Invariably Bert began to nod, and, after a few efforts to keep his attention fixed on the pages of the Use Book, was asleep sitting up.

He would get disgusted with himself; but every night it was the same way. I felt sorry for him, and tried reading with him, taking turns about, as a means of holding his attention. In this way my interest in the subject became aroused.

In those days we had no children; the lumber-camp offered no social diversions; and the few household tasks required to keep our tiny camp-shack in running order were not sufficient to keep me busy. I had no sewing-machine, and no money to buy materials, even had there been any need to sew.

I began to read ahead of Bert during the day, because I was interested and found food for thought in conservation of water power, reservation, reclamation, reforestation, homestead laws, land surveys, and all the other subheads coming under the general subject of national reservations.

As I read I marked passages that I wanted Bert to explain more fully to me, or with which I was particularly struck. These marked passages always formed material for conversation and discussion in the evenings.

Bert used to get so interested expounding and explaining that his eyes would shine, and often we remained up, reading and discussing, past our usual bed-time.

Sometimes Bert would come in at dinner-time and with enthusiasm exclaim:

"Do you know, girl, that matter we were discussing last night! I've been thinking about it all day, and it seems to me—"

And I'd have to interrupt him in order to get him to eat his dinner.

I began to make topical outlines in notebooks as I read during the day, and these we used in reviewing the subjects after we had finished the readings.

The section of country was new to us, recently out from the East, and with only a general knowledge of the Northwestern geography. Often, in hunting up on maps for the details of local geography, much time was consumed. So I adopted the plan of hunting up all these points in the day-time, and having them ready to point out when reference to them was required by the subject matter of the readings.

Gradually this method of my doing the preliminary hunting up and outlining by day became a systematic auxiliary of the night's study.

When we went on fishing and hunting trips over Saturday nights and Sundays, the Use Book accompanied us instead of the former current magazines, and during our noonday rests we read.

At last the time came for the examination. As a final review, Bert went over all my topical outlines and refreshed his memory on those points that might easily be forgotten. As he dressed I made sure there were several clean handkerchiefs in his pockets, also his pocket comb (he was going without a bag), and a couple of extra collar buttons in case the ones I had put in his shirt-band became obstreperous.

Bert laughed and said: "Why, anybody would wonder how I ever did anything before I had you."

I answered: "Well, anyway, now you've got me, you have to do as I say; so run along, and see that you don't disgrace me."

I called after him: "Don't forget to wipe the dust off your boots before you go in." (He had to walk several miles along the forest road.)

He was gone three days—days that were utterly lonely for me, yet filled with a pleasant sort of expectancy. Bert's return would be an event in itself, as it was the first time he had left me, and he would have much to tell of the examination.

The evening he returned, I met him away out on the forest road, eager and impatient. He looked tired. The fingers of his right hand were inky, and, as he pulled out a handkerchief to mop off the dust and perspiration before kissing me, I beheld it streaked and spotted with ink.

"Why, look at your handkerchief, Bert," was my prudent-wife cry. It was one of his best linen initialed ones, too.

"I positively swallowed the ink," he grumbled. "I never want to see a pen again. Every question must have had twenty parts. I wrote for two days till night; didn't stop to eat. Gee! I was glad to hear those papers called in and get out to the field work. I did fine in the field examination, girl, but I don't know about the other part. So much writing gave me the headache. What do you think I did ? I gave the estimates on paper for a cabin of certain dimensions, and built it with only three sides! It was rum!"

Bert seemed so uncertain of the work he had done in the written examination that my heart sank.

A little testily I flung at him:

"Well, I think you might build a cabin right without me to coach you, when you have built more of them than I have."

When the reports of that examination were received, Bert had passed well, one of only five who did pass, although twenty had taken the examination.

His highest grade was in his field work, but his written examination was also most creditable. I was so happy I was silly. And a month later he received his appointment as national forester.

Mrs. B. O. T.

Your Mind is Part of Our National Resources: What Are You Doing to Improve It?

I RECENTLY addressed a letter to the librarians in half a dozen large cities asking them whether they had noticed any change in the character of books called for since the war broke out.

Each of them replied that the war had created a demand for more serious reading. Apparently people are thinking harder and studying more than in the piping days of peace.

This is fortunate for America.

It would be a calamity if the processes of mental growth were to be altogether broken down by the war. To a certain extent they will be, however much we may deplore it.

Colleges are losing a large percentage of their students. Young men who had planned courses of study for themselves at home will be called into camp, where study will be more difficult. It will be a temptation for all of us to say, "After the war I will take up my reading again and go on with it; now I have no time."

The sober fact that every one of us needs to remember is this: The war is costing the world not merely wealth, but an enormous loss of productive power represented by the lives of men.

There will be fewer men in every country to do the world's work when the war is over; if the world is to continue to progress, these fewer men must train themselves to do more work and better work than before.

Self-improvement has been a purely personal matter for you in the past: the war has made it almost a patriotic duty.

The fact that you have less time while the war lasts may in itself be an advantage: out of it may come a capacity for the intensive cultivation of time that will add tremendously to your efficiency when peace returns.

"Under my tent, in the fiercest struggles of war, I have always found time to think of many other things." So said Caesar, whose time was probably as fully occupied as that of any soldier who ever fought in battle. "I have no time" is never a reason; it is an excuse.

It will require more will power to keep your mind alert and growing in the next year. But that hardship, also, will have its compensation.

"A somewhat varied experience of men has led me, the longer I live, to set less value on mere cleverness," said Huxley; "to attach more and more importance to industry and physical endurance. Indeed, I am more disposed to think that endurance is the most valuable quality of all."

A better appreciation of the value of time, a firmer capacity for sustained effort—these are two of the rewards that will come to the man who, in spite of the exigencies of war, refuses to allow his mental progress to grow slack.

"Why should I do any more studying, when I may be shot in another six months?" a rather flippant young man said to me the other day.

It was a foolish remark.

It is a man's business to keep growing to the very last moment allotted to him.

"If a man constantly aspires," exclaims Thoreau, "is he not elevated?"

And Browning, with the same thought: "'Tis not what man does which exalts him, but what he would do."

Every bit of courage, every bit of truth and honest effort and patient study, brings its own reward in character. It is worth while, regardless of whatever money reward may follow. It would be worth while for us all to push forward along the right lines; it would be our high duty and splendid privilege even if we knew that all life was to be wiped out to-morrow.

But life is not to be wiped out. The war does not mean the end of the world, but the beginning of a new and better world. A world handicapped, to be sure, by debt and the loss of men; but a world that will demand even greater abilities and reward even more generously those who fit themselves to answer that demand.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

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ALTITUDE

By WALTER PRICHARD EATON

Illustrations by Gerald Leake

IT all happened because I took my hundred feet of Alpine rope with me into Glacier National Park, that beautiful land of virgin precipices. The altitudes there are not great—Cleveland, the highest peak, is less than 11,000 feet. But even Cleveland is without a trail, and many a splendid battlement on the Continental Divide can be reached only by scaling a 3000-foot wall, unless, of course, you laboriously follow a game trail for miles along the top of the spine.

We were a rather large party from an Eastern State, piloted by the officers of our State Forestry Association, earnest souls most of us, intent on fighting gypsy moths and white pine blister, filled with a crusader's passion against old-time vandal lumbermen, and intent on studying the action of forests in holding back water in the high mountains, so we could more intelligently lobby for State forests in our own mountain regions.

You might think that such a party would contain few elements of romance, but that was not the case. Romance does not always neglect the intelligent, or even the well-to-do. For instance, we had in our party a young woman of thirty or thereabouts, named Marcia Knowles, who was possessed of a thousand acres of forest land, besides a manor house, a big income, a cold disposition, and an ardent lover. Marcia's income was so large, in fact, that she was interested in forestry from a commercial viewpoint—it being always the rich who make money out of their land in our part of the world. John Abercrombie, her lover, was a gentleman of leisure, which he devoted entirely to her—so far unsuccessfully. The more tenderly and slavishly he waited on her every whim, the farther away he seemed to be from the goal of his desires. Of course, he had come along in this party, having joined the State Forestry Association for the purpose—though he couldn't tell a pine tree from a fir balsam.

That was romance number one. Number two was in strange contrast. Tommy Stratton was, to be sure, no less devoted than John, but his inamorata, Julie Ramsdell, was one of the cooey, gushy feminine kind, who just loved him for it. They were the sort who, if he hadn't inherited from his father a place in the country as well as a law business in town, and if she hadn't been the daughter of the vice-president of the State Forestry Association, a man who owned several mills run by water power (hence his interest in forestry!), would have spooned on a park bench. As it was, they spooned on the observation platform of a Pullman.

Number three was a highly intellectual though not a Platonic affair, to which the parties were Professor Alpheus Farnsworth, professor of economics in a well known Eastern college, and Miss Amy Pratt—who, I presume, would be classed as a "new woman." At least, she campaigned for equal suffrage, took a tremendous and at times garrulous interest in problems of government, made a good income lecturing on "current events" to women's clubs and courses, and was almost stridently self-reliant, energetic, and full of sheer animal vitality. I suppose she admired the professor for his undoubted intellectual gifts—perhaps, in her heart, she knew they were more solid than her own. Certainly she could hardly have felt much physical affinity; for he was small and bald and timid of body, while she was robust and handsome, the sort of woman it takes a big man to appreciate. At least, that's what you would suppose. Yet here was this pair, as devoted as two twenty-year-olds, making love over a copy of the Economic Review.

Most of the remainder of our party were mated couples, and romance was buried in the prose of matrimony. Of course, there were sons and daughters along, but they were chiefly youngsters who sang rag-time in the presence of tremendousness, and I avoided them as far as I could. As for myself, I was (and am, for that matter) a bachelor. I am interested in forestry chiefly because I love our mountain wildernesses and want to see them protected. I am also intensely fond of climbing, having had considerable experience over both rocks and ice. That was why I carried my rope to Glacier, as well as a large box of spikes and the proper boots.

TO get at the story as quickly as possible, we were all camped in that marvelously beautiful and caressing meadow at the foot of Grinnell Lake, under the shadow of the frowning precipices of Gould Mountain and the Great Divide, with the white glacier tilted on its lofty shelf above us, and the meadow grasses, amid the pines, starred with lovely chalice cups. That was to be our camp for three or four days, while we made side trips over Piegan Pass, or up to the glacier, or otherwise enjoyed ourselves gettingin shape for a longer pack-train excursion over the Divide and up through the denser forest on the western side.

It occurred to me that here was an excellent opportunity to make a try at Gould, which reared its nearly 10,000 feet of rock ridge-pole directly over our heads and looked practically unclimbable. I communicated my intention to one of our guides, an old-time big-horn and goat hunter and later a Park ranger. He had never tackled it, but said that, after guiding parties of petticoats for three summers, it would be a relief to try; so we set out up Piegan Pass trail to study the cliff wall.

Gould is like the steep wall of a house set across the Divide at the northern end of a long rock rampart. The entire eastern wall of this rampart falls in a sheer precipice down into a cañon. The trail over Piegan Pass winds up southward, at first in and then across this cañon, so that you have a clear view of the whole precipice from the path, and the soft thunder of the 3000-foot waterfalls that pour down from the summit snow-fields drifts faintly across to you. We had proceeded four miles southward before there appeared to be any hope of a way up the precipice. Then it broke somewhat from the perpendicular, and ledges appeared cutting across the great red and white and gray and pink stratification belts.

Presently Walter, the ranger, pointed upward and cried, "Look!"

I looked, and saw nothing at first but a few little specks of snow. Then suddenly I realized these specks were moving. They were goats!

"Get out your glasses and watch 'em sharp," said Walter.

We dismounted and watched those goats come zigzagging down. Through my glasses I could see that they were on ledges invisible to the naked eye. I could also see that the cliff wall wasn't so nearly perpendicular as it looked. But it was steep enough, in all conscience, and once or twice the goats simply went head-foremost over a rim and landed many feet below on a ledge, or else slid down a chimney cleft half full of loose shale.

They came down to a snow-field at the top of the débris pile at the base of the cliff, ate some snow, and started back. We watched their ascent no less carefully, noting that they followed exactly the same ledges, save for a couple of detours where they had jumped.

"That's the way up," said Walter. "Get to the top of that snow-field, and we'll find a regular trail. Once on the summit of the Divide, we can walk north to Gould."

"It'll be a regular boulevard," said I.

He glanced at the castellated summit of the ridge, and grinned.

"Just like Fifth Avenue," he said.

WE rode back to camp, where I foolishly communicated my plan; and, to my consternation, all three of the romantic couples and several of the youngsters demanded to go with me. I turned down the youngsters flat; I can't be disturbed by chatterboxes while I'm handling the rope. But I rather thought the rest could make it—all but the professor. He didn't look up to it, to me. But he assured me he was a great walker, and had climbed Mount Washington; so I yielded.

To tell the truth, I had a sneaking desire to get these Easterners up on the side of that precipice and give 'em a taste of something real. So Walter and I spent that evening screwing nails into their shoes, and throwing the fear of the Lord into their hearts by telling 'em what happened to climbers who let go of the rope. We also announced a four o'clock start.

Miss Knowles demurred at this. Looking at the towering snow-cap of Gould, still pink in the late northern twilight, she said that if we could get there at all we could surely do it in two or three hours.

"There was a feller come out here once," Walter drawled, "who set out to walk to a place before breakfast, and a feller I know went with him, to see the fun. 'Bout ten in the mornin' they come to a brook, and the stranger started to peel off his clothes.

"'What yer doin'?' says my friend.

"'That looks like only a brook, but I ain't takin' no chances,' said the stranger."

Then Walter bent over the sole of a boot again.

SO we routed out a cold and shivering party at three-thirty, made 'em some coffee and cakes, caught the ponies, and, long before sun-up here in the cañon mouth, were off up the trail. I'd ordered the women to leave all skirts behind, and Julie was giggling in her khaki riding-breeches while Tommy whispered something to her, I don't know what, and rode his horse close behind her.

The Pratt woman, who made a fine figure in a pair of cloth breeches, sat her horse erectly, with a determined look on her face, and told the professor rather crossly that his stirrups were too short. She made Walter dismount and lengthen them.

Marcia Knowles rode behind me at the head of the line, without saying a word. I doubt if she'd ever been up so early in her life before, and she didn't like the hasty fried breakfast, and she hadn't slept well on her bough bed in camp, nor had a chance to bathe properly. In

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short, she was in that mood guides know so well, especially on the first days out, when they are handling parties of people who have lived soft lives and are unused to the wilderness. John Abercrombie was trailing close behind her, trying to soothe her, to explain that a camp in the Rockies couldn't be like her $50,000 "cottage" in the Berkshires. She shut him up with a "Don't be a fool!"

Personally, I wanted to send her home then and there, but I didn't quite know how to do it. We plodded up Piegan trail for the most part in silence, broken chiefly by "oh's!" and "gracious's!" from Julie, as she looked across the cañon at the frowning precipice. Sometimes she became more articulate, and informed the surrounding landscape that she was quite sure she could never get up there, because she wasn't a goat, you know.

"No, she ain't a goat," Walter muttered once, touching his horse with his heel and passing me on the trail.

Poor Walter! He had anticipated a jolly day, and here he was, doomed to help pull six tenderfeet up a precipice!

THE sun wasn't up far enough to take the chill out of the air when we reached the high point on the trail, two thousand feet above our camp, where we were to leave our horses and walk around the head of the cañon to the base of that snowfield where the goats had been. But we were all feeling better, except Miss Knowles. She was still cross and glum; and after one of the camp boys who had followed us up had taken the horses in charge, and we had started out on foot to cross the head of the cañon, past a roaring waterfall, I noticed that she seemed actually resentful of poor John's attentions. He tried to help her over rocks or across the brooks, but she would almost push him away from her and rather haughtily make her own way. I knew her type—the wealthy, aristocratic New England female who is self-reliant, not from a love of being self-reliant, but because she's just a bit too good for anybody to presume to assist or advise! This particular specimen was so far out of her element here that she had to assert herself in double measure to preserve her personality.

I let her hurry ahead for a few minutes, and then I pulled her up sharp.

"I'm the leader to-day," said I, "and everybody takes my pace. Come back here and get into line, or you don't go on this trip at all!"

I wish you could have seen the look she gave me—but she got into line. John looked daggers at me, too, rushing to her defense. But I only grinned at Walter and kept on at a steady plod.

The professor was trailing behind Miss Pratt, saying very little; for he was busy with his feet. She, on the contrary, had begun to wax garrulous, and burbled in my ear about the view till I began to regret that I hadn't worn a placard on my back, like the famous one worn by a member of the Mazamas on Mount Rainier: "I am not very sociable when I'm climbing."

Julie and Tom were too intent on each other to bother the rest of us. He was helping her, and she was having a fine time being helped. "At least," thought I, "they'll give me no trouble."

Poor Walter, to enjoy the start of his trip at any rate, went on ahead, ostensibly to find the best way.

WE found him waiting at the foot of the steep shale heap that led to the snow-field. The sun was now high enough to strike down into the canon, and this, together with the walk, had warmed us at last. But when the party gathered in a group under the cliff and looked directly up at the work ahead, I could feel some of them grow cold again. Julie screamed.

"I know I can't do it!" she said hysterically.

The professor, I noted, turned rather pale, though he said nothing. Miss Knowles gritted her teeth, but she too was silent. To my surprise, John Abercrombie, her lap-dog, was the only one to express enthusiasm. He took a long look upward, threw out his chest, and cried, "Say, that's going to be some climb! Come on; let's get started!"

"He's almost human," Walter whispered in my ear.

The lanky ranger took the rope and went scrambling up the shale slide, giving the rest a rail, as it were, to follow with. When we reached the lower edge of the snow, which was inclined at an angle of about fifty degrees, and still hard, I took the rope up to the top and anchored it around a boulder, while Walter waited at the bottom to hold it taut and catch anybody who slipped back. So far it was easy enough, and we were soon huddled at the top of the snow, looking down several hundred feet, with the sheer rock rising above us.

Walter and I quickly found the goat tracks, and their first transverse ledge, which led upward at a sharp angle. It was a narrow ledge, too, not more than eighteen inches wide. Walter took the rope, and in silence the party watched

him ascend, playing it out behind him.

Presently we saw him anchor it, and signal. I anchored my end, and told Miss Knowles to lead the way.

"I won't!" she said. "I won't be the first up there!"

"Very well," I answered. "Miss Pratt?"

"Surely; I'm not afraid," said that energetic female with honeyed sweetness. She grasped, the rope and started up.

"Professor," said I, "keep well behind her, and don't let go."

"I—I understand," said he.

He was very pale, and I noticed that his hands trembled a little. I knew then I ought not to let him go on. But he followed his buxom lady love grimly.

I sent Julie and Tommy Stratton next.

"Oh, what shall I do without Tommy to help me?" she cried.

"You'll help yourself, or go back to the horses here and now," I snapped. "And, for heaven's sake, don't scream. If you scream you may kill us all. Try to have some sense for the next three hours."

"I—I think you're horrid!" she said.

"You'd better be careful how you talk!" Tommy cried angrily.

"Get up there!" I answered.

"Now," I added to Miss Marcia Knowles, "perhaps you will deign to go."

She bit her lip and took the rope in silence. Her hands, too, were shaking. "Aha!" thought I, "the old cliff is taking some of the New England out of her already!"

John, rather annoyed at being the last, followed; and when I saw them all safely up to the ranger, I brought along the rope.

One hundred feet up, the precipice—and huddled on a narrow shelf, with no room for me to pass! As they all flattened against the wall, I looked at their faces. They were a strange study. The normal expressions had all gone. The professor was quite apparently physically affected by sheer altitude, and looked like a man who was going to be seasick. Marcia Knowles expressed on her cold face nothing but commonplace terror fighting with grim determination to go on, or rather with pride, I presume. Julie's face was almost a blank. She lacked imagination to be genuinely terrified; she was just facing the unknown, and her hand sought her lover's. He, on the contrary, was beginning to enjoy it, and John Abercrombie's face was radiant. His lapdog soul had been touched for the first time with the thrill of a real adventure. He was expanding, and his eyes glowed as they sought the trail above.

I LET them all rest a moment, and then I sent Walter up again. The next lift landed us on a broader ledge, at the foot of a sheer wall thirty feet high, which could only be scaled through a cleft like a chimney flue, half filled with loose shale.

"Oh, let me take the rope up there!" cried John.

"You'll do nothing of the kind! You'll stay behind with me!" snapped Miss Knowles.

Poor John looked at her in amazement, and meekly assented. The ways of woman on a precipice were too much for him to grasp.

I took the rope up that chimney myself, and left Walter the delightful task of boosting the party up. The first face to come straining over into my view was Amy Pratt's. She was smiling, though flushed with the exertion, and began at once to describe her sensations of enjoyment.

I cut her short to pull the professor over the rim.

"Don't look down!" I told him. "Keep your eyes on the wall in front of you, and take it easy!"

I was getting scared about him, but Miss Pratt began to reproach him for not boosting her over a bad place—and he twenty pounds lighter and going hand over hand on the rope below!

Then I pulled up Julie, whose rotund cheeks were puffing with exertion, gave Tommy yank, and put out my hand to help Miss Knowles. But she scorned me until she found she couldn't clear the edge alone. John came rapidly up behind her. He was unexpectedly agile, and I felt sorry I'd thought so ill of him. A man with good muscles, wind, and a cool head on a rock climb is never to be thought ill of.

FOUR hundred feet, five hundred feet, six hundred feet—we dropped the cañon down below us, and I began to center most of my attention on the professor, watching keenly for symptoms of sickness. We couldn't leave him here, and I certainly didn't want to turn back now.

I was too worried about him to notice much what was happening to the rest of the party, beyond seeing that they spaced properly on the rope. Grim silence had settled over most of them now. Even John, for all his enthusiasm, now that he could look down into that hole below, and up still farther above, began to realize the extent of the undertaking. However, he had grasped the fact that the professor was in a bad way, without my having to tell him aloud and alarming the others, and he had learned the trick of helping over bad places; so he was almost a third guide.

I did note once or twice, as he aided Julie or Miss Pratt, that his own lady love showed distinct signs of annoyance. I also noticed that once, as we had to round a ledge over a sheer drop, Julie screamed, and Tommy Stratton slapped her mouth quite calmly and deliberately. It shut her up, too!

But I had to get the professor around that ledge, and I couldn't speculate then on after-effects.

The last five hundred feet to the top of the Divide was a nightmare I shall not soon forget; for I saw the professor getting green under the eyes, and I knew the sickness was coming on him. He fought gamely. Poor man, it wasn't his fault. Some people are built that way. The altitude and the precipitous drop underfoot had combined to get him. I made John take the low end of the rope and either Walter or I stayed close behind him.

Fortunately, the last stages were not so steep, and finally we reached the summit, at a point where the knife-blade Divide was a hundred feet wide. There was a deep snow-field here; but just beyond it, in the shelter of a ledge, I saw a little bed of moss campion blooming pink and brave far up here above the world, and Walter and I laid the professor upon it and covered him with our sweaters.

"Why, what's the matter?" exclaimed Miss Amy Pratt, pausing in a rhapsodic lecture regarding the extraordinary view obtained by our ascent, and coming to his side.

"Altitude gets some folks that way," said Walter—"that, and the precipice."

"Altitude! why, I never felt better in my life!" she exclaimed again. "Nonsense, Alpheus, you'll be all right in a few moments."

"He is going to stay here till we get back," I said briefly. "By that time we may be able to get him down."

"But who's going to stay with him?" she cried.

"I should think you would be the logical choice," I told her.

"Why, I—I—"

She broke off, looking rather ashamed.

"We aren't going any farther, are we?" Marcia Knowles interrupted. "I should think we'd all had about enough for one day."

"Speak for yourself," said John. "We started for the top of Gould, didn't we? If you're a quitter, why don't you stay with the professor?"

He spoke sharply and crossly, as he would speak to an annoying child. He spoke, in fact, just as she had spoken to him that morning, in the lowlands. And I had to turn my head away to hide a malicious smile when she answered, "Oh, John, how can you talk to me that way?" and actually moved to his side and took his arm—which he twitched away.

Meanwhile Julie and Stratton had come up. I could see that they, too, had been quarreling. It was a merry party!

"You had no right to hit me, you brute!" I heard Julie say. "I don't love you one bit any more!"

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"Right! My God, the woman talks of rights on the edge of eternity!" cried Tommy, in a loud voice addressed to all of us.

Julie began to weep hysterically.

The professor raised his head.

"I think, if you would all leave me I should feel better," said he. "I'm very sorry to spoil the party, but organs beyond my control—"

I motioned Walter to get the rest away, and I helped the poor man around the rock to the ship's rail, as it were.

"Now," said I, as I laid him down again and covered him over, "you're only nine thousand feet up, and this sickness will pass if you lie still here in the sun and don't look over the edge. We'll be back presently. Don't you want me to tell Miss Pratt to stay with you?"

The sound of Miss Pratt's voice—her fat, unctuous voice, her ceaseless voice (why had I not realized before that she had the garrulity of the female lecturer?)—was wafted to us on the breeze. She was pointing out the wonders of nature visible below to the most casual inspection, as if she had discovered them.

"I'd rather you took her," he said,—"if you don't mind," he added with faint politeness, as his lids closed wearily.

SO we left him, and pushed on. We had only a couple of miles to go, north along the spine of the Divide, and then up the final pitch of Gould summit. But those two miles were over and around battlements and towers and loose piles of rock, across ice and snow-fields, through shale.

Sometimes we had to use the rope almost to pull up the women to surmount a battlement. Sometimes we could work around it on a ledge, again having to use the rope as a railing. At one cornice we crossed at the very edge of the main precipice, where the drop was close to three thousand feet.

Even Miss Pratt was silent now. And even she was getting fagged. Julie was plugging along with tear-streaks on her dirty face; for she had attempted to wipe off the tears with hands that had been grasping rocks all the morning. Miss Knowles looked something less than the haughty aristocrat, with her hair half coming down and sheer dog-weariness getting the better of her pride. She stuck close to John. She waited for his hand to pull her up or help her down. She leaned on him whenever she had a chance. She glared when he gave his hand to one of the other women, speaking petulantly when he returned to her.

Finally, in exasperation, I heard him say: "If you don't shut up, I won't help you at all. You women make me sick. What did you think this was going to be—a stroll over to Lenox?"

I looked for an explosion, but none came. She merely bit her lip and fought back the tears.

Finally we reached the base of the summit ridge. Above us was only five hundred feet of sharply inclined rock, which an ordinary climber could scale easily and quickly without a rope. There was one bad place close to the summit, but I saw that we could work around it. Walter started up with his lank, easy stride, and John Abercrombie started after him.

"John!" Marcia called with something of her old peremptory tone.

He paid no attention, keeping right on up.

She bit her lip, made as if to follow him, and suddenly gave a little scream and sank on a stone.

"Oh, my ankle!" she moaned.

John stopped and looked back. "What's the matter?" he said.

"She says she's sprained her ankle," I told him.

He came down again. "Here, get your boot off and let's see," he said, kneeling in front of her.

"Oh, no, no; it's not as bad as that—just a—a wrench. But you'll have to help me. There—see, I can go on now, if you'll help."

She looked at me as she spoke, with a vengeful glance, and rose, leaning on John's arm. All the way to the summit she clung to it, while Julie tried to cling to me, and Tommy Stratton raced up like a boy till he caught Walter, and had a fine time pretending that he was helping to find the path to the peak.

A GOOD deal of the summit was covered with a snow-cap. Walter and I left the women collapsed beside this snow, while we worked out to the eastern nose of the peak, overlooking the deepest drop of the precipice to Grinnell meadows. It is seldom granted to the ordinary mortal to stand on a more impressive brink—four thousand feet almost as the plummet drops from naked rock and eternal snow to a green lake and a green meadow and the smoke of camp-fires, and all beyond a wilderness of peaks and cañons, green lakes and glaciers, to the far blue plain of the prairies, which more resemble the ocean than the land. We were both silent, Walter and I. We had conquered a peak: we were receiving our reward like a benediction. Then—

"My goodness, you can see the camp, can't you? Why, I believe I could throw a stone right down on my tent. It's the third tent from the right—the brownish one."

"Try a snow-ball—that'll do less damage, marm," said Walter—and he moved away, leaving me alone on the roof of the world with this encyclopædia of current events.

"Oh, I do hope the professor is all right," she was saying. "I'm so ashamed of him—though I knew, of course, he wasn't a powerful man—like you."

"It isn't a question of power," said I, edging away from her a little. "Doubtless he's a good sailor, while I get seasick going to Coney Island. Some people can't stand looking over steep places or ascending to high altitudes."

"The higher we get, the better I feel," she burbled. "Why, I just feel reckless now. I should love to be a bride of the peaks—to be carried off by some strong mountaineer, above the timber, to the edge of the eternal snows. How wonderful they are, the eternal snows!"

I looked hastily around for Walter; but he had moved far away.

"We must get back to the professor," I said, and strode toward our party.

But I sent Tommy and John out to the edge to see the view, and faced Miss Knowles in grim silence till they returned. I let her use up John's strength leaning on him, too, until we had reached the bottom of the summit ridge. Then I halted.

"Now," said I, "we'll have a look at that ankle."

She refused. I turned to John.

"Take off her leggin and her boot," said I,—"if she can remember which ankle it is."

John sat her down abruptly on a rock, and unbuckled her gaiter, while her face was a study. Then he took off her boot. I felt of her ankle. As I thought, there was no sign of swelling.

"Now," said I, "put on your boot and come along on your own legs. We've got a sick man to get down this mountain before dark, over more than a thousand feet of dangerous precipice. Walter and I will need every ounce of help Abercrombie can give us. You've all acted like a set of silly children. Yes, all of you—" (I choked off an interruption I saw coming from Current Events). "But you'll all begin to feel better with some food in you, and maybe you'll be yourselves again when we get down to five thousand feet—if you're alive at all then."

JULIE began to blubber this, and Tommy told her to "shut up." Miss Knowles sought the side of her erstwhile lap-dog, and he moved away from her touch. I strode ahead before I had a chance to see what Current Events was going to do; but I soon heard her panting along behind me, and trying to tell me how thrilling it was to find "these brave little Alpine flowers growing amid the eternal snows."

I had always thought it rather brave of them myself, but somehow I couldn't have spoken about anything so intimately precious as an Alpine flower to that woman at that moment, not to save my immortal soul, if I have one. However, I could have cheerfully thrown her over the edge of the precipice. Looking back, I judged Walter was entertaining much the same sentiments toward the tear-stained Julie; for she had to have some one to lean on, and, Tommy having failed her, she had turned to the poor ranger. His sheepish embarrassment as she clung to his hand was comical to see.

WE didn't get back to the professor till after two o'clock. He was still lying on his bed of moss campion, beside the two packs of lunch that Walter and I had left beside him. The green had gone from his face; his mouth was open, his eyes shut, and he was snoring. That little bald-headed atom of humanity, opening its silly mouth and snoring toward the imminent zenith on the ridge-pole of the continent, struck me as supremely ludicrous. I laughed. But Current Events glared at me suddenly, and rushed to his side, waking him, and inquiring with maternal solicitude: "Oh, Alpheus, how are you? Better, dear, I am sure."

The professor came to, rubbed his eyes, looked at her, at the rest of us, back at her, and said dryly: "At the second day out stage, thanks for your interest."

Then we fell upon the lunch. Miss Knowles may have been scornful of fried "saddle blankets" that morning, but she tore into a ham sandwich now like a ravenous dog. So did everybody else. We sat on stones or on the clumps of moss campion by the edge of the snow-field, and cleaned the packs to the last crumb. As Julie was stuffing a piece of sweet chocolate into her soiled face, Tommy suddenly burst into peals of laughter.

"What's the matter?" she asked.

"Gee—your face! Oh, if you could see how dirty it is! I hadn't noticed before."

"No; you've not noticed me for a long time," she answered.

"Come," said he. "We'll wash it."

He took her by the hand, led her to the snow-field, and began to scrub her face with the cold crystals, which are like soft rock salt. She screamed, and laughed, and was happy again.

"Well," said I amiably, "food is a wonderful thing. They didn't even have to drop down to five thousand feet."

Walter grinned; Current Events looked puzzled; the professor, John, and Miss Knowles were silent. I saw Miss Knowles tentatively put forth her hand low at her side, letting it creep toward her lover's, all her pride gone. But he withdrew his fingers from her touch, got up quickly, and began to eat snow to quench his thirst.

"They say that among the inhabitants of the Himalayas goiter is very prevalent, owing to the consumption of snow water," Current Events lectured in her fatly unctuous voice, accompanied by a coy laugh. The simplest thing touched off a fact in her! I saw the professor wince. He was not yet in a mood for facts.

Ten minutes later, Marcia Knowles had lapsed into a dejected and weary silence. The professor was trying to sleep again. Walter was smoking his pipe and watching an eagle aëroplaning out over the cañon, John had retired with a cigarette behind a rock. Julie and Tommy, in the joy of their reunion, were whispering close together on the farther side of the snow-field. Current Events, realizing at last that her attempts at conversation met with no encouragement, was sitting near the edge of the western wall, no doubt

(Continued on page 22)

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

FROM ITALY TO THE CRUGER FAMILY

AN Italian murdered Ruth Cruger—a nightmare of a murder that will haunt all parents. And the natural result is that hundreds of people feel an unjust resentment against Italians. For one crime like that people will censure a whole race of gentle, cordial, and affectionate people as uncontrolled, hot-blooded, and treacherous.

Onorio Ruotole, a young Italian sculptor who has been working in a little New York studio, loves Italy, and he loves the United States.

When the murderer was discovered, and broke down and confessed, Ruotole was so afraid that Americans would think resentfully of all Italians that he modeled this memorial and presented it to the dead girl's father.

He wished to show that "the great bulk of the kindly Italian people felt the suffering of the parents and sympathized with them."

The design is symbolic. Death, a protecting and compassionate angel, is bearing away a sleeping girl. At the base of the statue is a coiled serpent—Vice.

IT'S HARD WORK TO BE LAZY

THERE is one cause of almost all our failures and of nearly all our misfortunes. This is weakness of will. The average man remains average because he would rather saddle himself to a lifetime of work he doesn't enjoy, and deny himself pleasures he would enjoy, than to persist in effort that always brings happy success.

Indolence, like every other vice, wants to justify itself. In The Education of the Will (Funk & Wagnalls Company) Jules Payot knocks four favorite props from under the man or woman too lazy to be happy:

I was born that way. "Have we never seen selfish men carried away by transi- tory enthusiasm, sacrificing their existence for their country or for some other noble cause? A character which can transform itself so radically, be it only for half an hour, is not an immutable character, and there is hope of renewing this change more and more frequently."

I haven't time. "There is always plenty of time for those who know how to make it. It is impossible that in twenty-four hours one can not find four that would suffice for thorough intellectual culture."

I'm too sleepy. "Some indolent people assert that in the morning work has to be given up because so much time is required to get the mind in proper trim. No greater mistake can be imagined. It is always possible, after persevering for a quarter of an hour, to make some effort to put oneself into the right mood. This pretended torpor of the intelligence is nothing else but torpor of the will."

I don't have the chance. "In France one often hears it said that no real intellectual work is possible except in the large universities and in Paris. There is nothing more fatal nor discouraging than this statement, solemnly reiterated by men of talent. What is said of Paris applies to New York, Chicago, and other large cities.

"The facts are against it. Kant, Rousseau, Darwin, Stuart Mill, Spencer, and Tolstoy, who have revolutionized modern thought on so many points, owe the best part of their success to solitude.

"Neither has it been proved that a large city is indispensable to the physician who needs laboratories. A little initiative, coupled with a passion for research, will take the place of material support and accomplish marvels. The important thing is to possess unbounded enthusiasm.

"Great libraries even are not without drawbacks. A man who can not have access to libraries surrounds himself only with books of the highest order.

"The one great advantage of living in the city—and it can not be overestimated—is the opportunity for esthetic culture. Music, painting, sculpture, eloquence—there is in the marvelous city an artistic initiative which is lacking in the majority of provincial towns. But once this initiative has been received, the provinces have many resources for any intellectual worker who wishes to avail himself of them.

"Talent is not produced by external conditions," he concludes. "Development does not take place from without to within, but rather from within to without. The circumstances of the outer world are never more than accessories."

HOW WAR CHANGES

AMERICANS have only to read the letters of their grandfathers, written from Bull Run or Atlanta or Gettysburg, to appreciate how war, once adventurous and almost gay, has changed. They were boyish letters, full of cavalry rides in the moonlight. That kind of war is now only historical.

Even since 1914 there have been three distinct changes in warfare, writes Raoul Blanchard in the Atlantic Monthly. At the outset there was the warfare of movement, when the German armies hurried south into Belgium and France. This lasted for two months, August and September, 1914.

Then came trench warfare, which held until the beginning of 1916, in which the opposing armies dug themselves into zigzagging ditches, and a ghastly deadlock ensued, in which thousands of men were sacrificed over the gaining or losing of a few feet of ground. This is most people's idea of modern warfare.

But since early in 1916 offensive warfare has been getting stronger, and fighting has again become mobile.

In 1914 the German armies were hurled down into France with a speed that was unprecedented in the history of wars. Before their enormous guns the French fortresses on the border, great concrete masses, crumbled to dust. Nothing in the war was more terrible than the disillusionment of the first French armies who went to meet the invaders. Says Mr. Blanchard:

"In the first battles we were treated to the spectacle of infantry charging across open country towards objectives which had scarcely been touched by their artillery. The Germans, invisible in their gray-green uniforms (the French soldiers wore red trousers and bright blue coats), rained down such a storm of artillery that the attacking forces did not even get within striking distance of them."

The Marne battle marked a crisis. The Germans had advanced too fast. They were away ahead of their supplies. To hold the ground they had gained, they dug trenches. This was unfortunate for them, for when their supplies arrived and they tried to advance, they found the French had imitated them.. As a consequence the battle line became fixed and immobile.

After the best military minds in the world have been striving to invent means to break through trenches, the offensive has become strong, and warfare is again mobile.

This is the way they do it now:

Heavy artillery, so highly developed that it can utterly demolish the defensive works of the enemy, covers and blasts to powder every square foot of the coveted soil. Then the infantry moves forward.

"Infantry is still an important factor for success. This is due to its transformation into a sort of artillery, very mobile and of strength undreamed of at the outset of the war. It carries small fusilmitrailleurs served by teams of three men; grenades which destroy everything within a large radius, and machine-guns twenty- four to a regiment instead of four or five, each one served by a special crew.

"They advance in open formation into the shell fire of their own artillery, nearing always at the double quick. Behind the first wave of assault come bodies of troops armed with knives, automatic pistols, and hand grenades. When they reach their goal, they halt, bring the cannon and machine-guns into position, and wait until the lifting of the artillery permits progress." Will this kind of offensive prove irresistible?

PEOPLE WE LIKE

THE government of almost every country suffers from some man who is continually shouting the truth. England has its Bertrand Russell; Germany's gadfly is Maximilian Harden.

"We shall no longer stand for lies—official lies. We shall no longer swallow them. Never and nowhere has there been such indecent and stubborn lying as in our land!"

Harden is now about fifty-five years old. He began his career on the stage. The stage was not large enough for his restless personality, so he became a newspaper reporter. About this time, 1890, Bismarck— who had been retired by Kaiser Wilhelm—read some of these writings, and invited the young man to visit him. They became friends, and it is said that Harden promised to make the Kaiser smart for his injustice to the Chancellor.

The time came. Harden learned of immorality among the German army officers near the Kaiser. He sharpened his pen. One by one, officers disappeared.

And when the Kaiser wished to punish Harden for causing these public exposures, the editor said: "Don't make me play my last card!" After that a year's imprisonment was mysteriously waived.

---

ON BEING SEVENTY

WE all dread old age. It means weakness and incompetence. Impatient younger relatives will have to take care of us. We won't have the physical vigor to enjoy life, sports, travel, work. But there are compensations, writes Edward Carpenter, who has passed seventy, in My Days and Dreams (Charles Scribner's Sons):

"Old people and infirm, chronic invalids, and the like often get needlessly depressed over the impression that they may be a burden and an infliction to their friends, whereas in very truth, by calling out the sympathies, the energy, the consideration of those around them, they are really conferring the greatest benefits; and many a household is really supported and held together by one who to all outward appearances seems to be the most frail and useless member of it. I find I am a little hard of hearing, and people are good enough—in fact, are compelled—to speak up and speak distinctly. They have the pleasure of helping me over my deafness, and I have the satisfaction of getting them out of their mumbling habits of conversation."

As for old age itself, "the most generally accepted view of it is as something a little dull, a little ineffectual, as consoling itself with good advice and other second-hand joys."

This may be a correct view; yet, says Carpenter, there is another thing about old age—the sense of adventure.

Youth is full of acknowledged adventure; the campaigns of Love and War; but youth does not know how absorbing may be the great adventure of Death. In my little individual way, I feel a curious sense of joy in observing the natural and inevitable decadence of some bodily organism, the failure of sight and hearing, the weakening of muscles, the aberrations even of memory—a curious sense of liberation and of obstacles removed. I acknowledge that the experience—the satisfaction and the queer sense of elation—seems utterly unreasonable, and not to be explained by any of the ordinary theories of life; but it is there; and it may, after all, have some meaning.

"Terrible as war is, and terrible the apparent folly of mankind, still those engaged in it would not give their lives as they so constantly do, not only with conscious devotion, but even with savage joy, if they were not impelled to do so by the insurgence of a greater life within—a life within each one more vivid and even more tremendous than that which he throws away."

THE CONSERVATION OF THE CLAM

EVERY clam you eat releases a chop for service at the front.

Clams are dug each day in the week. They are eaten on one. Fish are caught every day; they are eaten on Friday. The surplus is thrown back into the sea. And still there are people who go hungry for meat because they can not afford it. That is why, according to the Sea-Food Journal, the Department of Food Conservation is planning a campaign for one fish meal as a meat substitute every day instead of one fish day a week.

There's lots of good fish, good fish in the sea—

The average housewife is not only ignorant of many kinds of sea delicacies—she does not use the kinds she knows to be good.

The clam, for instance, has many attractions. It is, says the Department of Conservation, nutritious, digestible, cheap, plentiful, easily and quickly cooked, and of a delectable flavor. It is, besides, a volunteer crop.

A poor year may affect meat, fruit, and vegetable markets, but the carnivorous clam continues to fatten on its own microscopic live stock, which never fails.

Nor are the marine vegetables, on which other fish subsist, subject to the weather or to blight. They flourish year after year, without planting, cultivation, or care.

"Indulge the public appetite for clams," says Hoover.

SUBMARINE DEVICES YOU NEED NOT INVENT

LITERALLY thousands of suggestions for circumventing the submarine have poured into Washington. Some of these are by recognized experts, and show promise; many are from people who never thought of inventing anything before in their lives.

There are three lines of experiment that have interesting possibilities, according to Park Benjamin in the New York Times:

1. At the present time a submerged submarine is blind. If a way could be found by which a submarine could project a shaft of light for a short distance through the water ahead of her, it would enable her to steer a course through mine fields, and to attack and sink a blind enemy submarine. Electricians are working to see whether such a projection of light under water is possible.

2. Electricians are trying also to make a submarine reveal her own position by establishing electrical currents in places where submarines are frequent—the idea being that the passage of a steel body, such as a submarine, through the circuit will create a disturbance and signal the submarine's presence and course.

3. It may be possible to develop a microphone, which when submerged would reveal the submarine's presence by registering the sound of its propeller, which is a different sound from that made by any other kind of ship.

Meanwhile, here are Mr. Benjamin's "Don'ts" for would-be inventors:

Don't try to improve on the internal construction of ships to enable them to ward off or withstand the torpedo explosion. That matter has been closely studied for a long time by naval constructors, and there are already many promising plans being developed.

Don't try to fasten shields or plates, movable or otherwise, or masses of elastic material, on the outside of a vessel, in the hope of either warding off the torpedo or causing it to expend its explosion harmlessly. They don't work. Wire nets are sometimes used to surround the ship while she is at anchor, in perfectly smooth water, or moving very slowly; but they are practically of no avail in heavy seas, and, besides, are liable to be torn off and foul the screws. They have also been found easily penetrable by a high-powered torpedo.

Don't try to arrange big electro-magnets on the vessel for the purpose of making the torpedo swerve and so avoid the ship. They have an unfortunate tendency—supposing they work at all—to attract the torpedo to the ship instead of deflecting it.

Don't try to arrange mines of peculiar and original construction into which the submarine is expected to run, on the theory that it travels always at a certain depth, and the mines are supposedly placed so deep that the keel of no ordinary surface vessel will reach them. The rise and fall of tides, the presence of currents in shoals or after storms, or the advent of high seas usually upset such calculations.

DO YOU WANT TO BE AN EMMA McCHESNEY?

IF you talk about yourself for fifteen minutes to a friend, his attention wanders. But if you talk about him for fifteen minutes, he is so fascinated with your choice of subject that he would gladly listen an hour.

"The most vitally interesting thing about your proposition to the customer," says Adelaide Benedict-Roche in Salesmanship for Women (Ronald Press Company), "is:

"What service will it render me? What advantages will it give me which I do not now possess?

"Of far more importance to her to have the assurance that the article will afford her perfect satisfaction than to know how large your factory is or how many years the inventor struggled to produce the finished product."

If you want to eliminate the "I" to make room for the "you," and to clear your own mind on little points that you must make clear to your customer, it is best to write out your selling talk.

"What would you think," asks an old salesman, "of a minister or teacher who would appear before an audience or class without a thorough preparation of what he had planned to say and how he had planned to say it?

"By studying a talk until its thoughts and words become second nature, one can use them with perfect freedom, with splendid effect, and with genuine selling power."

THE CANDID FRIEND

From The Bystander's "Fragments from France"

DON'T EAT DUST

IS yours a "dusty" job? If so, you probably have found that life-insurance companies paid little attention to your applications for insurance, and not without reason. The United States Bureau of Mining, coöperating with the Public Health Service, has been making an investigation of the effects of dust in mining and metallurgical plants, and has made some highly important discoveries which have been reported in the bulletin on the subject of "Occurrence and Mitigation of Injurious Dusts in Steel Works," by J. A. Watkins, passed assistant surgeon, Public Health Service, according to Safety Engineering:

"To the industrial hygienist, no health hazard to which modern industrial workers are exposed is of greater moment than that of a dust-laden atmosphere. The importance of the effects of atmospheric conditions on the worker has become so generally recognized that many life-insurance companies refuse to accept as risks those who are engaged in the so-called dusty trades in any line.

"Dust may be injurious in three different ways, depending upon the character of the dust particles: (1) By irritant action; (2) by toxic action; and (3) by mechanical action.

"A dust may act in two ways simultaneously; for example, a dust may be both toxic and irritating. An example of an irritant dust is that from flint chert or similar silicious rocks. The particles of such dust are hard, sharp, and angular. When the sharp particles are inhaled, they injure the membranes lining the respiratory tract, and set up an inflammation.

"The result is that the injured tissues form a fertile location for the growth of pathogenic organisms, such as those of common cold, influenza, pneumonia, or—of much more consequence—the causative organism of tuberculosis."

WHAT CAN THE AMERICAN WOMAN LEARN FROM THE CANADIAN WOMAN?

By ETHEL WATTS MUMFORD

FIRST of all, let me say that registration of women for war work is flatly pronounced a failure in Canada, positively and without peradventure. It was carried out intelligently and thoroughly in the first year of the war, and, as results were nil, it was wholly discarded, and charged up to profit and loss as a waste of money, energy, and time. The government never had occasion to avail itself of its records. The so-called "women of leisure" who applied (with the exception of those whose natural executive abilities found places for them in various organizations without the assistance of the League) turned out to be unreliable, and therefore undesirable. The women munition workers, of whom there are thousands in Canada, obtained their positions by direct application at the plants, following the announcement that the work was open to them. The same is true of those now employed by various factories and institutions. The one suggestion that the organizations make in supplement to their discard of the registration plan is—a thorough canvassing of non-governmental employment bureaus, jacking them up to honesty, efficiency, and patriotism—keeping them supplied with lists of such unusual work needs, and inducing them to investigate the labor they send to market, that it may be up to the standard.

Volunteer Workers for Patriotic Organizations

THE director of such a registration bureau, in Toronto, never sends her applicants to munition or other factories without giving each a personal two weeks' test as to neatness and punctuality.

Another hint of "what not to do," which comes unanimously from all quarters, is—and this, while seemingly a minor matter, is really one of grave importance—not to maintain paid workers in the patriotic organizations. Volunteer work has proved itself the best, and has shut the door to patronage.

There are opportunities open everywhere now. For instance, the Bank of Commerce alone has taken on eight hundred women. The demand is greater than the supply. But there is no place in national activities for either patron or protégée.

The great training camps seemed, at first, to offer another angle of effort and usefulness. Such coöperation was found unadvisable and of very limited benefit. The war units of the Young Men's Christian Association have so effectively and satisfactorily taken charge of the camp necessities that there was little or nothing to be done that was not overlapping. Therefore, camp work for women has been altogether discontinued.

The Young Women's Christian Association has formed a division that offers a most excellent hint for the United States. More than three hundred school teachers and students have offered their services to the farmers in the Niagara fruit-raising district this year. Last season invaluable crops rotted on the ground for want of labor. This volunteer army of pickers and packers, working from nine to sixteen hours a day, and enlisted for a term of from six to eight weeks, will be divided and lent to the districts in distress. In order to house and feed these agricultural volunteers, the Y. W. C. A. has planned for nine camps and canteens; also a hospital unit to care for accidents and possible sickness. Furthermore, in connection with the munition plants, this organization operates a hotel for women workers and three canteens.

One can not but feel that such efforts would be deeply appreciated in our own over-productive sections, where vegetables and fruit congest with no hope of handling and moving.

The American Sisters of the Red Triangle could make their war section a factor as mightily to be reckoned with as the war work of the Brotherhood, by constituting themselves first aid to the farmer.

Dividing the Soldiers' Pay

"IF you only knew what unending trouble you are going to have if you do not pass a compulsory pay division law, you would have every organization working night and day with every State and national representative to demand it." This, in varying tones, from the heads of every service, civil and military.

For a year and a half, at the beginning of the war, the enlisted man was under no obligation to remit any part of his pay to his family. The result was that, with the small separation allowance and the soaring cost of living, destitution and want crowded the resources of every relief to the limit.

The Dominion was compelled, much against its sentimental feelings, to pass a law giving fifteen dollars out of the thirty-three dollars paid to the soldier to his wife. This is not left to the operation of Tommy's volition. His pay comes in two checks—one to him and one to his wife.

The first great and pressing need for women's work is nursing. In the early stages of the war the service everywhere suffered from the transports of untrained zeal. But where find trained nurses enough, even in Canada, where the trained nurse comes from?

An Intensive Course in Nursing

THE solution came in the Volunteer Aid Detachment; and the young women of the United States could not do better than follow their splendid example. These girls went to hospitals, took an intensive three months' course of training, and—each released a trained nurse. There are one hundred and ten thousand of them now at the front; two thousand have gone right ahead completing their courses, and are now full-fledged graduate nurses.

Many have elected to stick to the humbler but most necessary work. The convalescent homes of Canada are now managed by them. They can dress a wound, make a bandage, cook an invalid's meal and serve it. They keep the charts, take temperatures, make beds, care for instruments, and attend to the sterilization of hospital utensils. In short, they assume all the routine work of the fully trained nurse, leaving her more experienced services for the more complicated cases and medical needs. The V. A. D. is the little tin goddess of Canada, and she deserves to be. There are undoubtedly such opportunities open for the young women of America.

When the Dominion asked the Medical Corps in England to estimate the number of tuberculosis cases Canada must prepare to receive, the Medical Corps' figures were under the fact by one hundred per cent. We should begin at once, we women of America. The need will be so great, when it does come, that then we can not afford the precious three months of training. "Do it now!"

Teaching Invalids to Knit

MEMBERS of the V. A. D. help the educational work too, and McGill University has taken a noble part. The tuberculosis patients must be kept busy—their attention must be concentrated upon the work of their hands; otherwise, melancholia sets in.

As they are forbidden all forms of labor that call the chest muscles into play, their field of activity is necessarily restricted. Therefore the woman instructor and the extraordinary sight of cohorts of khaki-clad men absorbed to the point of perspiration in needlework, knitting, and basketry. And they are inordinately proud of their productions. The work is sold and the proceeds of each man's work is banked for him.

Be it happily said that tuberculosis contracted at the front, directly from exposure or following "gassing," seems to be nearly always curable, due to the excellent condition of the men prior to contracting the disease. But fifty per cent of the consumptives of the Canadian Army developed the disease before they sailed; that is, they had it in incipient stages when they were "passed." This could be prevented if, after general medical examination, each would-be soldier should be sent before a tuberculosis expert. Ninety per cent of these waste enrolments could be thus eliminated.

Soldiers' clubs? There are many of them. Some in delightful surroundings, such as the Khaki League's charming house on Drummond Street, Montreal. They are nearly all under the auspices of the women's clubs, though many are church auxiliaries. There is, however, a great difference of opinion as to their real value. Some of the experienced leaders shake their heads. "It's hard enough to make the returned soldier get back into harness anyway, without luring him to loafing centers," they say; but they are all agreed in this: "You'll have ten times too many at first. It takes people that way—but, well—not too many. Pick the best."

"Avoid Our Mistakes"

"I WISH," said one splendid woman, "I could will you women of America my experience—all our collective experience. But if we can give you just pointers to avoid the mistakes we made at first, perhaps that will really help; though I've seldom seen people learn from other than their own drubbings of misfortune. But, really, you will have to, you know—what is that quaint Americanism you have to express it? Oh, yes,"—and she smiled her delightfully serious Vere de Vere smile,—"get a movement on."

Said another, an intense, eager little Frenchwoman who has established a painting school for maimed French Canadians: "Me—I have two sons at war. From one I have not heard in two years. Of course, in America, you will work as I do—all day, all the time—with all your might. My work, mon œuvre— it is only a little paint, perhaps a few wounded soldiers. No—it is France, it is my soul—it is my sons!"

Their Last Words

THEY MANAGE THE MANAGERS

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HOW I WENT THROUGH COLLEGE

By THOMAS F. EVERHART

IN a hospital where I recently had to spend some time I overheard a young man telling a friend that his failure to secure an education, because of his poverty, had been the greatest misfortune of his life. It had put him in a class with the common day-laborer, he said, which meant that he must work long hours and receive poor pay.

After his departure, his friend came over to my bed and said: "What do you think? That fellow you saw me talking with a bit ago is twenty-five years old, and he can neither read nor write."

Among those who heard the remark, some said, "What a pity!" others, "What a mistake!"

It was neither a pity nor a mistake: it was a crime against manhood. I know from my own experience that that man, if he had really wanted it hard enough, could have had a college education.

In the earlier years of my life I was denied, as thousands of others have been denied, the privileges of a common-school education—owing to the fact that I was almost a helpless cripple, due to an injury to my spine.

My father and mother—both hardworking people, though extremely poor, with a family of seven to feed, clothe, and educate—sacrificed as only parents must sacrifice in order to provide me with competent surgical aid necessary to effect a cure, while at the same time seeking to fulfil their obligation to the rest of the children. As soon as my physical condition would permit it, I was put to work.

It Was "Up to Me"

I KNEW that my parents had done for me all that was in their power.

It was now up to me to make good—to get for myself the education that they had been unable to give me.

How was this to be accomplished when I was twenty-four years old and working from ten to twelve hours each day in a blacksmith shop? Did my problem have a solution?

To be sure, there was a free night school that held out an opportunity to me; but the question of buying clothes, books, and paying board raised difficulties that seemed sometimes too great to be overcome, and yet they must be overcome if I was ever to rise out of the ten-dollar-a-week class.

I purchased at a second-hand store the books that were needed in the night school, and resolutely started in. The course of study covered a period of six weeks.

As soon as the school closed, I interested one of the teachers in my ambition, and enlisted her aid. When I laid my plan before her, she gladly gave me the aid I was seeking. Thus, after weeks of self-denial and sacrifice on her part, she made it possible for me to pass the required studies admitting me to college.

Not Even Railroad Fare

BUT my hardest fight was yet to be fought. I had the qualifications necessary for admittance; but, as the time drew near for the opening school term, I became painfully aware of the fact that I did not have enough money to pay even my railroad fare, let alone the matriculation fee, board, room-rent, books, clothing, etc.

It was a discouraging situation. Yet I held to the hope that, if only I could continue to raise the money necessary to get me to the college, I would surely be able to find some work, after school hours and on Saturday, that would assist me in meeting my expenses while there.

So, with this thought in view, I sought out a publishing house, and succeeded in getting a line of religious books and Bible cards to sell. The books retailed at one dollar each, and the cards sold for one dollar a set, paying me a fifty per cent commission.

I put in a month with the books and cards, and succeeded in getting together enough to pay my railway fare and the first term's tuition fee. However, when this was done, it left me nothing with which to pay board, buy books, clothing, etc.

Nevertheless I determined to let the future care for itself, and set out for the college.

I introduced myself to the president, who listened attentively to my story, and said:

"I am deeply interested in the struggle that you are making for an education, and would gladly help you if it were in my power; but you are only one of the many that have asked for work. However, if you desire to return in September and try it out, I will promise you the first opening that we have."

It occurred to me that I might possibly pay my way with the books and cards that I had been selling. I asked him what he thought of that plan, only to receive the unhappy information that the same books and cards were being sold in the territory adjacent to the college by another student, who was working as I was to secure an education. Of course I could not infringe on his territory.

Getting a New Grip on Myself.

IT SEEMED to me that my last hope had been taken away. But I was unwilling to admit defeat.

I think that college president must have known something of my disappointment, for he said, as he placed his hand on my head:

"Never mind, my boy. Remember, the darkest hour is just before day. You have the mettle in you that makes men, and I'm sure that you will win out."

These words put new life into me. I took a new grip on myself, and determined that I would win out.

I paid the entrance fee out of the money I had on hand, and decided to trust to my ability to find work to pay for everything else. I would go as far as the money I had on hand would carry me. At the end of that time, if I could not make it go, it would be time enough to think of failure.

There were still three weeks before the term opened, and I continued the book business as vigorously as possible in territory near my home. I was successful in making enough money to pay my board while at home and to buy a new suit of clothes and an overcoat.

When the time came for me to say good-by to my friends. I took an invoice of what I had on hand, discovered that I had my railroad ticket and $19.75 in money as the grand total of all my earthly possessions. Yet I was happy. Indeed, it seemed to me that I never was so happy in all my life as when, on the opening day, I took my place beside the other students.

Managing on Twenty Dollars a Month

BY close figuring, I found that by doing my own washing, ironing, and cooking I could manage on twenty dollars a month; so, with my $19.75 as a working capital, I realized that I had at least one month's grace, in which I could organize myself and have an opportunity to find work.

I opened a "pressing parlor," and charged the students 25 cents each for pressing their trousers. This was the only source of revenue I had the first month of school.

At the end of that period the president of the university, true to his promise, notified me that the faculty had elected me to fill the position of college postmaster.

My duties were to gather the outgoing mail from the college and carry it to the post-office in the village, a distance of a mile. I made three trips each day—at 7 A. M., 12 noon, and 7 P. M.

This gave me a six-mile walk each day, and provided me with needed exercise, besides paying me a salary of ten dollars a month.

The Hardest Years of My Life

I NEXT started a stationery business in connection with my office. The mail route paid my tuition, ninety dollars per year. My stationery business paid my food bill for the year—fifty-five dollars. My pressing and repair department averaged me thirty-five dollars a year.

This covered the cost of my clothing, twenty dollars; books, ten dollars; and left me five dollars over. These figured a grand total of one hundred and eighty dollars a year, and by close application and hard work I completed the four years' course of study in three years. My books were bought second-hand from the upper-class men.

Those three years were the hardest of my life, but they have paid large dividends, and they lifted me permanently out of the ranks of helplessness and despair on to the road that leads to success.

THE ABANDONED ROOM

By WADSWORTH CAMP

Illustration by Robert McCaig

FOR a long time the little group in the snow-swept cemetery was silent. The lamp, shaking in the district attorney's hand, illuminated each detail of the casket's linings.

To Bobby, in that moment, the supernatural legend of the Cedars seemed more triumphantly fulfilled than it would have been through the return of his grandfather's ghost. For Silas Blackburn was a reincarnation more difficult to accept than any ghost. Had Paredes all along grasped the truth? Who, in the semblance of Silas Blackburn, had they buried, to vanish completely?

The old man stretched his shaking hands to Bobby and Katherine.

"Don't let them bury me again. They never buried me. I've not been dead! I tell you, I've not been dead!"

He broke down and covered his face.

Paredes spoke softly to Graham:

"The Cedars wants to be left alone to the dead. We would all be better away from it."

"You won't go yet awhile," Robinson said gruffly. "Don't forget you're still under bond."

The detail no longer seemed of importance to Bobby. The mystery, centering in the empty grave, was apparently inexplicable. He experienced a great pity for his grandfather, and, recalling that strengthening moment with Katherine, he made up his mind that there was only one course for him. He would tell Robinson everything—from the party with Maria and Paredes in New York, to the moment when Graham had stopped his somnambulistic excursion.

Robinson turned his light away from the grave.

"There's nothing more to do here. Let us go back."

THE little party straggled through the snow to the house. The hall fire smoldered as pleasantly as it had done before they had set forth; yet an interminable period seemed to have elapsed. Silas Blackburn went close to the fire. He sank into a chair trembling.

"I'm so cold!" he whined. "I've never been so cold. What is the matter with me? For God's sake, tell me what is the matter! Katherine—if—if nothing happens we'll close the Cedars. We'll go to the city, where there are lots of lights."

"If you'd only listened to Bobby and me and gone long ago!" she said.

Robinson stared at the fire.

"I'm about beaten," he muttered.

Rawlins, with an air of stealth, walked upstairs. Graham, after a moment's hesitation, followed him. Bobby wondered why they went. He caught Robinson's eye, and signaled that he would like to speak to him in the library. As he left the hall he saw Paredes, who had not removed his coat, start for the front door.

"Where are you going?" he heard Robinson demand.

Paredes' reply came glibly:

"Only to walk up and down in the court. The house oppresses me more than ever to-night."

And, while he talked with Robinson in the library, Bobby caught at times the crunching of Paredes' feet in the court.

"Why does that court draw him?" Robinson asked. "Why does he keep repeating that it is full of ghosts?"

But Bobby didn't answer.

"I've come to tell you the truth," he burst out—"everything I know."

HE withheld nothing. Robinson listened with an intent interest. At the end he said, not unkindly:

"If the evidence and Howells' report had not disappeared, I'd have arrested you and considered the case closed before this miracle was thrown at me. You've involved yourself so frankly that I don't believe you're lying about what went on in the old room when you entered to steal those exhibits. Can't say I blame you for trying that, either. You were in a pretty bad position—an unheard-of position. You still are, for that matter. But the case is put on such an extraordinary basis by what has happened tonight that I'd be a fool to lock you up on such a confession. I believe there's a good deal more in what has gone on in that room and in the return of your grandfather than you can account for."

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"Thanks," Bobby said. "I hoped you'd take it this way; for, if you will let me help, I have a plan."

"What's your plan?" Robinson asked.

Bobby forced himself to speak deliberately, steadily.

"To go for the night alone to the old room, as Howells did."

Robinson whistled.

"If the answer is anywhere," Bobby went on, "it must be in that room."

"There is something strange and unhealthy about the room," Robinson said. "Certainly the secret of the locked doors lies there. But we've had sufficient warning. I don't know that I ought to let you."

Bobby smiled.

"I've been enough of a coward," he said; "and, Robinson, I've got to know. I sha'n t go near the bed. I'll watch it from a corner. If the danger's at the bed, as we suspect, it probably won't be able to reach me; but, just the same, it may expose itself. And Rawlins or you can be outside in the corridor."

"Howells had no chance to give an alarm," Robinson muttered. "We'll see."

When they returned to the hall, Bobby shrank from the picture of his grandfather still crouched by the fire. Groom alone had remained with him. After a little Graham and Rawlins came down the stairs. Graham's face was marred by fresh trouble.

"What have you two been doing up there?" Bobby asked Graham.

"Rawlins is hard-headed," Graham answered in a low, worried tone. He wouldn't meet Bobby's eyes.

"Why won't you tell me what you were doing?" asked Bobby.

"Only keeping Rawlins from trying to make more mischief," Graham answered.

Rawlins and Robinson joined them, sparing Graham a further defense. The district attorney had an air of fresh resolution. He was about to speak, when the front door opened quietly.

Silas Blackburn cried out:

"They've opened the door! Don't let them in! Don't let them come near me again!"

ALTHOUGH they knew that Paredes had been in the court, the spell of the Cedars was so heavy upon them that for a moment they did not know what to expect. Then Rawlins sprang forward, and Bobby called:

"Carlos!"

Paredes stepped from the shadow. It was plain that something was wrong with him. In the first place, he seemed unwilling to enter.

"Shut the door," Silas Blackburn moaned.

Paredes, with a quick gesture of surrender, stepped in and obeyed. His face was white. He held his left hand behind his back.

"What's the matter with you?" Robinson demanded.

The Panamanian's laugh lacked its usual indifference.

"When I said the Cedars was full of ghosts, I should have heeded my own warning. I might better have stayed comfortably locked up in Smithtown."

Silas Blackburn spoke in a hoarse whisper:

"What did you see out there? Are they coming?"

"I saw very little," Paredes answered. "It was too dark."

"But you saw something," Dr. Groom said.

Paredes looked at the floor.

"A—a woman in black."

"By the lake?" Bobby cried.

"Not as far as the lake. It was near the empty grave."

Silas Blackburn began to shake again.

"It was a woman—a flesh-and-blood woman?" Robinson asked.

"If it was a ghost," Paredes answered, "it had the power of attack; but that, as you will recall, is by no means unusual here. That's why I've come in, rather against my will. It seems strange, but I, too, have been struck by a sharp and slender object."

With a motion of repugnance, he moved his left hand from behind his back and stretched it to the light. The coat below the elbow was torn. The slender hand was crimson. He tried to smile.

"Luckily, it wasn't at the back of my head."

"Sit down," Dr. Groom said, waving Robinson and Rawlins away. "Let me see how badly he's hurt. There'll be plenty of time for questions afterwards."

Paredes lay back in one of the chairs and extended his arm. He kept his eyes closed while the doctor stooped, examining the wound.

Dr. Groom glanced up.

"Nothing serious. It's only torn through a muscle. It might have pierced the large vein."

His forehead beneath the shaggy black hair was deeply lined.

"Maybe you'll tell us," Robinson said, "what made the wound."

"No use shirking facts," the doctor rumbled. "Mr. Paredes has been wounded just as he said—by something sharp and slender."

"You mean," Robinson said, "by an instrument that could have caused death in the case of Howells and—and—"

"I won't have you looking at me that way," Silas Blackburn whined.

"Yes," the doctor answered. "Before we go any further, I want to bind this arm. There must be an antiseptic in the house. Where is Katherine? Find her, Bobby."

As Bobby started to cross the dining-room he heard the slight scraping of the door that led to the kitchen. He knew there was some one in the room with him. He touched a cold hand.

"Bobby!" Katherine breathed.

She wore the black cloak. Against the darkness of the room she had made no silhouette. When he put his arms around her and touched her cheek, he noticed that that, too, was cold, and the shoulders of the cloak were damp.

"Where have you been?" he asked.

"Outside," she answered frankly. "I could not sit still. I wondered if the woman in black would be around the house to-night. Then I was afraid; I came in."

Dr. Groom's voice reached them:

"Have you found her?"

Without any thought of disloyalty, Bobby recognized the menace of coincidence.

"Take your cloak off," he whispered. "Leave it here."

"Why?"

While he drew the cloak from her shoulders he raised his voice:

"Carlos has been hurt. The doctor asked me to find you."

His simple strategy was frustrated by the appearance of Rawlins. Without ceremony he took Katherine's coat from Bobby, draping it over his arm.

"The doctor," he said to Katherine, "wants a basin of warm water, some old linen, carbolic acid, if you have it."

She nodded and went back to the kitchen, while Bobby returned with the detective to the hall.

"Where did you get the coat, Rawlins?" Robinson asked.

"The young lady," Rawlins answered with soft satisfaction, "just wore it in."

Paredes looked at the cloak.

"You could recognize the woman who attacked you?" Rawlins said.

Paredes shook his head.

"You've forgotten how dark it is. Don't ask me to swear it was a woman."

"You're trying to say it wasn't flesh and blood," Blackburn quavered.

Paredes smiled weakly.

"I'm trying to say nothing at all."

"Tell us each detail of the attack," Robinson said.

But Katherine's footsteps reached them from the dining-room, and Paredes would not answer.

---

---

Paredes glanced at Katherine once. There was no softness in her attitude as she knelt beside his chair. Neither, Bobby felt, was there the slightest uneasiness. With a facile grace she helped the doctor bathe and bandage the hand.

"A silk handkerchief for a sling—" the doctor suggested.

"I won't have a sling," Paredes said. "I wouldn't know what to do without the use of both my hands."

Bobby took the basin and the bottles from Katherine, and rang for Jenkins. This new development made him wonder about Graham's theories as to Paredes. If it was Maria who had struck the man, there had either been a quarrel among thieves else no criminal connection had ever existed between them.

Rawlins still held the cloak. After Jenkins had removed the doctor's paraphernalia, every one seemed to wait. It was Silas Blackburn who finally relieved the strain:

"Katy, where you been with that coat? What's he doing with it?"

Without answering, she took the coat from Rawlins, and started up the stairs, turning at the landing. Her farewell seemed pointed at the Panamanian, who looked languidly up at her:

"If I'm wanted, I shall be in my room."

"Who would want you, Katherine?" Graham blurted out. But it was clear that he had caught the coincidence, too.

"That remains to be seen," Robinson sneered, as soon as she had gone. "Now, Mr. Paredes."

"I've really told you everything," he said. "I walked toward the graveyard. At a point very close to it I felt the presence of this creature in black. I spoke. I reached out. I touched nothing."

He raised his injured hand.

"I got this for my pains."

"What made you go to the graveyard?" Robinson asked suspiciously.

Paredes pointed to Silas Blackburn.

"I wanted to retrace his journey. I thought at the grave, if I were alone, something might expose itself that had remained hidden before, in the presence of so many materialistic human beings."

A smile spread over Rawlins' cold, unimaginative features.

"That sounds well, Mr. Paredes, and there is a lot about this case that looks like ghosts; but leave us a few flesh-and-blood dues. This woman in black is one of them, although she's been slippery as an eel. It looks to me as if you went to the grave to meet her alone, exactly as you went to the deserted house to talk quietly with her night before last. Maybe she mistook you for one of us snooping in the dark, and let you have it."

"If that is so," Paredes said easily, "why not go out and arrest her then? She might explain everything except the return to life of Mr. Blackburn. I'm afraid that's rather beyond you, in any case. But, at least, find her."

Robinson joined in Rawlins' laugh.

"Why go outside for that?"

Paredes started.

"You never mean—"

"You bet I do," Rawlins said. "If what I've doped out hadn't been so, we'd have caught her long before. We're not blind. You remember the other night, Mr. Robinson. You'd just questioned her in court, and had threatened to question Paredes too, when she came in here ahead of us and slipped out the back way. She must have told him to follow. They went by different roads to the deserted house. We happened to hit his trail first and followed it. I'll guarantee you didn't see her when you first came in."

Robinson shook his head.

"Mr. Graham kept me busy, and I rather waited for your report before pushing things. I didn't see her or question her until after Mr. Graham and Mr. Blackburn had started for New York."

"And she could have sneaked in the back way any time before that," Rawlins said.

"It's utter nonsense!" Graham cried.

Rawlins turned on him.

"See here, Mr. Graham; you've been trying to fight me off this way all afternoon. It won't do."

"Katy's a good girl," Silas Blackburn quavered.

WITH a growing discomfort, Bobby told himself that Katherine was assuredly the victim of coincidence. He could not picture her entangled in any of Paredes' purposes. Her dislike of the man was complete and open. But he saw that Rawlins, out of the mass of apparently inexplicable clues, had extracted this material one, and would follow it desperately, no matter who was hurt; and Robinson was behind him. They had evidently found something to sharpen their suspicions, and Graham probably knew what it was.

Robinson took out his watch.

"We can't put this off too late," he mused.

The detective at his heels, he walked to the library. Bobby started after them. Graham caught him, and they crossed the dining-room together.

"What do they mean to do?" Bobby asked.

"I have been afraid of it since this afternoon," Graham answered. "I have not cared to talk about it. I had hoped to fight them off. They intend to search Katherine's room. I think they believe she has something important hidden there. I've been wondering if they've got track of Howells' report, which we told Jenkins to hide."

"Why," Bobby asked, "should that involve Katherine?"

"Howells may have written something damaging about her. He knew she was devoted to your interests."

Robinson called to them from the library.

"Won't you please come in, Mr. Blackburn?"

Bobby and Graham went on to the library. They found Rawlins gazing through the door of the private staircase.

"We could go up this way," he was saying, "and across the old room, so that she needn't suspect."

"What is he talking about?" Bobby asked Robinson angrily.

"You wanted to help," Robinson answered, "so Rawlins and I are going to give you a chance. We are about to search your cousin's room. We hope to find there an explanation of a part of the mystery—the motive, at least, for Howells' death; perhaps your own exoneration. You'd do anything to have that, wouldn't you? You've said so."

"At Katherine's expense!" Bobby cried. "You've no right to go to her room. She's incapable of a share in such crimes. Do you seriously think she could plan an escape from a grave and bring back to life a man three days dead?"

"Give me a human being that caused death," Robinson answered, "and I'll tackle the ghosts later. You're wrong if you think I'm going to quit cold because your grandfather looks like a dead thing that moves about and talks. If your

---

cousin's skirts are clear, no harm will be done. I want you to get Miss Perrine out of her room. I want you to see that she stays downstairs while we search."

"No!" Bobby cried. "I wouldn't do it if I believed you were right. And I know you're wrong."

"Prove that we're wrong. Clear your cousin by helping us," Robinson urged.

"Since you're so determined," Graham said quietly, "I'll do it."

"Hartley! What are you thinking of?"

"Of showing them how wrong they are," Graham said. "I'll tell her Dr. Groom wishes to speak to her about Mr. Blackburn. I'll warn him to keep her downstairs for a quarter of an hour. That should give you plenty of time."

Robinson nodded.

"She'll never forgive you," Bobby said.

"It's the best way to satisfy them," Graham said. "I have, perhaps, more faith in Katherine than you have."

He left them to carry out Robinson's instructions. They waited at the entrance of the private stairway.

AFTER a long time Graham descended the private staircase, carrying a lighted candle. He beckoned, and they followed him back through the private hall into the wide and mournful bedroom. It encouraged Bobby to see the district attorney and the detective hurry across it. After all, they were really without confidence of solving its ghostly riddle. What they were about to do, he argued, was a last chance. They would find nothing; they would acknowledge themselves beaten.

When they entered the farther wing, he noticed that Katherine's door stood wide.

"You see," he said.

"When I called her," Graham explained, "she thought something had happened to her grandfather. She ran out."

"And forgot all about the door," Robinson grinned. "That's lucky." Now, Rawlins."

Bobby could not bring himself to cross the threshold; but from the corridor he could see the interior of the room and all that went on there in the next few moments. A candle burned on the bureau, exposing the feminine neatness and delicacy of the furnishings. The presence of the three men was a desecration—what they were about to do, an unforgivable vandalism.

Rawlins went to a work-table, while Robinson rummaged in the closet. Graham meantime leaned against the footboard of the bed, watching with anxious eyes. Bobby's anger was increased by this picture. He resisted an impulse to run to the stairs and call Katherine. But that would only increase Robinson's suspicions. There was nothing she could do—nothing he could do.

Rawlins had clearly been unsuccessful at the work-table. He glided to the bureau. One after another, he opened the drawers, fumbling within, lifting the contents out, replacing them with a rough haste, while Bobby's futile rage increased.

SUDDENLY he saw Graham's attitude change. Rawlins' back stiffened. He pulled the bottom drawer out from the bureau and placed it at one side. He gazed into the opening.

"Come here, Mr. Robinson," he said softly.

Robinson left the closet and stooped beside the detective. He exclaimed. Graham went closer, looking over their backs.

"You'd better see, Bobby," he said, without turning.

"Yes," Robinson said. '"Let me show you how wrong you were, Mr. Blackburn. Let me ask if you knew that you were wrong."

Bobby entered with a quicker pulse. He too stooped and looked in the opening. Abruptly everything altered for him. He wondered that his physical surroundings should remain the same, that the eager faces beside him should retain their familiar lines.

Against the back-board of the bureau, where it would fit neatly when the drawer was in place, lay a plaster cast of a foot-mark. Near by was the rumpled handkerchief that Bobby recognized as his own and the envelop containing Howells' report which they had told Jenkins to hide.

"Well?" Robinson grinned.

"I swear I didn't know they were there," Bobby answered. "You'll never make me believe that Katherine knows it."

"I've guessed," Rawlins said, "that the stuff was hidden here ever since this afternoon, when I saw a small bundle sneaked in."

"Who brought it?" Bobby took him up.

Robinson's grin expanded.

"Leave us one or two surprises to spring in court.

"Then," Bobby said, "my cousin was not in the room when this evidence was brought here."

"I'll admit that," Rawlins answered; "but she wasn't far away, and she got here before I could investigate, and she's kept the door locked ever since until just now."

He lifted the exhibits out. The shape of the cast, the monogram on the handkerchief, cried out their testimony.

Robinson grasped Howells' report, and glanced over the fine handwriting. After a time he looked up.

"There's the case against you, Mr. Blackburn, and at the least your cousin's an accessory. But why the devil did you come to me and make a clean breast of it?"

"Because," Bobby cried, "I didn't know anything about these things being here. Can't you see that?"

"That's the trouble," Robinson answered uncertainly, "I think I do see it."

"Besides," Graham said, "you're still without the instrument that caused death."

"I expect to land it in this room," Rawlins said grimly.

He replaced the drawer, and continued to fumble among the clothing it contained. All at once he called out and raised his hand. On the forefinger showed a tiny red stain.

"How did you do that?" Robinson asked.

"Something pricked me," the detective answered. "Maybe it was only a pin, but it might have been—"

Excitedly he resumed his search. He took the clothing from the drawer and threw it to one side. Nothing remained in the drawer.

"I guess it must have been a pin," Robinson said, disappointed.

But Rawlins took up each article of clothing and examined it minutely. His face brightened.

"Here's something stiff. By gad! I believe I've got it!"

Concealed in a woolen blouse, with the slender shaft thrust through and through its folds was a peculiarly long, stout, sharp hat-pin. Rawlins drew it out. He held it up triumphantly.

"Now maybe we're not getting somewheres! That's the boy that did the trick, and it's what scratched Mr. Paredes. Maybe you noticed how quickly she came upstairs to hide this when she got in."

"Good work, Rawlins," Robinson said.

He glanced at Bobby and Graham.

"Have either of you seen this deadly thing before?"

Bobby would not answer; but after a moment's hesitation Graham spoke.

"There's no point in lying, Bobby. Katherine knows nothing of this. I disagree with Rawlins. If she had been working with Paredes—which is unthinkable—she'd never have made such a mistake. She wouldn't have struck him. I have seen her wear such a pin."

"If she didn't cut him with it," Rawlins reasoned, "who else could have got it out of here and put it back to-night when she kept her door locked?"

"There's no getting around it," Robinson said: "Take charge of these things, Rawlins. Put them in a safe place."

"What are you going to do?" Bobby asked.

"I'm afraid there's only one thing to do," Robinson answered. "I'll have to arrest you both. One of you used this pin in the old room. It doesn't make

---

much difference which one. You've been working together, and we'll find out about Paredes later."

"You're making a terrible mistake," Bobby muttered. "Give me until morning to prove how wrong you are."

"What would be the use?" Robinson asked.

"If you'll do that, I will get the truth for you—the whole truth: how the room was entered, everything. I swear it, Robinson. Only a few hours. Let me carry out my plan. Let me offer myself to the dangers of the old room, as Howells and my grandfather did. Your case is no good unless you can explain the miracle to-night. Give us this chance. Then, in the morning, if nothing happens and you still think I'm guilty, lock me up; but, for God's sake, Robinson, leave her out of it."

"He's right, Mr. Robinson," said Rawlins. "You could lock up a dozen people. You might send them to the chair without uncovering the real mystery of the Cedars. Maybe he might find something, and he'd be as safe in that room as in any jail I know of. I mean, one of us would be in the library and the other in the corridor outside the broken door. How could he get out? If there was an attempt to repeat the trick, we'd be ready. As for the girl, it's simple enough to safeguard against her getting away before morning."

Robinson considered.

"I don't want to be hard," he said finally, "and I don't want to miss any chance of cleaning up where poor Howells failed."

He glanced at the extraordinary array of evidence. The good nature that one felt should always have been in his face shone at last.

"I don't believe you're guilty. As far as you're concerned, it's likely enough a put-up job. I don't know about the girl. Go ahead—anyway, and tell us, if you can, how the locked room was entered. Explain the mystery of that old man who looks as if he were dead, but who moves around and talks with us."

"The answer, if it's anywhere," Bobby said, "is in the old room."

Robinson nodded.

"Under the conditions, it seems worth while. Go on, then, and clear your cousin and yourself, if you can. You have until daylight to-morrow."

BOBBY'S gratitude was sufficiently eloquent in his eyes, but he said nothing. He hurried from the room to find Katherine. As soon as he had stepped into the corridor, he saw her figure against the wall.

"Katherine!" he breathed.

"I heard everything," she said.

He led her to the main hall, where the greedy ears in her bedroom couldn't overhear them.

"Then you suspected what they were about?" he asked her.

"Uncle Silas," she answered, "seemed just as he had been when I went upstairs, so I wondered, and I remembered that I had left my door unlocked."

"Then you knew those things were there?"

Her face was white. She trembled; her words came jerkily:

"Of course I didn't. I only kept my door locked because they had searched so thoroughly before. It was a humiliation I couldn't bear to face again."

"You don't know," he asked, "who took that stuff from Howells—who hid it in your bureau?"

The trembling of her slender body became more pronounced. She spoke through chattering teeth.

"Bobby! Why do you ask such things? You believe I am guilty, as you thought I was the woman in black! You think now, because those things were in my bureau—"

"Stop, Katherine! I can't bear it. You won't answer me?"

"No," she said, backing away from him. "But you are going to answer me. We have come to that point already. Just an hour or two of trust, and then this! It's the Cedars forcing us apart, as it did when we had our quarrel. Do you think I'm guilty of these atrocious crimes, or don't you? Everything, for us, depends on your answer, and I'll know whether you are telling me the truth."

"Then," he said, "why should I answer?"

And he took her in his arms and held her close.

She didn't cry, but for a moment she ceased trembling, and her teeth no longer chattered.

"My dear," he said, "even if you had hidden that evidence, I'd have known it was to protect me."

Then she cried a little; and for a moment, even in the unmerciful grasp of their trouble, they were nearly happy. The footsteps of the others in the corridor recalled them. Katherine leaned against the table, drying her eyes. Graham, Robinson, and Rawlins came into the hall.

"Hello!" Robinson said. "I suppose that isn't an unfair advantage, Mr. Blackburn. Still, I'd rather she hadn't been told."

"He told me nothing," Katherine answered. "I came back to the corridor; I heard everything you said."

"Maybe it's as well," Robinson reflected. "It certainly is if what you heard has shown you the wisdom of giving the whole thing up."

She stared at him without replying.

"Come, now," he wheedled. "You might tell us at least why you stole and secreted the evidence."

"I'll answer nothing."

"That's wiser, Katherine," Graham put in.

She turned on him with a complete and unexpected fury. The color rushed back to her face. Her eyes blazed. Bobby had never guessed her capable of such anger. His wonder grew that her outburst should be directed against Graham.

"Keep quiet!" she cried hysterically. "Don't speak to me again. I hate you! Do you understand?"

Graham drew back.

"Why, Katherine—"

"Don't," she said. "Don't call me that."

The officers glanced at Graham in frank bewilderment. Rawlins' materialistic mind did not hesitate to express its first thought:

"Must say, I always thought you were sweet on the lady."

"Hartley!" Bobby said. "You have been fair to us?"

"I don't know why she attacks me," Graham muttered.

His face recorded a genuine pain. His words, Bobby felt, overcame a barrier of emotion.

They heard Paredes and Dr. Groom on the stairs.

"What's this?" the doctor rumbled as he came up.

"I—I'm sorry I forgot myself," Katherine said through her chattering teeth.

She turned to Robinson.

"I am going to my room. You needn't be afraid. I sha'n't leave it till you come to take me."

"Truly I hope it won't be necessary," the district attorney answered.

She hurried away. Rawlins grinned at Paredes.

"I'm wondering what the devil you know."

ROBINSON made no secret of what had happened. In reply to the questions of Paredes and the doctor, he told of the discovery of the evidence and of the stout hat-pin that had, unquestionably, caused death. The man made it clear enough, however, that he did not care to have Paredes know of Bobby's plan to spend the night in the old room, and Rawlins, Bobby, and Graham indicated that they understood.

"It's quite absurb that any one should think Katherine guilty," the doctor said to Robinson. "This evidence and its presence in her room are details that don't approach the heart of the mystery. That's to be found only in the old room, and I don't think any one wants to tempt it again. In fact, I'm not sure one can learn the truth there and live. You know what happened to Howells when he tried. Silas Blackburn went there, and none of us can understand the change that's taken place. I have been watching him closely. So has Mr. Paredes. We have seen him become grayer. We have seen his eyes alter. He sits shaking in his chair. Since we came back from the grave the man seems to have—shrunk."

"Yes," Paredes said. "Perhaps we shouldn't have left him alone. Let us go back. Let us see if he is all right."

Rawlins laughed skeptically.

"You're not afraid he'll melt away?"

"I'm not so sure he won't," Paredes answered.

They all followed him downstairs. Because of the position of Blackburn's chair, they could be sure of nothing until they had reached the lower floor and approached the fireplace. Then they saw. It was as if Paredes' far-fetched fear had been realized. Blackburn was not in his chair; nor was he to be found in the hall.

There was no one in the library or the dining-room; and Jenkins, who sat in the kitchen, still shaken by the discovery at the grave, said he hadn't moved for the last half-hour, and was sure no one had come through from the front part of the house.

They returned to the hall, and stood in a half circle about the empty chair where a little while ago Silas Blackburn had cowered.

Paredes spoke gropingly.

"What would we find," he whispered, "if we went to the cemetery and looked again in the coffin?"

"Why should he have come back at all?" Groom mused.

Robinson opened the front door.

"You know, he might have gone this way."

But already the snow had obliterated the signs of their own passage in and out. It showed no fresh marks.

The storm was more violent. It discouraged the idea of examining the graveyard again before morning.

Robinson glanced at his watch. He led Bobby and the detective to the library.

"Then try your scheme if you want," he said. "But understand, I assume no responsibility. Honestly, I doubt if it amounts to anything. Shout out if you are attacked, or the moment you suspect any real cause for fear. Rawlins will be in the corridor, and I'll be in the library or wandering about the house—always within call. Rawlins will guard the broken door, but be sure and lock the other one."

The two officers went upstairs with Bobby. Graham followed.

"You understand," Robinson said. "I'd rather Paredes and the doctor didn't suspect what you are going to do. Change your mind before it's too late, if you want."

Bobby walked on without replying.

In the upper hall they found Katherine waiting.

---

"You sha'n't go there for me, Bobby," she said.

"Isn't it clear I must go in my own service?" he answered, trying to smile.

He wouldn't speak to her again. He wouldn't look at her. Her anxiety and the affection in her eyes weakened him, and he needed all his strength. For at the entrance of the dark, narrow corridor the fear met him.

Rawlins brought a candle. and guided him down the corridor. Graham came, too. The detective locked the door leading to the private hall, and slipped the key in his pocket.

"Nobody will get through there, any more than they will through the other door, which I'll watch."

With Graham's help, he made a quick inspection of the room, searching the closets and glancing beneath the bed and behind the furniture.

"There's no one," he said, preparing to depart. "I tell you, there's no chance of a physical attack."

His unimaginative mind cried out.

"I tell you, you'll find nothing, learn nothing, for there's nothing here to find; nothing to learn."

"Just the same," Graham urged, "you'll call out, won't you, Bobby, at the first sign of anything out of the way? Take no foolish chances."

"I don't want the light," Bobby forced himself to say. "My grandfather and Howells both put out their candles. I want everything as it was when they were attacked."

Rawlins nodded, and, followed by Graham, carried the candle from the room and closed the broken door.

THE sudden solitude and the darkness crushed Bobby, taking his breath. He felt his way to the wall near the open window. He sat down there, facing the bed.

At first he could not see the bed. But gradually the outlines of the room and of its furniture dimly detached themselves from the black pall. He could see, after a time, the pallid frames of the windows, the pillow on the bed, and the wall above it. He fancied the dark stain, the depression in the mattress where the two bodies had rested. He thought how those two men, dead for many hours, had moved apparently of their own volition; how his grandfather had come back from the grave and then had disappeared, leaving no trace; and he comforted himself with the thought that the explanation, if it came at all, must arise from a force outside himself, whether of the living or the dead.

Could any subtle change overcome him here, as it evidently had the others? Could there be repeated in his case a return and a disappearance like his grandfather's? There was, as Rawlins had said, no way in or out for an attack. Therefore the danger must come from the dead.

The whole illogical, abominable course of events warned him to bring his vigil to an end before it should be too late; urged him to escape from this room. And he wanted to respond. He wanted to go to the corridor and confess to Rawlins and Robinson that he was beaten. But that course meant the arrest of Katherine and himself in the morning. For a few hours he could suffer here for her sake. Daylight, if he could persist until then, would bring release; and surely it could not be long now.

HE shrank back. Steadily it had grown colder in the old room. He shivered. He drew his coat closer about him. What temerity to invade the domain of death; as Paredes had called it, to seek the secrets of unquiet souls!

He ceased shivering. He waited, tensely quiet. Without calculation he realized that the moment for which he had hoped was at hand. The old room was about to disclose its secret; but would it permit him to depart with his knowledge? He forgot to call. He waited, helpless and terrified, against the wall. He heard a moaning cry, faint and distant—the voice they had heard in the forest and at the grave.

But it was more than that which held him. He knew now what Katherine had heard across the court, heralding each tragedy and mystery. He caught a formless stirring. Yet on the bed there was no one. Fortunately, he had not lain down there.

He tried to call out, realizing that the danger could find him if it chose; but his throat was tight and it permitted no response.

His glance had not wavered from the wall above the stained pillow. There was movement there. Then he saw. A hand protruded from the blackness of the paneling where they had sounded and measured without success. In the ashen, unnatural light from the snow, the long fingers of the hand were like the feelers of a gigantic reptile. They wavered feebly, and he became convinced that the hand was immaterial, that it was unattached to any body. If that was so, it couldn't be the hand of Katherine. At least he had proved that Robinson and Rawlins had been wrong about her. That sense of victory stripped him of his paralyzing fear. It loosed the tight band about his throat. He could call. He could prove the immaterial nature of the repulsive hand wavering from the wall.

Crying out, he sprang to his feet. He flung himself across the bed. With both of his hands he grasped the slender, inquisitive fingers that wavered above the stained pillow, and once more his throat tightened. He could not cry out again.

To be concluded next week

Altitude

(Continued from page 7)

planning a rhetorical outburst about the Rockies to enrapture the Woman's Club of Melrose, Massachusetts, next winter.

I looked sidelong at Miss Knowles, and felt a sudden pity. She had encountered a reality that had made an ordinary mortal out of her, but that had also made a man out of her lap-dog. Now, for the first time, she wanted him; and now, for the first time, he didn't want her!

"Miss Knowles," said I, "altitude is a funny thing, isn't it?"

She bit her lip, without looking at me. "I don't know what you mean," said she.

"Take the professor, for instance," I answered. "He goes seasick with it, and suddenly hates to hear Current Events burble—"

"Who wouldn't?" she interrupted.

"Exactly; but he's been listening with a lover's ears for I don't know how long at sea-level."

"She's a fool, and he's a weakling," said Miss Marcia.

"Physically, yes," said I. "He's weak on a precipice, but strong on the tariff. Then, Tommy slapped Julie's mouth—who would have suspected that?"

"She's a fool, too."

"No; just an ordinary girl," I smiled. "And then John—"

Now Miss Knowles looked at me with the consciousness of womanly sovereignty, superior ancestors, and an inherited income in her eyes.

"We'll not discuss John," she said.

"No? You can hardly avoid the discussion if I choose to pursue it, since the space here is rather restricted," I answered.

"I rely," said she, "on your being a gentleman."

"That," I replied, "is a poor reliance. It has been too long the main reliance of your sex. Frankness on both sides is a better one. I simply wish to say that the altitude has proved John a good sport, and proved you a bad one. You, who probably consider yourself a thoroughbred, ought to know what a good sport is. It's none of my affair whether you keep John or not, except as I was responsible for this trip. But, if you do want to keep him, you've got to come across as a good sport yourself. You can never play with John again, nor toss him bones from the table."

"I should call 'frankness' a conservative adjective," said Miss Knowles frigidly. But I saw her eyes wandering around in search of John.

"Pardon me—it's the altitude," I replied, and called loudly to the others.

WELL, we got the professor down. He was weak, and the moment he got to the rim he went green again under the eyes. But he was plucky, and by keeping his face to the wall and looking downward as little as possible, with John and Walter or me below on the rope to guide his feet, we got him down, hundred feet after hundred feet. I carried him bodily around one ledge, and Waiter took him around another. Our progress was necessarily slow; and the agony wasn't lessened any by the maternal burblings of Miss Pratt, who asked the professor at each landing place how he was getting along, and attributed his monosyllables to weakness, which set her to burbling the harder.

But Julie was a reformed character. She came down quietly, and she came down as efficiently as she could, poor girl, never having been trained to manage for herself in places of physical danger or difficulty. Tommy encouraged her with praise, and that spurred her on to renewed effort. They had passed their crisis.

As for Marcia Knowles, she uttered never a word, either to me or to John. She took his help when he gave it. When he was not by, or when she dared try alone, she gulped down her terror of the heights, and, with a grim look on her face, followed the one in front. She was trying to be a sport. She was wrestling with herself, and with this tremendous reality of rock. I saw John look at her with curiosity once or twice, but I was too busy for much observation.

When we stepped off the last ledge on to the snow-field at the base, something pent up in all of us broke loose, and simultaneously we yelled. Julie and Tommy laughed loudly. The professor sank in a heap. I tied the rope under his arms, sent John down the drift, and lowered this learned little man most undignifiedly, like a bale of hay, to the bottom. Even Marcia smiled a little now.

IT was six o'clock when we reached our horses, and even Current Events had to be lifted into her saddle. I saw Miss Knowles, however, trying to mount unaided. She got her foot nearly over, but slipped back, too weak to accomplish it. I sprang to catch her; but John was ahead of me, and prevented her fall, for her hand could not keep its grasp on the saddle-horn.

"What's the matter?" he said. "You should have waited for help."

She looked at him oddly, humbly, without any coquetry.

"I didn't want to bother any one, if I could do it myself," she explained. "But I guess I can't."

John swung her up.

"You are very strong," she said. "I never knew you were so strong. And I never knew I was so weak."

He made no reply to this; but he kept close behind her as we plodded wearily down the trail, and I noted that his eye seldom left her, and his figure straightened, alert, if she swayed in her saddle.

"Oh, dear," sighed Miss Pratt, as we drew near camp, "I do think it's a shame that it isn't proper for me to put poor Alpheus to bed. But I'll get my hot-water bottle for you to give him. I brought a hot-water bottle with me, you know. They told us to cut our equipment down to the minimum, but I couldn't be without a hot-water bottle. A hot-water bottle—"

"Is something you'll need yourself tonight," I interrupted. "You needn't worry further about the professor; I'll look after him."

And I got him into his tent as soon as I could, and put him to bed, after he'd had a bit of hot food. He sank wearily back, and thanked me, Then he added: "Have you any idea of how I can get a train out to-morrow?"

"What do you want a train for?" said I. "You'll be all right in the morning."

"Doubtless," he replied. "But certain—er—psychological events have taken place. I desire extremely to take a train."

I looked at him sharply. His face was drawn with weariness, but there was no mistaking the set purpose of his mouth.

"Very well," I answered. "I'll tell a guide to wake you early, and you and he can ride down to Many Glacier Hotel, where you can connect with the nine

o'clock motor-bus for the railroad, and catch the noon train east."

"Thank you," said he, and closed his eyes.

I went out of the tent, and fell to on the hot food, which the rest of our party were also devouring in the concentrated silehce of hungry animals with a bone. The women had not stopped to put on their skirts, nor to do up their hair. Miss Marcia Knowles was holding back her dilapidated coiffure with one hand, in fact, while she stooped her head over a tin mug of tea and drank thirstily. Only Walter, the ranger, hatless, his hair freshly brushed, his boots dusted, his lean, tanned face smiling, sat a little apart, as if he had done no work whatever, and ate, slowly and deliberately, a plate of fried cakes.

WHEN the meal was over, Julie went at once to bed, and so did Current Events, with only a brief and sleepy comment on the beauty of the late northern sunset upon the peak of Gould far above us. Tommy was soon narrating the exploits of the day to a knot of other campers. Marcia and John had disappeared. I strolled out toward the lake shore, in the cool twilight, through the grasses starred with chalice cups, the startled ground squirrels scolding about my feet. It was that wonderful still time and hush of the world when the upland meadows of the high Rockies are at their loveliest. The green lake lay in shadow. A thousand feet above it the glacier gleamed white, and the descending waterfalls sent a soft and delicate roar through the air. Standing far up into the last pink flush of sunset, the summit of Gould glowed like a subdued jewel.

And, then behind a little clump of trees, I heard voices. Of course, I could have departed as quietly as I had approached—but I didn't. One never does! I listened.

"To think that I climbed 'way up there!" Marcia was saying. "Oh, John, you can never know how afraid I was when we got on that precipice! I hated it. I hated the whole Rockies; I hated him for taking me up there."

"Do you hate it now?"

"No, not now. Oh, no—for I learned so much! John, I learned so much about both of us."

He was silent.

"You did too, didn't you?" I heard her continue. "You learned I—I'm not a good sport. You got dreadfully impatient with me, and spoke crossly. John, it's funny, but I never knew I loved you till you spoke crossly to me."

"That is a strange method of love-making, Marcia."

"But not with me. John, I have been a mean, selfish woman. I have always received and never given. And, even so, I've never stood on my own feet, but been propped up and supported. I—I am not going to be that way any more. I am going to learn to love you, John, and if you don't love me any more, why—why, it will be good for my soul"

She finished with a little choke in her voice—a choke suddenly stifled, as if by some pressure on her lips. The next sound I heard was a low, soft laugh.

"'How beautiful upon the mountains!" she said. "Look, John, all the pink has gone except one rosy spot on the very top—there, where we climbed to-day!"

Then I tiptoed back through the chalice cups.

THE next morning the professor was not at breakfast. Current Events rushed to his tent as fast as she could, hobbling on her stiff, lame legs, and called. She rushed back to inquire if anybody had seen him. I took her aside and told her where he had gone; for it was now too late for pursuit. Her face went blank, then flushed crimson. She turned abruptly from me. An hour later, she too had packed and departed; but the best she could do was the evening train.

"He has eight hours' start," said Walter. "Give me that and I can get away from anybody."

"Even her voice?" said I.

He nodded. "Even that. Besides, you don't fear a petticoat no more after you've taken her up ten thousand feet."

Making Garbage into fuel

HERBERT HOOVER announces that in the month of June the garbage records of a number of leading cities show a reduction of about thirty-two per cent.—in other words, a third of what was formerly thrown away as garbage is found, under war economy, to be worth saving as food.

We can go a long way further in reducing our kitchen wastefulness before we shall compare in thrift with the peoples of Europe. And when we have done that,—when we have cut down our garbage to the smallest possible amount,—then the garbage itself ought to be taken and turned to use.

San Antonio has solved the problem. Its garbage is hauled out to a plant on the edge of town, where it is converted into a fuel brick known as "oakoal," which is said to burn excellently. The time will certainly come when the garbage that is now wasted will be burned, and from its heat electricity manufactured to light our cities: and the sewage now dumped into our rivers will be spread across the farms as fertilizer.

Little by little, the world is getting itself organized on the basis of real efficiency, which means no particle of waste.

How I Conquered My Diffidence

THE thing that held me back for years and caused me to fill a lower position than I was really fitted for was my inability to approach men of business in a self-reliant manner. I was far too self-conscious. I often found myself in the position of the stage-struck amateur who knows his lines perfectly, but is unable to recall them until he is out of sight of the audience.

I had never realized how seriously this condition was interfering with my success until I was brought face to face with the whole truth in the following manner:

One of my friends advised me that the firm by whom he was employed was receiving applications from experienced men to fill a responsible executive position. As I was especially fitted to accept a position of this nature, he advised me to write a letter of application to the president of the firm. The salary was supposed to be more than twice what I was receiving, and the chances for advancement were good.

I wrote a long letter setting forth my qualifications for this position, and a few days later received an answer from the president, in which he stated that he would be pleased to have me call at his office for an interview at my earliest convenience. Immediately upon receipt of the letter I went to his office. Our conversation lasted for one hour, in which time he told me the duties of the position, details about the firm's business and its future, and ended by saying:

"You can write a good business letter, and had almost convinced me that you were the man for the position. You are well educated and have enough experience in business. But you lack one of the most important things—confidence in yourself.

"I'm going to give you some advice. Cultivate your personality so that you can meet men on an equal basis. Be firm, yet courteous. Make the most of your knowledge and experience. Fear no man, no matter what position he occupies; and if you are certain of your convictions, defend them. Think success, and you will be successful."

I lost the position, but I found myself that day. "Think success, and you will be successful," appealed to me, and I decided to put it into practice. From that time I made every effort to develop my will power. One of the methods by which I achieved good results was to write a success essay every day. These essays were usually short, only two or three hundred words, but they contained the best thoughts on success and efficiency that occurred to me during the day.

I also read some of the best success literature, among which were the biographies of famous men. I not only read and wrote these success thoughts, but whenever I approachd business men I put these ideas into practice, as far as possible.

I tried to meet as many men as possible—something I had studiously avoided before. And all the time, every day, I tried to remember:

"Think success, and you will be successful."

To-day I do not fear to meet any man, no matter what position he occupies in the world. I am no longer conscious of the fact that I occupy an inferior position, nor do I lose control of my thinking processes. In these few short years I have made rapid strides toward my goal, and I am confident that in a few more years I will arrive. This process of educating myself as to my possibilities has not been an easy task, but it has been worth while, and I have often expressed my appreciation to the man who first told me the truth about myself.

C. O. R.

From a Man Whose Name Can't be Published.

FROM a man in England who is so I close to the seats of the mighty that his name can not be published a private letter came to America recently. We are allowed to quote this very interesting paragraph from it, which gives a glimpse of the war's probably outcome as viewed by well informed Englishmen:

The men who know are watching two curves of destiny plotted on the calendar of 1918. One curve represents Germany's man power, the other the available 1600-ton ships of the world. A certain line is drawn across the chart. Where the German curve reaches that line we get the probable date of Germany's collapse. A second—or submarine—line is drawn. Where the shipping curve reaches it—Deutschland ueber Alles.

Only strategical genius can alter the inexorable curves.

What is an Internal Bath?

By R. W. BEAL

MUCH has been said and volumes have been written describing at length the many kinds of baths civilized man has indulged in from time to time. Every possible resource of the human mind had been brought into play to fashion new methods of bathing, but strange as it may seem, the most important, as well as the most beneficial of all baths, the "Internal Bath," has been given little thought. The reason for this is probably due to the fact that few people seem to realize the tremendous part that internal bathing plays in the acquiring and maintaining of health.

If you were to ask a dozen people to define an internal bath, you would have as many different definitions and the probability is that not one of them would be correct. To avoid any misconception as to what constitutes an internal bath, let it be said that a hot water enema is no more an internal bath than a bill of fare is a dinner.

If it were possible and agreeable to take the great mass of thinking people to witness an average post mortem, the sights they would see and the things they would learn would prove of such lasting benefit and impress them so profoundly that further argument in favor of internal bathing would be unnecessary to convince them. Unfortunately, however, it is not possible to do this, profitable as such an experience would doubtless prove to be. There is, then, only one other way to get this information into their hands and that is by acquainting them with such knowledge as will enable them to appreciate the value of this long-sought-for health-producing necessity.

Few people realize what a very little thing is necessary sometimes to improve their physical condition. Also, they have almost no conception of how little carelessness, indifference or neglect can be the fundamental cause of the most virulent disease. For instance, that universal disorder from which almost all humanity is suffering, known as "constipation," "auto-intoxication," "auto-infection," and a multitude of other terms, is not only curable but preventable through the consistent practice of internal bathing.

How many people realize that normal functioning of the bowels and a clean intestinal tract make it impossible to become sick? "Man of to-day is only fifty per cent. efficient." Reduced to simple English this means that most men are trying to do a man's portion of work on half a man's power. This applies equally to women.

Nature never intended the delicate human organism to be operated on a hundred per cent. overload. A machine could not stand this and not break down and the body certainly cannot do more than a machine. There is entirely too much unnecessary and avoidable sickness in the world.

How many people can you name, including yourself, who are physically vigorous, healthy and strong? The number is appallingly small. It is not a complex matter to keep in condition, but it takes a little time, and in these strenuous days people have time to do everything else necessary for the attainment of happiness but the most essential thing of all, that of giving their bodies their proper care.

Would you believe that five to ten minutes of time devoted to systematic internal bathing can make you healthy and maintain your physical efficiency indefinitely? Internal Bathing will do this, and it will do it for people of all ages and in all conditions of health and disease.

People don't seem to realize, strange to say, how important it is to keep the body free from accumulated body-waste poisons. Their doing so would prevent the absorption into the blood of the poisonous excretions of the body and health would be the inevitable result.

If you would keep your blood pure, your heart normal, your eyes clear, your complexion clean, your mind keen, your blood pressure normal, your nerves relaxed and be able to enjoy the vigor of youth in your declining years, practice internal bathing and begin to-day.

You will probably want to know WHAT an Internal Bath is, WHY people should take them, and the WAY to take them. These and countless other questions are all answered in a booklet entitled "THE WHAT, THE WHY and THE WAY OF INTERNAL BATHING," written by Doctor Chas. A. Tyrrell, the inventor of the "J. B. L. Cascade," whose lifelong study and research along this line make him the preeminent authority on this subject. Not only has internal bathing saved and prolonged Dr. Tyrrell's own life, but the lives of a multitude of hopeless individuals have been equally spared and prolonged. No book has ever been written containing such a vast amount of practical information to the business man, the worker, and the housewife; all that is necessary to secure this book is to write to Dr. Tyrrell at Number 134 West 65th Street, New York City, and mention having read this article in ASSOCIATED SUNDAY MAGAZINE and EVERY WEEK, and same will be immediately mailed to you free of all cost or obligation.

Perhaps you realize now, more than ever, the truth of these statements, and if the reading of this article will result in a proper appreciation on your part of the value of internal bathing, it will have served its purpose. What you will want to do now is to avail yourself of the opportunity for learning more about the subject, and your writing for this book will give you that information. Do not put off doing this, but send for the book now while the matter is fresh in your mind.