Hezekiah is Dead: but His Formula Still Holds Good

THERE is a certain man among my acquaintances who, with a little less ability, would have made a splendid success.

That sounds strange; but employers of men will understand it: they will have a picture right away of the kind of man he is.

In his boyhood he mowed lawns, like the other boys: also he ran a lemonade stand besides, and managed a newspaper route, and was forever riguring out a new scheme.

He graduated from high school and entered business with great promise. But he had not been at work three months before he was running a couple of little private businesses on the side.

So he has continued through life—cursed with the unhappy gift of being able to do three or four things at once.

Le ekes out a very fair income to-day, drawing it in little bits from half a dozen different sources.

But he is getting along in life, and there is no one single business of which he can say: "I made it.: He has scattered himself so widely that there is not one spot in the wor'ds like that bears the permanent imporint of his effort.

Twice he has almost broken down from overwork. And four of the men who were his boyhood play-mates—men who were satisfied to mow lawns and attempt nothing else—have plugged along, each in a single business, and, with far less ability than he, have reached a higher place in the world.

I was reminded of him last night, in running across a reference to Lord Mount Stephen, in the new biography of James J. Hill.

George Stephen—he became Lord Mount Stephen afterward—was the son of a carpenter in Dufftown, Scotland. He worked for a time in a shop in Aberdeen, but was brought to America at an early age, and became one of the makers of Canada, and a power in the British Empire.

In 1901, visiting Schotland, he was presented with the freedom of the city of Aberdeen; and this is what he said: Any success I may have had in life is due in great measure to the somewhat Spartan training I received during my Aberdeen apprenticeship, on which I entered as a boy of fifteen. To that training, coupled with the fact that I seem to have been born utterly without the faculty of doing more than one thing at a time, is due that I am here before you to-day. I had but few wants and no distractions to draw me away from the work I had in hand. It was impressed upon me from my earliest years, by one of the best mothers that ever lived, that I must aim at being a thorough master of the work by which I got my living; and to be taht I must concentrate my whole energies on my work, whatever that might be, to the exclusion of every other thing.

Concentration—with the exception of honesty, it covers a larger measure of the secret of success than any other word.

I once asked a very successful man how he was able to get so much done and still have leisure time.

"I pick up only one paper from my desk at a time," he said," and I make it a point not to lay that paper down until I have settled the business that it involves."

I was present in his office when a friend came to offer him a participation in an enterprise taht promised to be very profitable. He answered:

"I can't do it, Jim. I don't need the money. And no amount of money could possibly compensate me for the nuisance and inefficiency of having to carry two things on my mind at the same time."

If you want a very good little example of how big things are done, read the desciption of the creation of the world as recorded in the first chapter of Genesis.

It is a fine little treatise on efficiency.

An enormous job, but no hurry no rush, no confusion.

One day the creation of light—nothing else. The next day, the firmament. The third day, the creation of land, and its division from the waters.

One thing each day, followed by a good night's sleep, and a full day's rest at the end of the week.

The world has never improved on that formula for success.

It was the formula of Hezekiah, who refused to dally with side-lines or attempt more than one thing at a time.

"And in every work taht he began he did it with all his heart—and prospered."

Bruce Barton, Editor.

THE MOST INTERESTING MAN I KNOW

Ignace Jan Paderewski

By WLADYSLAW T. BENDA

JUST twenty-five years ago—November 21, 1892, to be exact—a young Pole whom London, Paris, and Berlin had already acclaimed a master pianist made himself known to America in a concert at Carnegie Hall, New York. Beethoven, Mozart, Schubert, Liszt, Mendelssohn, Rubinstein, and Chopin—particularly Chopin—he played as no one had ever heard them played before. There was no dissenting voice to the opinion that that young man, Ignace Jan Paderewski, played the piano better than any one else on earth.

Twenty-five years have passed since that first American concert.

For one man to remain preëminently preëminent in a generation essentially given to change and contrast is in itself a remarkable thing. No one but Paderewski has done it. The shadow of Duse has always darkened the brilliant summit of Sarah Bernhardt's fame. For a little while only was Melba the supreme soprano. Paderewski alone has remained unchallenged, untouched by the ebb and flow of other geniuses.

Nine times he has visited America; and his fortune, before the war, made him more than twice a millionaire. Yet always his heart has remained true to his native country. He has been, and is, first, last, and always a Pole. Through his generosity and influence public schools exist in Poland as well as institutions for the sick, the poor, and the blind. Since the war he has worked indefatigably for her relief : and it is an interesting comment on the spirit of Poland that, in the hour of her supreme misfortune, her main support should come, not from statesmen, financiers, or jurists, but from a musician.

Paderewski has been twice married. The tragedy of his first love tempered the music of his early days with a passionate sadness. Before the war changed everything, he lived at Morges, in Switzerland, on the shores of Lake Geneva. There, almost a recluse on his great estate, he was accustomed to practise on the piano often ten hours a day, seldom less than eight. In the evening he would allow himself the relaxation of a game of billiards; and was very proud of his prowess with the cue.

The war that has broken the heart of Poland has cast a deep shadow over the spirit of her most famous living son, and has claimed the larger part of his fortune. Paderewski to-day is almost a poor man.

A NEW GENERATION SHALL RISE

By ALEXANDER HULL

Illustrations by M. L. Bower

GRANVILLE is a Middle Western town of perhaps eighteen thousand inhabitants, and as characteristic of towns of that size as are the Lingoods of the honorable and shabby genteel. Granville has its court-house, a relic of Civil War days; its rows of brick buildings—business houses—of two, three, sometimes four stories, examples of the architectural period of the '80's; and it has its new five-story steel and tile (I suppose, for it is very white and shiny) department store, and its still more modern and resplendent seven-story Masonic Building of terra-cotta brick.

These modern structures, glaring with a virtuous newness, stand amid the low-flanking, dingy older buildings, symbolizing the new generation. A new generation, that the old does not always understand very well, is rising. And when I think of Thea Lingood, I have no regret for the passing of the old régime.

I remember the Thea of ten years ago, as she appeared when I routed her out of the corner of Amos Lingood's book store, where invariably I found her of evenings after school, curled up with her feet under her on the counter of the little alcove, with her snubby and piquant little nose buried in a book. She would come out at my hail, her black eyes sparkling with annoyance at being interrupted, and wait upon me, with the book she had been reading in her not always too clean little hand, and with a finger between the pages to keep her place. If it became necessary, she would lay the book down while she tied up my purchase, but only if it was necessary. And she had a habit—which annoyed most Granville folk—of asking you if you wouldn't rather carry your book unwrapped.

It was said, too, that she read every book that came into her father's book store before she allowed him to put it on the shelves or to deliver it to the customer who had ordered it. I do not doubt it. When I told her that she would be a chronic sufferer from literary dyspepsia, she merely laughed, with a gleaming show of her regular white teeth, and retorted:

"Not until we buy and sell a good many more books than Granville reads."

IT was true, I suppose, that Granville did not read much. But then, I think sometimes, in extenuation, that reading is a somewhat modern accomplishment, anyway.

At any rate, people thought that Thea read a great deal too much, and too daringly, for a girl of her age, and that she spent too much time on the streets and at picnics and parties, and that she had far better be at home helping her mother—a euphemism that covers a tremendous variety of unpleasant occupations for a sixteen-year-old girl.

Perhaps Thea justified the criticism. She was a precocious girl, who wore her hair up, and her shirt-waists with abbreviated sleeves and a V at the neck that exposed a rather alarming depth of creamy neck and girlishly undeveloped chest. She was a great favorite with the boys, of her class in high school, and with the girls as well; and these companions were almost her only distractions from the books in her father's store.

In spite of her failings, Thea was thoroughly and delightfully alive, and for that I liked her, and it became my habit to slip in to buy my books and stationery

when I knew that her father would be out and Thea would be on duty. I liked her, indeed, out of all proportion to her merits, for she was sometimes pertly and outrageously frank. For example, I recall that she told me one day—me, ten years her senior and a person of some importance in Granville—that green wasn't my color, and she should have thought some one might have mentioned it to me before, but since, apparently, no one had, she accepted the duty as hers, and would I please get myself blue, gray, or brown ties after that?

The older people of Granville greatly disapproved of her. Mrs. Rush, wife of the Presbyterian minister, told me one evening that "that snippy little Lingood girl was a source of great worry to her mother. Mrs. Lingood has absolutely no control over her. She seems to have none of the other children's good qualities. Take Ed, now."

"But Ed is much older," I objected.

"But even when he was her age," said Mrs. Rush firmly, "a steadier boy and a better worker I never saw. Mr. Gates predicts that Ed will be starting out in business for himself within a year or two. And Ruby. She's only twelve—but one needn't have two pairs of eyes to see what Ruby will be. She'll be—"

"A replica of her mother," I admitted. "But don't you think—"

Mrs. Rush would not wait to indulge in speculation. "A good, wholesome, Christian girl," she said sententiously. "Of course, I'm not so surprised at Thea, considering the way they've humored her, and the way she has been permitted to read anything and everything. It has been the ruination of her. Mark my word—"

"No—no," I interposed. "Thea is a good girl at heart."

Mrs. Rush bore me down.

"If she had a heart, she would be at home occasionally helping her mother with the work, instead of—well, this is only Wednesday, and I've seen her in four different wash dresses so far this week. And somebody, you know, must wash and iron them. And Thea doesn't."

"She helps at the store," I suggested.

"Why?" demanded Mrs. Rush triumphantly. "Why? Because she wants to read undisturbed. And how does she act, may I ask, when any one comes in to buy anything?"

I nodded, but for the life of me I could only think, "Poor kid—how natural!" Thea was not like the other Lingoods.

MR. AMOS LINGOOD was a man of forty-five, with a placid and easy-going way that Granville folk considered refined. It was refined, too, in a sense—refined to a state of hesitating inadequacy. Even as far back as that, I can recall that Amos was growing gray and bald, and that it was going to be a case of nip and tuck as to which, grayness or baldness, would get his head first. And I had an idea, pretty well grounded, that a sort of gentlemanly insufficiency was his strongest quality. He had not infrequent spells of mental and physical depression due to what he mentioned vaguely as "money troubles." With an energetic and ambitious wife, perhaps— But Mrs. Lingood was neutral in color, in ideas, and in everything else.

Thea was the only one of them who was really alive. There was something tonic and exhilarating merely in speaking to her, slangy and entirely lacking in reverence as she was apt to be. Did I say that Thea at sixteen, though she was scarcely more than a slim and half-grown little girl, "did up" her hair? She did, with an oddly disturbing effect of sophistication and added age. She was nearly always good-natured, and she was always interested intensely in something. She reminded me sometimes, with her quick ways and her sparkling eyes, of an observing and inquisitive squirrel. She was a ringleader in everything really worth doing, from a school-girl's standpoint, in Granville, and no being ever lived, I'm sure, who more thoroughly enjoyed living than Thea Lingood.

It must have been this exuberant vitality that prejudiced the older people against her. I heard one puritanical young matron predict that "Thea Lingood would come to a bad end," and that right shortly. Why, precisely, I did not see. But there was a subtle antagonism between Thea and her elders that did not diminish as the years went by, but rather increased. Even to-day, very few

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of them believe in her, I think. They never understood her, and I confess that there was a time when I myself had doubts.

IT was shortly after Thea graduated from high school that I went into the store one noon to make a purchase; and Thea, flinging aside her book wholeheartedly for once, came from her alcove with flaming cheeks and a great light in her eyes.

"Mr. Blackmore," she cried, "guess—guess what!"

"I suppose I have the conventional three?" I suggested.

"Yes—yes! But hurry—or I sha'n't be able to wait till you've made them!"

"You've started your first novel," I said solemnly. She had told me with great seriousness that she meant to write one some day.

"No—silly,!"

"Mrs. Astorbilt has invited you to—"

"Now, please don't be stupid," she said, dimpling.

"Give it up, then," I said promptly.

"I'm going to college!"

"No! Not seriously!"

She shook her head a dozen times in vehement affirmation.

"I've made them let me," she said. "In six weeks. Father tried to put me off for a year—and I simply wouldn't stand for it."

Then she added with an engaging candor:

"Money. He said in another year he hoped business would be better—you know. But it's been my experience that business never is any better, and I don't believe in taking any chances, because it might be a good deal worse. And you're young only once, and I want my chance—now. It's all right for Ed—he never did care about anything but his old shop, and it wouldn't matter to him if Granville was twice as stupid and poky as it is. But I want to get out."

The world-old cry of youth, I thought. Nevertheless, I pretended to be shocked.

"Stupid! Poky! Is that the way—?"

She interrupted me eagerly:

"Don't pretend! You know it is! If I were you, and had a reputation, and could get away whenever I wished—well, then, I might be able to stand it. But it's slow! It's ten years behind the times. And people are just as satisfied! They go right along. And sometimes it just makes me want to scream!"

Such precocity was bewildering.

"Why," I said, laughing weakly, "I supposed you were having the very best—"

"Pooh!" She pouted her scarlet lips daintily. "With those kids?"

The scorn in her cool little voice was something delicious to hear. I wished, for a moment, that some one of those "kids"—with whom, I doubt not, she had spooned right royally—had happened in to hear her.

"Nobody does anything worth while here," she proclaimed suddenly. "And they don't even know that they don't—that's the worst of it!"

She darted me a mischievous glance, older by far than her years. "That doesn't mean you, Mr. Blackmore!"

I could not help laughing.

"Well—it's true! I'm going to get away where people really do things. Where you can be something or somebody without being laughed at for trying," she said grandly.

"We shall miss you," I said gravely.

She shot me a sidelong and suspicious glance. "Not very much—I bet!" she said, with a lapse to the commonplace.

WHEN she went away, I took her a box of candy and a new book to read, and carried her suit-case to the station. Just before the train pulled out, there arrived a delegation of her schoolmates of both sexes, the one sex shaking hands with a painfully preoccupied dignity, and the other kissing her and chattering volubly about a thousand and one weighty and perfectly inconsequential matters. And when the dignified young gentlemen—I heard no less than six of them offer—wished to put her on the train, she refused them scornfully, saying with a comical and serenely grown-up superiority, "Mr. Blackmore, thank you, Bob, Dick, or Harry"—as the case might be—"will look after me!"

At last she detached herself from her admirers and climbed on board. I put her in her seat and commended her cordially to the porter. I took her hand in my most polished manner and wished her every success and happiness. She was quite overwhelmed, for the moment, by my magnificence.

Then I spoiled it all by laughing. "And I think," I said finally, "that you might write me occasionally—just a line to let me know—"

"Oh—I will!" she said suddenly. A wave of hot color swept over her face. "There isn't anybody in here that we know, is there?" she asked.

I glanced around and shook my head.

"No—why?"

She flushed a deeper rose.

"Because—you've been awfully good to me, Mr. Blackmore—because— Oh, good-by! The train is starting!"

Then I understood. She flung her arms about me suddenly and kissed me with her moist, hot lips. Then she pushed me away and said breathlessly: "Because you ve been so good to me—and haven't laughed at me—and I like you! Oh—do hurry! You'll be carried away!"

"Thank you, Thea. Remember to write." I turned and went to the door.

"I'll not forget," she said, as I swung to the platform.

And she did not, for a while. I had perhaps two dozen letters from her that winter. I have them still. They are scrawled in a girlish, immature hand, filled with—with what you might expect of a seventeen-year-old school-girl—descriptions of dances, ball games, class affairs, criticisms of her professors.

She must have been as popular at college as she had been in high school, for her time in Granville the following summer was limited to two weeks. She had more invitations for the holidays than she could accept, her mother told me. I saw her only once that summer—at the park on the Fourth of July, a day that Granville annually honored with a municipal celebration.

That was the year of the "peach basket," and Thea had a very elaborate and stylish one upon her attractive little head, and wore a white piqué skirt, lengthened to accord with her new-found dignity, and a white shirt-waist, and she carried a bright emerald-green parasol, which I refused to have opened because of her old warning that green wasn't my color. She laughed and stood in the shade talking to me for a few moments. I saw, not without a momentary sadness, that the day of impulsive kisses was over for her. She was now distinctly the young lady, with a self-possessed manner and an amused toleration for Granville's somewhat boisterous holiday mood.

Frankly, I did not think her so interesting. She had put a veneer over much that had been Thea. But I had expected that, and I realized that in the making of a human being one must accept certain stages when their attractions wane, just as one knows that a bird, even the most beautiful one, must moult and be ugly. And I had hopes that Thea would "come through" royally at the last, when she had learned to appraise things at their true values—when she had begun to live consciously, and not, as she was now doing, self-consciously.

THEN she was gone again. That winter her letters dwindled to a scant half dozen. This, too, was no more than I had expeeted. The men from the university near by and the girls of her own school were "rushing" her tremendously.

From that time I caught no more than four or five fleeting glimpses of her until her graduation. To that I had an invitation, which I accepted.

Her father had made shift to go too, and we ran down on the same train. Thea, resplendent and almost beautiful, met us, smiling, at the station, with a dozen of her friends, and as we stepped from the train I had an odd sensation of being engulfed in a little whirlpool of laughing, chattering femininity. For three days we were plunged into the feverish vortex of commencement, and Thea, an admirable and delighted hostess, brought us through without disaster.

THE last ceremonial rite was done, I recall, and we were walking back to Thea's sorority-house, Thea and I somewhat in advance of the others.

"I've been wondering," she said suddenly, "why you stay on in Granville. Your practice can't amount to anything."

I am accustomed to call myself a literary lawyer, meaning one whose clients are so few and unexacting that he can spend much of his time at literary pursuits. In fact, three fourths of my income came from my writing.

"Not much," I agreed. "Only—one likes to keep faith with—well, there are certain clients I have whom no one else could serve quite so well. Then, as you know, I'm not there, usually, more than six months in the year."

"But you keep up your place—you call it your home.

"Yes. And perhaps there's no real reason. I may be flattering myself even about the clients. Sentimental reasons, perhaps. I don't know. I shouldn't like to lose touch with it, somehow. I think I must be rather fond of Granville. There's something about it. I shall be surprised if you don't see it yourself, now that you're older, when you come home."

She shot me a quick glance. "But I'm not going home," she said.

"You're not!"

We had reached the house. The others were some distance behind us. Thea took my arm.

"Come," she said, "around into the garden."

She pulled me down to the bench beside her under the delicate shade of a tall cut-leaf maple.

"Why should I?" she asked abruptly. "I've grown away from Granville—my friends all live elsewhere. What could I do there?"

"Your family—"

She stopped me.

"Do they need me—really?" she asked. "I don't want you to think I'm selfish about it—and I do want to be reasonable. Ed is married now, and has started his own shop. Mother always has been fond of Leila, and living with father and mother Leila is a great help. Ruby is nearly through high school, and she tells me she doesn't care to go to college. I believe she means it. They don't really need me, I'm sure."

"Perhaps not—from the material standpoint. But don't you think they want you?"

She looked at me, just a trifle distressed.

"Oh—yes. I suppose, in a way, they do. I've been over all that in my own mind. They have learned to get along without me, you know. They're used to my not being there. And, after all, mustn't one live one's own life? And wasn't that why I came to college? Otherwise, where was the use in it at all—if I am to go back to Granville and do as the other Granville girls do? If I am to—well, you know what they do. They go through high school, and stay at home for a year or two, and then get married, and then there are the children, and they have no outlook on life, no liberality, no—anything!

"Mr. Blackmore, I can't do it—I can't. If I had never known otherwise, I might have been content. I know Ruby is. It was those books, I think, that

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changed me. Even when I was only twelve, I began to want to get away—and do things. And it was your books—the ones you ordered—most of all that were responsible. Now—when I think of Granville, and the Shakespeare Club, and the Home Missionary Society, and all the rest—I can't go back!"

Thea in revolt still. There was something pathetic in the thought to me. Here were a hundred girls, most of them, no doubt, in Thea's position, seeking the niches that they could fill with the sacrifice of as few of their desires and ideals as possible. I knew how discouraging a percentage of them were foredoomed to failure. Perhaps Thea too!

"You have plans, then?" I asked.

"Yes. Lucy Cardwell is going to New York to study art—and she wants me to go with her."

"But you—"

"Art—no! I haven't a particle of talent—worse luck. But there are other things, you know. That novel of mine—"

And she unfolded a plan so vague, so indefinite, so flimsy, that I was aghast.

Just then Amos Lingood came down the path.

"If father can let me have the money," she ended, appealing to him.

It seemed to me that he looked rather harassed and tired.

"I guess I can manage," he said, smiling.

He was very proud of his girl, I'm sure; and she was so lovely, so beautifully dressed, so popular, and so clever, that I could not blame him.

Just the same, I could have told him, even then, that supporting Thea in New York and in Granville were two different matters; and I knew that Ed's shop had drawn upon Amos rather heavily. But blame—I could not find it in my heart to blame Thea, either. I left that for those—and there were plenty of them in Granville—who found life so simple that they had ready solutions for every one's difficulties—save, perhaps, their own!

Granville said that Thea should have come home to help her mother—to clerk in the book store, if necessary. Granville did not believe in the education that unfitted one for the daily grind of life, but only in that which enabled one to live the old life more profitably, in that which increased one's earning power. It was a matter of dollars and cents. For the glory of forlorn hopes, for the far sweep of youth's desires, Granville had not even patience.

And the years went by slowly, and Thea, in those years, never came back to Granville.

I THINK one of the things that endeared the town to me was the intimacy of observation that was possible. The Lingood family, for instance.

There was a pathetic incompetence in that family. I had always known that. And it touched, I saw at last, even Thea. For, after five years, I had yet to hear of any successes for her; and I used very often to see Amos in the bank buying a draft for her, or in the post-office filling out a money-order blank with her name. I never heard him complain of this, but I knew that it must be hitting him hard. He sent her remittances, I'm sure, every month of that long five years.

Thea no longer wrote to me, and my only news of her came through Amos, and occasionally her mother. She was still in New York, still with Lucy, who, I learned, was beginning to win out. I frequently saw her sketches in magazines. But Thea—when would she become discouraged and give it up to come home?

A dozen times in the last year, suspecting from certain persistent rumors that things were becoming rather impossible for Amos, I thought of writing her, of hinting at disaster; but, after all, what right had I? None. And therefore I put it off until that October day when Amos clattered slowly up the stairway of the Journal Building to my office.

If I could have sketched him as he stood there before my desk, illuminated by the thin October sunlight, I should have labeled the result, "The End of the

Tether." For, if ever a man appeared beaten, it was Amos Lingood. His face was lined with fine wrinkles, his eyes were tired and of a strange, washed-out blue, the baldness had saved one little patch of hair for the grayness. Even his voice was tired.

When I thought, involuntarily, of heedless Thea, who had done her part toward metamorphosing the man from an ordinary being to the beaten creature that he now was, I was conscious of a feeling of bitterness toward her. She had shirked life and work for play. She had selfishly taken and taken and taken again, and she had given nothing. Not even courage or her presence.

"I guess," said Amos drearily, "that it's come at last."

I nodded.

"That business of Ed's"—Ed had failed completely, after borrowing with consistent regularity every spare cent that his father could raise for him—"was the end. Of course, I've had to help Ruby's husband, too. And Thea—I've sent her, first and last, a good deal. Not that I begrudge it. I'm glad one of us has had the chance to get away for a while. But I've done all I could now. I have a letter here from Hollis & Craig."

He took it from his pocket and handed it to me.

"And they give me to the twentieth to pay up. If I don't they'll put me into bankruptcy. There's no need of them waiting till then, though, if they're so anxious," he said, with faint sarcasm, "because, of course, I sha'n't be able to do anything more. I just got the letter a few minutes ago. I don't know what the proceedings are, but I want you, if you will, to look after me. You might as well tell them to go ahead. The sooner it's over, the better."

I nodded. "And Thea?"

"Well," he said slowly, "I can't send her any more money. I guess she'll have to come home and live here—like the rest of us."

"You haven't told her?"

"No"

"Then let me tell her, please."

He looked at me—rather astonished, I think.

"Well—if you want. It isn't a thing I like to do myself."

I meant that Thea should see how things were. Amos, I felt, would be too soft with her.

"Very well. Bring me your papers and accounts, and I'll begin going over things at once."

"I'll be over right after dinner," he said, and went clattering downstairs again.

I wrote Thea at once by special delivery. The next evening I received a telegram from her. It said:

Do nothing please until you see me. Home ten Thursday.

PERHAPS the precise economy of that ten-word telegram should have warned me. Still, I don't see how it could have, and Thea herself admitted that.

However, the instant I saw her I knew that the tone of my letter had been a mistake.

Suddenly I felt very foolish; for, if ever there was a being who was all that she should have been and so little of what she should not have been, it was Thea Lingood that morning. I suppose my idea of Washington Square—oh, I don't know—irresponsibility, carelessness, all that sort of thing. And there had been that ten-year period of her systematic mulcting of her father. All this swept through my mind. In spite of the chaotic condition of my impressions, I know, from the moment that she stepped from the train, before she said a single word about business, I began to make readjustments in my appraisal of her.

She was wonderfully dressed, and she was radiant with color and vitality and good spirits. She swept her father into her arms and kissed him warmly. Then she turned to me with the spirit of mischief in her eyes.

"Perhaps I might have kissed you too, if you hadn't written me such a horrid letter!" she said.

"I wish I hadn't," I said, more convinced than ever that I had been mistaken in doing it.

"Too late. Three fingers is all you get!" And she carefully gave me just that many. "Come," she said. "Let's hurry! I can scarcely wait to get up to the house. How is mother—and Ruby—and Ed—and everybody?"

"Pretty well, I guess. But worried," said Amos.

Thea put her arm through his and squeezed it affectionately.

"You poor dear!" she exclaimed, smiling tearfully. "Now why—please—didn't any of you tell me how things were?"

"Well, we didn't exactly like—" began Amos.

"Then half of your trouble is your own fault," she cried, as I put them into my car and started the engine. For a moment the sound drowned her voice. Then I heard her ask:

"And how much is it?"

When he had told her, she said:

"How absurd! And you could have had it any time, if you had only dropped me a hint. But of course you didn't know."

THEN she began to ask questions about her old school-mates, and to make comments upon the changes that she saw. I remember, as we passed the Mammoth Department Store, dazzling even in the cool, diluted sunshine of the October day, she exclaimed:

"Gracious, how fine we are!"

Amos sighed as he replied:

"Yes—and six months ago they put in a book and stationery department, and that about finished my trade."

"Well, why didn't you advertise? You should have given them a run for their money!" said Thea.

"It was too late," said Amos truthfully. "Ed's failure had cost me such a lot. I didn't have the money to advertise."

"Never mind," said Thea. "We'll manage that! Oh—isn't that Dora Meaghan across the street there?"

Continued on page 23

THE MELTING POT

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

THE TERROR OF MIDDLE AGE

THE American has a terror of middle age such as exists nowhere else in the world, says Freeman Tilden in Second Wind (Huebsch). The very mention of the words makes one shudder. Every Want Ad column in the paper contributes to the fear. "Wanted, a man. Must not be over thirty-five." "Wanted, a young man," etc.

Poor middle-aged man! He reads those notices, and trembles for his position. He feels that he is not a live wire. He is thirty-nine: he has passed the live-wire period. He begins to feel that he is a has-been. He dares not confide this belief to any one in the world. He locks it up in his heart and makes himself miserable with it.

Everything conspires to bluff the middle-aged. It is the age where the man has his largest responsibilities. It is the age where his movements are most constricted. If he has children, the children are just then most in need. Physiologically it is the age of transition, with attendant troubles. Psychologically the man is nearing the point of a great "taking account of stock." It is the "nervous" age—the age of bad dreams, of neurasthenic illusions, of little panics. This is the age when a man often falls to wondering "what would happen" if certain things were to happen.

The point is: Don't be bluffed. Don't run. And don't assume that geography has anything to do with contentment; or that one job is better than another for you; or that the land is the place to go back to as a last resort, to escape the wolves. But, with the proper understanding of what going back to the land means and involves, and the good intent and firm resolve to win a secure place on the land, the possession of a farm is a fine thing for a man who is getting his second wind.

HOW TO BECOME A LORD

FOR a long time it has been no secret in England that the easiest way to be "honored by the Sovereign" with a title is to make a generous contribution to the campaign funds of the ruling party.

The distribution of titles, of course, represents, not the King's judgment, but the judgment and choice of whoever happens to be prime minister. Prime ministers require parliamentary votes; votes can be won only by winning elections; and elections require cash.

Lord Selborne in the House of Lords recently brought the whole thing out into the sunlight by charging that titles had been and were being offered to individuals in exchange for cash. To this Lord Curzon retorted with a demand for the names of any men to whom offers had been made. A day or two later the London Times published this blunt letter from Mr. Granville Farquhar:

I see Lord Curzon asked in the House of Lords for the name of any person who had bought a title with a check. Some years since, when Sir Henry Campbell-Bannerman was Prime Minister, an underling of the Radical party asked me if I would like a knighthood at the price of £5,000 [$25,000], the only stipulation being that if the transaction went through I should vote Radical for the future. This did not happen to appeal to me, but the individual in question had better luck in another quarter. A check for £5,000 was paid, the knighthood was announced in the first Gazette, and I have no doubt the recipient of this "honor" voted as was wished.

If Lord Curzon is really anxious to have names, I could tell him, in confidence, the name of the person who came to me and the name of the recipient of the knighthood.

THE NIGHT THAT EDITH CAVELL WAS SHOT

AT half past eight on the night of October 12, 1913, the little group of devoted people at the American Legation in Brussels, who had been working day and night to save Edith Cavell, learned that she was to be shot during the night.

The news was brought to Hugh Gibson, Secretary of the Legation, by her lawyer, Gaston de Leval.

Getting the Spanish Minister to join them, Mr. Gibson and De Leval went immediately to the Political Department to plead with Baron von der Lancken to stay the execution. At first Lancken flatly denied that Miss Cavell was to be shot. "He suggested that we all go home 'reasonably,' sleep quietly, and come back in the morning to talk about the case," writes Mr. Gibson in the World's Work:

It was very clear that if the facts were as we believed them to be, the next morning would be too late, and we pressed for immediate inquiry. I had to be rather insistent on this point, and De Leval, in his anxiety, became so emphatic that I feared he might bring down the wrath of the Germans on his own head, and tried to quiet him. There was something splendid about the way De Leval, a Belgian with nothing to gain and everything to lose, stood up for what he believed to be right and chivalrous, regardless of consequences to himself.

Finally, Lancken agreed to inquire as to the facts, telephoned from his office to the presiding judge of the court martial, and returned in a short time to say that sentence had indeed been passed and that Miss Cavell was to be shot during the night.

We then presented with all the earnestness at our command the plea for clemency.

We all pointed out to Lancken the horror of shooting a woman, no matter what her offense, and endeavored to impress upon him the frightful effect that such an execution would have throughout the civilized world. With a sneer he replied that, on the contrary, he was confident that the effect would be excellent.

Count Harrach remarked that his only regret was they had not "three or four old Englishwomen to shoot."

It was a bitter business leaving the place with the feeling we had failed. But it was worse to go back to the Legation, to the little group of Englishwomen who were waiting in my office to learn the result of our visit. There was no way of breaking the news to them gently, for they could read the answer in our faces when we came in. All we could do was to give them each a stiff drink of sherry and send them home. De Leval was white as death, and I took him back to his house.

I had a splitting headache myself, and could not face the idea of going to bed. I went out and walked the streets, much to the annoyance of German patrols. I rang the bells of several houses in a desperate desire to talk to somebody, but could not find a soul. It was a night I should not like to go through again.

SIX RULES FOR WRITING A SALES LETTER

IS the writing of a good sales letter a natural "gift," or can the ability be acquired by patient application along certain clearly defined lines?

To find an answer to that question nearly forty million pieces of sales literature (letters, circulars, folders, and booklets) have been analyzed, according to Lejaren Hiller in System. The analysis left absolutely no doubt that sales efforts are successful in accordance with the degree to which they conform to the following six rules:

1. Never assert in any way in your letter that which is debatable or untrue. . . . There is a danger, for instance, in saying, "You are a busy man" or "You have seen our letters." You do not know these facts are certain.

2. Never check or interrupt the steady flow of your prospect's thought. An ambiguous statement, or a statement that has not been introduced logically earlier in your letter, does just this.

3. Make your letters easy to read; ... break them up into many paragraphs, separating long or tedious paragraphs with contrasting short and easy ones.

4. In every letter give, or imply, all the facts about your proposition that your reader could possibly want to know.

5. Avoid confusing the prospect by presenting to him a series of propositions from which he must make a selection.

6. Make your letter portray advantages to be gained rather than evils to be avoided. Be positive rather than negative.

Perhaps the whole subject, concludes Mr. Hiller, simmers down to the old proverb, "If you want the cat to purr, rub its fur the right way."

WHAT BECOMES OF JOHN D.'S MONEY?

MAGAZINES of the past have devoted so much space to criticizing John D. Rockefeller for the way he made his money that it seems only fair to give a little publicity to what he is doing with it, now he has it.

The annual report of the Rockefeller Foundation for 1916 has just been published, and shows, among other items, these:

       

To the Red Cross (unconditionally)	$5,000,000
To the Y. M. C. A.	300,000
For medical research (to find out what causes pneumonia and cancer, etc., and how they can be cured)	951,000
For play-grounds	2,000,000
For Dr. Carrel's research work in France (resulting in saving the lives of thousands of suffering men)	300,000
To the China Medical Board (in a country where physicians are as rare as hen's teeth and thousands die needlessly)	814,000
For the children of Belgium	100,000

No matter how he got it, the fact remains that he has it. And how many men do you know who would have done as well with it as he?

DO WOMEN EVER COMPOSE GREAT MUSIC?

"THERE has never been a single woman who can be considered as a candidate for a place in the first rank of the great musical composers; there has been scarcely a single handful of women who can make a brave show of a claim to a place in the second rank."

Unterrorized by feminists, George Trumbull Ladd, in the Yale Review, dares any honest person to claim a place for a woman among the twenty greatest composers, or more than a possible place for Clara Schumann and three or four others among the eighty next in greatness.

The superiority of men composers is not, says the writer, due to woman's lack of education and opportunity, which assist in the breeding of talent, but do not account for its possession. It is due rather to man's greater emotional endurance.

A woman may have a lively fancy, an artistic skill, an exquisite sense of loveliness. Her life of feeling may be more rich and delicate and sensitive than the brutal impulse of violence, "the coarseness of greed and lust and anger which moves the male will to its strongest expression.

"But great music aims only to express the passions and emotions which are most elemental and fundamental—human feeling, relatively free from personal or conventional considerations. There is little doubt that the passions of the male human animal are more robust, more insistent and compelling, than are the corresponding emotions of his female mate. Men demand and secure more license for themselves than women either do or can. In general, woman is more conservative and more subject to convention than is man. That is one of her virtues, on the maintenance of which her personal welfare, the purity of family life, and the safeguarding of society depend."

The conquering force of the male overcomes appalling obstacles, grasps the resources of land and sea, breaks down political barriers, at the cost of heroic sacrifice and rivers of blood. It is this same subduing energy, says the writer, with its power of concentrated attention, prolonged effort, scornful endurance, that backs up the elemental passions, and is expressed in great music.

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CAN THE AËROPLANE BEAT THE SUBMARINE?

GIVE the Allies enough aëroplanes and the submarine would be done for. That, at least, is what many people have assumed. An aëroplane flying high above the water can detect a submarine even when it is submerged. Presto, it drops down, lets fly a couple of bombs timed to explode at a certain depth, and the business is done. Nothing easier.

But apparently it is not by any means so simple a matter. Various experiments conducted by different powers have amply indicated that the detection of a submerged submarine from an aëroplane was possible only under ideal conditions of wind and weather, and only in those parts of the world where water of great clarity is to be found, says M. F. Hay in Secrets of the Submarine (Dodd, Mead & Company).

And even if the submarine be really detected, the chance of successfully bombing it is not very brilliant. Not long before the war broke out, an exhaustive series of experiments was made, in which the outline of the deck of a battle-ship was chalked out in a large open field, and especially vulnerable spots represented by bull's-eyes. A squadron of aëroplanes was provided to attack the ship, and the rules of the game permitted the aëroplanes to descend within five hundred yards. The result was highly comforting to the deck personnel of the battle-ship, for 90 per cent of the bombs dropped failed to hit the deck at all, and landed in the adjoining field, which corresponded to the sea.

SHALL WE BE EATING VENISON NEXT YEAR?

IN some of our Western States, fishermen have been known to turn the course of a trout-stream so that hundreds of fish were landed high and dry, scoop up as many as they wanted, and leave the rest to spoil, rather than take the trouble to catch the fish in the ordinary way. This is rather an extreme instance of bad sportsmanship. But it is no worse than a great deal of the merciless slaughter of game that goes on in this country.

Now less than ever can we afford to have our game killed off by greedy hunters who go out and kill merely for sport's sake —sometimes not even troubling to pick up the animals they shoot. The whole world is hungry. Since the war began there has been a decrease of cattle in the world amounting to 28,000,000. There has been a decrease in hogs of 32,000,000. And there is a demand for beef and bacon such as there never was before.

If game sanctuaries were established on all the waste lands in every State, it would go a long way toward meeting the food shortage, says W. T. Hornaday, director of the New York Zoological Park, who has been trying for three years to get Congress to authorize this. We could raise two million deer by this means alone.

"The white-tailed deer," said Dr. Hornaday, "is the deer of all deer the most difficult for man to exterminate. He flees to the underbrush at the approach of a human being, lacking the element of curiosity that impels other species to permit the near approach of the hunter. He will live in any part of North America. He is very hardy, a good breeder, will take care of himself, finding his own food and shelter, and if we act intelligently we can produce about two million of these deer a year, each worth from twenty to thirty dollars.

"There are twenty-seven States that contain national forests. If the white-tailed deer were turned loose in these forests under restricted game laws, the meat question would be partially solved.

"Pennsylvania has bought sixteen huge tracts, of five thousand acres to each tract, called State reserve forests, and in each forest there is a game sanctuary; a spot provided with a high wire fence, beyond which no hunter may penetrate. The deer soon learn that they are safe there.

"Tried as an experiment, the plan is proving so successful that the State of Pennsylvania is buying white-tailed deer by the hundreds to be placed in these preserve parks."

THE WORLD IS FULL OF BRAVE MEN

"YOU must reach your objective at any cost. If driven back, you are to make a stand at the edge of the wood, and hold out till the last man falls."

This was the order that Captain Gilbert Nobbs received just before Leuze Wood. On the other side of the wood the Germans lay intrenched with machine-guns. "It sounded like a death sentence," he says.

He led the advance by jumping out of his trench and leaping forward into a newly made shell-hole, where he took momentary cover until six of his company could join him.

"When six of us were in the shell-hole it was time for us to empty, it to make room for others. Farman and I took it in turns to lead the way, and this process went on through the wood, leaping from hole to hole, and yelling at the top of our lungs for the others to follow us."

Nobbs finally reached a trench on the other side of the wood, and here gathered together what was left of his company. Half of it had been mowed down and the real attack had not yet begun.

His men were Territorials—men from the City of London. They had been clerks, bookkeepers, waiters, mechanics, before the war. They did not falter as they received the order to advance again out of the trench into the open. "What follows beggars description," Captain Nobbs writes. "My hand hesitates to describe the hell that was let loose upon those men. Machine-guns from several points sprayed their deadly fire backward and forward, dropping them like corn before the reaper."

At ten yards from his objective Captain Nobbs found himself left with only nine men. "My position was desperate. I could not retire. My orders were imperative: 'You must reach your objective at any cost.' I must get there somehow. But, even if we got there, how long could I hope to hold out with a handful of men?"

Taking momentary refuge in a shell-hole, he sent two of them back for reinforcements. Both were shot before they had gone a dozen paces. He noticed the Germans in the trench in front of him running away along the trench.

"It was now or never! We must charge over that strip of land and finish them with the bayonet. The trench in front must be taken by assault. There were six or seven of us left, and we must do it."

But Captain Nobbs never reached the German trench. As he jumped out of the shell-hole and ran toward the enemy, his seven men following him, a bullet went clean through his head—not killing him, but permanently blinding him. In his book, On the Right of the British Line (Charles Scribner's Sons), Captain Nobbs tells how he was taken to a German hospital; of his captivity in a German prison-camp; and of how he at last returned to London, to be presented there with bills for his own funeral expenses.

THE GREAT GAME OF INVENTING THINGS

IT'S a great old game, this of inventing things. And you never can tell what's going to win. The man who first thought of putting an eraser on the end of a lead pencil made $100,000 out of the thought, according to the St. Louis Post Despatch: on the other hand, the inventor of the very plausible "pedal calorificator" made nothing. The calorificator was predicated on the idea that we all want our feet warm in winter, and provided a means by which a man might blow on his toes and thus warm them, as he would his fingers.

The device was simple—a rubber tube down each pants leg, and a mouth-piece at the top end. But, somehow, it never seemed to "catch on."

Every one laughed at the man who patented a metal top for bottles. Why should people want a metal top, when corks were plentiful and cheap? Yet he made $54,000 the first year. The man who first conceived the notion of punching a hole in a piece of paper and pasting it on a tag to prevent the string from tearing through also did very well indeed.

What more universal need than for a dainty receptacle in which to carry one's chewing gum? A thoughtful inventor provided the receptacle in the shape of a neat locket; but this too failed—as did also a cleaner for false teeth, fashioned from the plain old-fashioned corn-cob.

The patent office is full of interesting studies, from the noiseless alarm clock, designed to wake the sleeper by pouring cold water over his feet, to the tornado-proof house, built on a pivot so as to turn before the wind. They leave one with a heightened sense of the ingenuity of one's fellow creatures, together with a conviction that the percentage of those who win in the patent game must be exceedingly small in comparison with the host who patiently put in their lives and gain nothing.

A CHEF'S ADVICE TO HOUSEWIVES

WOMEN are not enterprising enough about using labor-saving devices. They seem to have a terror of machinery. Before they can achieve the same order and smoothness in the running of a home that one finds in a good club or hotel, they must learn to avail themselves of time- and labor-saving machinery, says a New York chef in the Housewives' Magazine.

"In hotels we save time and labor by having machines for every possible thing. We have our vegetable washers, our soup-strainers, our butter churns and cutters, our cream and mayonnaise whippers, our silver polisher, our coffee grinders, etc., all operated by electricity. Is there any article I have named which might not be used with equal or even greater profit in the home kitchen? Even if the initial cost of such apparatus as this is high, it soon pays for itself by the saving in service which it effects."

HAVE YOU EVER DONE ANYTHING FOR YOUR TOWN?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

THIS suburb would surely be annexed to the city, and improved, and property values must go up—the real estate agent said. So the mail-carrier bought a home on instalments, and during the long trolley ride to work liked to think of his children playing outdoors, and the rent money turned into savings.

But after several years he had doubts. Trolley service was bad. An extension of the subway had been finished, but was not running, and nobody seemed to know when it would run. The suburb had been annexed, and now paid city taxes, but lacked city benefits. The children had to walk a mile to attend an overcrowded school. There were mosquitoes that could be eliminated by drainage; the place lacked garbage removal; and so on.

Other men had larger property interests than the mail-carrier. He wondered why they did nothing. After wondering a year, he decided to do something himself.

He had little time to spare from his work, but he went to see some city officials. They received him kindly, and suggested that he was only one citizen, and that he might get some neighbors together to find out what the community really wanted. So he formed a little neighborhood association of several dozen tax-payers, each paying a dollar dues. To his astonishment, they elected him president, because of his activity.

Now he represented an organization, and officials paid more attention. Street-car service was improved. Somebody promised to investigate the idle subway extension.

Still the movement was not large enough. One day he got an invitation to the sheriff's banquet, as president of the association. A great local political event, in which the community should have been represented. But—ten dollars a plate! The association had no money; and he could not spare that much out of his wages.

Getting the Community Interested

HE decided that the community ought to have a better association head—a man with business training, time, and means. He went to see such a man, but he refused to take the job unless the association got more members to back up his work. Then the mail-carrier wrote a circular letter explaining the whole situation and asking tax-payers to join. He had only enough money to mail fifty at first. But these brought in twenty-five new members with a dollar each. More letters were sent. When they had three hundred, a meeting

was held, the new president elected, committees appointed, and an improvement campaign started. In less than a year the mail-carrier's children were in a better school, and he was riding back and forth to work in the new subway.

A typical case of doing something for the town.

The average American citizen seldom undertakes to do anything for the town he lives in until he is driven to it by necessity.

If he is a little citizen, he may see something that ought to be done, but imagines that he is too small to count in public affairs, and just guesses somebody bigger than he is attending to that anyway. If he is a big citizen, he is probably too busy with his own interests, or afraid to meddle in "politics," or doesn't know how to go to work.

If everybody understood how the average American town—and that may be a factory town, or a country neighborhood, or a suburb, or a city ward—needs leadership in public matters, small and great, and how much can be accomplished by even one person who will start a movement, and what a lot of fun and glory there can be in doing something for the town, there would probably be more activity along these lines, and our community life would be improved.

About half the community projects set going in this country are started by somebody who just gets interested, and begins, and goes on, learning the game as the project develops.

Up in Wisconsin there was a farmer who kept cows and sold milk to a cheese factory. He grew suspicious of cheese prices, which appeared to be too low. It seemed plain to him that the cheese-buyers were manipulating prices; and as he watched events he wondered why nobody protested. Nobody did, however, so finally he undertook the job himself, first gathering some facts and then embodying them in an article, which he sent to every newspaper in the State.

Wisconsin makes two hundred million pounds of cheese a year—more than half of our total output. One cent a pound on the price paid farmers runs up to a tidy sum—two million dollars. He rather thought that article would stir up "public opinion." What it did stir up was a mass meeting at the fair grounds in his own town, where he appeared, to give more facts to the farmers in that county; and out of that grew a farmers' cold storage plant and market service, selling half the cheese in the county, at a saving of one hundred thousand dollars a year to the farmers working coöperatively.

A farming town in a Western State is situated about ten miles from a big mining district. One of the citizens got to wondering. He wondered if the same deep deposit of zinc and lead might not lie under their town. He wondered why nobody had ever prospected for them. He wondered why outside capital did not come in and investigate this reasonable possibility. And finally he wondered if he couldn't do something about it himself. And the result was a new idea in prospecting, pronounced excellent by mining men.

Forty merchants of the town formed an exploration company to look for minerals by drilling. They found that a year's work would be necessary, and that the cost would be about ten thousand dollars. So each partner in the enterprise agreed to pay in twenty dollars a month for a year; and the work is going on. If there is no mineral under the town the individual loss will be moderate, while, if there is, nobody can predict what it will do for that town.

What Good Lighting Can Do

IN a certain Eastern city there was one street that lay over a gold-mine for years unsuspected. Then a citizen started a little movement to develop that idle wealth. This street was three blocks from the main shopping district of the town. It had good stores, and attractive offerings of merchandise, because its rents and expenses were lower than those of stores in the popular retail section. But it never got its share of trade until a landlord who wanted a tenant for an empty store there made a study of the situation. He decided that the reason shoppers avoided this street was because it had never been well lighted. A movement was started among the merchants, and that street was turned into a little Great White Way. Cheap electric light is a remarkable material. It has changed lines of travel in cities, cleaned up slums, reduced crime. It did the business in this case.

One suburban town in southern California has added a clear hundred thousand to its population in the last three years, and expects to have a million shortly. Not that many people, but hens—laying hens. Some business men in this suburb got to wondering whether poultry would not pay as an industry, and went on an excursion to a big poultry center in the north. They took an architect along to study poultry houses, and went over the district in automobiles, gathering facts.

Then they brought back two of the most efficient poultrymen, and started in, with the banks and business men behind the industry. Now the egg output is worth three hundred thousand dollars a year, and is marketed by a coöperative association.

If the average citizen ever considers doing anything at all for his town, he is apt to think of some smashing big project, like landing a million-dollar manufacturing concern, or securing national publicity for the local climate or red apples or pretty girls. But very often the thing waiting to be done is right at home—and so insignificant that it has been overlooked.

A famous business expert was scheduled to address the Chamber of Commerce in a Middle Western factory town. The merchants and manufacturers all turned out to hear him, anticipating live ideas on attracting outside industries or advertising the town. But he put them through a quiz.

"How many men in this audience have been through all the factories in this town?" he asked.

There was not a single business man there who could say that he had. Some of them had visited as many as half a dozen factories. The majority knew only their own plants.

"How many of you manufacturers have ever entertained the school children in your factories?" he asked next.

Not one had done this.

"The youngsters are growing up," continued the expert. "To-morrow they will come to your factories to work. Is it worth while to let them become acquainted with the town's industries while they are going to school? Suppose you sent your autos around to the schools some afternoon, and took pupils to the factories, and let them see what supports the town—would that be a good idea?"

The meeting decided that it would, decidedly, and immediately organized to put the suggestion into practice.

Improving a Town through Its Foreigners

SO many foreigners worked in the shoe factories of one New England city that language was a serious problem. Work was often spoiled for lack of a means of giving clear instructions, and men were hurt because they could not read warnings of danger. To improve this situation, an association was formed to encourage the teaching of English and citizenship. A special first reader was written and published, with all its lessons taken from the shoe factories, and each operation in the making of shoes shown by pictures and simple words.

Doing something for the town is a fine kind of self-development.

Plain John Smith, ordinary citizen, finds a public task, and tackles it because nobody else seems interested. He starts out by making inquiries, and learns more; gets convictions; is able to explain his idea forcefully. The newspapers begin to take notice, whereas before he would have had to commit a crime to be "news."

Organizations invite him to explain at meetings. He meets people worth knowing. The public falls in behind him, taking him for a leader, and after a little astonishment he learns to lead. The very fact that he is trying to accomplish something for the community has effected a wonderful transformation in the community's attitude toward him, and in himself.

Eventually the project goes through, for if it is worth doing at all it simply requires explanation until everybody understands, and then nothing can stop it. Finally it becomes fact; and plain John Smith, who started out to get a better road or sewer for himself, has got what he wanted, and got it for all his neighbors at the same time, and ceased to be an ordinary citizen. For now he has learned how to help administer the community, and his way of looking at everything thereafter will be broad-gage and altruistic.

Here's a Woman Who Did Something for Her Town

MRS. CHARLES WILLIAMSON is the official weed exterminator of St. Joseph, Missouri. No, she doesn't carry a hoe. As chairman of the Vacant Lot Garden Committee of the St. Joseph Federation of Women's Clubs, she has taken local weeds from their place in the sun. Last year she succeeded in getting amateur gardeners to cultivate 512 vacant lots. The crop value of these vacant-lot gardens was estimated at $12,500.

A weed patch near her home gave her the idea. She tried to get a family to plant flowers on it. Failing in this, she found a man who appreciated the opportunity to grow a table crop. With the aid of the Commerce Club; she multiplied this by two hundred the second year, by three hundred and seventy-five the third year—and by five hundred and twelve last year.

And this year everybody's doing it.

FUTURE AMERICANS

Photographs by Lewis W. Hine

THE LADY WITH THE HOE

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FROM OFFICE-BOY TO PRESIDENT

At the Turn with Wilfred

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by Arthur William Brown

"You couldn't blame mother for bein' stirred up. Somewhere, in some army camp or other, her Wilfred was minglin' with the coarse sons of the common people."

I EXPECT Mr. Robert overstated the case a bit. He was more or less hectic back of the ears about then, havin' just broken away after a half-hour session with Mrs. Stanton Bliss.

"That woman," says he, slumpin' into a chair and moppin' his brow, "has the mental equipment of a pet rabbit and the disposition of a setting hen. Good Lord!"

I looks over at Vee and grins. Had to. It ain't often you see Mr. Robert like that. And him bein' all dolled up in his nifty navy uniform made it seem just that much funnier. But Vee don't grin back. She'd sympathize with 'most anybody. At that exact minute, I'll bet, she was bein' sorry for both of 'em all in the same breath, as you might say.

"But can't something be done—somehow?" she asks.

"Not by me," says Mr. Robert, decided. "Great marlinspikes! I'm not the war department, am I? I'm only a first-grade lieutenant in command of a blessed, smelly old menhaden trawler that's posing as a mine-sweeper. I am supposed to be enjoying a twenty-four hour shore leave in the peace and quiet of my home, and I get—this."

He waves his hand toward the other room, where the afore-mentioned Mrs. Stanton Bliss is sobbin', snifflin', and otherwise registerin' deep emotion by clawin' Mrs. Robert about the shoulders and wavin' away the smellin' salts.

"If it was the first time," growls Mr. Robert. "But it isn't."

That was true, too. You see, we'd heard somethin' about the other spasms. They'd begun along in July, when the awful news came out that Wilfred's red ink number had been plucked from the jar. Now you get it, don't you? Nothing unique. The same little old tragedy that was bein' staged in a million homes, includin' four-room flats, double-decker tenements, and boardin'-houses.

Only this happened to hit the forty-room country house of the Stanton Blisses. Course, it was different. Look who was bein' stirred up by it.

So mother had begun throwin' cat-fits. She'd tackled every one she knew, demandin' to know what was to be done to keep Wilfred out of it. Among others, of course, she'd held up Mr. Robert. Wasn't he their nearest neighbor, and hadn't the Blisses entertained the Ellinses a lot? Not that she put it that way, exactly. But when she came with this hunch about gettin' sonny a snap job on some sort of naval construction work, why, of course, Mr. Robert couldn't duck. Yes, he thought he could place Wilfred. And he did—time-keeper, six-hour shift, and near enough so he could run back and forth every day in his machine.

That might have been good enough for some folks. It meant dodgin' the draft for Wilfred, dead sure. But mother didn't stay satisfied long. She went investigatin' around the plant. She found the office stuffy, Wilfred's desk had no electric fan on it, she wasn't sure of the drinkin' water, and the foreman was quite an impossible sort of person who always sneered when he had anything to say to Wilfred. Couldn't Mr. Robert attend to some of these things? Mr. Robert said he'd try—if he had time. He didn't get the time. More visits from mother.

Then this latest catastrophe. The Stanton Blisses had been away from home for three weeks or more, house-partyin and motorin' through the mountains. Poor Wilfred had had to stay behind. What a stupidly distressin' thing war was, wasn't it? But he had been asked to spend his nights and Sundays with a college chum whose home was several miles nearer the works.

And then they had come back to find this scribbled note. Things had been

gettin' worse and worse, Wilfred wrote. Some young hoodlums around the plant had shouted after him as he drove off in his car. Even young girls. The men had been surly to him, and that beastly foreman— Well, he wasn't goin' to stand for it, that was all. He didn't know just what he was goin' to do, but he was clearin' out. They'd hear from him later.

They had. This six-word message from Philadelphia, dated nearly two weeks ago, was also waitin'. It said that he'd enlisted, was all right, and for them not to worry. Nothin' more.

YOU couldn't blame mother for bein' stirred up. Her Wilfred had gone. Somewhere, in some army camp or other, or at some naval trainin' station, the son and heir of the house of Bliss was minglin' with the coarse sons of the common people, was eatin' common food, was wearin' common clothes, was goin' up against the common thing generally. And that wasn't the worst of it. Where? Why didn't Mr. Robert tell her where? And couldn't he get him away at once? Mr. Robert had almost gone hoarse tryin' to explain why he couldn't. But after every try she'd come back with this wail:

"Oh, but you don't understand what it is to be a mother!"

"Thank the stars I don't!" says he, as he marches out of the room.

I was for clearin' out so he'd be free to shoo her in any style he wanted to. We'd been havin' dinner with the Ellinses, Vee and I, and it was time to go home anyway. But there's no budgin' Vee.

"Don't you think Torchy might find out where he is?" she suggests. "Bein' in the army himself, you know, and so clever at that sort of thing, I should think—"

"Why, to be sure," breaks in Mr. Robert, perkin' up all of a sudden and starin' at me. "Lieutenant Torchy to the rescue, of course. He's the very one."

"All, say, how'd you get that way?" says I. "Back up!"

He's off, though, callin' Mrs. Stanton Bliss. And before I can escape he's sickin' her on real enthusiastic. Also there's Vee urgin' me to see if I can't do something to locate Wilfred. So I had to make the stab.

"Got that wire with you?" I asks.

Yes, Mrs. Bliss had all the documents right handy. I takes the yellow sheet over under the readin' lamp and squints at it sleuthy, partly to kill time, and partly because I couldn't think of anything else to do. And of course they all have to gather round and watch me close, as if I was about to pull some miracle. Foolish! It was a great deal worse than that.

"H-m-m-m-m!" says I. "Philadelphia. I suppose there's some sort of naval trainin' station there, eh?"

Mr. Robert says there is.

"But if Wilfred was at it," I goes on, "and didn't want you to find him, he wouldn't have sent this from there, would he?"

Mrs. Stanton Bliss sighs. "I'm sure I don't know," says she. "I—I suppose not."

"Must be somewhere within strikin' distance of Philadelphia, though," says I. "Now, what camp is near?"

"Couldn't we wire some one in Washington and find out?" asks Mrs. Bliss.

"Sure," says I. "And we'd get an official answer from the Secretary of War about 11 A. M. next spring. It'll be a lot quicker to call up Whitey Weeks."

They don't know everything in newspaper offices, but there are mighty few things they can't find out. Whitey, though, didn't even have to consult the copy desk or the clippin' bureau.

"About the nearest big one," says he, "is the Ambulance Corps Camp at Allentown. Somewhere up on the Lehigh. S'long."

Here was another jolt for Mrs. Stanton Bliss. The Ambulance Corps! She near keeled over again, just hearin' me say it. Oh, oh! Did I really believe Wilfred could have been as rash as that?

"Why," says she, "they drive right up to the trenches, don't they? Isn't that fearfully dangerous?"

"War isn't a parlor pastime," puts in Mr. Robert. "And the ambulance drivers take their chances with the rest of the men. But there's no fightin' going on at Allentown. If Wilfred is there—"

"If he is," cuts in Mrs. Bliss, "I must go to him this very moment."

SOMEWAY that statement seemed to cheer Mr. Robert up a lot.

"Naturally," says he. "I'll look up a train for you. Just a second. In the A's. Allentown—Allen. Ah, page 156. M-m-m. Here you are. First one starts at 2 A. M. and gets you in at 5.15. Will that do?"

Mrs. Bliss turns on him sort of dazed, and blinks them round eyes of hers. She's a fairly well put up old girl, you know, built sort of on the pouter-pigeon type, but with good lines below the waist, and a complexion that she's taken lots of pains with. Dresses real classy, and, back to, she's often mistaken for daughter Marion. Travels in quite a gay bunch, I understand, with Mr. Stanton Bliss kind of trailin' along behind. Usually, when she ain't indulgin' in hysterics, she has very fetchin', kittenish ways. You know the kind. Their specialty's makin' the surroundin' males jump through the hoop for 'em. But when it comes to arrivin' anywhere at 5.15 A. M.—well, not for her.

"I should be a sight," says she.

"You'd still be a mother, wouldn't you?" asks Mr. Robert.

It was rough of him, as he was given to understand by the looks of all three ladies present, includin' Mrs. Robert; so he tries to square himself by lookin' up a ten o'clock train, all Pullman, with diner and observation.

"I would gladly take you up myself," says he, lyin' fluent, "if I didn't have to go back to my boat. But here is Torchy. He'll go, I suppose."

"Of course," says Vee.

AND that's how I came to be occupyin' drawin'-room A, along with mother and sister Marion, as we breezes up into the Pennsylvania hills on this Wilfred hunt. A gushy, giggly young party Marion is, but she turns out to be quite a help. It was her who spots the two young soldiers driftin' through towards the smokin' compartment, and suggests that maybe they're goin' to the same camp.

"And they would know if Wilfred was there, wouldn't they?" she adds.

"Maybe," says I. "I'll go ask."

Nice, clean-cut young chaps they was. They'd stretched out comfortable on the leather seats, and was enjoyin' a perfectly good smoke, until I shows up. The minute I appears, though, they chucks their cigars and jumps up, heels together, right hand to the hat-brim. That's what I get by havin' this dinky bar on my shoulders.

"Can it, boys," says I. "This is unofficial."

"At ease, sir?" suggests one.

"As easy as you know how," says I.

Yes, they says they're ambulancers; on their way back to Allentown, too. But they didn't happen to know of any Wilfred Stanton Bliss there.

"You see, sir," says one, "there are about five thousand of us, so he might—"

"Sure!" says I. "But mother'll want an affidavit. Would you mind droppin' in and bein' cross-examined? There's sister Marion, too."

Obligin' chaps, they were; let me tow 'em into the drawin'-room, listened patient while Mrs. Bliss described just how Wilfred looked, and tried their best to remember havin' seen such a party. Also they gave her their expert opinion on how long the war was goin' to last, when Wilfred would be sent over, and what chances he stood of comin' back without a scratch.

Once more it was Marion who threw the switch.

"Tell me," says she, "will he be wearin' a uniform just like yours?"

They said he would.

"Oh!" gurgles Marion, "I think it is perfectly spiffy. Don't you, mother? I'm just crazy to see Wilfred in one."

Mother catches the enthusiasm. "My noble boy!" says she, rollin' her eyes up.

From then on she's quite chipper. The idea of findin' sonny made over into a smart, dashin' soldier seemed to crowd out all the panicky thoughts she'd been havin'. From little hints she let drop, I judged that she was already picturin' him as a gallant hero, struttin' around haughty and givin' off stern commands. Maybe he'd been made a captain or something. Surely they would soon see that her Wilfred ought to be an officer of some kind.

"And we must have his portrait painted," she remarks, claspin' her hands excited as the happy thought strikes her.

The boys looked steady out of the window and managed to smother the smiles. I imagine they'd seen all sorts of mothers come to camp.

It's a lively little burg, Allentown, even if I didn't know it was on the map before. At the station you take a trolley that runs straight through town and out to the fair grounds, where the camp is located. Goin' up the hill, you pass through the square and by the Soldiers' Monument. Say, it's some monument,

---

too. Then out a long street lined with nice, comfortable-lookin' homes, until you get a glimpse of blue hills rollin' away as far as you can see, and there you are.

The boys piloted us past the guard at the gates, through a grove of trees, and left us at the information bureau, where a soldier wearin' shell-rimmed glasses listened patient while mother and sister both talked at once.

"Bliss? Just a moment," says he, reachin' for a card-index box. "Yes, ma'am. Wilfred Stanton. He's here."

"But where?" demands Mrs. Bliss.

"Why," says the soldier, "he's listed with the casuals just now. Quartered in the cow-barn."

"The—the cow-barn!" gasps Mrs. Bliss.

The soldier grins.

"It's over that way," says he, wavin' his hand. "Any one will tell you."

They did. We wandered on and on, past the parade ground that used to be the trottin' track, past new barracks that was being knocked together hasty, until we comes to this dingy white buildin' with all the underwear hung up to dry around it. I took one glance inside, where the cots was stacked in thick and soldiers was loafin' around in various stages of dress and undress, and then I shooed mother and sister off a ways while I went scoutin' in alone. At a desk made out of a packin'-box I found a chap hammerin' away at a typewriter. He salutes and goes to attention.

"Yes, sir," says he, when I've told him who I'm lookin' for. "Squeaky Bliss. But he's on duty just now, sir."

I suggests that his mother and sister are here and would like to have a glimpse of him right away.

"They'd better wait until after five, sir," says he.

"I wouldn't like to try holdin' 'em in that long," says I.

"Very well, sir," says he. "Squeaky's on fatigue. Somewhere down at the further end of the grand stand you might catch him. But if it's his mother—well, I'd wait."

I passes this advice on to Mrs. Bliss.

"The idea!" says she. "I wish to see my noble soldier boy at once. Come."

SO we went. There was no scarcity of young fellows in olive drab. The place was thick with 'em. Squads were drillin' every way you looked, and out in the center of the field, where two or three hundred new ambulances were lined up, more squads were studyin' the insides of the motor, or practisin' loadin' in stretchers. Hundreds and hundreds of young fellows in uniform, all lookin' just alike. I didn't wonder that mother couldn't pick out sonny boy.

"What was it that man said?" she asks.

"Wilfred on fatigue. Does that mean he is resting?"

"Not exactly," says I.

About then sister Marion begins to exhibit jumpy emotions.

"Mother! Mother!" says she, starin' straight ahead. "Look!"

All I could see was a greasy old truck backed up in front of some low windows under the grand stand, with half a dozen young toughs in smeary blue overalls jugglin' a load of galvanized iron cans. Looked like garbage cans; smelled that way too. And the gang that was handlin' 'em—well, most of 'em had had their heads shaved, and in that rig they certainly did look like a bunch from Sing Sing.

I was just nudgin' sister to move along, when Mrs. Bliss lets out this choky cry:

"Wil-fred!" says she.

She hadn't made any mistake, either. It was sonny, all right. And you should have seen his face as he swings around and finds who's watchin' him. If it hadn't been for the bunkie who was helpin' him lift that can of sloppy stuff on to the tail of the truck, there'd been a fine spill, too.

"My boy! Wilfred!" calls Mrs. Stanton Bliss, holdin' out her arms invitin' and dramatic.

Now, in the first place, Wilfred was in no shape to be the party of the second part in a motherly clinch act. It's messy work, loadin' garbage cans, and he's peeled down for it. He was costumed in a pair of overalls that could have been stood in the corner all by themselves, and an army undershirt with one sleeve half ripped off.

In the second place, all the rest of the squad was wearin' broad grins, and he knew it. So he don't rush over at once. Instead he steps around to the front of the truck and salutes a husky, freckled-necked young sergeant who's sittin' behind the steerin' wheel.

"Family, sir," says Wilfred. "What—what'll I do?"

The sergeant takes one look over his shoulder.

"Oh, well," says he, "drop out until next load."

Not until Wilfred had led us around the corner does he express his feelin's.

"For the love of Mike, mother!" says he. "Wasn't it bad enough without your springin' that 'muh boy!' stuff? Right before all the fellows, too. Good night!"

"But, Wilfred," insists mother, "what does this mean ? Why do I find you—well, like this? Oh, it's too dreadful for words. Who has done this to you—and why?"

Jerky, little by little, Wilfred sketches out the answer. Army life wasn't what he'd expected. Not at all. He was sore on the whole business. He'd been let in for it, that was all. It wasn't so bad for some of the fellows, but they'd been lucky. As for him—well, he'd come here to learn to be an ambulance driver, and he had spent his first week in the kitchen, peelin' potatoes. Then, when they'd let him off that, and given him his first pass to go to town, just because he'd been a little late comin' back they'd jumped on him somethin' fierce. They'd shoved him on this garbage detail. He'd been on it ever since.

"It's that mucker of a top sergeant, Quigley," says Wilfred. "He's got it in for me."

Mrs. Stanton Bliss straightens out her chin dimple as she glares after the garbage truck, which is rollin' away in the distance.

"Has he, indeed!" says she. "We will see about that, then."

"But you must handle him easy, mother," warns Wilfred.

"That person!" snorts mother. "I shall have nothing to do with him whatever. I mean to get you out of this, Wilfred. I am going straight to the general."

"Now, mother!" protests Wilfred. "Don't make a scene."

WHEN she was properly stirred up, though, that was mother's long suit. And she starts right in. Course, I tried to head her off, but it's no use. As there wasn't a general handy, she had to be satisfied with a major. Seemed like a mighty busy major, too; but when he heard his orderly tryin' to shunt the ladies, he gives the signal to let 'em in. You can bet I didn't follow. Didn't have to, for Mrs. Bliss wasn't doin' any whisperin' about then.

And she sure made it plain to the major how little she thought of the U. S. Army, and specially that part of it located at Allentown, Pa. Havin' got that off her chest, and been listened to patient, she demands that Wilfred be excused from all his disgustin' duties, and be allowed to go home with her at once and for good.

The major shakes his head. "Impossible!" says he.

"Then," says Mrs. Stanton Bliss, tossin' her head, "I shall appeal to the Secretary of War; to the President, if necessary."

The major smiles weary. "You'd best talk to his sergeant," says he. "If he recommends your son's discharge it may go through."

"That person!" exclaims Mrs. Bliss. "Never! I—I might talk to his captain."

"Useless, madam," says the major. "See his sergeant; he's the one."

And he signifies polite that the interview is over.

When mother tells sonny the result of the visit to headquarters, he shrugs his shoulders.

"I knew it would be that way," says he. "They've got me, and I've got to stand for it. No use askin' Quigley. You might as well go home."

"But at least you can get away long enough to have dinner with us," says mother.

"Nothing doin'," says Wilfred. "Can't get out unless Quigley signs a pass, and he won't."

"Oh, come!" says I. "He don't look so bad as all that. Let me see see what I can do with him."

Well, after I'd chased the ladies back to the hotel with instructions to wait hopeful, I hunts up Top Sergeant Quigley. Had quite a revealin' chat with him, too. Come to look at him close after he'd washed up, he's rather decent appearin'. Face seems sort of familiar, too.

"Didn't you play first base for the Fordhams?" I asks.

"Oh, that was back in '14," says he.

"As I remember," says I, "you was some star on the bag, though. Now, about young Bliss. Case of mommer's pet, you know."

"He had that tag all over him," says Quigley. "But we're knockin' a lot of that out of him. He's comin' on."

"Good!" says I. "Would it stop the process to let him off for an evenin' with the folks—dinner and so on?"

"Why, no; I guess not," says Quigley. "Might do him good. But he must apply himself. Send him along."

So a half hour later I sat on a cot in the cow-barn and watched Wilfred, fresh from the shower bath, get into his army uniform.

"Say," he remarks, strugglin' through his khaki shirt, "I didn't think old Quig would do it."

"Seemed glad to," says I. "Said you was comin' on fine."

"He did?" gasps Wilfred. "Quigley? Well, what do you know!"

Not such a bad imitation of a soldier, Wilfred, when he'd laced up the leggins and got the snappy-cut coat buttoned tight. He's some different from what he was when sister first discovered him. And we had quite a gay dinner together.

FIRST off mother was for campin' right down there indefinitely, where she could see her darlin' boy every day; but between Wilfred and me we persuaded her different. I expect the hotel quarters had something to do with it, too. Anyway, after Wilfred had promised to try for a couple of days off soon, for a visit home, she consents to start back in the mornin'.

"What I dread most, Wilfred," says she, "is leavin' you at the mercy of that horrid sergeant."

"Oh, I'll get along with him somehow," says Wilfred. "I'm goin' to try, anyway."

And right there, as I understand it, Wilfred Stanton Bliss started to be a man and a soldier. He had a long way to go, though, it seemed to me.

So here the other day, only a couple of weeks since we made our trip, I'm some surprised to see who it is givin' me the zippy salute on the station platform out home. Yes, it's Wilfred. And say, he's got his shoulders squared, he's carryin' his chin up, and he's wearin' his uniform like it grew on him.

"Well, well!" says I. "Got your furlough, eh?"

"Yes, sir," says he. "Seventy-two hours. Had a whale of a time, too. You can't guess who I brought home with me, I'll bet."

I couldn't.

"Our top sergeant—Quigley," says he. "Say, he's all right. He's had us transferred to the best barracks in camp. Guess we deserve it, too, for we're on the way to bein' the crackerjack section of them all. You ought to see us drill. Some class! And it's all due to Quigley. Do you know what he thinks? That we're slated among the next lot to go over. How about that, sir? Won't that be great?"

"Huh!" says I. "How long ago was it you signed up, Wilfred?"

"Just six weeks, sir," says he.

"Whiffo!" says I, gawpin' at him. "If we had about a hundred thousand Quigleys!"

YOUTH CHALLENGES

By CLARENCE BUDINGTON KELLAND

Illustration by Lucius W. Hitchcock

(Continued)

BONBRIGHT reported at Malcolm Lightener's automobile factory promptly at seven o'clock, and found Lightener already in his office.

"Morning," said Lightener. "Where's your overalls?"

"Overalls?" inquired Bonbright.

"Didn't I tell you to bring some? You'll need 'em. Wait, I'll send a boy out for some—while we have a talk. Now, then, you've got a job. After six o'clock you and I continue on the same basis as before; between seven in the morning and six at night you're one of the men who work for me—and that's all. You get no favors. What they get you get. Clear?"

"Perfectly," said Bonbright.

"The object of this plant is to make automobiles—to make good automobiles, and to make the most of them that can be made. If one man falls down on his job it delays everybody else. Every job is important because it is a part of the whole operation, which is the turning out of a complete automobile. Understand?"

"Yes."

"You've got the stuff in you to make a man at the top—maybe. But you don't start at the top. You've got to scramble up, just like anybody else. You're going to wear overalls and get your hands dirty. If you don't like it, you can always quit. I know how to do nearly everything that's done in this place. The man who gets up near me has got to know it too." Here was a hint for Bonbright of the possibilities that Malcolm Lightener was opening up to him. "This morning you're going into the machine shop to run a lathe, and you're going to stay there till you know how it's done. Then we'll move you somewhere else. Your place is in the office; but how soon you get there is up to you. Like the looks of it?"

Bonbright was silent a moment. When he spoke, it was to put into words a fear.

"The men," he said—"how about them? You know, father sort of advertised me as a strike-breaker and that kind of thing. Our men hate me. I suppose all laboring men feel that way about me."

"We don't have any unions here. I run my own plant, and, by gracious, I always will. I give my men fair pay—better than most. I give them all the opportunity they ask for. I give them the best and safest conditions to work in that can be had. I figure a good crew in a plant is a heap more valuable than good machinery—and I keep my machinery in repair and look after it mighty carefully. But no union nonsense. You won't have any trouble with the men."

Bonbright was not so sure.

PRESENTLY the boy returned with the overalls. Lightener wrote a note and handed it to him.

"Take this man to Shop One and give this note to Maguire," he said.

Bonbright followed the boy.

In a moment the boy opened a big door, and Bonbright stepped through. The sight took away his breath—not that he had never seen this room before, but that he was now seeing it through different eyes. It seemed to him as if the dimensions of the room should be measured, not in feet, but in acres. It was enormous; but, huge as it was, it was all too small for the tangle of machinery it contained. To Bonbright's eyes it seemed a tangle. A labyrinth of shafting, counter-shafting, hung from the high ceiling, from whose whirring pulleys belts descended to rows upon rows of machines below.

Men with trucks, men on urgent errands, hurried here and there; other men stood silently feeding hungry contrivances—men were everywhere, engrossed in their work, paying scant attention to anything outside it.

But, as he walked down the aisle, dodging from time to time men or trucks, he was able to perceive something of the miraculous orderliness and system of it. He was given a hint of the plan: how a certain process would start—a bit of rough metal; how it would undergo its first process, and move on by gradual steps from one machine to the next and on to the next in orderly, systematic way. No time was lost in carrying a thing hither and thither. When one man was through with it, the next man was at that exact point to take it.

Through this room they walked,—the room would have sufficed in extent for a good-sized farm,—and into another no smaller, and into another and another. His destination, Shop One, was smaller, but huge enough. The boy led Bonbright to a short, fat man in unbelievably grimy overalls and a black visored cap.

"Mr. Maguire," he shouted, "here's a man and a note from the boss." Then he scurried away.

Maguire looked at the note first, and shoved it into his pocket; then he squinted at Bonbright—at his face first, then, with a quizzical glint, at his clothes.

"You're a hell of a looking machinist," said Maguire.

Bonbright felt it to be a remarkably truthful remark.

"The boss takes this for a kindergarten," Maguire complained. "Ever run a lathe or a shaper or a planer?"

"No."

"He said to stick you on a lathe. Huh! What's he know about it? How's he expect this room to make a showing if it's goin' to be charged with guys like you, that hain't nothin' but an expense?"

Bonbright got the idea back of that. Maguire was working for something more than wages—he was playing the game of manufacturing to win.

"You go on a planer," Maguire snapped. "And Gawd help you if you spoil more castings than I figger you ought to. The boys here'll make it hot for you if you pull down their average."

So the boys were interested, too.

"Goin' to work in them clothes?"

"Overalls," said Bonbright, tapping his parcel.

THE foreman went to his desk and took a key from a box. "I'll show you your locker," he said.

And presently Bonbright, minus his coat, was incased in the uniform of a laborer. Spick and span and new it was, and it gave him a singularly uncomfortable feeling because of this fact. He wanted it grimed and daubed like the overalls of the men he saw about him.

Maguire led him to a big contrivance called a shaper. A boy of eighteen was operating it. On its bed, which moved back and forth automatically, was bolted a great cake of iron—a casting in the rough. The machine was smoothing its surfaces.

"Show him," Maguire said to the boy; "then report to me."

The boy showed Bonbright efficiently, telling him what must be done to that iron cake, explaining how the machine was to be stopped and started, and other

---

necessary technical matters. Then he hurried off. Bonbright gazed at the casting ruefully, afflicted with stage-fright.

He started the planer gingerly. It had not seemed to move rapidly when the boy was operating it, but now the bed seemed fairly to fly forward and snap back. He bent forward to look at the cutting he had made; it was all right.

Surreptitiously he laid his palm in a mass of grease and metal particles and wiped it across his breast. It was an operation that he repeated more than once that morning.

Gradually his trepidation passed, and he began to enjoy himself. He enjoyed watching that casting move resistlessly under the tool; watched the metal curl up in glittering little curlicues as the tool ate its way across. He looked with pleasure at the surface already planed, and with anticipation of the surface still in the rough. It was interesting; it was fun.

UNTIL the noon whistle blew, Bonbright hardly took his eyes off his work. He did not know that Maguire passed him a dozen times, not stopping, but watching him closely as he passed. With the stopping of work about him he realized that he was tired. He had lifted weights; he had used unaccustomed muscles. He was hot, sweaty, aching. He was hungry.

"Where do we eat?" he asked the man who stood at the next machine.

"Didn't you bring no lunch?"

"No."

"Some doesn't," said the man, as if he disapproved exceedingly of that class. "They feed at the hash house across the street. Hain't broke, be you?"

Bonbright understood the kindly offer implied. "Thank you—no," he said, and followed to the big wash-room.

He ate his lunch from the top of a tall stool. It was not the sort of food he was accustomed to, and the coffee was far from being the sort that had been served to him in his home or in his club; but he hardly noticed that. When he was through, he walked back across the street and stood awkwardly among his mates.

An oldish, smallish man looked at him and at his overalls, and grinned.

"New man?" he asked.

"Yes."

"Thought them overalls wasn't long off the shelf. You done a good job, though, considerin'."

Bonbright blushed.

"Where you been workin'?"

How was Bonbright to answer? He couldn't tell the truth without shaming himself in this man's eyes—and all at once he found that he greatly desired the good opinion of this workingman and of the other workingmen about him.

"I—the last place I worked was Bonbright Foote, Incorporated," he said, giving the institution its full name.

"Um. Strikin', eh ?"

Bonbright nodded. He had struck.

"'Bout over, hain't it, from all I hear tell?"

"I think so," said Bonbright.

"Bad business. Strikes is always bad—especially if the men git licked. Unions hain't no business to call strikes without some show of winnin'. The boys talk that this strike never had no chance from the beginnin'. I don't think a heap of that Foote outfit."

"Why?"

"Rotten place to work, I hear. A good machinist can't take no pleasure there, what with one thing and another. Out-of-date machines and what-not. That young Foote, the cub, is a hell-winder, they say. Ever see him?"

"I've seen him."

"His father was bad enough, by all accounts. But this kid goes him one better. Wonder some of them strikers didn't git excited and make him acquainted with a brick. Seems like this kid's a hard one. How'd he strike you?"

"I was sorry for him," said Bonbright.

"Sorry! What's the idea?"

"I—I don't believe he did what people believe. He didn't really have anything to do with the business, you know. He didn't count. All the things that he was said to do—he didn't do at all. His father did them, and let the men think it was his son."

"Sounds fishy—but if it's so somebody ought to lambaste the old man. He sure got his son in bad. What's this I hear about him marryin' some girl and gettin' kicked out?"

"That's true," said Bonbright.

"Huh! Wonder what he'll do without his pa? Maybe he's well fixed himself, though."

"He hasn't a cent," said Bonbright.

"Appears like you know a heap about him. Maybe you know what he's doin' now?"

"Working."

"Friends give him a soft job?"

"He's working in a—machine shop."

"G'wan," said the man incredulously.

Then he looked sharply at Bonbright, at his new overalls, back again at his face.

"What's your name?" he asked suspiciously.

"Foote," said Bonbright.

"Him?"

"Yes," said Bonbright.

The man paused before he spoke, and something not kindly came into his eyes.

"Speakin' perty well of yourself, wasn't you?" he said caustically, and, turning his back, he walked away.

BONBRIGHT saw the man stop beside a group, say something, turn and point to him. Other men turned and stared. Some snickered. Bonbright could not bear it. He jostled his way through the crowd and sought refuge in the shop.

The morning had been a happy one; the afternoon was dismal. He knew he was marked. He saw men pointing at him, whispering about him, and could imagine what they were saying.

One remark he overheard that stood aptly for the attitude of all. "Well, he's gettin' what's comin' to him," was the

sentence. It showed him that the reputation his father had given him was his to wear, and that here he would find no friends, scant toleration, probably open hostility.

He got no pleasure that afternoon from watching his cake of metal move backward and forward with the planer-bed.

When the whistle blew again, he hurried out, looking into no man's face, avoiding contacts. He sneaked away. And in his heart burned a hot resentment against the father that had done this thing.

SUCH pretense as Bonbright's and Ruth's is possible only to the morbid, the eccentric, or the unhealthy. Neither of them was morbid, eccentric, or unhealthy. Ruth saw the failure of it days before Bonbright. After the day Dulac burst in upon her, she realized that the game must be brought to an end—that their life of make-believe was weighted with danger for her. She determined to end it: but, ironically enough, to end it meant to enter upon another make-believe existence far harder to live successfully than the first.

In the beginning Bonbright had been optimistic. He had believed his experience was that of all bridegrooms. Days taught him his experience was unique.

Ruth saw him often now sitting moodily, eyes on the floor—and she could read his thoughts. Yet he tried to bolster up the pretense. He had given his promise, and he loved Ruth. What neither of them saw was that pretense had made a sudden change to reality impossible.

Bonbright was unhappy at home, unhappy at work. Just as he was outside his wife's real life, so he was excluded from the lives of the men he worked with.

"He's no squealer," Lightener said to his daughter. "He's taking his medicine without making a face."

"What's the good, dad? Why don't you take him into the office?"

"We have a testing department," he said. "Every scrap of metal that goes into a car is tested before we use it. Bonbright's in the testing department."

"Isn't it possible to keep on testing a piece of metal till it's all used up?" she said.

As she turned to leave the room, her father called after her:

"Bonbright quit chawing castings tonight. He doesn't know it, but to-morrow he gets a new job. Has all of that he needs. Knows how it feels."

"What's he going to do now?"

"Nice, light, pleasant job. He'll be passing rear axles—made by his father—down a chute to the assembling track. Bet he'll need St. Jacob's oil on his back to-morrow night. Give his wife a job."

"Why," Hilda scolded, for she was on intimate terms with the factory, "that's common labor. He'll be working with all kinds of foreigners."

Her father nodded. "If he stands the gaff I'll ease up on him."

"If he doesn't?"

Lightener shrugged his shoulders.

WHEN the factory heard what had become of Bonbright, it laughed. Bonbright was aware that it laughed, and he set his teeth and labored. Beside what he was doing now, the machine shop had been play.

Bonbright had to pass down a certain number of axles an hour. At definite brief intervals a fragment of an automobile would move along the assembling track and pause beneath his spout and—his axle must be ready. There was a constant procession of fragments, and a second's delay brought up to his ears pointed comment from below.

He worked feverishly. After a while it became acute torture. He felt as if every axle he handled was the last he could manage. But he forced himself to just one more, and then just one more—and another. He worked in a daze. Thought processes seemed to stop. He was just a mechanism for performing certain set acts. The pain was gone—everything was gone but the stabbing necessity for getting another axle on that chute in time. He wanted to stop at a certain stage; but there was something in him that would not allow it. After that he didn't care. "Another—another—another," his brain sang over and over endlessly.

After a century the noon whistle blew.

Bonbright did not leave his place. He simply sagged down in his tracks, and lay there, eyes shut, panting. Gradually his brain cleared; but he was too weary to move.

Then thirst drove him to motion, and he dragged himself to the wash-room, cramped, aching, and there he drank and sopped himself with cold water.

So this was what men did to live! No wonder they were dissatisfied. Bonbright was getting in an efficient school the point of view of the laborer.

IN the afternoon Malcolm Lightener stood and watched Bonbright—though Bonbright did not see, for he was working in a red haze again, unconscious of everything but that insistent demand in his brain for "another—another—another." Lightener watched, his granite face expressionless, and then walked away.

Bonbright did not hear the evening whistle. He placed another axle on the chute, but no one was below to take it. He wondered dimly what was the matter. An Italian from the next chute regarded him curiously, then walked over and touched his shoulder. "Time for quit," said the man.

Bonbright sat down where he was. It was over. That day was over. Not another axle, not another, not another. He laid his head against the chute and shut his eyes. Presently he staggered to his feet and walked blindly to the stairway. At the bottom stood Malcolm Lightener—not there by accident, but with design to test Bonbright's mettle to the utmost. He placed himself there for Bonbright to

---

see, to give Bonbright opportunity to beg off, to squeal.

Bonbright, shoulders drooping, legs dragging, face drawn, eyes burning, would have passed him without recognition; but that did not suit Lightener's purpose.

"Well, Bonbright?" he said.

Sudden fire flashed in Bonbright's brain. He stopped, and with the knuckles of a hand that was torn and blistered and trembling he knocked on Lightener's broad chest as he would have knocked on a door that refused to open. "Hang your axles!" he said thickly. "I can get them there—another—and another—and another—and another. They're too slow below. Make 'em come faster—I can keep up." And all the time he was rapping on Lightener's chest.

He was conscious of what he did and said, but he did not do and say it of his own volition. He was like a man who dimly sees and hears another man. Subconsciously he was repeating, "Not another one till to-morrow. Not another one till to-morrow."

Abruptly he turned away from Lightener, and plodded toward the wash-room. He was going to rest. He was going to feel cool water on his head and his neck; he was going to revel in cool water. And then he would sleep. Sleep! He made toward sleep as one lost in the desert would make toward a spring of sweet water.

LIGHTENER stood and looked after Bonbright. His granite face did not change; no light or shade passed over it. Not even in his gray eyes could a hint of his thoughts be read. Simply he stood and looked after Bonbright, outwardly as emotionless as a block of the rock that he resembled. Then he walked to his office, sat down at his desk, selected and lighted a cigar, and tilted back in his chair.

"There's something to that Bonbright Foote formula," he said to himself. "It's all wrong, but it could produce that."

Then, after a few moments of puffing and of studying the thing, he said: "We'll see if he comes back to-morrow. If he does come back—"

Bonbright came back in the morning, though he had been hardly able to drag himself out of bed. It was not strength of body that brought him, but pure will. He came, looking forward to the day as a man might look down into hell—but he came.

"I'll show them," he said aloud at the breakfast-table, as he forced himself to drink a cup of coffee.

Ruth did not understand. She did not understand what was wrong with him; she feared he was on the verge of an illness. He had come home the night before, scarcely speaking to her, and had gone directly to bed. She supposed he was in his room preparing for dinner; but when she went to call him, she found him fast asleep, moaning and muttering uneasily.

"What did you say?" she asked uneasily.

"Didn't know I spoke," he said, and winced as he moved his shoulders.

But he knew what he had said—that he would show them.

It wasn't Malcolm Lightener he was going to show, but the men—his fellow laborers. The thing that lay in his mind was that he must prove himself to be their equal, capable of doing what they could do. He wanted their respect—wanted it pitifully.

Ruth watched him anxiously as he left the apartment. She knew things were not well with him and that he needed something a true wife should give. First, he needed to tell some one about it. He had not told her. If she had been inside his life, where she belonged, he must have told her. Second, he needed her sympathy, her mothering. She might have been able to give him that—after a fashion. She felt how it should be done, knew how she would have done it if only she loved him.

"I could be the right kind of a wife," she told herself wistfully. "I know I could."

Bonbright went doggedly to his place at the mouth of the chute, and was ready with the whistle, an axle poised to slide down to the assembling car below. He was afraid—afraid he would not be able to get through the day—absurdly afraid, and ashamed of his physical weakness. If he should play out!

A boy tapped him on the shoulder. "You're wanted in the office," he heard.

"I've got to—keep up," he said dully. "Cars are coming along below," he explained carefully, "and I've got to get the axles to them."

"If you keep the boss waiting—" said the boy ominously.

Bonbright walked painfully to Lightener's office.

"Well?" said Lightener.

"I can do it—I'll harden to it," Bonbright said.

"Huh! Take off those overalls. Boy, go to Mr. Foote's locker and fetch his things."

"Am—am I discharged?"

"No," said Lightener, bestowing no word of commendation. Men had little commendation from him by word of mouth. He let actions speak for him. When he gave a man a task to perform, that man knew he was being complimented; but he knew it in no other way.

"That's the way a laborer feels," said Lightener. "You got it multiplied. That's because you had to jam his whole life's experience into a day."

"Poor devils," said Bonbright.

"I'm going to put you in the purchasing department—after that, if you make good, into the sales end. Able to go ahead to-day?"

"Yes."

"Before you amount to anything as a business man you've got to know how to buy. That's the foundation. Then you've got to learn how to make. Selling is easiest of all—and there are darn few real salesmen. If you can buy, you can do anything."

"I—I would rather stay out in the shops, Mr. Lightener. The men—found out who I was. I'd like to stay there till they—forget it."

"You'll go where I put you. Men enough in the purchasing department. Got a tame anarchist there, I hear, and a Mormon, and a Hindu, and a single-taxer. All kinds—after hours. From whistle to whistle, they buy."

Lightener took Bonbright personally to his new employment, and left him. But Bonbright was not satisfied. Once before he had sought contact with men who labored, and he had landed in a cell in police headquarters. That had been mere boyish curiosity to find what it was all about. Now his desire to know was real. He had been—very briefly, it is true—one of them. Now he wanted to know. He wanted to know how they thought, and why they thought that way. He wanted to understand their attitude toward themselves, toward each other, toward the class they largely denominated as capital.

He determined to know the men, and planned accordingly. With that end in view, instead of lunching with men in his department, he went to the little hash house across the road to drink vile coffee and rub elbows with laborers in greasy overalls. He would go there every day; he would seek other opportunities of contact. Now that he felt the genuine, sympathetic hunger for an understanding of them and their problems, he would not rest until it was his.

BONBRIGHT found himself a layman in a department of specialists. On all sides of him were men who knew all about something, a few who knew a great deal about several things, and a man or two who appeared to have some knowledge of every element and article that went into a motor-car. There was a man who knew leather from cow to upholstery, and who talked about it lovingly. This man had the ability to make leather as interesting as the art of Benvenuto Cellini. Another was a specialist in hickory, and thought and talked spokes. Another was a reservoir of dependable facts about rubber, another about gray iron castings, another about paints and enamels.

---

Here was business functioning as he did not know business could function. Here business was an art, and Bonbright applied himself to it like an artist. Here he could lay aside that growing discontent, that dissatisfaction, that was growing upon him. Here, in the excitement of distinguishing the better from the worse, he could forget Ruth and the increasingly impracticable condition of his relations with her.

He tried to conceal his unrest, his discontent, his rebellion against the thing that was, from Ruth. He came to doubt her love. He could not do otherwise. Then he wondered why she had married him, and, reviewing the facts of his hurried marriage, he wondered the more, with bitterness and heartache. Against his will, his affairs were traveling toward a climax. The approaching footsteps of the day when something must happen were audible on the path.

The day after his installation in the purchasing department he lunched at the little hash house across the street. Sitting on his high stool, he tried to imagine he was a part of that sweating, gulping crowd of men; that he was one of them, and not an outsider, suspected, regarded with unfriendly looks.

Behind him a man began to make conversation for Bonbright's ears. It had happened before.

"The strike up to the Foote plant's on its last legs," said the man loudly.

"So I hear," answered another.

"Back's busted now. Nothing's holdin' it up but that man Dulac. There's a man for you! I've knowed labor leaders I didn't cotton to nor have much confidence in—fellers that jest wagged their tongues and took what they could get out of it. But this Dulac—he's a reg'lar man. I've listened to him, and I tell you he means what he says. He's in it to git somethin' for the other feller. But he can't hold out much longer."

IT was true: Dulac could not hold out much longer. That very noon he was fighting with his back against the wall. In Workingmen's Hall he was making his last fierce fight to hold from crumbling the resolution of the strikers who still stood by their guns.

He threw the fire of his soul into their dull, phlegmatic faces. It struck no answering spark. Never before had he spoken to men without a consciousness of his power, without pose, without dramatics. Now he was himself; and he was more dramatic, more compelling than ever before. He pleaded, begged, flayed his audience. It did not respond to his pleadings, nor writhe under the whip of his words. It was apathetic, stolid.

In the body of the hall a man haggard of face arose.

"'Taint no use, Mr. Dulac," he said dully. "We've stuck by you—"

"You've stuck by yourselves," Dulac cried.

"Whatever you say. But 'tain't no use. We're licked. Hain't no use keepin' up and stretchin' out sufferin'. I hain't the least of the sufferers, Mr. Dulac—my wife hain't with me no more." The dull voice wabbled queerly. "There's hunger and grief and sufferin—willin'ly endured when there was a chance. But there hain't no chance. 'Tain't human to ask any more of our wimmin and children. It's them I'm a-thinkin' of, Mr. Dulac; and on account of them I say, this strike ought to quit. It's got to quit, and I demand a vote on it, Mr. Dulac."

"Vote—vote—vote!" roared up to Dulac from all over the hall.

It was the end. He was powerless to stay the rush of the desire of those weary men for peace.

Dulac turned slowly around, his back to the crowd, walked to a chair, and, with elbows on knees, he covered his face with his hands. There was silence as the men saw his suffering. They appreciated his suffering because they appreciated the man—his honesty to their cause and to his work. He had been true to them.

The vote was put. There was no dissenting voice. The strike was done, and Bonbright Foote, Incorporated, was victor.

Men clustered about Dulac, wringing his hands, speaking words of comfort with voices that broke; and the number of those who turned away with tears was greater than of those whose eyes remained dry.

Dulac spoke: "We'll try again—men. We'll start to get ready—to-day—for another fight."

Then, hurriedly, blindly, he forced his way through them, and made his way out of the hall. Grief, the heaviness of defeat, was all that he could feel now. Bitterness would come in its time.

THERE is an instinct in a man which, when his troubles become too weighty to bear alone, sends him to a woman. Dulac was drawn to Ruth.

This time she did not try to close the door against him. His first words made that impossible.

"I'm—beaten," he said dully.

His flamboyance, his theatricality, was gone. He was no longer flashily masterful, no longer exotically fascinating. He sagged. He was just a soul-weary, disappointed man looking at her out of hollow, burning eyes.

"I'm—beaten," he repeated; and, in truth, beaten was what he looked—beaten and crushed. "But I'll—try again," he said, with a trace of the old gleam in his eyes.

Ruth clasped and unclasped her hands, standing before him, white with the emotions that swayed her. This was the man she had loved, in his bitterest, darkest moment.

"I must have you," Dulac said with dead simplicity, as one states a bare, essential fact. Then Bonbright was visualized before him, and rage flooded once more. "He sha'n't keep you! You're mine—you were mine first. What is he to you? I'm going to take you away from him. I can do that."

The girl was moved. He needed her. She was cheating Bonbright. He had none of her love, and she believed this man had it wholly. She had wronged Bonbright—what would this matter? It was not this that was wrong, but the other—the marrying without love. And she too was beaten. She had played her game and lost, not going down to defeat fighting,

---

as Dulac had gone down, but futilely, helplessly. She had given herself for the cause—to no profit. And her heart yearned for peace, for release.

"I'm his wife," she said to Dulac.

"You're my wife."

He lifted his arms toward her, and she swayed, took a step toward him. Suddenly she stopped, eyes startled, pallor blighting her face. There was a step on the stairs.

"He is—here."

She was awakened by the shock of it. She saw—saw clearly. She had stood upon the brink—and he had come in time. And then she was afraid.

Neither of them spoke. Dulac got to his feet, his breath coming audibly; and so they waited.

BONBRIGHT opened the door.

"Ruth," he called, putting what pretense of gaiety he could into his voice, "you've got company. The chronic visitor is here." He was playing his game bravely.

She did not answer.

"Ruth," he called again, and then stood in the door. She could not see him, but she felt his presence, felt his silence, felt the look of surprise changing to suspicion that she knew must be in his eyes.

For a moment he stood motionless, not comprehending. Then the attitude of his wife and of Dulac spoke eloquently, and he whitened.

"I don't understand," he said.

The words were meaningless, pointless, perhaps; but they stabbed Ruth to the heart. She turned to him, saw him step forward slowly, looking very tall, older than she had ever known him. He had drawn within himself—there manifested itself his inheritance from his ancestors. He was like his father, but with an even more repressed dignity than was his father's.

"You don't understand?" snarled Dulac. "Then I'll tell you. I'm glad you came. I'm after your wife. She's going away with me."

"No—no!" Ruth whispered.

"Be still. She's mine, Foote—and always was. You thought she was yours. Well, she's one thing you can't have. I'm going to tell you why she married you."

Ruth cried out in incoherent fright, protesting.

"She married you to use you. Not even for your money. She married you because her heart was with the men your kind is grinding down. She saw that you were the kind of man a woman could twist around her finger—and you owned five thousand men. Get the idea? She was going to do things for them—with you. So she married you; and you cheated her. So she's done with you. You can't give what she paid for, and she's going away with me. She loves me. She was promised to me—when she saw what she could do with you—and I let her go. If she could give, so could I. But I love her, and she loves me—and we're going away."

IT was true. Bonbright knew it was true. But he would not admit the belief until he had confirmation from his wife's lips.

"Is this true?" he asked her quietly.

Ruth was shaking with sobs—crouching against the wall.

"Don't be afraid," Bonbright said again in a strange, quiet, courteous voice. "Is it true?"

"Yes," she whispered: for she could not lie with his eyes upon her.

"I knew there was—something," he said, with a little halt in his voice.

That was all. He did not look at Dulac, but stood looking at Ruth for a moment steadily, almost with grave inquiry. She looked from him to Dulac. Subconsciously she was comparing them.

Bonbright did not speak again. He turned slowly and walked steadily out of the room. Ruth heard the outer door close behind him, and knew that he was gone.

Dulac laughed shortly.

"That settled him," he said. "Now you'll come."

She stood regarding him as she might have regarded some strangely endowed person she had never seen before. Then, with a sudden passionate vehemence, she burst out upon him:

"Never—never! I'll never go with you. I'm his wife—his wife. Oh, what have you done? I hate you—I hate you! Don't ever dare—come near me again. I hate you!"

She turned and fled to her room and locked the door. Though he knocked and called, though he pleaded and threatened, she made no reply, but sat dry-eyed on her bed until she heard him go away.

To be continued next week

Beating Father in the Pig Game

TWELVE-YEAR-OLD Frank Burgess—whose father had made him a present of a pig—got hold of some pamphlets issued by the Bureau of Animal Industry, Department of Agriculture, giving explicit instructions as to hog-raising. Frank's father laughed at him for "fussin'" with the pig. "Just let 'em grow up," was his advice. But the boy followed the government instructions: gave his pig a clean pen, plenty of green fodder, and kept the porker clean.

The boy's father raised the rest of the litter in the usual way, feeding them whatever he happened to have, and keeping them in a dirty pen.

In the fall Frank's pig weighed 385 pounds, and he sold it for $60. Only one other pig of the litter survived. It weighed 65 pounds; and father sold it for $10.

The following year Mr. Burgess took his boy into the pig business with him on equal shares, securing the pigs and providing the feed, and letting Frank care for them. This arrangement proved so profitable that they have since paid the mortgage on their little Georgia farm and bought more land.

My Finest Moment in France

By ARTHUR HUNT CHUTE

[Late of the First Canadian Division]

MY finest moment in France was the first time we advanced our guns after nearly two years of waiting. I found very little of the gay or dashing in my experience of modern warfare. It was, rather, a melancholy round of dismal tasks calling more for the qualities of stolidity and patience than for those of valor and dash.

"I am fed up" was the commonest expression of all in the Tommy vernacular. One of the officer's hardest tasks was to keep the spirits of his men bucked up.

Suddenly, in the Somme push, there was experienced a change of spirit throughout the entire forces. While we sat still in one place month after month, our spirits steadily descended; but when we were once advancing, we were undismayed by cold or hardship, or lack of food, or ceaseless toil, or added dangers, or increasing death. None of these things mattered, so long as we were going ahead.

One bright summer morning in column of route, our battery pulled out of the Ypres salient, and marched steadily for several days to a quiet place in the back country, well behind the lines. Here, on a great tract of wild country reserved as a manœuvering area, we practised assiduously for open warfare.

During the months of virtual siege work much of the tactics of open fighting had been forgotten. On this manœuvering area we were trained again at battery drill, at taking up new positions, at coming into action at the gallop, and at cooperating with cavalry.

The air was full of immanency and expectancy during these days. Were we destined for an advance soon? Were we really to become an army de chasse? Some said that Fritz's line could not be broken, that the war would end where we were. But evidently the powers that be thought otherwise, or they would not thus have trained us in open manœuvers.

When the training behind the lines was ended, we were despatched to the Somme, and as we marched thither the speculations and rumors increased.

Once in action in our new position, we never really settled down, as in former places. Somehow, there was a feeling that our gun-pits here were temporary abiding-places. At night we watched the star shells with the long track of light that traced the German line. "Behind that line is where our guns are going to be, me boys," said "Hell-Fire" MacDonald, Sergeant of Number 1 Section, to his gun-crew on the first night in action. "All of us fellers may not be alive to git there, but this old howitzer is goin' to bark right over there where Fritz's battalion reserves are guzzlin' beer and pretzels right now."

"Come Over Here"

THE first time I was up in the front line in this sector I found myself regarding the opposite parapet with strange emotions. In the Ypres salient, and in all other places heretofore, the opposite parapet marked a forbidden country, an inscrutable land which we might not explore. As I scanned that gray line of sand-bags that marked out the Germans' parapet, I seemed to read: "Thus far shalt thou come, and no farther."

But in the Somme I read a new writing. Every time I regarded Fritz's front line, I seemed to descry the name of a popular English revue, "Come Over Here." Always beckoning from the opposite parapet by day, and beaconing in the Verey lights by night, was that invitation, "Come Over Here!"

After nearly two weeks of waiting I was back at the wagon lines, acting as Battery Captain—my job being to move ammunition forward to the guns. For nearly a week I had been rushing up the supply, until we had several thousand, rounds in reserve, and still the guns were crying for more.

"Next strafe we 'ave, 'ell's goin' to pop for fair," exclaimed the Sergeant-Major, when the brigade headquarters ordered still more ammunition to be delivered in our already deluged pits.

When the Big Push Began

TO quote from the Sergeant-Major, "that night the lid blew off o' 'ell!" I was standing with a brother officer watching the peaceful twilight, when an aëroplane, sailing low, dropped a white flare across the heavens. In a twinkling the stillness was gone and a thousand guns spoke with one voice. Instinctively every one looked at his neighbor and exclaimed: "The Big Push has begun!"

All night long, without a break, the bombardment continued. About four in the morning, after ceaseless hours of hauling ammunition, I sank down in my tent, and instantly was asleep, only to be awakened almost immediately by a galloper who had just arrived with a message from the guns.

The message read:

Have gun-limbers at battery position to advance guns at 8 A. M.

At last our great moment had come. Our two years of waiting had not been in vain.

Two hours before the time ordered found us on the road.

At the battery position there was a thrill of excitement not common among old soldiers in France. Hell-Fire MacDonald, unkempt and grimy from his night in the gun-pit, was spitting tobacco juice and shouting orders with more vehemence than ever. To see him and his crew jump to the task of man-handling the gun out of the gun-pit, one would never have thought that for ten hours they had been tending a reeking, roaring howitzer.

As soon as all the guns were hooked to the limbers, the order was given, "The battery will advance in column of route from the right, w-a-lk—march." How many a time had I given that order for mere manœuvers; but now, for the first time, it sounded with a thrill. Gunners and drivers alike were dead beat; but there was no lagging back. With a gusto the guns and limbers swept over the crest on to the road. Once on the road, the whole column swept forward at the trot.

I had the position to which we were to advance, two thousand yards ahead, marked on a map. Already the Major had gone forward to lay out the lines of fire from the new position. On each side of the road new regiments were moving up for the counter-attack which the Germans were sure to launch at any moment.

As we drew nearer to the actual scene of fighting, we began to encounter the backwash of the battle. The roads were gone now; the ground was pocked with shell-holes, and progress was slow. The dead and dying were more and more in evidence. Across an open field, plowed up with shell-fire, the ground was literally strewn with corpses, mute witnesses of the awful price paid for that scarred, torn field.

The End of a Soldier's Existence

SOMEHOW, in spite of all obstacles, we arrived at the place which yesterday Fritz had called his country. Of course we did not cheer: the job in hand was too grim and too exacting for any mere aside.

But as the guns were swept into their new positions, and the order was given, "Halt, action front," I am sure that every man heard that order with a deeper joy and satisfaction than he had ever known before in France.

All about at our feet lay the dead and the dying, while the stretcher-bearers passed back and forth like angels of mercy. Out of the opposite sky-line came a constant whirr of shells, and an unbroken hail of shrapnel rained about us. Sometimes near, and sometimes happily far away, a high-explosive shell, sent a great geyser of earth and fire and steel high up into the air.

"It's pretty thick," some one exclaimed.

"Aw g'arn! what d'ye expect up here?" expostulated his pal. "We'll blame soon make it hotter when we're passin' the fast freight across to Fritz!"

Every man had long since earned his rest. All night at the guns, with its awful nerve-racking shock, and now all day under shell-fire, these men were ceaselessly toiling, stripped to the waist, digging for clear life to make an overhead protection for themselves and the guns from the showers of shrapnel. Human endurance was exhausted. But the only taps that sounded here were the taps of death.

But what mattered exhaustion or pain or wounds, or even death? We had justified the end of our soldiers' existence: we had moved up.

A Lawyer's Advice to You

BEFORE you leave for France, young man, stop, look, and listen.

Have you made your will? Have you left your bank account in such shape that your wife can draw against it? Is the deed to your house so arranged that she can sell the house if it should be necessary?

William Hamilton Osborne, who is both a lawyer and a writer, tells next week some important things that every man ought to know about the handling of his affairs. And incidentally he gives some legal forms that may be useful to you, whether you go to war or stay at home.

A New Generation Shall Rise

Continued from page 7

It was, and Thea waved her hand gayly.

I stopped before the Lingood house and let them out.

"Do you have the papers and things at your office?" she asked.

"Yes."

"And is it still where it used to be?"

I nodded.

"Then I'll be up to see you after lunch. One o'clock."

"I'll come for you," I suggested.

"No—don't. I'll walk. A day and a half on the train—only walking will drive those cobwebs away!"

SHE was there on the minute—alone. "Father will be down soon," she said in explanation, drawing off her gloves and flinging them on my table on some scattered papers. One sheet fell fluttering to the floor. She stooped and picked it up. "Hello!" she said, glancing at it. "Another of those Bainter stories?"

I nodded.

"They're awfully good," she said with generous warmth. "Well—are you bursting with questions?"

I laughed.

"If you aren't, you ought to be," she said seriously. "And you ought to be ashamed, too. Do you know, I've always had an idea that you believed in me? There was a time when that did a lot for me. But your letter rather took the wind out of my sails. You made me out quite a selfish little harpy, didn't you?"

She sank in a chair and looked into my face with a disconcerting directness.

"If I had seen you I never would have done anything so silly. But, remember, the thing appeared very different from this angle, Thea. And I don't understand yet—only I know that somehow you are all right and I am all wrong. I absolve you on faith."

She laughed merrily. "I haven't blamed you one bit!" she declared. "I don't know how right I've been, really; but I'll tell you. I shall have to do some plain speaking about my family—but you'll not mind that."

"No."

"To begin with," she told me, "the Lingood family isn't—well, competent. We have no push, no initiative. Our vitality has slipped to low ebb."

None of that applied to Thea, though. I said so.

"Perhaps not," she agreed. "Somehow, I was a 'sport.' I don't know where I got my energy—none of the others had it. I saw that when I was very young—before I left Granville, I think. I knew that father had never saved anything, and that very slowly and gradually his business was falling off, and that he likely never would be able to save anything. I thought about such things more in those days than they gave me credit for. I knew that Ruby had no ambition, and I never had much confidence in Ed's business ability. He was steady, but—well, you know! And I insisted that they should let me get away. I didn't want to slip into that deadly groove with the rest of them.

"Please don't misunderstand me again. You know I don't care any the less for them. But I can't be—I couldn't be—blind to that.

"And I had plenty of hints as to the way things were going with Ed and with Ruby's husband, because they wrote me often, both of them, reproaching me for taking the money that would have made their business a success, they said. But it wouldn't have, and I knew it. And I thought, 'Every cent that father sends me will be saved from the holocaust when it comes,—as it surely will,—and I'll bank it for father. But I'll not tell him or give it to him, for if I do he'll only give it to Ed and Frank, and we will be just where we were before.'

"And I'm not going to back any dead businesses now. Father's debts are ridiculously small. I shall pay them and help him start the book store going again. He must have something to do, and I have a sort of sentimental interest in the book store, you know."

She smiled at me with charming candor.

"But Ed and Frank—not a cent have I to fling away after bad money! I shall make them understand that."

"My dear Thea," I said, "you talk of money as if it were—"

"And you don't understand?" she said. "I'll tell you. I owe it to you, anyway, because even when I was a scrawny, impudent little girl I thought a great deal of you, and looked up to you, and meant, some day, to be like you. And when I went away to college—"

"I remember that day," I said.

Thea colored; then she laughed.

"I was in love with you—then!" she exclaimed. "Well, I too meant to write. I have written. And I've made money, too. Even at college I very nearly paid all my expenses, one way and another. When I went to New York, I got a place on a paper directly—through a girl I'd met in college whose father was an editor. For two years I reported, and wrote fiction on the side. And then I began to break in. I gave up reporting, and the last three years I've been selling nearly everything I wrote. I meant to let you in the secret when my first novel came out—and that's to be in February. I tell you, I've worked! I've worked!"

r was a trifle dazed by it all. "But I've seen nothing of yours!"

She laughed. "I use a pen name," she said. "And I'm sure you have! Only last month—there's the magazine on your table now—I had a story right next to yours, Mr. Author! And I was that proud!"

I remembered the story. "No—I'm proud of you, though!" I said.

She caught her breath a little, and laughed as she replied:

"I'm glad. I wanted you to be!"

THEN, as I looked at her, I knew what I had vaguely suspected all these years, and I wondered why I had been so blind, why I had let her fight it out all alone, this battle against her heritage and the world. But then, as I realized the strength in the fine, delicately cut lines of her face, I wondered if I could have helped her much. I sat there staring at her in a long and tell-tale silence.

"I don't know," she said softly, after a while, "whether you mean what you are looking—"

It seemed as incredible as a miracle to me. I went over to her, and she rose bravely to meet me.

"Thea," I said, "I'm just beginning really to see it. I've loved you, I think, for ten long years! But I am so much older than you are, and—"

"As if that mattered!" cried Thea indignantly. "What is ten years, anyway? And as for me—there has never been any one else—no, not for one single moment—since I was a little girl in pinafores. And I didn't mind your misunderstanding me so much, because I deliberately let everything look that way. But if you make me do what I had to do a long time ago on the train—I shall be really—angry!

"This," I said, "is different. It's not good-by, Thea dear, but welcome home, and I love you, and—"

Suddenly Thea, starry-eyed and yielding, half laughing, half crying, was in my arms.

"But I want you to understand, Mr. Blackmore of Granville," she said, "that I won't stay here more than three months out of the year. I'm afraid of Granville! Promise me!"

I would have promised her anything—anything!