Be Good to Yourself, This Christmas, by Being Good to Some One Else

A CERTAIN man whom I know set out many years ago to become rich.

To himself and to his friends he said: "I do not care for money for its own sake. I want it for the good I can do with it. I am going to get together such and such a sum, and then I shall begin to give."

From time to time, as he prospered, opportunities came to him to do generous things: requests for contributions; individual cases of need; the pathetic appeal of the sick and the unfortunate.

From all of these he excused himself with the same reply. He would give them attention later, he said to himself. For the present he must devote all his energies to making his fortune.

The day came when he had gathered together the sum on which he had set his heart, and many thousands more.

And a tragic thing had happened to him: he had forgotten how to give. When he reached the place where he could afford to do the princely thing, behold, the habits of a life-time rose up and forbade him.

The generous impulse, so long denied, had not force enough to function. He died surrounded by his dollars—a lonely, shrunken, loveless old man.

I did not know Mrs. Hetty Green: few people did. But I can imagine that something of the same sort must have gone on inside of her.

Doubtless she had determined sometime to do some great good with her money.

But the time came, and she had lost the power. The instinct to get and to deny had smothered to death the ability to give.

Even in the making of her will she could not bring herself to one single generous act. In death, the hands so long hard clenched could not be opened.

We too often forget that our generous impulses—like our muscles—grow weak unless they are exercised.

Go through life saying, "I have not time to be kind to-day; later on, when I am not so busy, I will do it"—and behold, later on, when you are not busy, you will have lost the power to be kind.

Deny to-day the impulse to give a little money, and tomorrow's impulse will be that much weaker—until, finally, the impulse will not return at all.

He is great who confers the most benefits [says Emerson]. He is base—and that is the only base thing in the universe—to receive favors and render none. In the order of nature we can not render benefits to those from whom we receive them, or only seldom. But the benefit we receive must be rendered again, line for line, deed for deed, cent for cent, to somebody. Beware of too much good staying in your hand. It will fast corrupt and worm worms. Put it away quickly in some sort.

Men pass over the saying "It is more blessed to give than to receive" as if it were a bit of idealistic nonsense.

It is, of course, one of the truest bits of wisdom ever spoken.

Every man who gives, gives to himself. To the sweetening and broadening of his own nature. Every man who refuses to give, by that refusal contracts and narrows his own soul.

A great opportunity is offered us this year—not merely to give to our own friends and relatives, but to send something to the boys in the camps; to the stricken people abroad; to the families of those men who have gone.

Make the most of that opportunity.

Picture to yourself the million and more boys in the camps: away from home; doubly lonesome because it is Christmas.

Put a gift in some soldier's stocking: let the day be happier for one homesick boy because of your thought and sacrifice.

Give, and give, and give. For in so doing you shall be showering benefits on yourself.

"Inasmuch as ye have done it unto one of the least of these," said the Founder of Christmas, "ye have done it unto me."

By which He meant, "ye have done it unto yourselves, unto your own souls—unto the God that is within you."

Bruce Barton, Editor.

KIFFIN ROCKWELL'S LETTERS TO HIS BROTHER

ABOUT nine o'clock on the evening of Monday, April 17, 1916, four cheerful, enthusiastic, eager-faced youths in the uniform of the French aviation corps, and one sad-featured civilian, stepped out of a taxi-cab in Paris. The aviators were Victor Chapman, my brother Kiffin Rockwell, Norman Prince, and James McConnell. They were happy and gay because they had at last come to the realization of their fondest hope, and were off for the front as the first four members of the newly formed American escadrille. The civilian was myself, and I was sad because I was not going with my four companions, and because I was apprehensive for the future.

A little dinner was held at a Paris restaurant that evening and the four aviators took the train for a place in Champagne.

The next four weeks were quiet ones. Machines were slow in arriving, and the boys began to get impatient. Then the aëroplanes came, and on the morning of May 17 the American escadrille made its initial flight over the lines as a fighting unit. Leaving their aviation field at daybreak, its members patrolled the German lines for two hours. Not one enemy machine was seen, but the Americans were everywhere greeted by a heavy shell fire from the boche anti-aircraft guns. Chapman and Thaw had their machines hit, but no real damage was done.

The following day Kiffin destroyed the escadrille's first German aëroplane, which was also the first one he had ever encountered in the air. He wrote me of his victory as follows:

Thursday, May 18, 1916.
Dear Paul:

Well, I at last have a little something to tell you. This morning I went out over the lines to make a little tour. I was somewhat the other side of our lines, when my motor began to miss a bit. I turned around to go to a camp near the lines.

Just as I started to head for there I saw a boche machine about seven hundred meters under me and a little inside our lines. I immediately reduced my motor and dived for him. He saw me at the same time, and began to dive towards home. It was a machine with a pilot and a gunner, carrying two rapid-fire guns, one facing the front, and one in the rear that turned on a pivot so it could be fired in any direction.

The gunner immediately opened fire on me, and my machine was hit; but I didn't pay any attention to that, and kept going straight for him until I got to within twenty-five or thirty meters of his machine. Then, just as I was afraid of running into him, I fired four or five shots, and swerved my machine to the right to keep from having a collision.

As I did that I saw the gunner fall back dead on the pilot, his machine-gun fall from its position and point straight up in the air, and the pilot fall to one side of the machine as if he too were done for. The machine itself first fell to one side, then dived vertically towards the ground with a lot of smoke coming out of the rear. I circled around, and three or four minutes later saw smoke coming up from the ground just beyond the German trenches.

The captain said he would propose me for the Médaille Militaire, but I don't know whether I will get it or not.

Yesterday Thaw had a fight that ended by the boche diving towards the ground. He was signaled as leaving the air on being seriously hit, but being able to get in his own lines.

Am very busy just now, as the order has just come for us to go to Verdun. Jim sent you a telegram about my fight.

Much love.

KIFFIN.

THE first great air battle of the escadrille took place on May 24. The day's activity started before dawn, when Kiffin and Thaw flew far within the German lines. Over Étain they sighted a Fokker and an Aviatik. Thaw dived on the Fokker and shot it down in flames, while Kiffin gave battle to the Aviatik. After firing a few shots the boche fled; then the two Americans returned home to report Thaw's victory. Hastily refilling their reservoirs, they joined the other men of the escadrille for a patrol over the Verdun battle-ground.

Scores of French and German aëroplanes were up, and the battles that ensued were innumerable. The American pilots had several fights each, and two German machines besides Thaw's Fokker were officially credited to the escadrille that day. Thaw got in a mix-up with several boches, and a bullet hit him in the arm, breaking a small bone near the elbow. He was barely able to land just back of the French trenches, and was picked up in a dazed condition by several poilus. He was hastened to Paris, where he was under treatment for several weeks.

In a battle against three Aviatiks, Victor's arm was badly grazed by a bullet; but he did not even quit the fight, and succeeded in driving away his adversaries, destroying one of them and possibly another. Kiffin attacked a group of German aëroplanes. He shot one of them down; then an explosive bullet struck his wind-shield, and many bits of the missive cut nasty gouges around his mouth and nose. He was able to land safely, however, and had his wounds dressed at a Red Cross station.

I have an evil-looking bit of that German bullet, which was removed from his nose. Captain Thenault wished him to enter a hospital for treatment, but he refused. Taking a twenty-four hour leave, he came to Paris to assure me that he was not seriously hurt, then hurried back to fly. No pleading could induce him to take a few days of rest. I have never seen any one more full of eager anxiety to get back into the fray and fight the Germans.

I have before me three of the citations won by the boys that memorable day. They read:

Corporal-pilot Victor Chapman, an American citizen engaged voluntarily for the war's duration, a pilot remarkable for his audacity in dashing forward and attacking any number of enemy aëroplanes. Flying alone May 24, he attacked three enemy aëroplanes. In the course of the combat his clothing was traversed by many bullets, and he was wounded in the arm.

The citation for which Kiffin was proposed on May 18, and the one of May 24, were published together in the Journal Official as follows:

The Military Medal is conferred upon Corporal-pilot Kiffin Yates Rockwell, volunteer for the duration of the war. Wounded first during a bayonet charge, May 9, 1915. Transferred to the aviation service, he has there shown himself a skilful and courageous pilot. May 18, 1916, he attacked and brought down a German aëroplane. May 24 he did not hesitate to deliver attacks on several enemy machines, during the course of which combat he was painfully wounded in the face.

The present nomination carries with it the Cross of War with palm.

William Thaw was made a Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, with the following mention:

William Thaw, a volunteer pilot, remarkable for skill, dash, and contempt of danger. He has recently fought sixteen aërial battles at short range, brought down a German aëroplane on May 24, and attacked and pursued the same evening a group of three German machines. He was seriously wounded, but succeeded, thanks to his energy and audacity, in bringing back his seriously damaged aëroplane and landing normally.

WHILE the French and German infantrymen swayed back and forth, battling for every inch of ground, the airmen kept up their work above. The best German fighting escadrilles were daily over the Verdun sector, but the French pilots were more than a match for them. Inspired by the heroic daring and self-sacrificing devotion of their French comrades, the Americans put all their energy into doing well their "bit," and daily they drove enemy machines down from the clouds, hindering the Teutons much in their observation and artillery fire regulating work.

An idea of how they fought may be gained from this letter of Kiffin's, written June 16, the first anniversary of the death of Kenneth Weeks, Russell Kelly, Earle Fike, and others of his best friends of the Legion, who fell June 16, 1915, when the Legion had charged gloriously at Givenchy:

Saturday.
Dear Paul:

Well, the last two days have seen a lot of action in the air, but none of us have had much luck. I myself was caught twice yesterday by surprise, although I was watching for it at the same time and being very careful in what I was doing. The only reason that I didn't get brought down was that the boches shot poorly. I was attacking machines all the time, but they were always too many.

Victor has been a little too courageous, and got me into one of the mess-ups, because I couldn't stand back and see him get it alone. He was attacking all the time without paying much attention around him. He did the same thing this morning, and wouldn't come home when the rest of us did. The result was that he attacked one German, when a Fokker, in which we think was Boelke (the papers

Continued on page 20

A Letter to the Editor from a Homely Woman

I REALIZE that I am touching upon an unpopular subject: but something I have just read in a magazine has simply forced me to write. Why is no voice ever raised on behalf of the homely woman? Beauty seems to be the one essential in the eyes of men. Painters paint it, preachers preach it, and writers write it.

I know of only one story where the author had the nerve to keep his heroine homely to the end. To other writers the strain was too much, and always by some means—sickness, magic, on otherwise—they made the lady beautiful. Such things happen only in books—it doesn't ring true to nature.

The heart of a homely woman! Who has cared to fathom it? Verily it is an open sore for which there is no healing. Consciously or unconsciously, men and women, careless, indifferent, brutal or kind, send a thrust which keeps the wound forever unhealed.

Somewhere I read that a man was judged according to how he treated a homely woman in public.

My first realization of being homely was when a sister did not want me in the same picture with her. I was just a little girl, and it hurt. That was the beginning, and the end is not yet.

What I would like to know is why does a homely woman have to fight her way into the hearts of people? A pretty girl comes along, and without any questioning folks accept her and find her out afterward. Why not the same justice to the homely woman? Why must she prove her worth first before she is accepted?

I wonder what would happen to this old world of ours if the homely forces quit working, leaving just the pretty things for men to admire?

MRS. K. T.

Darkness—the New Anesthetic

REMEMBER, in the old days when mother had a headache, how she used to go into her room and pull down all the shades? There was a scientific foundation for that action, according to Dr. William H. Bates of New York. Darkness, under certain conditions, may be a real anesthetic: a patient may, in other words, reduce the keenness of his pain by resolutely "thinking black."

Let one who would seek relief by this method first of all close his eyes and press his palms over them, so to exclude all light. Then let him concentrate his mind on the thought of darkness: he may before closing his eyes, if he cares to, gaze steadily at a black fountain pen or his black shoes—the thing is, to fix the thought of total blackness so firmly in the mind that it excludes all other thoughts.

Dr. Bates has applied this treatment in the relief of neuralgic pains: under the anesthesia induced by it, he has seen teeth extracted and minor surgical operations performed. He believes that a wounded soldier lying in No Man's Land could, by its use, shut out the horrors about him, and by concentrating on the thought of blackness obtain some nervous let-down and some relief from pain.

It costs nothing, and it's worth trying, anyway. With your next hard headache, or your fit of nervous tiredness, close your eyes, press your palms across them, and "remember black."

You Can't Keep a Good Idea Down

IF you feel that the world is always turning a cold shoulder on your big ideas, and that you are not "appreciated," read this letter which Robert R. Livingston, the great Chancellor of New York, wrote in 1811 to a man who had the idea that a little later was to make distance a thing to laugh at and Chicago and New York near neighbors.

It is worth while recalling that the Chancellor had just collaborated with Fulton in perfecting a system of steam navigation and was perhaps prejudiced. The giants of those days had to face the same difficulties that we know to-day.

Albany, March, 1811

Dear Sir: I did not till yesterday receive yours of the 25th of February; where it has loitered on the road, I am at a loss to say. I had before read of your very ingenious proposition as to the railway communications. I fear, however, on mature reflection, that they will be liable to serious objection, and ultimately more expensive than a canal. They must be double, so as to prevent the danger of two such heavy bodies meeting. The walls on which they are placed must be at least four feet below the surface and three feet above, and must be clamped with iron, and even then would hardly sustain so heavy a weight as you propose moving at the rate of four miles an hour on wheels. As to wood, it would not last a week. They must be covered with iron, and that, too, very thick and strong. The means of stopping these heavy carriages without a great shock, and of preventing them from running on each other—for there would be many running on the road at once—would be very difficult. In cases of incidental stops to take wood and water, etc., many accidents would happen. The carriage of condensing water would be very troublesome. Upon the whole, I fear the expense would be much greater than that of canals, without being so convenient.

R. R. LIVINGSTON.

It was only a few years later that the legislature of New York granted the first charter to a railroad company.

Come on In—the Water's Fine!

IT'S all the photographer's fault. Ana Marie Potter, posing at the wheel of daddy's auto, ought to have been snapped in her annettekellermanns. She's only three, but she's very much in the swim; in fact, she's the undisputed water champion—age and weight considered—of Oakland, California. Breast stroke, side stroke, Australian crawl—she can do them all before she can spell them; and she dives from a height with all the abandon of a movie queen doing a rescue stunt. And yet, lots of people were drowned last summer because they had never learned to swim.

How a Successful Author Trained Herself to Write

I HAD wanted to go to college—no girl more so. It would have meant the first step toward my chiefest ambition. But college was out of the question. I took stock of what I could and couldn't do, and decided that I'd make a good stenographer and typewriter. So I set about teaching myself.

I mentioned what I wanted to do to a man friend, and he procured for me a series of lessons—twenty in all, a lesson to a card. One was supposed to master, with these cards, shorthand in twenty weeks. I don't doubt that some people can do it. I wasn't one of them.

Presently I secured my first position. For the use of a good machine and because I wished practice in actual business correspondence, I went into a certain office, receiving what old novelists liked to call a "slender stipend" for my services. It wasn't a pleasant place; but I was getting practice, and I was being paid while I learned. One thing I set before myself, and I stuck to it: Accuracy first! Speed would come later.

Then I went to a railroad office. Railroad work is heavy, and it was brand new to me; many of the common railroad expressions were as Sanskrit. My work covered lost and estrayed freights, rates, paid claims, and the general correspondence of the head of the office. I was a scared girl at first, but I knew I just had to hold down that job. I had to increase my speed and efficiency.

I took the heaviest note-book home with me at night, and set to studying the letters I had taken during that day. Every man has his own style of dictation, and there are certain words and phrases he will use again and again. A little careful study will disclose the range of his vocabulary. I shortened to the last possible notch all such phrases as I found were likely to be recurrent, and made what is called a word-sign for words in commonest use. Also, I made out a list of addresses, and kept it handy, so that I didn't have to ask for a regular correspondent's initials and address but once.

When I had a few minutes to spare, I practised my words and phrases on the machine, as well as those silly test sentences which nevertheless bring in all the letters of the keyboard. At the end of three months in that office I had really learned shorthand and typewriting.

I had never intended shorthand and typewriting to be anything more than a means toward an end. I wanted to write something more readable than railroad letters. Now, one is born to write just as another is born to be hanged. You can't really teach yourself how to write, but you can teach yourself how not to write: which is perhaps the great secret of literature. You can sharpen your tools—words. I was too busy for a regular course of study, even if I'd had the necessary books and means—which I hadn't. If I studied, it had to be in between-whiles.

I thought it out, and presently hit upon the simplest of simple plans, which utilized my spare minutes and didn't take any time from my employers. I got a very good little desk dictionary, and when I was waiting for dictation I kept it propped open and studied it page by page. Sometimes I had time for only two or three words, sometimes a half-page. But I learned the words and synonyms, and, when I could, the derivatives. I don't know anything more fascinating than the study of English words; and it isn't as dry as it sounds, for they're alive when you get to know them.

I'd been what one might call weaned on the Bible. As a child in my grandmother's house I had to learn many of the psalms. I was nine when a copy of the "Tempest" fell into my hands, and I discovered Shakespeare. And now I had these exhaustless springs of living water to draw from. I needed them, for I have always been an omnivorous reader.

When I couldn't withstand the urge within any longer, I began to write stories. They were without form and void, of course. I'd like to say that I was one of those lucky authors whose earliest efforts were gobbled up by greedy and clamorous editors. But I'm one of those who can't get anything worth while without working hard for it. Since that time it is true shat I have written stories that were a pleasure to me in the writing and that editors have been glad to get; but I have never written one I didn't have to work on, and I never expect to write one I sha'n't have to work on. Also, rejection-slips are not an unmixed evil: they burn out, like fly-blisters, any amateurish vainglory lurking in one's system.

Folks as busy as I have been all my life have to snatch at chances and learn to do things in between-whiles—as the heart sleeps between beats. I still wish I could have gone to college; but I have long since learned that being alive in times like ours is in itself the biggest of educations.

MARIE CONWAY OELMER.

LEAVINGS

By NANCY GUNTER BOYKIN

Illustrations by John Newton Howitt

"AS soon as I saw Mr. Muggles," sighed Lisa estatically, "I knew he was different from other men."

"We stuck him for a good thing," declared Clarissa—"a dinner at the Royal and a ride to the Farms! It's a pity he's so ugly."

"Ugly!" Lisa was horrified. "I wouldn't call him ugly. Sorter like a flamingo—a long nose and thin legs. But you get used to that. He's been so nice to us, he seemed real handsome to me."

"Some girl ought to nab him," commented Clarissa, absently smoothing down her eyebrows; "but I've always felt I was born for the movies."

"So've I," Carolissa agreed enthusiastically. "Think of getting in at forty per. It's too much better than old Swartz's cabaret—especially," she added sagely, "since we've lost that job."

Carolissa, known at Swartz's as the "beautiful Eyetalian pianist," had been Eliza Jane Perkins down in Wetumpka, Alabama—old Dan Perkins' "middlin' gal, the good-natured one who toted the baby." But Oscar Swartz, of the Élite Café, had advertised Clarissa as a "beautiful Italian," and when he found that Eliza Jane had a quick ear for music and a catchy way of rattling the keys, she was forthwith engaged as Clarissa's teammate—"Carolissa from Lombardy," although she was an ineradicably Saxon type, with quantities of pale gold hair and clear, passion-pure blue eyes.

"Swartz wasn't so worse," Lisa continued meditatively, "though I did get tired being just a back to the public, especially as my nose is my strong point."

She seized the hand-glass and examined the strong point lovingly.

"Let's see—we've been there six months. Funny he'd get fresh now."

"You don't know men," said Clarissa darkly. "Men're all fresh."

"That's why I like Mr. Muggles. We've known him a week and he hasn't insulted us yet. He's a perfect gentleman, Rissy."

Clarissa was trying to tame her too, too solid eyebrows by a skilful application of glue, as per "Miss Florence Fairchild's Beauty Hints," but she muttered, half inaudibly, "He's rolling in money, they say."

"Won't it be lovely," said Lisa, "when we get that forty dollars he's promised us in the movies? Let's get a place on Riverside—one of those Queen Anne apartments in pink and gold, like the parlor in the Royal Hotel. I'm tired living over a pet-animal store and dreaming the white mice are loose. Let's have pink boudoir lamps—and plenty of hot water. Oh, Rissy, won't it be grand?"

She was perched on the trunk, in petticoat and camisole, hastily reconstructing for her own use one of Clarissa's old evening dresses; for Clarissa, being senior member and star of the "Beautiful Italian Sisters," took most of the clothes that the partnership purchased.

But, although Lisa's fingers flew, the dress was forgotten, and Mrs. Bosey's room, with its hard-featured Victorian furniture and its frazzled rag rugs, had vanished from view. The eager blue eyes saw a spacious apartment, with tapestry and soft lights, and Carolissa, queen of the movies, carelessly throwing on a wrap of chiffon and fur as she leisurely awaited her limousine.

THE door-bell ringing sharply dispelled this lovely picture, and the shrill barking of Mrs. Bosey's Pomeranian proclaimed a caller. Clarissa whirled around from the mirror and caught Lisa's hands. Her pink chiffon dress billowed like a cloud about her, and her handsome dark face was set in determined lines.

"There he comes now! Kiddo, do me a favor? Stay at home, will you, just to-night? You know how I take with the men—not meaning to be conceited." She shot a quick glance at the mirror. "It's my winkly-twinkly eye and my syncopated walk. I think this old toad's stuck on me, but he can't say so with you along. You know how it is—things never speed up when you're with us, Lisa."

"Marry Mr. Muggles? Rissy, he's a thousand years old!"

"I don't care," cried Clarissa defiantly. "I'm not like you, Lisa; I can't be happy on nothing a week. Anyway, he's alive enough to totter to the altar on my arm."

The movies and the Sunday papers had prepared Lisa for this. The working-girl was always marrying the millionaire. In fact, a sneaking conviction that she would meet a like fate had helped to draw Lisa from her country home; but she expected her millionaire to be young, with eyes like Francis Bushman's.

"Are you sure, Rissy, he's going to propose?" For, after a protracted diet of canned beans in her room, she wanted the dinner at the Royal and the ride to the Farms very badly. "You know you thought so when that Terry de Peyster said he had something confidential to tell you. And, after all, he just wanted you to know his mother had mumps."

"This is different, kiddo." Clarissa shrugged impatiently. "Trust your little Rissy to read the signs. And think what it means, Lisa! A house on the avenue, clothes from Delphine's, furs that won't come off in patches when the wind blows, silk stockings—everything a girl can want."

The Riverside apartment began to pale before a more splendid edifice. A palace on Fifth Avenue, a coterie of liveried servants, soft carpets, lace curtains, and Clarissa in velvet and real pearls. Just what was her part in this unsurpassed menage Carolissa did not stop to consider.

"Watch me cut the 'Kissing Kids' for trying to queer our act!" Clarissa rattled on. "I'll have my own car, my own yacht, my own cottage at Palm Beach. Be a good sport, Lisa. Stay at home."

"Oh, Rissy, I'm glad." Quite overcome by all this grandeur, Lisa caught the older girl and kissed her as impulsively as she could without disturbing Clarissa's perfect coiffure. "Maybe he's not so old, after all. Of course I'll stay, Clarissa."

Mrs. Bosey's ponderous thud along the stairs had given place to the light, peevish squeak of the oncoming Muggles. Clarissa pulled open the wardrobe door.

"He sha'n't sit a minute, kiddo, keeping you in that rabbit's nest.

Lisa jumped into the wardrobe, and the hats and coats fell on top of her, but did not prevent her hearing Clarissa's best society tones:

"Oh, do come in, Mr. Muggles. My, but you're looking well! No; the child was just heartbroken, but she's got a dear friend real sick, and she's gone to her. Lisa's a regular angel, you know."

After three flights up Mrs. Bosey's stairway, Mr. Muggles made for a chair, but Clarissa firmly forestalled him. "It don't seem hospitable not to ask you to sit, Mr. Muggles, but this room is just too hot for anything, and it's such grand weather for a ride."

True to her promise to Lisa, she trundled Mr. Muggles promptly downstairs; and the regular angel, in a half stifled condition, crawled out of the wardrobe.

IT was a sultry summer night, as Clarissa had said, and the small room sizzled with heat from the tin roof above. Carolissa turned off the anemic gas-jet, and sat by the window to meditate on Clarissa's sudden triumph. But even such rosy thoughts needed some one to share them. The heat had emptied the tenements across the court, and the blonde who was practising for grand opera and the lady in curl papers who always oiled her husband's hair after dinner, were absent from their respective windows.

Lisa began to wish she did have a dear friend who was very sick. Everybody had gone somewhere, and in New York everybody wants do to what everybody else is doing.

Slipping down to the street, she set out for Broadway, habit and inclination drawing her to a small shop where reposed in conspicuous glory an alluring white fox summer fur. For five nights now she had gone regularly to gloat upon it. It was the first thing she intended to buy when she got her forty dollars from the movies.

There it lay, its graceful lines draped over a plush stand; and there behind it, his long legs twisted about a high stool, was the same young man she had seen every night, peering earnestly into the same heavy ledger, and whistling gaily:

Ah, I have sighed to rest me
Deep in the silent grave.

He was a homely young man, with jagged features under a thatch of upstanding red hair; but he was arrayed in harmonious lavender haberdashery and had a metropolitan manner of perfect assurance. Lisa had observed him scornfully the first night,—his eyes were not like Francis Bushman's,—and after that had given her entire attention to the fox.

To-night, however, the young man glanced up, and, seeing Lisa with her nose pressed against the window, leaned far over his books and smiled at her.

Lisa stiffened, but it was too late.

In Wetumpka it is a social error not to smile back, and the beaming blue eyes had wrung from her an unintentional response.

"The nerve!" she cried indignantly, checking her greeting half way as she remembered that she was now a New Yorker. "I wonder if he thinks I came to see him. With that face!"

She turned and scurried up the Avenue without a second thought for the impertinent young man.

At Ninety-eighth Street she paused. There was a bench over at Riverside

---

which, being in the bright glare of an electric light, was more patronized by insects than lovers. The electric light would filter through the trees much as the moon did at home, and a breath of cool air would come up from the river. Lisa thought of the empty windows across the court at Mrs. Bosey's. Besides, Clarissa would be out late. Accepting Mr. Muggles and his millions would naturally take time.

She found the bench, and was vainly struggling to protect her ankles from mosquitoes with a very scant shirt, when a cheery voice accosted her:

"Excuse me, Miss, but is this your bench?"

It was he of the flaming hair and the lavender hoisery. He stood fanning himself with a straw hat and shedding the wide smile of one who is always sure of his welcome.

Carolissa glared. When she first came to New York, nine long, long months before, she had been thrilled beyond measure when strange men addressed her. She liked adventure, but she craved the kind that leads to solitaire diamonds and wedding rings; and as these chance acquaintances sooner or later—usually sooner—proved that they had no such intentions, she had sadly but wisely gone back to Mrs. Grundy.

"This is my bench," she told him icily, "and if you try to talk to me I'll call a cop."

Her visitor was evidently not so bold as he pretended; for at these steely words his metropolitan manner was considerably shaken, leaving the tasteful haberdashery and the homely features in cruel contrast.

"Why, I thought"—he hastened to explain—"you were the girl— I'm William Wallace McGregor, from Madame Aline's. Aren't you the girl—"

"Yes," snapped Carolissa; "I am the girl who's been looking in Madame Aline's every night for a week to see if that white fox is rabbit or goat. You didn't think I was looking at you?"

"Oh, no," he cried hastily. "Only, there wasn't anybody there but me." Then he brightened. "I've been looking at you, though. You're the kind of girl I like. You look like a human being instead of a frozen image. I've been watching you every evening, and to-night I thought—of course you didn't—but I certainly thought you smiled. That's why I sprinted up the Avenue after you." He pulled out a lavender-edged handkerchief and wiped his brow. "I might have known you didn't. I'm a hard one to fool about girls, and I thought you weren't that kind."

Robbed of some of his self-confidence, he was a rather embarrassed young man, and Carolissa realized that the metropolitan manner had been only recently assumed.

"People in New York don't speak," she told him, "without a proper introduction."

Billy McGregor glanced reluctantly at the partly vacant bench.

"I'm sure I beg your pardon, Miss; but, honest, it did seem like I knew you, seeing your face at the window so often—one familiar face in all that Broadway mob."

HE replaced the straw hat at a jaunty angle, hung his cane over his arm, and turned as if to go; but Lisa was fairly bursting to tell some one of Clarissa's golden triumph, and the near presence of a massive policeman gave her courage.

"We have met—in a way," she conceded, making room on the bench: "And we're both strangers in the city—that is, if you weren't born in New York?"

"Nobody is," declared Billy McGregor, determined that no one should have more claim to the metropolis than he. "But I know this little old burg like a book. I came from Connecticut. Eleven of us boys, and not a girl in the bunch. We got so plentiful at home we were sleeping three in a bed, and dad said he guessed some of us better get wild and drift away. I'm the wild one—but don't you be scared of me, little girl. I got a job keeping books at the Pinkerton Hardware Company, and now I'm assisting Madame Aline. It gives me something to do evenings."

"I'm from Wetumpka, Alabama," interrupted Lisa, anxious to get through with the preliminaries. "We had a lovely old home down there. If I were back home, I'd be entertaining in my own parlor to-night."

And, indeed, when compared to the congested masses of semi-washed hoi-polloi who filled Mrs. Bosey's lodging-house, the crumbling shack on the Tallapoosa did seem a "lovely home."

Billy McGregor drew his brows together disapprovingly.

"Shouldn't have left, sister. A girl that's got a good home—"

"I hated to come," said Carolissa, though this was not strictly true; "but New York has more—opportunities."

Opportunities seemed a polite euphemism for millionaires. The truth was, Willy Ben Whiteside at the Luxury Theater had told her she looked like Mary Pickford, and she had read too many dime novels from circulating libraries. This, combined with a parent whose vocation was chiefly professional pall-bearing, had influenced her coming far more than she knew.

However, a more important topic was now absorbing her thoughts.

"I wouldn't be here alone to-night, but my chum has gone out with Mr. Muggles. You know Mr. Reginald Muggles, the patent shower-bath man?"

Billy McGregor eyed her out of the corner of his canny New England eye.

His bookkeeping at Madame Aline's had taught him the value of clothes, and he was not deceived by the brave front put up by her inexpensive habiliments. It had never occurred to Carolissa that in her pursuit of the golden circle she was badly handicapped by her costume—a short plaid skirt, with a gay blue coat and high-heeled pumps, and atop it all one of those small round knobs popularly know as a "sheeny derby."

"So your chum's out with that old soak!" McGregor whistled disrespectfully.

"But maybe he's not so old," Lisa urged. "We think maybe it's intellect, not age. And she's going to have a limousine and a cottage at Palm Beach—have everything she wants. Isn't it grand?"

"Umph!" said Billy McGregor dubiously.

But Lisa refused to be discouraged.

"I knew it would happen to Rissy. She's beautiful. Every man that comes to see her goes wild. She'll have a yacht, maybe. He brought orchids to-night—pink for Rissy and white for me."

"For you?" Billy McGregor again eyed her curiously. "What's he giving you flowers for, sister?"

"What for? To wear to the Royal—a dinner bouquet. And Rissy'll have—"

"But you didn't go?"

"No; well—you see—" She stopped, for she could not bring herself to admit that Rissy would have to angle for Mr. Muggles' proposal. "I didn't care so much about going, because I didn't have a new dress. I wear Rissy's leavings, you know, and we've been out of work two weeks now. We did a cabaret turn, the 'Italian Sisters,' at Swartz's Elite. I was at the piano. They just saw my back, so if my hooks and eyes were on, nothing else mattered. But Rissy's different. They saw her all around. She had to have real clothes."

"I see," declared Billy, nodding wisely. "So, having all the clothes, this Rissy gets the orchids and the rides and the dinners? Where do you come in?"

"But we've got to be practical," Lisa insisted. "Besides, I'm to have a lovely position in the movies. Mr. Muggles has a friend who is a director."

BILLY McGREGOR sat in silence perforce while she poured out the story of the promised place in the moving-picture studios and expatiated on the glory of Clarissa's future.

When she stopped for breath, however, McGregor had his say:

"This Rissy is making a big fool of you, little girl. They can't put anything over on me, you know. Now, I've got a friend works on a rubberneck. He'll give you a real job."

"On a rubberneck!" Lisa giggled scornfully. "Oh, no, thanks! I'd rather work in the movies."

"Joe says an empty rubberneck just naturally scares people. So he hires a noisy-looking girl, one of these yearning-eyed damsels who can draw the traveling men, and he gets an old lady to chaperon her—Joe wants respectable family parties too, you know. His old lady—Joe swears she was sixty-one—eloped last week with the bus driver."

"Sixty-one!" Carolissa drew back indignantly. "Thank you; I may look sixty-one."

"I was thinking," said Billy McGregor, regarding his lavender socks with cheerful obtuseness, "you'd give the tone Joe wants. You've got a look—so young and unsuspecting—different, somehow, from most girls. I guess that's why I followed you—I like to see a girl with that fresh-from-the-farm kind of face. I'll fix it up with Joe. Why not be a widow? The black would help, you being so young. It's twelve a week—in case that forty from the movies can't be cashed."

He pulled out a card, wrote on it, and stuck it in her arm-bag.

Lisa jumped up and hitched her smart little coat into place. Twelve dollars a week was absolutely uninteresting when one was planning real lace curtains for a Riverside suite.

"I have the word of Mr. Reginald Muggles," she told him, trying not to be too haughty. "I fancy it's as good as his bond. I don't care to be a widow, thank you, and I certainly won't wear black!"

LISA had been at Mrs. Bosey's some hours before Clarissa came in; but she spent the time very comfortably planning what she would wear when she visited her friend at Palm Beach. She was hesitating between a Japanese garden costume and a sport suit when the squeaking stairs announced the coming of the bride-to-be. She sprang to the door.

"Oh, Rissy, you look lovely! Did you have a grand time?"

Clarissa dropped the wilted orchids on a chair, and recklessly flung her hat and cloak on top of them.

"My dress is ruined!" The pink cloud, indeed, was sadly crushed.

"But your hair looks lovely. It hasn't flopped a bit. And your nose doesn't shine, Rissy. What did he say?"

"Nothing."

"Nothing?"

"Nothing worth listening to. Even when the band played:

You're the only little girl
In the whole wide world,

---

and I said I wondered what little girl it meant. Horrid old bald-headed thing!"

"He didn't propose? But I thought—there, don't cry, Rissy. We'll have fun anyway when he gets us that job in the movies."

"Job in the movies! Yes, he will not. He got drunk, and I slapped him."

"Got drunk? When he's out with a lady! The old scarecrow. I'm glad you slapped him."

"And there's only one dollar left. It's awful luck!" wailed Clarissa, beginning to feel sorry for herself. "Mrs. Bosey'll keep our trunks. How can you sit there with that hope-springs-eternal look, Lisa Perkins?"

It was a ghastly moment. To have the cottage at Palm Beach and the suite on Riverside snatched away in an instant was bad enough; but to lose the substantial if inelegant shelter of Mrs. Bosey's tin roof was worse. Carolissa gazed desperately about the room. It had its disadvantages; but even the sickly gas-jet seemed to brighten now as it was about to take its flight.

Her eye fell on a card dropped carelessly on the floor:

MR. WILLIAM WALLACE MCGREGOR
Introducing Miss Carolissa Perkins

She seized upon it joyfully.

"Never mind, Rissy. We should worry. I know a job I can get. It pays enough to pacify Mrs. Bosey. A friend got it for me. It's lovely work, and sure pay."

"THIS way—this way," bleated Joe, the barker, through his megaphone. "All aboard for Coney Island! Lively Luna! Spectacular Steeplechase. All aboard for Coney Island!"

Snetson, who drove the "Tourist's Delight," had placed it to great advantage in the white glare of a picture palace. Broadway surged about it, a seething, sweltering, hurrying mob of pleasure-seekers. And, as they jostled past, Joe the barker's gimlet eye clamped upon the wavering ones, and his wheedling tones coaxed them forth:

"All aboard for Coney Island! Sure, kiddo, come join the merry-merry— What's that, madam? You're from Kewanee? Your first trip to New York? Sure, it's the only genteel way to see the island. We've had the very best people from Kewanee— Sure, Mister; that's your change— No, madam, I can't remember their names— No, sir, no reduction for six in a family— Watch your step there— All aboard!"

In the middle seat of the bus sat a little widow heavily swathed in black. The somber veil and draperies of crape, insisted on by Joe, cast a mournful respectability over Lisa and the self-made blonde at her side. But Carolissa's guileless countenance showed no traces of grief, and her ever-hopeful eye cheerfully scanned the tide of oncoming humanity. Presently she was rewarded; for through the press came Billy McGregor in a new checked suit, fanning himself with his hat and whistling jubilantly:

Ah, I have sighed to rest me
Deep in the silent grave.

"This way for Coney Island," bellowed Joe, winking at Lisa; for he knew as well as she did that Billy McGregor did not spend his hard earned dollars every Saturday night for the pleasure of seeing Spectacular Steeplechase or Lively Luna.

All through the sizzling New York July Billy had been Carolissa's constant companion.

Hitherto the young men who had been drawn to the little pianist had been promptly lassoed by Clarissa; and Lisa had not objected, considering it an inevitable tribute to Rissy's beauty. With Billy, however, it was different; for to Lisa he soon came to represent the sum of human wisdom.

Billy could get waited on when the soda fountain was crowded; Billy could jolly the Subway guard into letting them in when the doors were almost closed; Billy had even argued successfully with an angry policeman who arrested them for walking on the grass in the park.

So Lisa prudently gave Clarissa no chance at annexation. She kept Billy McGregor sitting on park benches, riding up and down Fifth Avenue in the bus, or eating ice-cream cones in the Bronx; and when he objected that there were mosquitoes in the open, she relentlessly told him Mrs. Bosey's room was "stuffy."

Later, when Rissy, after some weeks of moping idleness, departed with a wandering vaudeville troupe, Mrs. Bosey's room suddenly became habitable. And there, while Billy McGregor, who had won Mrs. Bosey's heart by praising the peevish Pomeranian, guarded the door from the landlady's visits, Lisa, mounted on a chair, cooked chocolate pudding or fudge jumbles over the gas-jet.

It was great fun for both of them. Billy grew careless in the matter of harmonious socks and ties, plainly indicating that his heart was no longer at large; and Lisa neglected the newspaper accounts of marriages among the Newport set for columns of bargains in household furniture.

"All aboard for Coney Island!" The statistical school-teachers, the hilarious traveling men, the beflustered old ladies with guide-books, who make up such parties, had settled to their places, and the "Tourist's Delight" lumbered down Broadway.

"At your right, ladies and gentlemen, the famous Times Square Building—the only triangular square in the world."

This brought loud haw-haws from a gentleman from Montana, and Billy McGregor took occasion to whisper:

"Say, sister, you're a blooming beauty to-night. You should worry about wearing black."

Lisa blushed a gratified, embarrassed pink and hastily changed the subject.

"I have a new hat, Billy, cream chip with rosebuds. Of course I can't wear it now; but it was so pretty I just bought it anyway."

The chrome-colored blonde who had been engrossed in a young traveling man now inclined an eager ear in their direction, and Billy and Lisa lapsed into silence—a delightful silence to Lisa, however, for she was busy as a beaver building a home.

IT was a modest structure, a snug little flat up in Harlem, with curly maple in the bedroom and a three-piece plush set in the parlor. She had seen such a set at Blumfield's—a big stuffed chair that Billy could stretch out in, a sofa for her to decorate with hand-sewn pillows, a small rocker with a sewing basket to match. The real lace curtains of the Riverside apartment had given place to ten-cent lawn, and the furniture was not guaranteed mahogany, but Lisa was perfectly satisfied with it.

"At your left, ladies and gentlemen, the Bowery, famous for its sights and sounds—and smells."

This was meant to be funny, and Lisa usually felt that a noisy appreciation of Joe's wit made her position more secure. But to-night she forgot to laugh. Instead, she sat in a state of blissful expectancy; for a wide experience with enamoured Wetumpka lads led her to believe that Billy McGregor, the great and wise, was about to propose.

Under cover of Joe's airy badinage, he edged closer, and, with a watchful eye on the blonde, whispered confidentially:

"Yesterday, Lisa—up there at Bosey's with your sleeves back and that little apron, it seemed like a real home, didn't it?"

"It was fun," admitted Lisa.

"Honest, I lay awake hours last night, Lisa, thinking about you. There's nothing I don't know about girls, and I certainly can pick a winner when I see one. On the first I get a promotion—"

"All out for the Island," Joe's megaphone crashed through this interesting tête-à-tête. "No, mister, your ticket down don't entitle you to all the shows— No, madam,I can't keep your little boy— No, mister, we are not responsible for children and overcoats left in the bus— All out, there! all out!"

Lisa and McGregor scrambled out with the others, and were swept along by a laughing, jostling, shouting rabble of humanity. The sidewalks were lined with painted booths where gayly clad hawkers jested and shouted. Above them swings and wheels and aërial railroads squeaked and rattled through brilliant orbits, and over all blazed the red and blue and yellow lights of Coney Island. The very density of this mob of close-packed humanity created a spirit of unity. Lisa clung happily to Billy's arm, and the little flat in Harlem seemed very real and near.

"Let's get out of this jam," urged McGregor, "and get where we can talk."

He led the way into one of the small theaters along the pleasance. It was fiery hot inside, and an aggressive smell of garlic suggested that the patrons were none too choice; but Lisa was grateful for the darkness.

"Lisa," Billy whispered, when they had fumbled their way into two seats at the rear, "I've been thinking what a swell time I've had this month since I've been running with you, sister—"

But the fateful words were again cut short; for, with a blare of would-be Egyptian trumpets, the curtain rose on "Etolia, the snake-dancer from the Nile."

ETOLIA'S scanty costume was covered with rather tarnished sequins, and the stuffed snake flung over one shoulder was very dead indeed; but nothing could dim the brightness of the dancer's black eyes or silence the appeal of her small painted mouth. It was Clarissa!

Rissy got up lazily from a tiger rug, stretched herself, and began to dance, with little training but some natural grace. Seeing Lisa in the audience, she winked a greeting, then turned her attention to Billy McGregor.

It was the first time that a good-looking vampire had ever used her wiles on Billy McGregor; but to Clarissa all was grist that came to the mill, and a live man, however untried, was better practice than a dead snake. So she flashed her smile at him, and turned and twisted and tied herself up in the snake, all the time watching Billy from under her heavy lids.

All that Clarissa knew of Egypt had been learned from cigarette advertisements; but she did her best to look like Cleopatra. A small negro boy at her side waved an incense jar, and the fumes, mingling with the garlic and frankfurters in the audience, made an atmosphere not conducive to clear thinking. Three Egyptian mummies, seated cross-legged on the floor, beat out a low, monotonous measure.

Billy McGregor leaned forward in his chair, his eyes bulging. Lisa, waiting in the darkness at his side, felt his slow, unconscious withdrawal.

AFTER the act Clarissa sent for them to come behind the scenes. In a panic of womanly intuition, Lisa urged that they go straight home; but Billy would not hear of it. They found Clarissa seated on the table, smoking a cigarette, a scarlet negligée slipping off her plump shoulders. The dressing-room was small, but it had a theatrical flavor of tinsel glamour and Bohemian intimacy; and Clarissa, although she needed the softening footlights to mellow her painted cheeks, was to Billy and Lisa a creature of transcendent beauty.

Billy climbed on the trunk, and, hitching back his trousers to show his lavender socks, began a light rattle of banter with Clarissa, who blew rings of smoke in his face the while. Lisa, since she could not hang from the gas-jet, must needs sit on the only unoccupied piece of furniture the room afforded—a chair; and in this prosaic location was hopelessly at a disadvantage. She tried frantically to keep in the conversation; but it was, literally and figuratively, over her head, and

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

BE CAREFUL WHOM YOU FIRE

WHY is it that, with better raw materials, better transporation, and equally effective salesmanship, Americans find it difficult to compete in efficiency of production with Europeans?

One part of the answer, says Arthur Williams, one of our great industrial engineers, in the New York World, is found in our neglect of the "human side of the labor problem":

Henry Ford found that he was hiring 50,000 men in 1913, while only employing 13,000 or 14,000 at any one time. He figured the cost of breaking in a new man averaged $70. By tackling the human problem in the various ways he did, especially by instituting profit-sharing so that each employee had an employer's interest in the company, this labor turnover was almost completely eliminated.

In many industries the labor turnover averages 300 or 400 per cent. In some of the chemical industries it exceeds 700 or 800 per cent, which means that the average employee holds his job only three or four weeks.

This is frightful waste. It means more than the cost of breaking in new men, for no man can be at his best where his job is so uncertain. He may go through the mechanical motions required, but he can have no interest in the result. And even in the roughest of labor, in shoveling dirt or carrying bricks, this element of personal interest in the outcome is sure to tell. From the moment a man is hired in any capacity some sort of trusteeship should be considered established, with some sort of protection against the whims of his immediate superior. The right to discharge should be taken away from foremen and immediate supervisors. Their authority should be limited to suspension and their verdicts should be reviewed by some unprejudiced superior.

Many a competent man is discharged through anger or irritation on the part of his immediate boss. If the employer realized that it would cost him $70 to hire another he would think twice before permitting the change.

WINNING THE WAR WITH YOUR FURNACE

THE home garden and Mr. Hoover seem to have old General Starvation on the run. Now comes the question of coal; and most people do not need to be told that it is serious. Few Americans have as much coal in their cellars as they usually do at this time of year; thousands of families are living from hand to mouth. Thousands of manufacturers do not know whether they can run through the winter or will have to close down. The exact situation, according to J. Wainwright Evans in The Nation's Business, is this:

We could use this year, if we had it, 750,000,000 tons of coal, hard and soft. The best that we can get, assuming that the mines work all the time and that the railroads have no tie-ups, and that everything else works out right, is 660,000,000 tons. This 660,000,000 tons is an outside estimate. While many of the factories are running twenty-four hours a day, jammed with war orders, the mines run only eight—and that for only 235 days of the year.

So the coal scare is not exaggerated: it is really, serious. What can the average family do to meet it?

It can save, on the average, a ton of coal, answers Mr. Evans. The American householder wastes from one to two tons every winter. He insists on heating every corner of his house all day long, regardless of the fact that some rooms are used only at certain hours and some not at all. He keeps the temperature five degrees higher, on the average, than it needs to be. Professor E. H. Lockwood of Yale University made an experiment in coal-saving in his own home last winter. The winters are trying in New England, and temperatures low: but Professor Lockwood was able to heat his house of ten rooms with a hot-water furnace on 9.4 tons of coal: at a cost of $40 for coal plus $8 for wood for his fire-place, a total of $48. At that cost he maintained all winter—in all but two rooms, which were hard to heat properly—a temperature of seventy degrees. The cost was from $50 to $100 less than that of an average family in like circumstances.

Those who are interested in the whole story—and in helping to win the war by carefully watching their furnaces—will do well to send for Professor Lockwood's pamphlet, published by the Bureau of Mines in Washington. It is entitled Saving Fuel in Heating a House.

THE WISDOM OF THE CHINESE

A GRAVE and majestic outside is, as it were, the palace of the soul.
You may draw a tiger's skin, not his bones; you may know a man's face, but not his mind.
It is not as safe opening the mouth as keeping it shut.
A hut of reeds with mirth therein is better than a palace with grief.
The stag and the tiger do not stroll together.
We do not cook rice by babbling.
A man's conversation is the mirror of his heart.
There are two good men: one dead, the other unborn.

From Asia.

WHERE GIRLS AND SPIDERS MEET

IN the English surveying instrument factories spiders probably are the most indispensable workmen," says Commerce and Finance. "The cross hairs that mark the exact center of the object lenses of the surveyor's telescopes are made from spider web. Under the magnification of the powerful lenses the almost invisible threads woven by the spider are brought up to a uniform cylinder the thickness of a man's thumb. It is the only substance suitable for the purpose. Human hair has been tried, but when magnified it is irregular and appears like a rough hewn lamp-post. Human hair is transparent too, and the cross hairs of the telescope must be opaque.

"In the two months of the spinning season spiders produce thousands of yards of the delicate fiber, which is wound on metal frames and stored away until needed. The spider at work dangles on the invisible thread, one end of which is attached to the metal frame which is dextrously twirled by a young lady. The spider is allowed to rest on the frame in the girls' hands until the thread has been fastened, then as he springs supposedly to the floor the winding process begins. Several hundred feet of the thread is removed from a spider at one time

"Any sort of spider will not do for this work. He must be kept fat and contented. Flies are fed to them. The girls who work with them come to have an affection for the insects and call them by nicknames."

HARD ON THE DOCTORS

PROBABLY war works no greater hardship on the members of any profession than on the doctors. Thousands of them are called away from their practice to work under terrific strain at the front. And meanwhile the home population, under the restrictions of diet imposed by war, grows healthier and healthier. The National Emergency Food Commission publishes a letter received from a doctor during the gardening days of last summer:

"DEAR SIR: In behalf of the medical fraternity, I wish to enter my gentle protest against your work. You may not realize it, but your garden-planting campaign is actually driving some doctors into other fields. They say that with so many folks working in the open air, spading, hoeing, and cultivating their new gardens, their communities have become too healthy to be profitable to the profession, to say nothing of the gloomy outlook ahead for midsummer, when people will be eating their own garden-truck. An abundance of fresh vegetables will do as much to hurt our practice as exercise. Do you think this is fair to a hard-working and useful profession?"

DON'T LET YOUR CHILD WORRY ABOUT EXAMINATIONS

HEALTHY children like to learn things, given the right conditions. If your boy stands low in his studies, is restless or stupid, it usually means that he is overstrained or undernourished, or that he has adenoids or a spinal curvature, or that the ventilation is bad—any one of the twenty causes for which he is not responsible.

The first thing a mother must realize with regard to the children at school is the danger of overstrain [writes Elizabeth Sloan Chesser in Perfect Health for Women and Children (McBride, Nast & Co.)]. All children are not naturally bright. Also, many children become mentally and physicallyoverstrained after an illness. The old idea that a child was bound to take the infectious diseases of childhood, and the sooner he got them over the better, was a terrible mistake.

After any infectious illness the child's physique is enfeebled, his store of energy more or less exhausted, his vitality impaired. He finds the lessons difficult and fatiguing; and, unless he has a restful convalescence and a prolonged holiday, his health may be permanently damaged.

The school child needs a liberal allowance of food, with plenty of fat and sugar to supply energy for work. Even at the risk of his being late, don't let him hurry through his meals, bolt and swallow the food at express speed, and thus lay the seeds of school dyspepsia. A star on the blackboard isn't worth it.

The child who is being overstrained intellectually almost invariably develops headaches and is listless and uninterested in his work. Round shoulders and spinal curvature are signs of physical overstrain and should never be neglected. The mere fact of allowing a child to carry his heavy school-bag habitually over one shoulder may induce lateral curvature. The boy or girl who sits at a badly constructed desk or reads in a poor light, so that the body is habitually twisted into abnormal positions, contracts curvature of the spine.

The child who complains of headache, who holds his book at an unusual distance or at a peculiar angle, or who shows any other sign of eyestrain, should have his eyes examined by an oculist.

---

A CHANCE FOR THE WAR CRIPPLE

ONE of the most gloomy and terrible things about war in the past was the plight in which it left crippled soldiers. Whether the world has grown better or not, nations have waked up to the fact that they owe something more than a pension to their war cripples. In the first months of the war, Germany, France, England, Italy, and Russia all began independently to start training schools for these men. One reason for this was that already, in industry, it had been found that it paid to re-educate workmen crippled by industrial accidents. A man without a hand, without one or both legs, even a blind man, could be made into a skilled workman, if the state was willing to take the trouble to train him carefully. After the war began calling out all the able-bodied men, these skilled crippled workmen were greatly in demand.

In The War Cripple (published by Columbia University) D. C. McMurtrie tells how the cripples of the Great War must be encouraged and educated to face life anew.

In the first place, he says, one must remember that the crippled soldier has been a long time away from home influence and environment; that he has been living in the open, free from the routine duties of the civilian, provided automatically with every necessity of life. It takes a great effort of readjustment, even in a sound man, to get back from this sort of thing to every-day life and an every-day job—to the feeling of social responsibility.

With returning health, initiative must be reawakened, responsibilities quickened, a heartened ambition must replace discouragement. We can go to him and truthfully say: "If you will yourself help to the best of your ability, we will so train you that your handicap will not prove a serious disadvantage; we will prepare you for a job at which you can earn as much as in your previous position. Meantime your family will be supported and maintained. You will be provided with a modern artificial limb so that a stranger would not know you are crippled. Finally, we will place you in a desirable job."

It is absolutely essential that the training should be thorough.

One of the most notable features of the work in France is the length of some courses in which the war cripples are trained. To even comparatively simple subjects instruction periods of twelve and eighteen months are allotted. This permits the men to obtain not only a theoretic education, but a fair degree of practical experience as well—an experience which is of especial necessity in restoring to the soldiers a confidence in their own competency.

THEY SAVED SOMETHING OUT OF $3 A YEAR

DURING Brusiloff's drive through Galicia, a thousand Jews, in a state of abject poverty—ragged, filthy, starved, and utterly bewildered—were torn at a moment's notice from their homes in the Galician plains and set down in the heart of the primeval forests of Siberia not far from the Arctic Circle—vaguely charged by the Russian government with espionage and revolutionary activities. They were diseased, incredibly ignorant, and weak with hunger, writes Fortier Jones in the Century Magazine. They existed aimlessly in the forest; but, curious to say, they were not hopeless. The Russian government allowed them something like three dollars a year to house, clothe, and feed themselves. Out of this all of them saved something each month against the day when they would be allowed to live in the world again. To do this they lived twenty in a small cabin, and subsisted entirely on fish and wild fowl.

This strange community—including as it did thieves, rascals, and cutthroats—was governed, and well governed, by a weak, undersized invalid.

"It was the clearest sort of case of fearlessness, unselfishness, and a wonderful personality pitted single-handed against brutal, criminal cowardice, with the odds astoundingly in favor of the weak, brave man. His name was Zweig, and there was scarcely five feet of him; but he had a fine brow, a dignified and even noble face, and his finely shaped hands twitched incessantly with nervous energy. He was a thorough Hebrew scholar. In Galicia he had been wealthy.

"When Zweig arrived in Chigara, he found the Jewish horde without a shepherd. There were quarrels hourly, resulting in fights and wounded men. The many wretched women were in a terrible situation, and the children were running wild.

"Zweig sat down in a tiny hut, with a wooden bench for a bed, and fish-bladder window-panes, and created a government out of nothing at all but his own inclination. He called together several of the more intelligent Jews, injected a little of his spirit and courage into them, and formed a governing committee which decreed that lawlessness must stop. Lawlessness stopped—Heaven knows why. A slight tap on the head would have ended Zweig, the forest would bury him, and certainly the Russian government would hardly have exerted itself to catch the murderer. This apparently made no difference to Zweig. Having fully established his government, when I saw him he was founding a public school."

TWO GERMAN GEMS

IF the Germans had only kept still we might have doubted the truth of what their enemies said about them. But it's their own letters and newspaper editorials that have had more influence in forming American public opinion than any other written words.

Here is a letter from the cultured Professor Lasson, quoted in a book of German gems entitled Out of Their Own Mouths (D. Appleton & Company):

"For months I have not written to a single foreigner; a foreigner is an enemy until he is proved to be a friend. It is impossible to remain neutral toward Germany and the German people. Either one looks upon Germany as the most perfect political creation known to history, or else one believes it should be destroyed, wiped out. No one but a German understands Germany. We are morally and intellectually superior to other nations; we are without equals. The same is true of our organization and our institutions.

"William II has always protected peace, justice, and honor, although his power would have enabled him to crush all opposition. The greater his successes, the more modest he becomes. His Chancellor, Herr von Bethmann-Hollweg, knows no higher cares than those of truth, loyalty, and right. Our army is, so to speak, a smaller model of "the intelligence and morality of the German people. We are forced to sacrifice our best and our noblest in a war against Russian brutes, English hirelings, and Belgian fanatics. We shall have no peace until these three European mischief-makers are crushed."

Add to this the following gem from the ten commandments issued by General von der Goltz to his soldiers:

"War is not a work of charity, and in the soldier's heart there is no compassion.

"The soldier must be hard. Grow hard, warriors.

"It is better to let a hundred women and children belonging to the enemy die of hunger than to let a single German soldier suffer."

SPANISH JOHNNY

—By Willa Sibert Cather

THE old West, the old time,
The old wind singing through
The red, red grass a thousand miles,
And, Spanish Johnny, you!
He'd sit beside the water-ditch
When all his herd was in,
And never mind a child, but sing
To his mandolin.
The big stars, the blue night,
The moon-enchanted plain;
The olive man who never spoke,
But sang the songs of Spain.
His speech with men was wicked talk—
To hear it was a sin;
But those were golden things he said
To his mandolin.
The gold songs, the gold stars,
The world so golden then;
And the hand so tender to a child
Had killed so many men.
He died a hard death long ago
Before the Road came in;
The night before he swung, he sang
To his mandolin.

IF ALL THE BIRDS DIED

"WERE all the birds to perish, men would speedily follow them. At the end of ten years the insects unchecked would have eaten every green thing." So writes Neltje Blanchan in Birds Worth Knowing. (Doubleday, Page & Company). Even in winter, there are some birds that "carry on," hunting out and destroying the eggs that are to hatch next summer's horde of insect pests, where they are hidden beneath the bark of trees. In this winter warfare the woodpecker does valiant service:

Inspecting each crevice where moth or beetle might lay her eggs, he works his way around a tree from top to bottom, now stopping to listen for the stirring of a borer under the smooth, innocent-looking bark, now tapping at a suspicious point and quickly drilling a hole where there is a prospect of heading off his victim. Using his bill as a chisel and mallet and his long tongue as a barbed spear to draw the grub from its nethermost hiding-place, he lets nothing escape him. Boring beetles, tree-boring caterpillars, timber ants, and other insects which are inaccessible to other birds, must yield their reluctant bodies to that merciless barbed tongue.

The cheerful chickadee is also an ally not to be despised, since "in a single day he will sometimes eat more than four hundred eggs of the apple plant-louse, while throughout the winter one will destroy an immense number of the eggs of the canker-worm."

NEGROES MAKE GOOD SOLDIERS

THE American Indian can not be made into a good modern soldier. He is too unadaptable. Above all, he will not fight under discipline. Francis Parkman, who wrote more interestingly than any one else on American Indians, tells how, even among the fierce and terrible Iroquois, the chief never had any real authority, but only what he could exert by force of personality.

The Negro, on the other hand, makes a good soldier.

Negro soldiers have distinguished themselves on several occasions (says a writer in the Journal of Heredity), and those that secure places in the ranks nearly always prove satisfactory. There were 178,975 Negroes in the Civil War on both sides, and, although they were not extensively in action, they performed very creditably. Their famous rescue of the Rough Riders at San Juan Hill is one example of their gallant bravery.

YOUTH CHALLENGES

By CLARENCE B. KELLAND

Illustration by Lucius W. Hitchcock

(Continued)

RUTH had continued to live in the apartment. It had not been her intention to do so. From the moment of reading Bonbright's succinct note she was determined to go back to the little cottage and to her mother. But she put it off for a day, then for another day; and the days grew into weeks and months. "To-morrow I'll move," she told herself each night; but next day she was no nearer to uprooting herself than she had been the day before.

Dulac's presence at her mother's was not the real reason that impelled Ruth to continue in the home Bonbright had made for her. It was something less tangible. She found the thought of leaving that spot unendurable; but she did not, dared not, seek in her heart for what made it unendurable.

For a week she scarcely ventured outside the door; then the loneliness, the lack of occupation, drove her out. She must be busy; for when she sat idly in a room her thoughts became torture. There were many sides to her affliction. First in her mind she placed the failure of her great project. She had wrecked her life for it without accomplishment. Second in the rank of her griefs stood the fact that she had been on the point of giving herself to Dulac. She would have gone with him, disregarding convention, breaking her vows of marriage. For that she despised herself—despised herself the more because she knew now that she did not love Dulac, that she had never loved him.

She accused herself bitterly for mistaking glamour for love. She knew now that Dulac had called from her nothing deeper than a foolish, girlish fascination. His personality, his work, his enthusiasm, had enmeshed her, had blinded her. Of this she was certain.

Third in the order of her griefs was the consciousness that she had caused Bonbright grief. She dealt ungently with herself because of it; for Bonbright had not deserved it at her hands. She could appreciate how good he had been to her, how solicitous, how patient, how tender. She remembered small thoughtfulnesses which had been a part of his daily conduct to her.

If Hilda Lightener, who came often and stayed long, had asked her if she missed Bonbright or were lonely without him, she would have denied it hotly. But Hilda did not ask. Ruth did not ask that question of herself. She knew she was lonely, miserable, and she thought she knew why—but Bonbright's absence had nothing to do with it.

"I can't stand this," Ruth said one evening. "I can't bear to stay here alone in these rooms. If there were work enough to keep me busy—but there's nothing."

"If you'd only go to the places I ask you to," said Hilda.

"No. I'm going to work. I'm going to find a place and work."

"But—" Hilda wondered what Bonbright would think.

"I know what you were going to say. He wouldn't want me to. Maybe he wouldn't—but if he knew he'd let me do it. I tell you, I've got to, Hilda."

"You've got to decide for yourself," Hilda admitted.

So Ruth became a job-hunter; and, because intelligent stenographers are by no means as plentiful as daisies in a July field, she was not long in finding employment. From that day life was easier. She found her wages ample to support herself and pay the rent of the apartment. Ample in that they sufficed. There was no surplus. So she folded and put away the weekly checks she received from Bonbright. She did not send them back to him, because, to her mind, that would have been a weekly slap in his face. But she would not cash them. There was a difference to her: probably there was a real difference.

Of Sundays Ruth often went driving with Hilda. Hilda noticed how closely her companion watched the sidewalks, how she scrutinized the passing crowds. It was as if she were looking for somebody. While daylight lasted, Hilda saw that Ruth sat by her windows, looking down at the street. Once Hilda ventured dangerously.

"Why do you always sit there watching folks go by?" she asked.

Ruth turned, looking at her strangely. "I—why, I don't know," she said.

ONCE Ruth asked for news of Bonbright. After that Hilda brought her news voluntarily. Not too frequently, but often enough, according to her notion. Between-times she gave Ruth plenty of time to wonder what was happening to her husband. Ruth knew that Hilda saw him often. She wondered if they talked about her, and what they said; but she never asked, nor did Hilda refer to such conversations. Indeed, they were few and sparing, for Bonbright could not be made to talk about his wife—even to her. But she gave Bonbright news of Ruth, just as she gave Ruth news of Bonbright.

Sometimes Hilda purposely tormented Ruth.

"Bonbright looks mighty thin," she said. "I think he's working too hard. If he keeps it up he'll make himself sick."

"Oh!" said Ruth—nothing more; but for the rest of that Sunday she was quiet—very quiet.

Once Hilda found her friend in a passion of tears; and when she sought the reason, she learned that Ruth had met Dulac on the street face to face and that he had spoken to her. He had told Ruth that he was staying in the city because of her; that he would not go without her. He had been careless of listening ears, not concealing his emotions.

"Well, he didn't hurt you, did he?"

"No," said Ruth.

"Then what are you making all the fuss about? He can't carry you off."

"He might have seen us together," said Ruth. "And—and it made me—remember—that terrible afternoon."

"What if Bonbright did see you together? Don't you suppose Bonbright thinks you are seeing him? Of course he does. What else would he think? Naturally, he supposes you are going to have your divorce when the year is up, and marry Mr. Dulac."

Hilda was merciless.

"Does he think that? Are you sure?"

Hilda shrugged her shoulders.

"He mustn't think it," Ruth said affrightedly. "Why, he—if he thought that—"

"If he thought—what?"

Ruth bit her lips and turned away.

"Nothing," she said. Then: "Can't you let him know? Not tell him, you know, but—sort of let him understand."

"If I see a good chance," Hilda said; but in her mind was the resolution that she would never see the chance.

"Does he—seem cheerful?" Ruth asked. "It's been quite a long time now—months. He—he must have gotten over—caring for me now. Do you think so?" Her voice was anxious, pleading.

Hilda could not hold out against that appeal. "No, silly, he hasn't. He isn't that sort. It's too bad."

"I—I wish he knew—about Mr. Dulac. He wouldn't think so—hard of me, maybe, if he knew I didn't —never did love Mr. Dulac."

"The only thing that would make any difference to him would be to know that you loved him," said Hilda.

Ruth had no answer, but she was saying to herself, with a sort of secret surprise: "If I loved him—if I loved him."

Presently she spoke aloud:

"You won't be angry with me, Hilda—you won't misunderstand; but—but won't you please—go away? Please. I—I don't want to see anybody. I want to be alone."

"Well, of all things!" said Hilda. But she was not offended. Her resemblance to her father was very faint indeed at that moment. She looked more like her, mother, softer, more motherly. She put on her hat and went away quietly.

"Poor Bonbright!" she was thinking. Then: "It's come to her. She's got a hint of it. It will come now with a rush."

Ruth sat in her chair without moving.

"If I loved him," she said aloud, and, then repeated it—"loved him."

She was questioning herself now, asking herself the meaning of things, of why she had been lonely, of why she had sat in her window peering down into the street—and she found the answer.

Did she love Bonbright? At last she dared to put the question squarely. Her answer came quickly.

"Oh, I do—I do!" she cried aloud. "I love him!" A surge of happiness welled up from her heart at the words. "I love him, she repeated, to hear the sound of them again.

The happiness was of short life. "I love him—but it's too late. It's always too late!" she sobbed. "I've lost him. He's gone."

THE girl who could give herself to a man she did not love for the cause was not weak; she did not lack resolution, nor did she lack the sublimity of soul which is the heritage of women. She had lost her happiness; she had wrecked her life; and until this moment there seemed no possibility of recovering anything from the wreckage. But she loved. There was a foundation to build from.

"If he loves me still—" she thought; and there hope was born.

"If I go to him—if I tell him—everything?" she asked herself, and in asking made her resolution. She would venture; she would dare, for her happiness and for his. She would go and she would say: "Bonbright, I love you. I have never loved anybody but you. You must believe me." He would believe her. That she knew. There was no reason why he should not believe her. There was nothing for her to gain now by another lie. "I'll make him believe," she said, and smiled and cried and smiled again. "Hilda will tell me where he lives, and I'll go to him—now."

---

At that instant Hilda was coming back to her; and Hilda looked grave, troubled. She walked slowly up the stairs and rapped on the door.

"Ruth," she called, "it's Hilda. May I come in now?"

Ruth ran to the door and threw it open.

"Come in. Come in." Her voice was a song. "Oh, Hilda!"

"Honey," said Hilda, holding her at arm's length, "his father is dead. They found him dead just after noon."

"Oh!" said Ruth. It was an instant before the full significance of this news was shown to her. Then she clutched Hilda with terror-stricken fingers. "No—no!" she cried. "It can't be. It mustn't be."

"Why—what is it? I—I didn't think you'd take it like this."

"I love him—I love Bonbright," Ruth said in a blank, dead voice. "I was going to him. I was going to tell him. And he would have believed. But now—he wouldn't believe. He would think I came—because his father was dead; because he—he was what I thought he was when I married him. Don't you see? He'd think I was coming to him for the same reason. He'd think I was willing to give myself to him—for that."

Hilda took the slight form in her arms and rocked her to and fro while she thought.

"Yes," she said sorrowfully, "you can't go to him now. It would look—oh, why couldn't his father have made a will as he was going to? If he'd left his old money to charity or something— We thought he had. But there has been no will. Everything is Bonbright's."

"I'm always—too—late," Ruth said quietly.

BONBRIGHT was in his own home again—in the house that had been his father's, and that was now his. He stood in the room that had been his since babyhood. He had not thought to stand there again; nor did he know that the room and the house were his own. He had come from the shops but a half hour before—had come from the room where his father lay across his desk, one arm outstretched, the other shielding his face.

It was inevitable that he should remember his father's threat to disinherit him. Now the thing had come—and it made little difference, for Bonbright had laid out his life along lines of his own. His father would be carried to the grave, would disappear from the scene—that was all.

He saw that the things were done which had to be done, and went home to his mother, dreading the meeting. He need not have dreaded it, for she met him with no signs of grief. If she felt grief, she hid it well. She was calm, stately, grave—but her eyes were not red with weeping, nor was her face drawn with woe. He wondered if his father's death meant as little to his father's wife as it did to his father's son. It seemed so.

There had been no affectionate passage between Bonbright and his mother. She had not unbent to him. He had hardly expected her to, though he had been prepared to respond.

Now he was in his room, with time to think—and there was strangely little to think of. He had covered the ground already. His father was dead.

A servant came to the door.

"Mr. Richmond wishes to speak with you on the 'phone, Mr. Bonbright," the man said. Bonbright walked to the instrument. Richmond had been his father's counsel for many years.

"Bonbright?" asked Mr. Richmond.

"Yes."

"I have just had the news. I am shocked. It is a terrible thing."

"Yes," said Bonbright.

"I will come up at once—if you can see me. The death of a man like your father entails certain consequences which can not be considered too soon. May I come?"

"If you think it is necessary," said Bonbright.

"It is necessary," said Mr. Richmond.

In twenty minutes Richmond was announced, and Bonbright went to meet him in the library. Richmond extended his hand with the appropriate bearing for such an occasion. His handshake was a perfect thing, studied, rehearsed, just as all his life was studied and rehearsed. He had in stock a manner and a handshake and a demeanor that could be instantly taken off the shelf and used for any situation that might arise. Richmond was a ready man, an able man. On the whole, he was a good man, as men go, but cut-and-dried.

"Your father was a notable man," he declared. "He will be missed."

Bonbright bowed.

"There will be a great deal for you to look after," said the lawyer, "so I will be brief. The mass of detail can wait—until after—er—until you have more leisure."

"I think, Mr. Richmond, it is my mother you wish to see, not myself. I thought you would understand my position. I am surprised that you do not, since you have been so close to my father. My father and I did not agree on matters that both of us considered vital. There were differences which could not be bridged. So I am here merely as his son, not as his successor in any way."

"I don't understand."

"My father," said Bonbright, with a trace of impatience, "disowned me and—disinherited I believe is the word—disinherited me."

"Oh, no. No—indeed, no. You are laboring under a misapprehension. You are mistaken. I am glad to be able to relieve your mind on that point. Nothing of the sort was done. I am in a position to know. I will admit that your father discussed such action; but the matter went no farther. Perhaps it was his intention to do as you say; but he put it off. He seemed to have a prejudice against making a will. As a matter of fact, he died intestate."

"You mean—"

"I mean that your father's wealth—and it was considerable, sir—will be disposed of according to the statutes of descent and distribution. In other words, having failed to dispose of his property by testament, the law directs its disposition. With the exception of certain dower rights, the whole vests in yourself."

HERE was something to think of. Here was a fresh uprooting of his life, another making over. Here was a new and astounding set of circumstances to which he must adapt himself. Bonbright experienced no leap of exultation. The news left him cold. Queerly, his thought in that moment was of Ruth and her great plan.

"If she had waited—" he thought.

No, he was glad she had not waited. He did not want her that way. It was not her he wanted, but her love. He thought bitterly that he would willingly exchange all that had become his for that one possession. He could have anything—everything—he wanted now but that.

"I am glad to be able to give you such news," said Mr. Richmond.

"I was thinking of something else," said Bonbright.

Richmond looked at the young man obliquely. He had heard that Bonbright was queer. This rumor seemed not without foundation. Richmond could not comprehend how a young man could think of anything else when he had just learned that he was several times a millionaire.

"Sit down," said Bonbright. "This, of course, makes a difference."

Richmond seated himself, and drew documents from his green bag. For half an hour he discussed the legal aspects of the situation, and explained to Bonbright what steps must be taken at once.

"I think that is all that will be necessary to-day," he said finally.

"Very well. There is no reason why affairs may not go on for a couple of days as they are—as if father were alive? Very well, then. Will you see to it? The—the funeral will be on Saturday. On Monday I shall be back in the office again."

"I hope you will call upon me for any assistance or advice you find necessary. Or for any service of whatsoever nature. Good afternoon. Will you convey my sympathy to Mrs. Foote?"

THE rest of that day, and of the days that followed it, Bonbright was trying to find the answer to the question: What does this mean to me? and its companion question: What shall I do with it?

One day he had his talk with his mother. Perhaps he was abrupt, but he dreaded that talk. Perhaps his diplomacy was faulty or lacking. Perhaps he made mistakes and failed to rise to the requirements of the conditions and of his relationship with her. He did his best.

"Mother," he said, "we must talk things over."

She sat silently, waiting for him to speak.

"Whatever you wish," he said, "I shall do—if I can."

"There is a qualification?" she said.

"Suppose you tell me what you want done," he said.

"I want you to come to your senses and realize your position," she said coldly. "I want you to get rid of that woman, and, after a decent interval, marry some suitable girl."

"I was discussing your affairs, mother, not mine. We will not refer to my wife."

"All I want," she said, "is what I am entitled to as your father's widow."

"This house, of course," he said. "You will want to stay here. I want you to stay here."

"And you?"

"I prefer to live as I am."

"You mean you do not care to come back here?"

"Yes."

She compressed her lips and regarded him with hostility. Then she shrugged her shoulders.

"I suppose I must make the best of it. I realize I am powerless." She realized it fully in that movement—realized that her son was a man, a man with force and a will, and that it would be hopeless to try to bring him to submit to her influence. "There is nothing for us to discuss. I shall ask for what I need."

"Very well," he said, not coldly, not sharply, but sorrowfully. There was no need to try to approach nearer to his mother. She did not desire it. In her the motherly instinct did not appear. She had never given birth to a son; what she had done was to provide her husband with an heir, and, that being done, she was finished with the affair.

He went from his mother to his own room, where he sat down at his desk and wrote a brief letter to his wife. It was not so difficult to compose as the other one had been; but it was equally succinct, equally barren of emotion. Yet he was not barren of emotion as he wrote it.

My Dear Ruth [he wrote]: My father is dead. This makes a very material change in my financial condition, and the weekly sum I have been sending you becomes inadequate. Hereafter a suitable check will be mailed you each week until the year expires. At that time I shall make a settlement upon you which will be perfectly satisfactory. In the meantime, should you require anything, you have but to notify me, or, if you prefer, notify Mr. Manley Richmond, who will attend to it immediately.

This letter he mailed himself. Not many days later it was returned to him with "Not Found" stamped upon it in red ink. Bonbright fancied there must be some error, so he sent it again by messenger. The boy returned, to report that the apartment was vacant, and that no one could furnish the present address of the lady who had occupied it. Bonbright sent to Ruth's mother, who could only inform him that Ruth had gone away, she did not know where, and such goings-on she never saw, and why she should be asked to bear more than she had borne was a mystery.

There was but one conclusion for Bonbright: Ruth had been too impatient to wait for the year to expire, and had gone away with Dulac.

Hilda could have corrected that belief, but he did not see Hilda—had not seen her; for his new duties and new problems and responsibilities occupied him many more hours a day than any labor union or legislature would have permitted an employee to be required to work. His hours of labor did not stop with the eighth, nor with the tenth. There were days when they began with daylight and continued almost to daylight again.

RUTH had not gone with Dulac. She was hidden away. Not even Hilda Lightener knew where she was, but Hilda knew why she had gone. Hilda knew Ruth had crept away because she had suffered the hardest to bear of all wounds—the crushing of hope.

She found a cheap decent boarding-house among laboring people. She found a new position. That was all. She hid away with her love, and coddled it and held it up for herself to see. Even in her darkest moment, she was glad she loved.

For a few days after the beginning of his reign, Bonbright remained quiescent. It was not through uncertainty, nor because he did not know what he was going to do. It was because he wanted to be sure of the best way of doing it. Very little of his time was spent in the room that had been his father's and was now his own. He walked about the plant, studying, scrutinizing, appraising, comparing.

He was aware that the men eyed him morosely. They still looked at him as the sort of person his father had made him appear, and viewed his succession as a calamity. The old régime had been bad enough, they told each other; but this young man, with his ruthlessness, with what seemed to be a savage desire to trample workingmen into unresisting, unprotesting submission—this would be intolerable. So they scowled at him, and

---

in their homes talked to their wives with apprehension of dark days ahead.

He felt their attitude. It could not be helped—yet. His work could not be started with the men; it must start otherwhere. He would come to the men later, in good time, in their proper order.

On his third morning in the office, he had called Malcolm Lightener on the telephone.

"Is your proposition to manufacture ten thousand engines still open?"

"Yes."

"I'll take the contract—providing we can arrive at terms."

"I'll send over blue-prints and specifications—and my cost figures. Probably our costs will be lower than yours."

"They won't be," said Bonbright, with a tightening of his jaw. "Can you lend me Mershon for a while?"

Mershon was Lightener's engineer, the man who had designed and built his great plant.

"I can't, but I will."

"As soon as he can arrange it, please. I want to get started."

"He'll be there in half an hour."

MERSHON came—a gray, beefy, heavy-faced man, with clear, keen, seeing eyes.

"Mr. Lightener has lent you to me, Mr. Mershon. It was a tremendous favor, for I know what you can do."

Mershon nodded. He was a man who treasured up words. He must have had a great store of them laid by, for in his fifty years he had used up surprisingly few.

"This is what I want," Bonbright said. "First, I want a plant designed with a capacity of twenty thousand Lightener engines. You designed Lightener's engine plant—so you're about the one man to give me one that will turn out more engines with less labor and at lower cost than his. That's what I want."

Mershon's eyes lighted. "It will cost money," he said.

"I'll find the money; you give me the plant," Bonbright said. "And, second, I want a survey made of this present plant. I know a lot of it is junk, but I'm not competent to say how much. You will know what to do. If I have to junk the whole outfit, I'll do it. I don't want to waste money, but I want these mills to be the equal of any mills in the country—not only in efficiency, but as a place to work. I want them safe. I want the men considered. Give them light and air. Wait till you see our wash-rooms!" He shrugged his shoulders. "It isn't enough to have the best machines," he said. "I want the men to be able to do the best that's in them. You understand?"

Mershon nodded.

"The next room is yours."

Bonbright pointed toward his old office, the one it had been the family custom to close on the accession of the heir apparent.

"You'll find it large enough. If you need more room, ask for it. Get what assistants you need."

"No more interruption of production than necessary," said Mershon.

"Exactly. And we need that new plant in a hurry. I've taken a contract to make ten thousand engines for Mr. Lightener this year."

It was that day that he called Rangar into the room. Rangar had been uneasy since his employer had died. He had been an important figure under the old order. He wondered what would happen to him now—more especially, if Bonbright had a notion of some of his duties under Bonbright's father. He was not kept in suspense.

"Mr. Rangar," said Bonbright, "I have been looking through the files. Some of your duties have become clear to me; I was familiar with others. Perhaps my father required a man like yourself. I do not. I shall direct the cashier to give you a check for six months' salary."

"You mean—"

"Exactly what I say."

"But—you don't understand the business. Who is going to run it while you learn?"

"I don't want to know how this business was run. It's not going to be run that way. There's nothing you could teach me, Mr. Rangar. Good afternoon."

Rangar went white with rage. But he dared not voice it. It was not in Rangar's nature to be open, to fight without cover. If he spoke, the check for six months' salary might be withdrawn; so, uttering none of the venom that flooded to his lips, he went away. Rangar was the sort of man who vows to get even.

THAT evening Bonbright sat in his window and watched the army of his employees surge out of the big gate and fill the street—five thousand of them. More than ever he realized it now—for he was their overlord. It was he who gave them the work that kept them alive. And he knew that in every one of those five thousand breasts burned resentment toward him. He knew that their most friendly feeling toward him was suspicion. He must turn their resentment, their bitterness, their suspicion, into trust. An older, more experienced man might have smiled at Bonbright—at his daring to conceive such a possibility. But Bonbright dared to set himself the task of bringing it about.

If his men had grievances, he would meet with them individually, or committees sent by them—committees of themselves. He would not treat with so-called professional labor men. Whatever differences should arise must be settled between his men and himself—with no outside interference. This was a position from which nothing would move him. It will be seen that he was separated by vast spaces from socialism.

He called together his superintendents and department foremen and took them into his confidence regarding his plans for improving and enlarging the plant. They came, if not with an air of hostility, at least with reserve; for they were nearer to the men than they were to Bonbright. They shared the prejudices of the men. Some of them went away from the meeting with all of their old prejudices and with a new belief that Bonbright added hypocrisy to his other vices; some withheld judgment.

When he was done describing the plans for the factory, he said;

"There is one thing I want to speak about. It is as vital as the other. We have recently gone through a strike that has caused bitterness toward this institution on the part of the men. There has been especial bitterness toward myself. I have no defense of myself to make. It is too late to do that. If any of you men know, the facts—you know them. On that point I have nothing to say.

"To-morrow notices will be posted in every department stating that my office door is open to any man who works for me—any man may come to me with complaint or with suggestion at any time."

As they went back to their departments the men who left the meeting discussed Bonbright, as he knew they would and hoped they would.

"It's a four-flush," declared one old fellow hotly.

"I don't know. Wait and see," said another. "He looked like he meant it."

Wait and see! That was the general attitude. They took nothing on trust, but put it squarely up to Bonbright to prove himself by his actions.

Mershon came into the office.

"How about this construction work?" he asked. "Need an army of bricklayers. What about the unions?"

Was this question coming up so quickly? Bonbright frowned. His attitude toward the unions must become public, and would inevitably raise another obstacle between himself and the men; but he was determined on the point.

"A man has a right to join the Masons or the Knights of Columbus or the Bricklayers' Union," he said presently. "That's for him to say. But when he comes to work here he comes as an individual."

"Open shop?"

"Yes."

"You won't recognize any union? I want to know how I stand with them at the beginning."

"I'll recognize no union," said Bonbright.

The card of a young man from Richmond's office was brought in. Bonbright sent word for him to be admitted.

"I came about that Hammil accident case," said the young man. "Hammil was hurt yesterday pretty badly, and the report makes it look as if we'd be stuck if the thing goes to a jury."

"I know nothing about it," said Bonbright, with a little shock.

IT was possible, then, for a man to be maimed or killed in his own plant, and news of it to reach him after days or perhaps never. He made a note to rectify that state of affairs.

"You mean that this man Hammil was hurt through our fault?"

"I'm afraid a jury would say so." The young man explained the accident in detail. "He complained about the condition of his machine, and his foreman told him he could stick to his job there or quit."

"Forced him to work on an unsafe machine or quit?"

"Yes."

Bonbright stared at his blotter a moment.

"What did you want to see me about?"

"We'd better settle. Right now I can probably run up and put a wad of bills under Hammil's nose and his wife's, and it'll look pretty big. Before some ambulance-chaser gets hold of him.

"Your idea is that we could settle for less than a jury would give him?"

The young man laughed.

"A jury'd give him four or five thousand, maybe more. Doctor says the injury is permanent. I've settled more than one like it for three or four hundred."

"The man won't be able to work again?"

"Won't be good for much."

"And we're responsible!" Bonbright said it to himself, not to the young man. "Is this thing done often—settling these things for—what we can squeeze them down to?"

"Of course."

"Where's Hammil?"

"At the General Hospital."

Bonbright got up and went to the closet for his hat.

"Come on," he said.

"You're not going up there, are you?"

"Yes."

"But—but I can handle it all right, Mr. Foote. There's no need to bother you."

"I've no doubt you can handle it—maybe too well," said Bonbright.

THEY were driven to the hospital and shown up to Jim Hammil's room. His wife was there, pale, tearless, by his bedside. Jim was bandaged, groaning in agony. Bonbright's lips lost their color.

He walked to the bedside. "Jim," he said, "I am Mr. Foote."

"I—know—you," said the man, between teeth set to hold back his groans.

"And I know you," said his wife: "I know you! What do you want here?"

"If you think I'm—goin'—to sign—one of them—releases—you're damn—mistaken," moaned the man.

"Jim," said Bonbright, "you needn't sign anything. What's done can't be mended."

"Mr. Foote," protested the young lawyer.

"I'll attend to this," said Bonbright shortly. "It's between Jim and me. I'll make it as nearly right as it can be made. First, we'll have you out of this ward into a room. As long as you are laid up, your wife shall have your full pay every week, and then you and I will have a talk to see what can be done. Only don't worry. You mustn't worry, Mrs. Hammil."

Hammil uttered a sound that was intended for a laugh.

"You can't catch me," he said in a dreadful voice. "I'm—up to—them sharp tricks. You're lyin'. Git out of here, both of you. You're—jest here—to cheat me."

"You're wrong, Jim."

"I know—you and—your kind," Jim said, trying to lift himself on his elbow. "I know—what you—done durin'—the strike. I had a baby—and she—died. You killed her!" His voice rose almost to a scream.

"Better go," said a nurse. "He's hurting himself."

Bonbright gazed at her blankly.

"How can I go?" he asked. "He won't believe me? He's got to believe me!"

"You lie—you lie!" Hammil cried. "I won't talk—to you. My lawyer'll—do my talkin'."

Bonbright paused a moment.

"I'll do what I promised, Jim."

"You—lie. You lie!" the man called after him; and Bonbright heard the words repeated again and again as he walked down the long corridor.

To be continued next week

This is His Week

THOMAS CARLYLE ascended painfully from the condition of a mason's son in a poor Scotch village to the undisputed primacy of his day in English letters. At fifteen he walked all the way from the Highland village, Ecclefechan, where he was born, to Edinburgh, to enter the University. He had a pack of clothes on his back and a few pounds in his pocket to pay for his first quarter's tuition. The stories that are related of his immense reading during his university days are almost fabulous.

"There is a boy of sixteen in my form who has read, so it seems to me, more than all the men of letters, thinkers, preachers, philosophers, historians, and ladies of leisure in the United Kingdom put together have read—classic, medieval, and present," wrote one of his masters to a friend in London.

It was not until Carlyle was thirty-five, however, and had spent many years of drudgery in teaching, that the furious, fiery style that has been called "Carlylese" began to develop. At thirty his writing was precise, but colorless, without character or form. Then—"overnight," as he tells us—the inability to express himself as he wished to was stricken away. "My mind followed my hand and my hand followed my mind. I never had any more trouble in writing."

After that Carlyle wrote prolifically. He pleaded for the education of the masses, and ceaselessly arraigned the "selfish and irresponsible individualism of the few." He was a fierce opponent of "individualism," and invented the word. He declared that the "individualism" that created Napoleon (and that has now created the Kaiser) would one day destroy the human race. Through his translations of Goethe England discovered German literature.

Carlyle was the first to advocate emigration as a solution to some of the social ills of the British Isles. To some degree, at least, the great influx of Scotch Irish into this country which started in 1846 began as a result of his essay, "Emigration."

THE DRAYMAH

Photographs from the Peter Pan Film Company

ARE THERE ANY MORE AT HOME LIKE THESE?

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WIVES WHO WORRY

How Do You Know You're Hitting the Target?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

FOR several years a big railroad company had been promoting the settlement by Northern farmers of great areas in the cut-over lands of the South. There had been much activity and expenditure, and the officers felt that results had been good.

A new manager took charge of this work. He proposed that it be concentrated on certain sections of the road, instead of being general promotion of whole counties and States.

"Oh, that would never do!" said the officers. "We can't antagonize one community by promoting another. Promote all, and let folks settle where they want to."

"How do you know you're getting enough settlers to pay for your work?" asked the new manager.

"Oh, general results show that," was the reply.

But the new man was skeptical. He wrote to several thousand persons who had asked for information in the preceding three years, and found that only one in ten ever settled in the South, and fewer than half of those on the company's line.

These facts led to a new campaign. The railroad concentrated on development of a few sections where local people were willing to coöperate, helping new settlers get started right when they came in. That brought results which could be figured in actual business, and at the same time overcame all danger of community jealousy. For, if a community complained that it was being neglected, the railroad simply said:

"All right; when you help us to do this work properly, we'll help you."

What Was Wrong with the American Housewife

THERE is much long-range artillery I practice in business nowadays, and the target is usually out of sight—thousands of miles off, very often, with our national spread of business.

Much good effort is wasted through neglect to watch the target for real hits. Counting the hits often calls for ingenuity, and sometimes expert assistance. But it is well worth while.

Some years ago a big tinware concern called in a domestic science expert, a woman, to help it find the target. Something was wrong with the American housewife, the general manager said. They made lots of twenty-four-inch and thirty-six-inch bread-pans as a regular part of their line, and formerly these sold well. But now people left them on the hardware dealers' hands. The American housewife was too lazy to bake bread, as her mother had, the manager thought—she would rather read novels and go to movies. How could they reform her and teach her to buy bread-pans?

The woman expert made a tour of investigation, and reported that the American housewife still baked plenty of bread. But with smaller homes and more costly fuel had come smaller stoves. The big bread-pans wouldn't go into the ovens!

"But we've got seventy-five thousand dollars tied up in machinery for making those pans!" protested the manager. It seemed like a personal grievance.

"All right," said the expert. "If you don't care to scrap that machinery, just keep on making bread-pans that women can't use!"

He scrapped the machinery—his target had been re-located.

He Located the Target

AN advertising man landed a fine position, not long ago, by accurately locating the target, and refusing to fire in a direction where it was not.

His was just a probation job at first, handling the advertising expenditure of a big store, but one in which nobody had ever made a success as advertising manager.

He, however, discovered what was wrong the very first week—half the expenditure was being wasted in announcements that the proprietor inserted in social club programs, political souvenirs, and other schemes.

To make advertising pay, of course, that money was needed in legitimate mediums—newspapers, signs, posters. The proprietor admitted that scheme advertising might not be good in itself, but said it made people "friendly."

On the basis that only those people were true friends of the store who bought goods there, the candidate for the advertising job went through the membership lists of several social clubs, and demonstrated by sales records that not merely did they buy nothing at that store, but they would save a nickel by going to bargain stores round the corner which never advertised in their schemes at all. The proprietor could not dodge these facts. He changed his policy, and made success feasible.

In another case, a big corporation was all ready to enter the market with a mechanical convenience for household use. The public had manifested great interest in such devices. They had been widely exploited.

This company, however, had something that was much better and cheaper. The forty-two centimeter guns of advertising and selling were all ready to blaze away. But an expert said: "Hold on! Don't begin now!"

By facts and figures he showed that the industry had been through a boom of over-selling and misrepresentation; that the public was now suspicious instead of eager; and that it would be better to wait, a while until bad memories of wrong dealing had settled.

This is a big company. It could afford to wait. It did wait—two years. By that time conditions had improved, and the target was in range again; and every shot counted.

Janitor for Art's Sake

ONE cold night some years ago, a tenant in a Chicago apartment-house drew courage from his shivering to go down and have it out with the janitor. He approached the janitor's cellar room with no gentle step—but the speech he had been preparing all the way down stopped at the first word.

For the janitor was bending over a rough sketch in which upflung waves stood out against a lowering sky; and so absorbed was he in putting in the last touches that he had not observed the angry lodger's approach.

Fortunately, this particular apartment dweller was as unusual as his janitor. He knew enough about such things to see that the sketch had power, that it was an effective treatment of one of the most difficult subjects—water in motion. He advised the janitor to seek an interview with Anders L. Zorn, the distinguished Swedish painter, who was then in Chicago.

That janitor was Charles Edward Hallberg, a Swedish sailor who had given up sailoring to try janitoring that he might have greater opportunity to make his sketches—always of the sea.

Hallberg thanked the lodger, and hurried off to stoke up. Next day he carried his sketches to Zorn. But Zorn, almost without looking up, said he was too busy to look at sketches.

"All right," answered Hallberg. "I thought it would do no harm to try."

His accent betrayed a fellow countryman. Moreover, something in the discouraged tone touched Zorn, and he called Hallberg back. Zorn studied the sketches a while and then held out his hand.

"Hallberg, you say your name is? Well, Mr. Hallberg, you will be a great marine artist some day."

Figuratively at least, Hallberg changed his cellar for a garret, and went to work. To-day he ranks among the best marine artists of his time. One of his recent pictures, "The Cloud," had a place of honor at the Spring Exhibition of the Chicago Institute, and won the Mrs. Julius Rosenwald prize. Paintings from his brush hang in the National Museum at Stockholm and in the Gothenburg Museum. His latest picture, "The Atlantic in War-Time," reproduced here, was shown recently at the Swedish Art Exhibition in Chicago.

Mr. Hallberg often speaks of his days as a janitor, but he has never been heard to express regret that he let the fires die down on the cold night when he froze his first critic into action.

Kiffin Rockwell's Letters to His Brother

Continued from page 3

say he is killed, but we don't believe it), got full on Chapman's back, shot his machine to pieces, and wounded Victor in the head. It is just a scratch, but a miracle that he wasn't killed.

Part of the commands on Chapman's machine were broken, but he landed by holding them together with his hand. The Germans came over yesterday and to-day and bombarded us. I didn't see them yesterday. To-day I went up, but my motor didn't work when I left the ground; one of the "boogies" was broken, so I was unable to get their height. There were four machines in this escadrille that didn't work, because we had been doing too much flying beforehand. The others had fights with the Germans, but didn't bring any down, so the escadrille is not in very good favor.

Navarre was wounded to-day. Then I saw a pilot and his passenger burned up in a machine, but that was the fault of the pilot.

I had thought beforehand that yesterday and to-day I would try my darndest to kill one or two Germans for the boys who got it this time last year; but, as I say, I had no luck. Am tired out now. Have been out four different times to-day, and all the time going up and down. One time I dropped straight down from 4050 meters to 1800 meters on a boche, but he got away. It tires one a lot, the change in heights and manoeuvering. Will close, with love.

KIFFIN.

On June 17 Clyde Balsley, who had not been long with the escadrille, was crippled for life in a heroic combat against an overwhelming number of boche aëroplanes. Kiffin wrote me of the fight:

Monday.
Dear Paul:

Well, yesterday was a rather bad day for us. You know we thought Balsley rather young and inexperienced, but ever since he came out to the escadrille I liked him better and better every day, as I saw he had plenty of good will to work, and was not afraid.

Yesterday we all left for an offensive barrage over the lines. We were all supposed to follow the captain; but only Prince, Balsley, and I did so.

We four were over the lines when we ran across about forty boches in one little sector, flying at different heights. At the top where we were there were twelve or fifteen little aviatiks de chasse, which go just as fast as we do, and in addition carry a passenger. The pilot shoots as we do, but the man back of him has a second gun, which can cover the rear and sides.

We were only four, and over the German lines, but we stayed close together, and for ten or fifteen minutes circled around the boches, they shooting at us nearly all the time from four or five hundred meters. Finally we saw our chance. One of their machines crossed over between us and our lines, while all the others were in the rear of us.

I saw either Prince or Balsley go over in a regular death-drop, and thought to myself that he was killed. Then I lost sight of another of our machines, and only

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the captain and I were left. He signaled to me, so we turned back and finally came home, thinking the other two were killed. Prince came home soon after. He had had to drop straight down, owing to a boche getting the upper hand on him and putting a bullet through his casque.

Poor Balsley seems to have dived on one boche, gotten close to him, and when he tried to shoot his gun it jammed after one shot. He turned off, and as he did so a bullet caught him in the hip and exploded on hitting the bone. Balsley fell straight down, but luckily had his feet strapped to the commands, and was able to readdress the machine and land with one foot. He landed just inside of our lines, and really had a close call. His machine was completely smashed on landing.

At present we are not sure of his wound. It may turn out to be only a slight thing, but several pilots have died from being wounded like that and getting blood poison. He has been proposed for the Médaille Militaire for his bravery.

Love from

KIFFIN.

SIX days later, Death, who ever stalks the airman, laid his sorrow-bringing hand on the American escadrille. It was gallant, wonderful, unforgettable Victor Chapman whom the inevitable conqueror touched and called as his first chosen from the little group. This is how Victor fell, as told by my brother:

Friday.
Dear Paul:

Well, I feel very blue to-night. Victor was killed this afternoon. I was the guard here to-day, so didn't go out over the lines. The captain, Victor, Prince, and Lufbery went out this afternoon. Inside the German lines they attacked five German machines. The captain, Prince, and Lufbery came out all right and came home. But Victor didn't show up.

We were beginning to feel uneasy, when a Maurice Farman pilot telephoned. He said he saw one of the Nieuports suddenly

dive straight down, and then the machine break to pieces in air. I figure that Victor was probably hit by a bullet, and that also some of the cables of his machine were cut by bullets. When he was hit he probably fell forward on his "broom-stick" (or whatever you call in English the controller), that would cause the machine to dive.

He fell inside the German lines. We are trying to notify his parents in America. I would like to see every paper in the world pay a tribute to Victor. There is no question but that he had more nerve than all the rest of us put together. We were all afraid that he would be killed, and I, rooming with him, have begged him every night to be more prudent. He would fight every boche he saw, no matter where or at what odds, and I am sure that he wounded and killed several of them. I have seen him twice right on top of a German, shooting; but it was always in their lines, where it is impossible to tell always when you bring a machine down.

Victor's head wound was not healed, yet he insisted on flying anyway and would not take a rest. Since the war he never received anything in the way of decorations; yet for the one month here he was proposed for two citations, à l'ordre de l'armée, and for the Médaille Militaire.

As I say, he and I had roomed together and flown very much together; so I rather feel it, as I had grown to like him so very much. I am afraid it is going to rain to-morrow; but if not Prince and I are going to fly about ten hours, and will do our best to kill one or two Germans for Victor.

Much love.

KIFFIN.

Victor's last citation reads:

Victor Chapman, sergeant-pilot with Escadrille N. 124, a fighting pilot who was a model of energy, daring, and bravery, winning the admiration of all his comrades. Seriously wounded in the head, June 17, he asked that he be not interrupted in his service. Several days later he threw himself forward to attack a number of enemy aëroplanes, and found a glorious death in the course of the encounter.

How many air fights were fought over Verdun by the American flyers during July and August I do not know. Kiffin had in July some forty officially reported combats. Lieutenant de Laage was his constant camarade de combat, and together they must have accounted for a goodly number of boche machines. Near the close of August Kiffin was given the following citation in army orders:

Kiffin Yates Rockwell, sergeant-pilot with Escadrille N. 124; enlisted for the duration of the war. Having entered the aviation de chasse, he revealed himself immediately to be a pilot of the very first order, of admirable daring and bravery. He never hesitates to attack the enemy, no matter what may be the number of adversaries he encounters, usually obliging the enemy, by the skill and sharpness of his attack, to abandon the struggle. Has destroyed two enemy machines. Has rendered the most valuable services to the aviation de chasse of the army by unsparing efforts during four months at Verdun.

Prince, Lufbery, and Hall also, had many successful combats during these months, each destroying one or more German machines.

ALONG in August, Jim McConnell was painfully injured in a bad smash-up. He had been patrolling the air with Kiffin and Norman during a hot battle around Fleury and Thiaumont, keeping the boche observation machines from doing their work. The bodies kept lurking well within their own lines and under protection of their anti-aircraft batteries, waiting for the French machines to go home. But the flyers for France stuck to their post until darkness began to fall and it was too late for any observing to be done. Then they started to return to camp by starlight.

Kiffin and Norman got in without unusual incident; but on the way home Jim's motor went wrong. He started descending, trying to pick a safe landing in the strange country. He was flying very low because of the darkness, and ran into some telegraph wires. His machine was dumped over and smashed up in a deep road-bed. Poilus ran out from a near-by camp, expecting to pick up a dead pilot, but Jim was seemingly all right, except for a few insignificant bruises.

About the end of the month, he and Kiffin came to Paris on seven days' leave. Jim's back grew worse and worse, and often he sat up all night, unable to sleep because of the pain. Of a morning Kiffin and I had to help him put on his clothes, and he could walk only with the support of a cane. Yet, when his seven days were up, he insisted on returning to the escadrille. When he got there he was unable to walk at all, and the captain at once sent him off to a hospital.

Kiffin celebrated his return from permission by knocking down another boche machine, which fell in the first-line trenches near Vauquois. He wrote me a few lines about it:

Saturday, Sept. 9, 1916.
Dear Paul:

Just a few lines. We have not yet left,

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but hope to be in Paris in a couple of days

This morning I attacked a boche at 3000 meters high; killed the observer the the first shot. Then my machine-gun jammed; but while fixing it I followed the boche machine down to 1800 meters, and riddled it with bullets. At that height I was attacked at close range by two other German machines. I succeeded in getting back home. My first machine fell just in the German trenches, and our artillery fired on it.

Love.

KIFFIN.

For this victory and his previous good work, Kiffin was proposed for a second lieutenancy.

On September 11 the entire escadrille arrived in Paris, having been ordered to leave the Verdun sector and return to Luxeuil. The day after their arrival in Paris, Kiffin, Thaw, Hill, Johnson, and Hall bought as a mascot a four-months old lion cub which they named "Whisky."

Early the morning of Sunday, September 17, I again went with a party of aviators en route for the front. This time they were Kiffin, Lufbery, Masson, Paul Pavelka, and Robert Rockwell. The two last named were new arrivals to the escadrille. As Kiffin gave me a farewell hand-shake he said:

"Cheer up; I'll be back again soon on permission."

Six days later he was killed in aërial combat, over Rodern, in reconquered Alsace.

At the very hour of his death I received the last letter he sent me, written Wednesday, September 20, on his twenty-fourth birthday:

Wednesday.
Dear Paul:

Received your letter this morning. The weather has been cold and bad ever since we arrived here. I have gotten my machine, which is the best they have, and have fixed it up with two machine-guns. But I don't expect much work here, as I fear the weather is going to be bad most of the time.

I found a number of people glad to see me back, and I think I can get along all right if we are forced to stay here for the winter.

At present am staying at this hotel, but am looking around for a nice, quiet little place to live, unless Captain Happe tries to make us live at the field, which would be foolish.

Love.

KIFFIN.

And this is his final citation in army orders:

Kiffin Yates Rockwell, an American pilot who ceaselessly won the admiration of his chiefs and his comrades by his sangfroid, his courage, and his daring. Killed in the course of an aërial combat September 23, 1916.

IF in some shadow-land my brother reads these lines, I hope that he will not be annoyed or angry that I have spoken more often of him than I have of his beloved comrades. In life Kiffin detested being written about. He used to request me time and again to do what I could to keep his name out of the newspapers. He often stated that his French comrades did daily, without one word of praise, much more than he did, and that it was not just that the exploits of the American aviators be given such prominence.

The only time he ever mentioned death was in a letter to his mother, written just before he went to the front as an aviator. In this letter he said:

"If I die, I want you to know that I have died as every man ought to die—fighting for what is right. I do not feel that I am fighting for France alone, but for the cause of all humanity—the greatest of all causes."

The death of these four aviators had a great moral effect in America, and I firmly believe did more than anything else to make the people of the United States pro-Ally, and to induce them to side with France and her Allies in force as well as in sympathy.

The highest tribute I can pay to Victor, to Kiffin, to Norman, and to Jim, I pay when I say that each was worthy of the other.

He Has Charge of One Third of the World's Gold

HERE'S a man who has not bought a Liberty bond, and who won't buy one. A slacker? Not by considerable margin. He hasn't and won't because he can't. And yet, he has in his vaults one third of all the gold in the world.

The answer to the riddle is that his job won't let him buy a government bond. Who is he? Well, his signature is familiar to you, even if you haven't recognized him by the picture, which shows him sitting on the job. You'll find that signature in the lower right-hand corner of that new five-dollar bill you managed to save out of the week's pay after settling with the butcher, the baker, and the gas-maker. The signature in a clear hand says, "John Burke"; and in fine type underneath you may read, "Treasurer of the United States."

John Burke is a Progressive Democrat from North Dakota. We say progressive because he progressed from a small judgeship in North Dokota to Governor of the State, and nearly progressed into the Presidential candidacy, but finally into his present office in Washington. He is custodian of all of the government funds, and for his watchfulness receives eight thousand dollars annually; and he can't add one cent to that amount from all the millions and millions he has under his guardianship.

He is the only bonded official in the Treasury Department, and is directly responsible for the United States Treasury, which makes his position the most responsible in the world.

John Burke is very busy these days: he cashes all the treasury warrants issued to England, France, Belgium, Russia, and Italy.

Leavings

—Continued from page 7

presently she slumped into dejected silence. From this Clarissa roused her:

"Say, kiddo, come out of your trance. If you and your hot-shot friend don't mind, I'm going back with you to-night."

"Going back? To Mrs. Bosey's?"

"You've named the joint—going back while the going's good. This show is on the slide, and your little Egyptian wise guy wants to get back to Broadway."

"Grand!" cried Billy. "Come ahead!"

And Lisa feebly echoed, "Grand!"

NEXT morning, while Clarissa was seeking dill pickles at the delicatessen, Lisa climbed on a chair before the mirror to discover if possible wherein she was lacking. The silhouette was perfect. The skirt could not have been shorter or tighter, the boots higher, the waved hair smoother. From head to foot, she was a little Broadway ultra-fashionplate. But her face was all wrong.

It was a lovely face, mild-eyed and ingenuous, the kind of face that looks out from under garden hats in sheltered, happy country places. On Broadway it had no excuse for being, utterly lacking as it was in the adamantine capacity for self-preservation that characterized Rissy's handsome countenance.

"You need dash," Lisa told herself scornfully. "Rissy's right: I've got no punch nor pep."

In pursuit of "pep," she purchased some of the strong and expensive perfume used by Clarissa, and, when Billy came, pretended to smoke a cigarette. It was useless. Billy did not like to see her smoke, and promptly took the cigarette away—then gave his entire attention to Clarissa, who was lounging on the sofa, frowsy-haired and in a torn dressing-sacque.

Still Lisa did not despair. She devoured Miss Florence Fairchild's advice by day and besmeared herself with cold cream by night, hoping against hope. Billy was constantly with her, but all he could talk of was Clarissa's charms. As for Clarissa, when at home she beamed upon Billy; but she was not often at home, being much occupied, she told them, doing vaudeville skits in private houses "for charity." She was so often away, in fact, that Lisa was thinking of building an addition to the Harlem home—a den for Billy to study in—the very afternoon that he came with the news of his engagement.

"Say, sister,"—he swung to the step of the bus, looking curiously dazed, but vastly proud of himself,—"if the bus fills up and you can make a sneak, will you go with me to buy a ring? I want to get a diamond for Rissy, a number one stone."

"A ring? For Rissy?"

The Harlem flat came crashing down, and the hope-springs-eternal look died on Lisa's face. However, she managed to hold her head high.

"Rissy's so beautiful," she gasped admiringly.

"She s a wiz," cried Billy. "Believe me, she is."

IT was not Rissy's or Billy's fault that Lisa had no "pep"; but, for all that, she decided to leave Mrs. Bosey's. She told Rissy she must be nearer her work, and took a room down on Ninth Avenue, where the rumbling of the L was an effective barrier to excessive retrospection. She had been engaged in the forlorn business of "forgetting" only two days, however, when Billy McGregor appeared.

"Say, Lisa, I came to ask you about Rissy." Billy was curiously perplexed and harassed. "Rissy's a real artist—just wrapped up in her work. She's out every evening. I want to plan some place for

---

us to live; but I can't make her take any interest in a home."

"Rissy was born in a boarding-house," Lisa suggested. "Maybe that makes people different about homes."

"Well, it don't do her any good, this running around half the night. Then she's out buying clothes all day. I thought maybe if I got the home started—waht kind of place does a girl like, Lisa?"

Lisa swallowed hard. "Oh, I don't know, Billy. A little flat, maybe, in Harlem."

"I want the best for Rissy—when a fellow gets a queen like that he wants the best. You'll come with me to choose it, Lisa?"

"Oh no, Billy—I can't—I'm awful busy."

"Course you're busy," Billy agreed absently. "But be a sport and come on. I tell you, I'm worried about Clarissa—that girl's wrapped up in her art. And what about furniture, Lisa? I want the best, you know."

All Lisa's protests were overruled, and they went together to choose the flat and the furniture.

Clarissa went once to see the flat, and was loud in praise to Billy and gratitude to Lisa; but after that she was always too busy to visit it, declaring sweetly that "anything Billy liked was good enough for her."

LISA thought Rissy's devotion to art and charity most commendable, and found great pleasure in buying for the flat, except for one strange circumstance: Billy, the gay and mighty, Billy, who had won the hand of the beautiful Clarissa, continued to grow thin and anxious, his proud but uneasy look reminding Lisa of little Tommy Ball in Wetumpka when a well meaning circus man gave him a panther cub for a pet.

It was finished at last, the little home in Harlem, even to the gold-fish in the sitting-room; and Billy and Clarissa came down to thank Lisa. Clarissa was resplendent in khaki-colored Georgette crepe, wonderfully beaded, quite the handsomest clothes Lisa had ever seen her wear, and was fervishly happy. Billy had lost his worried look, and, from the jauntily cocked straw hat to the shining patent-leather shoes, was a picture of proud possessiveness. They were to be married the next afternoon, very quietly, as Rissy did not care to make a show. Lisa must come.

It was a long visit. Rissy chattered incessantly, and Billy laughed at all her stories, and lept up an admiring monotone: "Some girl, huh, Lisa? Some girl!" Lisa laughed and chattered too; but toward the end of the visit began to have a queer, desolate feeling around the heart, much as when she used to have chills and fever back home. When they rose to go, she went downstairs to the door, reluctant to have them leave her.

"You're going to be so happy, Rissy, and you desrve it, working so hard for charity."

She flung her arms about Clarissa; but Rissy pulled away quickly and ran down the steps, laughing. A few yards down the street, however, she turned, and, seeing Lisa still standing on the brown-stone stoop, came hurrying back.

"Kiddo," she cried, with a little hyster- ical catch in her voice, "you certainly have got an ivory bean, but you're awfully sweet—and awfully good."

She kissed Lisa and was gone again, rejoining Billy, who stood proudly twirling his cane. When they vanished into the L station, Lisa suddenly realized that she was out of it all. No more bus rides with Billy, no more visits to the furnityre stores, no more afternoons together at the flat, hanging pictures and curtains. She ran upstairs and, burying her face in the pillows, cried long and hard because she did not have the winkly-twinkly eye and the syncopated walk.

WHEN she woke it was morning—Clarissa's wedding day! A gray day, misty and moist, with the heat clinging like a sticky garment. There would be few comers to the bus; she and the blonde would ride around all day, laughing at Joe's worn-out bantalities and trying to look like a crowd of interested sight-seers.

The telephone began to ring, and her landlady's razor-edged soprano floated up from the lower regions:

"Te—el—ephone, Miss Perkins."

It must be Billy—on Clarissa's wedding day. Why didn't he call up Rissy? He was all hers now.

Lisa slipped on her old blue kimono and stumbled down through the darkness.

"Say, Lisa," it was McGregor's voice, wilder and more ditrait than she had ever heart it, "say, could you come up? I'm at the flat, I—"

But the gentlest worm will turn.

"No, Billy, I won't come up. I'm busy sometimes, same as you and Rissy. I chose the flat and the furniture and everything, and I won't do anything more."

She slammed down the receiver, and, pressing back a lump that had risen in her throat, marched upstairs, deaf to frantic peals from the phone.

"Maybe the pipes have broken or gas is escaping." She sat on the edge of the bed, anxiously thumping the old cotton quilt with her hair-brush. "Well—it's none of my business anymore."

She crawled back into bed, but not to sleep. She was haunted by visions of Billy struggling to get married with only Rissy's temperamental assistance. Perhaps his new suit did not fit; perhaps he had lost the ring. She got up and began to dress. She might as well dress; for before long Joe, the barker, would be conducting the bus up Fifth Avenue in "the only genteel way to see the homes of the plutocrats."

She put on teh hated black dress and the mournful black bonnet. If the plumbing had broken, Billy would be sure to mop up the water with the best table-cloth, the initialed cloth she had mored for Sunday use. Well, it was no concern of hers—this was Rissy's wedding day. Still, Billy—

She hailed a downtown car, then waved it on and made a dash for the uptown L.

NO one answered her ring at the lower bell of the apartment-house, but the main entrance was ajar, and she slipped upstairs. It was a new house, full of clean odors from fresh paint and varnish; but the long vacant suites made it seem lonely and deserted. They had chosen the best for Clarissa—three outside rooms on the second floor. Lisa still had a key. She took it out and opened the door.

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It was all complete, the little home in Harlem, even to the box of parsley in the kitchen window. But it was very quiet, too quiet. Lisa noticed unopened packages in the hall. The curtains for the bedroom had come, but neither Billy nor Rissy had opened the box. Vaguely uneasy, she hurried into the living-room—that cozy living-room where Blumbfield's three-piece plush set held out its comfortable arms.

THERE, in Blumfield's over-stuffed easy chair, surrounded by a chaos of unopened parcels, hunched Billy McGregor, his red head deep in his hands.

"Billy, you're not sick?"

Billy lifted a face tightly drawn into lines of pain and disgust and utter physical exhaustion.

"Lisa! Bless you! I knew you'd come!"

"Where's Rissy?"

"Gone." He held out a crumpled letter. "This is nice for a man to get on his wedding day! Listen to this!" And he read, in a voice that tried to be gruff, but which kept getting squaky with emotion: "'You wouldn't like me to live in that dinky flat, Billy dear, when Mr. Muggles can give me everything I want.' "Billy dear'—did you get that?"

"Mr. Muggles!" cried Lisa. "You mean Rissy's married him, after all?"

"Married him?" stormed Billy, then checked himself and turned red. "Yes, sister; I guess that's what I mean— Rissy's married him. You see, Rissy hasn't been working for charity, like she told me. She's been running around with this man. Last night she and Muggles left for Chicago."

Lisa ran over, drawing the rocker close to his side.

"Billy, Billy, I'm sorry. Rissy was so beautiful."

"Sorry?" cried Billy defiantly. "I'm not sorry. What do I want to be married to a girl like that for? Last night I was wild—sure I was. I walked the streets for hours. But this moring I've got more sense. You see, Lisa, I found out long ago Rissy wasn't on the square with me, but I couldn't seem to break loose." He leaned back—hands dep in his pockets̬and gave a long whistle of dismay. "Phew! It was a bad dream Lisa—a bad dream."

Looking at Billy, so crestfallen, worn, and subdued, Lisa saw that, in spite of the winkly-twinkly eye and the suncopated walk, Clarissa mist have been a very bad dream. Amazed and wondering, she rose.

"Never mind, Billy; it's voer now." She glanced at the little new clock. "I hate to leave you, but there's just time to get the bus."

McGregor shot forward and clutched her skirt in sudden consternation.

"Have a heart, Lisa. Don't go. You aren't going to throw me over too?"

"I have to go; Joe's counting on me."

"Sure thing," he agreed; "Joe's counting on you." He jumped up and laid both hands on her shoulders. "Catch you going back on anybody, even Joe! But I'm coming too. Can I, Lisa? I know I'm a boob, the boob Rissy worked for a good thing and left behind on the dump-heap, but you can make a man of me, sister. I knew if from the first night. Aw, say, Lisa, quit your blushing. Don't run away. Honest, can't I come?"

Here was Lisa's chance for complete revenge. But Lisa did not want revenge; she did not realize it was Billy who had made her suffer. So she smiled upon him, her blue eyes wide with happiness.

"Get your hat, Billy. And hurry up. Of course, I'd love to have you come."

THE Tourist's Delight went lumbering up Fifth Avenue.

"Ladies and gentlemen," urged Joe, the barker, "turn to the right—"

But the old lady from Paducah refused to unhitch her disapproving gaze from a couple to the left.

"Mary Ella," she snorted in a stage whisper to her niece, "just look at that little widow! Laughing and giggling and setting up to that young chap like they were on a honeymoon! Outrageous!"

Breaking into a Bat Apartment-House

THERE is an apartment-house in New York where you can, if you will and are able, pay $25,000 a year for your flat. If this is the latest word in houses that hold many families under one roof, Mr. Roy C. Andrews—recently returned from China, where he had been sent by the American Museum of Natural History—tells of finding what is probably the oldest in the world. Its tenants are exclusively bats, and the great community dwelling occupies an area equal to two city blocks on a mountain-side on the Thibet border and is many stories high. Here is the explorer's story:

The Home of Thousands of Bats

SOME persons might have described the place as a cave, although nature and the best bat families had developed it into an underground flat. We had to stoop in order to enter; but, for that matter, there are doors almost as small as this entrance into Batland to be found at the

front of metropolitan cliff dwellings. Having successfully made our entry, we found ourselves in a central court or great foyer, to the right and left of which there were deep galleries running back into the rock as far as the eye could see. On the roofs of those chambers or corridors were hanging more bats than I ever saw before or hope ever to see again.

There were many thousands of them. Each division had bats of one kind only. Apparently each species of bat never went to visit any other variety. The atmosphere was close and clannish. This segregation process had been going on for centuries, no doubt, for the cave gave every evidence of having been occupied by that class of tenants since the beginning of time. For thousands of years these bats had been distributing themselves according to race. Generations of bats had come and gone, leaving their bones in the cavern; and their children had kept up the class distinctions.

The Bat's Caste System

THE big bats gathered by themselves; the medium-sized brown bats had their own galleries; and the tiny bats, which seemed more like huge insects than animals, were clustered in special reservations. The arrangement was so orderly that one might think it was a bat department-store in charge of a new efficiency expert. For any sort or condition of bat, you would go down so many aisles and turn to the right or the left, as you saw fit.

Imagine bats descended from long lines of forebears brushing disdainfully past the ones that had been in the cave only since the Kang-hsi dynasty, and gathering up their fur as they went for fear of coming in contact with social climbers. To such as these the events of our lives would seem as only incidents, they had been exclusive so long.

Our torches gave only enough light to make out the odd tenants of the place; and the still and drowsy air added to the uncanny effect. Presently a big fellow pendent from the end of a gallery stirred slightly and jostled his neighbor. A faint rustle, as of silken garments and furs, swept along the silent corridors, and the somber colonies stirred into action. Soon bats of all sizes and breeds were in flight. They flew about us, sometimes striking our faces with their smooth, damp wings.

Sometimes one reads of caverns of vampires, and here there came to us the thought of the legends that have to do with these strange fluttering things of the darkness. From such a retreat as this Dracula might have come. Some of the creatures were eighteen inches wide across their wings, and in the half darkness they seemed much larger.

When They Swarmed Down upon Us

SEVERAL times the bats swarmed about us, so that we were nearly carried off our feet by the impact of the soft bodies against us. We made our way back to the entrance, beating down the whirring masses about us with our clubs; but there was no time to stop and pick any of them up.

It was with a sense of relief that we gained the open air. After that we did our bat collecting at the mouth of the cavern by spreading a net across it and taking such specimens as came out at dusk.

From a scientific point of view, this excursion into the gloomy corridors gave fine results; for I have every reason to believe that our collections include several species never before described.

We left rather sooner than we wished, for a revolution or so had broken out in the vicinity. I have often wondered, since, whether the vampire aristocrats ever got their classifications and social distinctions back to normal: for certainly we did disturb the established order by our invasion.

The Three Favorite Axioms of E. H. Harriman

"To dodge difficulties is to lose the power of decision."
"It is never safe to look into the future with eyes of fear."
"Many spoil much good work for the lack of a little more."