Will Sociability and Business Mix?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

Illustration by Jessie Gillespie

NOT long ago, in a big New York law office, there was a ten-thousand-dollar assistant who was paid only three thousand dollars a year. His employers did not lack money—their practice is one of the best in the metropolis. But they could not afford to pay him any more because, along with a ten-thousand dollar training in the law, he had an eight-hundred-dollar way of dealing with clients. Sometimes he would be shy and humble, and again curt and overbearing. He could not "size up" strangers and put them at their ease, and in dealing with clients over the telephone or through letters he often did damage that took tactful work to repair.

His employers needed that assistant's law knowledge on important cases, yet they were afraid to trust him. So they decided to see what could be done to cure his shortcomings, and began with a quiet investigation of his habits outside the office.

Then the secret of his manners was laid bare.

He had no associates! Intensely absorbed in his work and in his home, he seldom went anywhere and saw few people. He belonged to no clubs, knew nobody on the trains that carried him to his suburb, took no part in church or politics or social life.

He was a hermit, shut off from his kind as far as new people were concerned, and especially from the first-class business men with whom he should have been at ease in his law work.

Both of his employers are men who have risen in law more by their knowledge of human nature than by profound study of small law points. They planned for their assistant a scheme of life outside the office that took him among people of the kind they wanted him to deal with intimately, throwing him among crowds first, and then into business gatherings where he had to hold his own, and also had a chance to demonstrate his understanding of book law.

In a year, by shrewd management, they provided him with a wide circle of friends, made him sociable, made him prefer being with people rather than alone. To-day he is handling major law cases, and getting the ten thousand a year that his technical ability justified several years ago.

Technical Knowledge Not Enough

MOST big jobs in business carry sociability obligations, and most of the little jobs have sociability handles to take hold of. Technical knowledge and bare business ability are not enough. Every job serves people in the end. The biggest jobs serve the biggest people. One must learn to understand people, be at ease with them, serve them, and the bigger the better.

One of the partners in this same law firm was a first-class book lawyer when he came out of college. But he won no cases!

Careful study of the precedents might show that his case was technically perfect, and that, according to Jones vs. Smith, 1885, the judge and jury should have handed him the decision on a silver salver. But the jury regularly brought in a verdict for the other side, and the judge upheld it.

He decided that something was wrong—that in sticking too closely to the law books he had neglected to find out what kind of people make up juries—and likewise what kind of people sit on the judge's bench. So for weeks he made it a point to mix with people in all walks of life, and to drop into the courts where he was likely to practise, and see if he couldn't influence the judge without ever speaking to him outside, simply by understanding him.

Studying Human Nature

HIS new human method was clearly illustrated by the first case he won. He had rather the worst of it technically, and had to make up for lack of legal advantages by some other means.

First he won the judge. Observation in his court had shown him to be an overworked, irritable old fellow. By great good luck the attorney for the other side was windy and tedious, always interposing objections and reading dry documents into the record.

The attorney who had never yet won a case undertook to protect the judge, saving him from this windy attorney. If the latter raised a trifling objection that promised a long argument, he would say: "If your honor is satisfied, I will waive that point to save time." And he would produce a long document of his own, with an air of being about to read it into the record, and then say, to the judge's manifest relief, "I won't ask you to listen to all this, your honor, because we are willing get along without it."

In the first half day the judge not only liked that man, but felt secure while he was in court.

A Problem in Sociability

THE jury was a simple problem in sociability. His case was a suit over real estate, and he learned that one of the jurors worked in a real estate office. He established a bond of understanding with that juror by smiles and glances over real estate points, and when the other attorney made a blunder would wink at the real estate juror, show good-humored sarcasm, implying that they two knew real estate better than that.

When the jury went out he was confident that his case had been won, and expected a verdict in a few minutes. But the jury stayed out four hours, causing him great anxiety, before it returned a verdict in his favor.

"Why did you stay out so long?" he asked the real estate juror later. "Wasn't the case perfectly clear to you? How could you give the verdict to anybody but my client?"

Sure, it was clear to me," replied the real estate juror. "But you must remember that I had to make those eleven boneheads see it the same way. That's what took all the time!"

"In a Manger"

JUST a group of simple shepherds they were: going about their jobs as usual, with no suspicion that this night would be different from any other.

And to them, of all men in the world, the heavenly vision came.

In their ears, mingled with the noises of their daily toil, the angel voices sounded.

Thousands of men were looking eagerly for the appearance of the Messiah that night—as they had looked for His appearance every night for years.

Surely with great acclaim He would come: in a King's palace, with signs and wonders to restore His chosen people.

And while their eyes were fixed on high to see the great event, lo, the great event took place at their very feet; and they never saw it.

He came to the world out of the depths, not on the heights. They found Him "lying in a manger."

It often happens so in life.

There is in the world to-day a man who has toiled terribly that he might achieve a vast success.

He has piled dollar upon dollar and business upon business. Mounting to the top of the great pile which he has made, he has looked longingly for a glimpse of the thing worth while; and he has not found it.

While, only one short block from his home, in a little cottage, surrounded by his red-cheeked children, a man who will never have ten thousand dollars to his name looks out on life through reverent eyes, and finds it wonderful.

Not in the palace on that street will one find the Kingdom of Happiness: but in the little cottage.

Even as they found Him, years ago, lying in a manger.

There is another man who cherishes in his heart the vision of a reconstructed social order.

He hopes by laws and ordinances, and by this and that, to hedge the people in and mold them so that they must be good in spite of themselves.

His mind is full of social betterment: and in his heart is no appreciation whatever of the men and women whom he seeks to better.

He has no confidence in them.

He forgets that it was from them Lincoln sprang.

He forgets that it was the French Revolution, in spite of its violence, and not the thought and plan of statesmen, that started the modern world on its great roll toward democracy.

Almost every great movement has grown up from below. Yet he does not understand it. He seeks to hand improvement down, like old clothes, from above.

He seeks the millennium from on high: and behold, at his very feet, the millennium is slowly working itself into being.

Even as the great beginning of the millennium came, not in a king's palace, but in a manger.

It is an easy thing to fix one's eyes on the distant splendor, and, pressing toward it, lose the nearer splendor that lies everywhere about.

It is a temptation to say, "I am so busy with the great work I am doing, my activities are so important, that I can not be bothered about little things."

He who was born in a manger was never busy. With the burden of the world on His shoulders, he was not too preoccupied to hear the cry of a single blind man.

Wearied by anxious hours of toil, He was not too weary to open his arms to little children.

"Take time to live each day in simple friendliness"—this would be His message to you on this anniversary of His birth.

The Kingdom of Happiness lies, not far off, but close about you.

It was thus that the shepherds discovered it.

In the midst of their daily job the heavenly light broke around them: with the noises of their regular, routine labor in their ears, the voice of the angel sounded:

"Ye shall find Him . . . lying in a manger."

Bruce Barton, Editor.

MY MARRIAGE

By THE READERS OF EVERY WEEK

Making the Best of It

(The Prize Letter)

I BECAME engaged soon after my seventeenth birthday to a man in his twenty-sixth year. He was mature for his age: I immature for mine.

I was brought up under the strictest New England régime of fifty years ago. The majority of my relatives were members of the Congregationalist Church, which, until some years after my marriage, taught that dancing, card-playing, the touching of even the mildest grades of liquors or the use of tobacco, was a sin.

Divorce, no matter for what reason, was regarded with the utmost horror. There had never been such a thing in our family as far back as its records went.

I had a good common-school education, and an inborn, unacquired taste for the very best in literature. At the age of twelve I had read all of Sir Walter Scott's novels and all of Charles Dickens's.

My husband and I were married on my eighteenth birthday.

A few months after our marriage my husband gave up his position as foreman in the factory where he was getting good wages, gave up our home in which I took so much pride, and went back to his boyhood home in a distant part of the State to live with his parents, who had constantly importuned him to do so. I was neither questioned nor consulted in the matter; and an unpleasant incident which occurred during the first of our honeymoon had frightened me so that I made not the slightest objection to the momentous change:

The silver, with which I was very well supplied, had been entirely the gift of my own family, who had always taught me to take the best of care of such articles; so, when my husband broke one of the knives while using it as an ice-pick, and a few days later broke another while prying up a refractory window, I mildly demurred, saying: "I fear my silver won't last long if you aren't more careful."

"My silver! My silver!" he shouted in a towering rage. "You feel damned big with your 'my silver,' don't you?" A harsh word had ever been to me worse than a blow; and I cowered under the words like a whipped spaniel, hoping and praying that I might never give him occasion for another. Therefore I dared not object to the proposed change.

My husband's people, of whom I knew absolutely nothing,—not that it would have made any difference as to my

marriage if I had,—were farmers. They welcomed me kindly enough, but without demonstration of any sort—even a handshake. My husband said: "This is my wife." Each parent bowed and answered my timid greeting with a careless but not unkindly "How do you do, Constance?"

They were a thoroughly respectable but godless race. Those who were not atheists and infidels were spiritualists. My father-in-law and his other son both drank. Although not drunkards, they often showed the effect of liquor. My husband sometimes but very seldom took a swallow or two with them. I had never smelled smoke about his clothing or seen him use tobacco in any form. He immediately took up smoking; and when I ventured to express my surprise he very truthfully informed me that I knew nothing whatever about him, saying he had always smoked at times, but hadn't happened to feel like it during our engagement. I thanked God that he didn't chew; his father and brother did.

We had been married eleven months when our first boy was born. When he was a year old Eli accepted a position as foreman in a factory in a small village. I could hardly believe my good fortune: I was to have a home once more.

Eli was slovenly in his personal habits, as were his father and brother; but unlike them he was niggardly in the matter of furnishing suitable clothing for me and our children—we have two. His friends were on a moral and social level much lower than any men with whom I had ever come in contact.

I slowly built up a circle of friends of my own. I went to church and Sunday school regularly as soon as my boys were old enough to accompany me. I worked hard in what was then known as our church sewing circle, and for our public library. My sons were my companions in everything possible. I inculcated a love of good literature in them.

I did plain sewing for some of my neighbors, thereby earning a modest allowance of spending money. But Eli vowed that the money was his if I did earn it and that I had no right to spend a cent of it without his permission.

The time came when the little village school no longer helped the boys. We almost got down on our knees to Eli, but he absolutely refused to allow them any more schooling. They already had had more than he had ever had, he argued. But after some weeks he consented. We had won a victory. After once consenting he was both kind and generous with them; we were not at all wealthy, and it required sacrifice from both of us; but, as he had left the mill and learned a good trade,—this after he was forty,—we got through.

Then Eli left his trade and went back into a mill. This necessitated our leaving the place where we had lived for almost twenty years and going among total strangers. As usual I made no demur—it would have been useless. He kept the job three years—it was the best paying one he ever had; then, for no reason whatever, he left it. For nine years he loafed more than he worked; but a year ago accepted a good and very responsible position in which he has—so far, at least—given satisfaction.

We are not even well-to-do. We have our home and a few hundred dollars, where we might as well have had thousands. I have taken boarders and done nursing and fancy cooking to help get a living.

For a personal grudge against my church he forbade my ever entering its doors again, giving me, as an alternative, my choice between that and never living with him another day. On my refusal even to entertain such an idea as the former I was ordered to take my few personal possessions and leave. I managed to get word to my sons and to my pastor, who all counseled me to remain and make the best of it. I have done so.

He drinks more as he grows older, often taking enough to make it noticeable, but never getting drunk nor anything like it. He plays cards and gambles for small sums.

Our sons hold good positions. Both are settled in the Middle Atlantic States. I spend some months with them nearly every year.

Nothing would tempt me to leave my husband. I married him for better or for worse. Thank God, it has not all been the latter. I live my own life. I make our home an abode of peace.

I wish, oh, so much, that I might become self-supporting, because it would help me to help him more, as well as making me entirely independent of him.

I have lost all of the old timid nature: I cower before no man: I strive to influence him by love and kindness; always to remember the vast difference in our upbringing: to remember also that, as a rule, men are more selfish than women and that the poor fellows can't help themselves, because they are born of women and women made them so.

In his wooden, undemonstrative way he loves me. Very gradually a change has been coming. He often kisses me and seems pleased to have me show marks of my affection for him.

Do I love my husband? Yes.

Would I marry him were I to live my life over again? No, not with my past experience, otherwise I would know no better than I did at seventeen; and were I to meet him as a stranger now he would not appeal to me in the slightest manner.

C.H.

A Marriage for Pity

IT happened five years ago, and I can recall it as if it happened to-day, for it was a revolution in my life. I did not marry for love, neither for money, but for pity, strange as it may sound, but it was so. I married—well, I might as well say it—a

Continued on page 19

She Founded a Fortune in Her Kitchen

THE question of why I embarked in business can be answered in a word of nine letters. My husband and I with our two baby boys had arrived in Seattle with a very limited capital and poor prospects of my husband getting a paying position. So the fact became apparent to me that I must help to row the domestic boat.

For a short time I was puzzled. Then, like an inspiration, came the answer: Friends who had tasted my home-made salad dressing invariably praised it, and it was their complaint that they couldn't buy as good in the market that gave me the idea. I turned the matter over in my mind, and then, with a strong determination to succeed, and aided by my kitchen range, a good recipe and ingredients for salad dressing, and a few empty bottles—my capital—I started on my venture.

Labeling the first few bottles by hand, I set forth with them to the nearest grocer.

He suggested that I give a demonstration in his store. I invested in some biscuits, and began my first demonstration, going home between times to attend to my babies and household duties. The demonstration was a success, the grocer sold out his sample lot of dressing, and placed an order for more.

Then I broadened my field of endeavor, placing the product in other stores, in bottles with printed labels, which lent a more businesslike aspect to the venture. The demand increased so steadily that I had to enlarge the kitchen and invest in a larger stove. Soon these, too, were outgrown, and my time was so absorbed in making the dressing that I was obliged to engage help for the housework and to assist with the children.

Finally, when the home kitchen refused to hold larger range facilities and utensils, I rented a small factory, and continued the work, hiring outside help to assist in the bottling and labeling.

I added other home-made products as they occurred to me—a mayonnaise dressing, peanut butter, fig and plum puddings, and a "Thousand Island" dressing. As the business grew a larger factory was rented, some labor-saving machinery installed, and more workers hired.

This was ten years ago. My boys have grown up, and my husband has assumed charge of the office details made necessary by the growth of a business that has become the largest of its kind in the city. But I have never given up the personal supervision of my work.

I now own a factory built to my order—an up-to-date, strictly hygienic place of brick and concrete. Our home is paid for, we have an automobile and motor delivery cars. But, above all, we have the confidence and esteem of the public; while the little business evolved in my home kitchen with less than five dollars capital has grown to be a national business.

MRS. M. A. PORTER.

What We Gained by Eliminating False Pride

AS a bride, I came to Washington with my husband, a twelve hundred dollar a year clerk. We came principally because we expected to find exceptional opportunities for him to study and win his way; to speedy promotion; besides, never having lived in a city, we were thirsty for the musical, dramatic, and literary treats we could have.

When we came to seeking a home, we found that if we wanted to live in a really desirable section of the city, the rent would take just about every cent of our salary besides what we had to have for food; clothes, and car-fare. This did not satisfy us at all, and we sat down to figure out some comparative values.

In our own home village, Tom, a county judge's son, and I, a minister's daughter, had sufficiently good social standing. We had pleasant friends, good homes, and plenty to eat and wear. If that was all we wanted in life, why had we come to Washington? On a twelve hundred dollar salary we surely couldn't splurge much, so why try at all?

The house we picked out was somewhat dingy looking, one of a dismal red brick row in an obscure street. A Greek family lived next to us and two negro families at the end; but it was only two squares from the place where Tom worked, and only three from one of those beautiful little parks which are scattered impartially over Washington. Daily carfare for Tom was eliminated.

In two long, short, richly satisfying years we saw a really good play almost every week during the season; heard scores of free concerts; spent days and days at the Library of Congress; more days—minutes and hours at a time—in the museums; heard good sermons and wonderful music in dozens of beautiful churches. We stood up, weary and rapturous, and heard Paderewski, Kreisler, Ysaye, Schumann-Heink; we haunted the art galleries and went to every special art exhibit; we always had four books out on our public library cards.

Of course we were shabby. And of course we didn't mind in a city as we would have in our own village. We never lost sight of the definite things we had come to Washington to get—and I am sure we had them.

After a while a very wonderful and welcome baby arrived, and naturally my gallivanting was pretty much curtailed. But we saw no reason why we should move for two or three years—our neighbors weren't dangerous, at least, and baby wouldn't do much visiting in any case; and being where we were was such a saving in Tom's car-fare. Baby and I stayed for hours in the little park near home and had just as much fresh, pure air as if he had taken his airings in Dupont Circle.

When he was three and sister was one, however, we decided we needed more room, and now we have a small house in the country with a fence around it, and are glad to have real neighbors once more.

Every once in a while we go (singly) to good things now, but not many, of course; for in our reckonings of comparative values we have realized that time, effort, and money spent for the kiddies are even more worth while than that spent on our "adventures in culture."

M. R.

One Portion of Ham and Eggs, $3.50

THE man who is always telling you of some one who is worse off just, as you are getting happy telling your troubles is a pest. All the same, the next time you gasp after a glance at the bill the waiter hands you, remember what happened to Colonel Fairfax Lee when he dropped in at the Oriental Restaurant in Richmond in 1864.

A bullet had knocked Colonel Lee off the active list, but it had not spoiled his appetite, and he decided to have a square meal to even up for camp fare. Here is what he ordered:

A glass of French brandy, soup, a portion of roast turkey, potatoes, cabbage, bread and butter, a cup of coffee, and a pint of madeira.

The waiter didn't even murmur an excuse about its being "on account of the war" as he handed the Colonel the bill, which totaled $71.50.

The bill of fare from which Colonel Lee ordered is presented to show how really modest prices are to-day. The charges are for single portions:

Soup, $1.50; turkey, $8.50; chicken, $3.50; ham and eggs, $3.50; rockfish, $5; roast beef, $3; beefsteak, $3.50; fried oysters, $5; boiled eggs, $2; raw oysters, $3; cabbage, $1; potatoes, $1; coffee, per cup, $3; milk, $2; bread and butter, $1.50, Wines, per bottle: champagne, $50; madeira, $50; port, $25; claret, $20; sherry. $35. Liquors, per drink: French brandy, $3; rye whisky, $2, apple brandy, $2. Porter or ale, $12 a bottle. Cigars, $1.

This Man Painted "The Spirit of '76"

HIS name is Archibald M. Willard. He is eighty-one years old and in a day that tries men's souls as much as did that one which inspired his famous picture, he was more eager to talk—as he sat for his picture for this magazine—of the time when, as a boy of nineteen in a carriage factory at Wellington, Ohio, he painted carriages for pay and pictures for love, than of the painting that brought him fame. Yet some of the best posters brought out by the world war are adaptations of Mr. Willard's painting.

How he graduated from carriages to more enduring if no more necessary art is too long a story to tell here. He had achieved popularity with "Pluck," beloved of our fathers and familiar to our youthful gray-haired readers, when in 1876 the approach of the Centennial celebration suggested a historical study. It was to have been what was known then as a serio-comic: a picture founded upon Mr. Willard's remembrance of the "trained bands" of his boyhood.

But he chose as model for his drummer his father, a Vermonter with the heroic lines of the granite hills in his face, and as he painted he found growing upon the canvas something very different from his original design. Mr. Willard's father didn't live to see the picture completed, but he was its real inspiration. Hugh Mosher, a fine old farmer, posed for the fifer, and Harry Devereux, a son of the late General Devereux, was model for the drummer boy.

The picture was exhibited at the Centennial as "Yankee Doodle." Hugh Mosher, dropping in for a look at it, was recognized by the crowd and received an ovation. Later, while on exhibition at Boston, the picture's title was changed to the now familiar one.

Alfonso Doing His Bit

IF there is to be a clean sweep of the king business after the war, Alfonso of Spain means to avoid the exit if he possibly can. While other kings have been growing more unpopular, he has done what he could to increase his influence and good will both inside and outside of Spain.

The French provinces occupied by the enemy, as well as Belgium, Serbia, and Rumania, would be almost entirely cut off from postal communication with the rest of the world, if Alfonso had not volunteered to act as intermediary between the prisoners of these countries held by the enemy and the civilians in them. The King's private secretary, Don Emilio de Vorres, receives the correspondence and sends the substance of each letter to the Spanish Embassy in Berlin, whence it is communicated to the individual. The letters include inquiries as civilians missing from their countries, and thousands of pathetic pleas for information about British, Russian, Serbian, and Montenegrin prisoners.

Birds Trained to Spy Out Submarines

WAR, by providing the urge of necessity, is at least the grandmother of invention. People who in peace times never thought of trying their hand at a non-refillable bottle or an automatic furnace feeder get in the game at once when the fighting begins. The War Department has been so flooded with suggestions that a special force had to be organized to receive and file plans for knocking out the Kaiser.

By far the greater number of these schemes aim at the destruction of the German U-boats. It's much harder to find a submarine than it is to destroy it, once found; and, bearing this in mind, Dr. A. D. Pentz, Jr., of Staten Island, has worked out a plan to enlist the services of sea-gulls as U-boat detectors.

He proposes that British submarines be equipped with hoppers through which food is to be released to float to the surface and impress the gullible gulls with the idea that every submarine is a meal ticket. Thus trained, he reasons, the gulls will flock about any under-water boat that they spy, and the nimble submarine-chaser will have only to follow the gulls to find its prey.

NOT A CHANCE IN A THOUSAND

By HOLWORTHY HALL

Illustrations by Frederic Dorr Steele

PROMPTLY at nine o'clock the door burst open, and Sargent rushed in, rampant and dynamic. He felt the stimulus of the bright November morning. He felt, too, the pulsing energy stored through his brief vacation. His face wore an exultant, boyish grin, due partly to the grandeur that was so newly his, and partly to the specific evidence of it on the door—his name, freshly lettered, and tagged with his lofty title. City solicitor he had been; assistant sales manager he was to-day; president he would eventually become. And he swept in as if to take his responsibilities by storm.

When Miss Hastings, who happened to be looking toward the threshold as Sargent crossed it, got the full and resplendent effect of that wide grin of his, she straightway went palpitant.

Sargent, catching sight of Miss Hastings, halted in mid-career; and an expression of horrified amazement replaced his joyousness.

He remembered now that when his chief had told him of the unexpected promotion, and shown him this cubicle that was to be his own, and told him to spend two weeks in recharging his cosmic batteries, he had also said that a secretary would be provided for Sargent, who in the past had dictated his occasional letters to a machine.

Without the slightest conceit, Sargent knew that he was good-looking. It was comparable to his knowledge that he weighed a hundred and seventy pounds. He accepted it as casually as he accepted that mysterious quality which made men like him—that attribute which made him a supreme salesman. But he knew, too, that his physique and his humor and his mannerisms appealed especially to women, who as a class had apparently conspired to flirt with and embarrass him. He was abnormally susceptible; he conceded in advance that any girl over sixteen could make a hopeless fool of him.

The mere conception, therefore, of being closeted for eight hours a day with any secretary had at first driven him to a reiteration of the platitude that woman's place is in the home—and not the Home of Standard Conveyers, either.

IT would undoubtedly have saved him a good deal of inquietude if he had known that the new secretary was very young, frightened half out of her wits, and not at all convinced that she was going to coöperate satisfactorily with Isaac Pitman.

More than that, she was a girl who had chosen her vocation partly because she lacked training in any other field, and partly because the prospectus of the business school had been drafted by an expert copy-writer. She had grasped at the straw of this particular position only after her continued inability to ally herself with a lady author or a social leader.

As Sargent stared, in an atrophy of judgment, at Miss Hastings, he was increasingly conscious of the demerits of her own stare, which was alarmingly direct, and calculated, as he knew at once, to throw him on the defensive. If she had only been more conservative she would have been adorable.

"G-good morning," said Miss Hastings.

Her voice was a trifle louder than usual; there was invincible virtue in it, not unmixed with Christian fortitude. A tidal surge of color swept over her cheeks. The man was as audacious as she had fancied; yea, more so! He had come in like a whirlwind, and he was ogling her.

Sargent cleared his throat viciously—this was the incident that led Miss Hastings to report to her mother that night that he had barked at her.

"I'm Mr. Sargent," he said. "I take it you're—"

"I'm Miss Hastings."

"Oh, yes," he remarked vaguely. "Well—"

And Sargent proceeded dignifiedly to his seat behind the big desk.

Sargent ventured to take a further survey of her, and suffered a further relapse into despondency. She was of a type peculiarly unsuited to the realm of business. She was a small and dainty brunette. Her eyes were large and perilously brown, and shaded by long lashes which she could evidently droop with telling effect at will.

"Br-r-r-ump!" said Sargent. "What's been your department?"

"I beg your pardon?" said Miss Hastings stiffly. She thought he had said "deportment." And she maintained the steady, frigid demeanor which she relied upon to chill his insolence.

"What department have you been working in?"

"Why, this is my first day with this company," she said precisely.

"Oh!" said Sargent. "Where were you before?"

"This is my— I never had a place before," said Miss Hastings truthfully.

"Indeed!"

SARGENT marked the soft curves of her chin and the strategic location of sundry fluffy little puffs of hair. No girl as diabolically pretty as this one would ever expect to need nore than her first engagement.

"Well," he said, "I—er—I'm very critical." This was meant to be a subtle warning. "And this won't be an easy job—not for a second!"

"Yes?"

She couldn't for the life of her avoid the rising inflection. It implied that she was familiar with his ancestry, even unto the third and fourth generation on both sides of the family, and that she saw through his wily innuendo with crystal clearness.

"But if you're—careful—and all that sort of thing—" His voice dwindled away to nothingness.

"Take a letter, please," he said mechanically.

Now, in reality, he had no need of writing letters that morning. The idea had been purely spontaneous and defensive. He wanted her to stop looking at him, and there was nothing else to which he could direct her diligence. And as Miss Hastings snatched for her notebook and pencil, gained them, and composed herself, Sargent was perplexingly at a loss for a correspondent.

Miss Hastings was intent and nervous. The note-book rested on her lap; the pencil was poised in readiness; and Miss Hastings' animation was most extraordinary. Sargent shivered. He had no way of comprehending that she was teaching him how strictly businesslike she was.

"Letter to Mr. Michael J. Sullivan, Sullivan Manufacturing Company, 3426 Sixth Avenue, this city," said Sargent with abrupt rapidity. "'Dear Mr. Sullivan: As you probably know comma I have recently been appointed assistant sales manager of this company comma but I am happy to say that I shall continue to handle the personal business with which'—er, I mean—'business which I have heretofore solicited period. With respect to the quote M 5 quote acid conveyers which I suggested to you last month comma I am sorry to say that the price has been advanced ten per cent. owing to war conditions, but'—What's the matter?"

Miss Hastings, gasping, lifted a face which was at once heroic and pathetic, belligerent and deprecatory.

"I can't—I'm not up with you. You said 'personal business by which I mean business—' And that's as far as I got."

"Read it to me from the beginning," he commanded, after a hushed interlude.

Miss Hastings caught her breath.

"Mr. Michael J. Sullivan, Sullivan Manufacturing Company, 3426 Sixth Avenue, City. Dear Sullivan—'"

"'Dear Mr. Sullivan!'"

She hastily scrawled the emendation.

"'As you know, I have recently been—'" She paused, and in her mortification bent low over the page. Her cheeks darkened, and Sargent at that moment was visited by an inspiration. He was still too young in authority to be given the power to employ and to dismiss, but it occurred to him that there was no legislation to prevent Miss Hastings from resigning. Very well—she should resign!

"'Appointed,'" said Sargent dryly.

"Oh, yes!" Her relief was great. "Appointed assistant manager'—"

"'Assistant sales manager,'" he corrected, still more dryly.

She appealed to him by means of her puissant eyes.

"I'm afraid I can't take dictation as fast as that yet," she said. "The rest of it is—rather confused, too."

Sargent sighed audibly, and scowled at poor Miss Hastings.

"See what you can do with it, anyway," he said. "Just end it, 'Yours very truly.'"

"But—it wasn't finished!"

"Never mind; I want to see how you space and—punctuate." He reflected, and tacked on, as an afterthought: "And spell."

"You mean—"

"Transcribe just what you have," said Sargent desperately. He reached out for his hat, and got energetically to his feet. "And put it on my desk. And if anybody asks for me, you can say I've gone uptown. Say I've gone up to see M. J. Sullivan."

He didn't return until the middle of the afternoon. In the meantime he had a session with his immediate superior. He had suggested that, if a secretary was to be thrust upon him, he ought to be equipped with a star performer, and not a novice. The chief smiled, and reminded Sargent that stenographers have to be broken in somehow, and that a very good general principle is to assign them to the posts at which experience can be gained most swiftly, with the least waste of efficiency. He had sent Miss Hastings to Sargent for two purposes—to accustom Miss Hastings to commercial usages, and to accustom Sargent to dictation. Miss Hastings, he said, was highly recommended, and ought to develop into a valuable assistant, provided only that Sargent was considerate of her.

SO, at three o'clock in the afternoon, Sargent slowly pushed open the door that had his name on it, and went in circumspectly. Miss Hastings, who had already reproduced the letter four times, refusing to allow a single erasure or deviation from the mathematical accuracy of alignment, was testing the advantage of a fresh ribbon in the typewriter. As Sargent entered, she looked up smilingly; for the long interval of solitude had refreshed her, and as she had labored with the trifling duty her spirits had risen until she was radiantly cheerful. Her smile was the involuntary reflection of her mood; but to Sargent it appeared positively brazen—because Sargent wasn't in the best of temper, and his apprehensions had gradually been fermenting.

"Well," he said gruffly, "how are you making out?"

For answer, she laid the fifth draft of the letter on his blotter. In her anxiety to assure herself that it was minutely perfect, she delayed to examine it once more over his shoulder. Sargent, uncomfortable at the proximity, moved about in his chair.

"I hope it's all right," she said.

Sargent nodded, and looked up. It was in that instant that he had an illuminating flash of intuition which served to double his discomfort. She was so feverishly ingenuous; it was incredible to Sargent, in spite of his information and belief, that she could really be the crafty diplomat he had pictured her. And Miss Hastings, watching Sargent narrowly, was similarly overtaken by a novel impression, which was that Sargent, after all, might be comparatively respectable.

"It is," said Sargent. "Thank you very much."

"You're quite welcome," said Miss Hastings.

At least, there was a sort of armistice.

BUT on the morrow they were both constrained again, and carefully on guard. They had each realized, after that one fleeting respite, how their danger had been augmented, and not lessened, by it. Sargent now recognized the additional handicap to which he would be subject if his secretary proved to be a nice girl as well as a manifest beauty.

Miss Hastings, too, had seen the light. She didn't intend to like him; she felt that it would be highly improper and unethical for her to like him; but she admitted to herself that, if he were the sort of man he had appeared to be, she might have difficulty in preserving her austerity.

It was wholly logical, then, for them to be constrained.

On this second morning Sargent compelled himself to dictate a dozen letters simply for the sake of moral effect; and Miss Hastings, now that she was nerved to the occasion, missed hardly a pothook. Thereafter she sparred zealously at her typewriter; and Sargent, from the safety zone behind her, found many opportunities to neglect his work and to

---

enjoy the silhouette of his busy secretary. He became abstracted; and once he blurted out a thought that never should have had that much publicity.

"Miss Hastings," he said unexpectedly, "do you ever read any of Robert Chambers' stories?"

He was instantaneously chagrined; he hadn't meant to ask her the question point-blank.

"Not now—I used to," she said, puzzled. "Why?"

"Nothing," said Sargent, florid to the ears. He had made a tactical error, and it galled him, because he foresaw that he would be misjudged.

What she was thinking was that Sargent looked like the best of the illustrations.

"Something in this circular," lied

Sargent, waving the folder of a brass foundry as an alibi, "reminded me of it."

"Really!"

"Romance of business, you know," he went on, endeavoring to cover his tracks. "The chap who owns this concern married his—"

"Married who?"

"It was as good as a novel," said Sargent hurriedly. "Suppose you take a letter to the Hoyt Motor Company."

IN the course of another week he had made a dozen blunders, not all as bad as this one, but all bad enough to anger him. And as Sargent lost his equipoise in striving so constantly to maintain it, he hadn't the pleasure of comprehending that Miss Hastings was baffled, too.

She had often thought that she was living through one chapter of a romance. Sargent was astoundingly young to have achieved such a record; he was obviously destined to great successes in the future. Miss Hastings hadn't considered herself as an actual party to the performance; she had viewed it only from the point of the bystander. But she had caught the dramatic value of it, and given it her appreciation. She was repeatedly guilty of visualizing the subsequent chapters.

At about that stage of their acquaintance, Miss Hastings, occupied in tabulating a lengthy set of quotations for the installation of some coal-conveyers, made a false start in her transcription. In the act of relentlessly excluding Sargent from her mind, Miss Hastings incidentally excluded the list of quotations. She had scarcely typed the corporation's signature when Sargent demanded the sheet.

"Done?" he queried impatiently. "Don't bother to read it—I'm late now! I'll stick it in my pocket. Thank you!" And departed on the run for an overdue appointment.

HE came back hesitantly and without his usual springiness. His expression, as he gave Miss Hastings the full benefit of it, was woe-begone. Her heart sank like a plummet.

Sargent leaned against his desk, and looked at her. There was a trace of humor in his gaze, and yet it was a brand of humor closely related to tragedy.

"Well," said Sargent presently, "I don't suppose you did it on purpose, but—"

"What?" she faltered. "Did what, Mr. Sargent?"

"I went uptown," said Sargent, speaking very meticulously, "for a final set-to on this coal contract. It ran into eight thousand dollars. And when I got there I was almost too late. They'd practically closed with some one else. But I got in for just a few minutes. It was a long shot, but they let me in. I had to talk pretty fast. And all of a sudden the right instant came—those times are mighty ticklish; you've got to win or lose on the break. And I put this letter"—he drew it from his pocket—"on the table. And my man took one look at it—and laughed—and started in to joke me about it. And that killed the sale. I did my best to get him lined up again, but it was all over. See what you think of it."

He gave her the letter, and Miss Hastings viewed it breathlessly. The first two paragraphs were faultlessly executed. Then came the tabulations, and Miss Hastings paled. The quotations were, at best, misleading.

Instead of listing two clam-shell buckets of two yards capacity, a derrick, a donkey-engine, a motor, drums, cables, pulleys, and incidentals, she had prepared the following remarkable set of estimates:

3 v; s,-djr;; nivlrys.!!!!!! % ;a—
2 frttovl . 4C!!!!!!!!!!! % :3—
2 fpmlru rmhomr !!!!!!!!!! % ;9—
2 H. R. ,pypt !!!!!!!!!!!!! % ;;—
Fti , s . vsn ; rd. i; ;rus . ryv!! % 3a—
Omdys; ;syompm!!!!!!!!!! % 9—
—
YSYP:!!!! % 9a—

The sheet slipped from her fingers and fluttered to the floor. She was white to the lips, and she was forced to clutch the corner of a filing cabinet for support. She knew that the error was worth more than her year's income.

"That cost us," said Sargent, "just about a thousand dollars clear profit."

He shrugged his shoulders and walked around to his desk.

Miss Hastings pivoted so as to follow his course. She couldn't remove her eyes from his stern-set countenance. She knew that her offense had been heinous; and yet, she knew that she wasn't altogether to blame. Sargent had grabbed the letter before she had verified it; and confessedly he hadn't read it himself before submitting it to his client. At the same time, she knew that she hadn't been entirely focused on those figures when she had typed them.

"It's better not to make any excuses," said Sargent gloomily. "Those things do happen.

"I wasn't making any excuses," she denied. "I'm just—s-sorry!" Two insurgent tears left their home and marked twin trails leading in the direction of her nose. She quivered in a little spasm of wretchedness, and it wasn't solely for herself that she was grieved; it was partly for Sargent.

Sargent raised his head, and was palsied at the crisis.

"Oh, come!" he said paternally.

Out of the silence, another sniff. Sargent got up, and strode around the obstructions.

"Now, look here," he said philosophically. "It's too bad—it's a shame. But your young life isn't blasted yet—nor mine, either. Come to think of it, you didn't have time to go over it, did you? Well, I didn't have time to go over it myself. It's one of those awful messes that everybody gets into every so often—"

Without the slightest introspection, and with the sole purpose of assuring her she could henceforward be consoled, he patted her shoulder. Then he was frozen with amazement at what he had done; and he had cause to be.

She didn't shrink from him in terror; and she didn't say, "How dare you!" and suit her gesture to the melodrama; for she was neither cowardly nor theatrical. She only looked at him; but she accomplished what she wanted.

Sargent wheeled sharply and went back to his seat.

It was within a few minutes of the closing hour. The room was absolutely quiet until, from a great distance, a bell rang cheerily. There was a rustling of papers. Sargent eyed Miss Hastings; Miss Hastings ignored Sargent, but perceived him nevertheless. They rose and simultaneously put on their hats and coats. Miss Hastings, ostensibly coercing a wrinkle or two, was waiting for Sargent to apologize; Sargent, dusting his shoes, was giving Miss Hastings an opportunity to close the incident on good terms.

"Good evening," said Miss Hastings coolly.

"Good evening," said Sargent.

THEY went into the corridor, and down to the street. They separated. They each took half a dozen steps. They paused. They turned. And as each saw the message on the other's face they turned again, much more quickly, and made off in opposite directions.

"Minx!" said Sargent to himself. "She thought she had me! Yah!"

"The brute!" said Miss Hastings. "The brute! He thought—he thought— I don't know what he thought!"

In the weeks that followed, Sargent, although he never managed to shake his individuality quite free of Miss Hastings' influence, nevertheless got into the swing of his routine, and showed results that were highly commended by his superiors.

He was now unshakably convinced, as he had been at the beginning of things, that she was out for conquest. He congratulated his own sagacity when, now and then, he observed that she had done something ultra-feminine and decoying, as, for example, when she appeared with an adornment of flowers, or with a new ribbon, or a jabot, or even new silk shoelaces. He got to be rather a clever detective in matters of this sort. Within two minutes from the opening of the office, he knew whether she had spread a fresh pitfall, and, if so, of what it consisted.

"Miss Hastings," Sargent would say, with an intonation cunningly implying that he was about to reproach her.

"Yes, Mr. Sargent!" And Miss Hastings, prettily alert, but incredibly impersonal, would discover him intent on a memorandum.

"Would it inconvenience you to stay a bit late to-night?" This would be so modulated as to suggest that naturally he expected her to decline.

"Why, not at all." Miss Hastings would pave the way to the inference that she was astonished at his question, since she existed only to further the aims of the sales department.

"I shouldn't ask you, but the Chicago office has wired twice for these figures." This was a palpable extenuation.

"Oh, it's quite all right, Mr. Sargent. They'll go out to-night." This was her intimation that she was interested in nothing but business.

"Half an hour ought to be enough. I have appointment at six, anyway." Sargent left nothing for her to cavil at.

"I'll surely get them out to-night."

And, having terminated the episode, Miss Hastings would revert instantly to her typewriter, and Sargent would generally contrive to get the door to the corridor open, in order that she wouldn't be suspicious of his purpose. Miss Hastings would usually scheme to get it closed again, in order to demonstrate to Sargent her contempt for his logic.

They behaved most queerly, too, when sometimes their eyes happened to meet directly, with no latitude for either of them to avoid the meeting. On these occasions they both showed conspicuous trepidation—showed it by reflex, or by a heightening of color.

Sargent often wondered why he didn't go straight to his chief and insist—absolutely insist—that Miss Hastings be transferred.

ONE day he went to lunch with an elderly salesman who was eloquent on the subject of stenographers.

"Confound it all," said the elderly salesman intolerantly. "We've got the rottenest bunch of typists I ever saw in my life! It's something fierce! I can't get a letter done decently with any speed—I can't get any service—they're a crowd of slackers. Oh, you haven't anything to kick about. You're in luck."

"I am?" said Sargent. "How do you make that out?"

The elderly salesman grinned.

"Well," he said, "you've got the prize peach of the whole collection. What more do you want?"

Sargent regarded him quizzically.

"Ever heard me do any gloating?"

"No; but that's where you're wise. Somebody'd grab her away from you."

"Let 'em grab," said Sargent. "I can stand it."

The elderly salesman was highly amused.

"It's been tried more than once, old top."

"When?" asked Sargent amusedly.

"Oh, any number of times. The advertising department wanted her, and the B. M. wanted her, and—if you've got to know the awful truth—we wanted her for city work. Nothing doing."

"Why not?" Sargent was growing uncomfortable.

"Think anybody could pry her away from you? Not a chance! You're a little tin god on wheels, you are! The other girls are always kidding her about it."

"Oh, they are, are they?"

Sargent was aghast.

"And, you take it from me," said the elderly salesman impressively, "you can hire brains, and you can hire hands, but you can't hire loyalty. You're certainly in luck."

Sargent made no immediate response, but he was thoughtful, and, to some extent, worried. It came as surprising news

---

to him that Miss Hastings had displayed loyalty so noteworthy as to excite comment, and he couldn't imagine what she had to be loyal about. He was depressed; he felt as if he had been ambushed, even while he was wide awake. She liked to work for him, did she? Well, he could fix that.

"If I ever get to be the head of a business," said Sargent soberly, "I'll be hanged if there's a woman in the whole outfit."

"Well, you have to pay men more," objected the salesman; "and, besides, it sort of toughens an office."

"The tougher the better," said Sargent. "Let's order something—we're wasting time."

When he returned to the office he was still distraught. Miss Hastings was out, and Sargent was unconscionably relieved. He leisurely set about the collation of loose ends from the morning; he progressed rapidly until he came to a hiatus which could be filled only by a letter which he had dictated that morning.

In the hope of finding the transcription on Miss Hastings' desk, he went over to hunt for it. There was a jumble of papers lying alongside the machine. He picked them up together; and saw under the pile two clippings. One was a brief article which he had recently written for a trade journal, and it included a half-tone of himself. Sargent grimaced, and stooped to investigate the second clipping. It was a bit of free verse from a current issue of Vanity Fair, and it was entitled:

A KISS
Listen!
For I can't say it above a whisper.
So please listen—
I knew you were going to kiss me.
I knew it weeks ago,
Sooner or later,
Some day, some hour,
You'd kiss me—
Glorious ultimate!
But listen,
At least, look attentive!
Isn't it funny, I knew it so well,
Knew that you were—going to kiss me?
Nirvana!
Listen, and tell me,
Is it because you are you
Or because I am I,
Or because you kiss every girl that you know?
None of these reasons you acknowledge?
And it's all just because—
I knew you were going to kiss me—
And you did—
Again—and again—!

Sargent replaced the clippings carefully, and jumbled the letters over them. His eyebrows were drawn down tightly, and his lips were thin and straight. His jaw was firm and tense, as if his teeth were very close together. There was a blot of angry red above his cheek-bones.

"Enough is enough," said Sargent bitterly to himself, "and too much is a great, great plenty!" He scowled at Miss Hastings' desk, and formed his wisest judgment. "She's through on Saturday," he determined with finality. "Ab—so—lute—ly!"

And went over to the chief's apartment in order to be absent from the office when Miss Hastings came in. He knew that he couldn't look at her and keep his temperamental balance. The chief told him that henceforth he could arrange the matters of assistance as he saw fit. And Sargent, instead of exulting, was unreasonably pensive.

THERE were two days until Saturday, and for two days Sargent didn't earn so much as a beggarly fraction of his salary. He couldn't expel from his mind the decision he had made, and what it would mean to him. He couldn't refrain from watching Miss Hastings, and from studying intently every detail that had to do with her charm. He couldn't forget her, not even when he had quitted the office at night. Saturday found him vacillating and restive.

At nine o'clock he resolved to enlighten her at once; at half past nine he thought it would be kinder to wait until noon. At ten he wondered if he ought to give her a further trial; forty minutes later he was disconsolate at the prospect of doing without her. Eleven o'clock came, and Sargent was painfully nervous. He was sorrowful, but adamant in his decision. And then, after nearly an hour of torment, he knew that he had been influenced by a pathetic fallacy; he must end it now and forever.

He cleared his throat.

"Miss Hastings," he said.

"Yes, Mr. Sargent."

He cleared his throat again. She was looking at him, and, as always, he was unquiet under her glance.

"How long have you been here, Miss Hastings?"

"Just six months," she said.

"That's right. We usually take on new people for six months' trial."

SHE continued to look at him, but said nothing. Sargent observed, however, a flicker of uncertainty in her eyes, and he was glad—she was probably getting the idea, so that it wouldn't come to her as a shock.

"I told you it wouldn't be easy."

"But I've liked it," she said.

"Really?"

Sargent's imagination was captured anew by her loveliness; he began to feel like a cruel despot. She was unquestionably hindering his career—and yet, how she embellished the somber office!

"Really and truly," she said.

"Well—" He was somewhat abashed; he temporized by clearing his throat. "Now, about the future." She didn't help him out by a single syllable. "Unfortunately—"

He couldn't bring himself to utter the discharge; and, as he met her eyes, he was maddeningly conscious that he didn't want to. He didn't want her to go; he didn't want her to stay. What on earth was it that he wanted?

"You see," said Sargent, "it's like this." And he began to tear small sections from his blotter. "I haven't been certain of how well satisfied you are. As a matter of fact, I don't believe you like office work, do you?"

He glanced up, and felt his heart flutter.

"I—I'm doing the best I can," said Miss Hastings.

She was applying herself sharply to a diagnosis of his meaning. His own lack of poise was premonitory, and she hadn't yet disposed of all her innate assortment of qualms.

"Yes—I know," said Sargent.

He rose abruptly, and went to the window, peered out, and slowly faced Miss Hastings. As it happened, he caught her unawares. There was no mistaking the proper translation of her look to him, and spontaneously Sargent was no employer, but a mere man. The significance of all this fluctuation of mood was suddenly clear to him, and it was paralyzing in its purport.

Sargent stammered, and put out his hand aimlessly. A succession of visions trooped across his brain. He saw his friend, the elderly salesman, laughing at him. He saw himself on that first morning, solemnly weighing his chances. He saw himself, in the past, spending lonely evenings during which he expended an astonishingly large amount of time in reflecting upon the vagaries of men and women. He saw Miss Hastings cutting gaps in the trade journals. He saw the other girls taunting her with her fealty to him, who did not deserve it. He saw his chief, humorously grave, reminding him of his impulsiveness. And, finally, he saw Miss Hastings in the flesh, there before him. Sargent wavered, and fell. The thousandth chance had finally overtaken him.

"And still," he said, a trifle unsteadily, "I don't know. I don't know whether this is the sort of thing you ought to be doing—"

She was also on her feet now, staring at him in panic.

"Mr. Sargent!"

With the sensation that he was carrying out his predestination, he walked swiftly to her side. There was no more irritation in him. He was placidly calm, save for the convulsion in his heart.

"At twelve o'clock to-day," he said, never taking his eyes from hers, "this engagement ends—"

And, before he could complete the sentence, a factory whistle screamed shrilly, another and another joined it, until the air fairly quivered to the uproar. Miss Hastings winced. Then there was dead silence.

She turned, and fumbled at her desk. Sargent came yet closer.

"And as for your next engagement," he said, "can you make up your mind about it now?"

She caught her breath.

"If you can," said Sargent, "I—wish you would. I think I must—need you!"

In the corridor outside there was the tramping of many feet, and the sound of chattering and laughter. The place was semi-public, and privacy wasn't long to be continued.

But as Miss Hastings turned to Sargent he forgot about all this. He forgot that this was his doom unescapable; he forgot everything but the reality of the present.

His arms went out and around her. He was looking down into the eyes which had so confused and baffled him; he was bending toward her lips, and he had reached them. His world burst into radiant color, and he had ceased for all time to be Sargent, the hardened cynic.

Then the knob of the door rattled, and they sprang apart. The door swung open, and two of Sargent's friends—unobserving youths—were on the threshold. Rebuffed, they went away, leaving the door open. And Sargent and Miss Hastings, avowed lovers for hardly a quarter of a minute, looked at each other from the opposite sides of the room while scores upon scores of passers-by looked in upon them.

AFTER the last stragglers had gone, Sargent, who had aped concentration upon his loose-leaf records, leaped toward her. Once and twice, quickly but ever so thoroughly, he kissed her; and then he snatched her hat from the near-by rack and thrust it into her hands.

"Come on—hurry!" he said. "Let's get out of doors! It's impossible—here! My car's downstairs. We'll get away somewhere where we can talk."

She was ordering her hair as well as she could; and Sargent was standing behind her, complicating the process.

"I knew this was going to happen," he said suddenly.

"D—did you?"

"Always," said Sargent. "But—tell me, where did you find that verse that begins—'Listen! For I can't say it above a whisper'?"

She was brilliantly crimson, and her hands shook.

"Why, how did you know?" she gasped. "I—I found it—"

"I saw it on your desk," said Sargent.

"Why, I—I found it—"

"On the floor?"

"Yes! I—"

"I wondered where I'd dropped that clipping," said Sargent. "I'd only cut it out that morning, and—"

She was in his arms again, her face close to his shoulder.

"But I did know!" she breathed. "I knew it ever so long!"

"That's why I clipped it," said Sargent. "So did I!"

And, hand in hand, they slipped down the broad stairway to the curb, where Sargent's runabout was waiting to carry them out into the sunshine.

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

A MODEL SHELTER FOR HIS CHILDREN

A London merchant living in the suburbs has built this bomb-proof shelter to accommodate his family and friends during air raids. The dug-out, constructed on the approved frontline model, is made of reinforced concrete 3½ feet thick, and the roof of steel girders is further protected by sand bags. It is fitted with electric lights, and is sunk two feet in the ground. The cost was about $250.

All over London people are constructing impromptu bomb-shelters. Practically every article that could be trusted to stand strain has been used—old doors, old iron, and lumber, combined with a top dressing of sand bags filled with anything from ashes to coal. Some people have improvised shelters indoors. These have a base consisting of a strong table, with a covering of either sand bags or mattresses. A mattress is then laid on the floor underneath, and the children sleep there as a matter of habit.

THE MAN WHO SLAUGHTERED AN ARMY

THE old man at the left in this picture is General Sukhomlinoff, once the Russian Minister of War, and the woman beside him is his wife. The photograph was taken at their trial before a body of the Russian Senate—assisted, for the first time in Russia, by a jury—in August, 1917. He was charged with high treason, she with being his accomplice. One of his generals, a chief witness against him, testified that when the war broke out the War Department was besieged with demands for shells. It was implored to increase the output of munitions and to use private factories to manufacture them. The Minister of War replied to all telegrams with promises, but did nothing. "As a consequence the soldiers perished in masses."

The jury was out seven hours. It returned a verdict of "Guilty" on twelve out of thirteen charges against him. The Minister was condemned to hard labor for life. His wife was acquitted.

THE MOST PROFITABLE FORM OF THEFT

FROM the standpoint of profit and comparative safety, there is no form of theft like the theft of automobiles. It is described by William Klinger, an insurance man quoted in the Police Bulletin, as one of the safest ways of "making a living without working."

Occasionally an automobile thief is sent up to prison; but the percentage is small, and the carelessness of owners is a constant invitation to new recruits to enter the business. How large is the traffic in stolen machines is shown by the following figures, representing the record of the first six months of 1917 in nine principal cities:

          

	Stolen	Recovered	Missing
New York	861	762	99
Chicago	1706	1200	506
Detroit	2136	1707	429
Los Angeles	699	533	166
Boston	368	249	119
Seattle	317	239	87
Minneapolis	350	100	250
Omaha	350	291	59
Denver	448	379	69

WOMEN TEACHERS OUGHT TO MARRY

ACCORDING to the 1914 report of the Commission of Education, there were in the United States 169,029 men engaged in school-teaching, and 537,123 women. More than half a million women, practically all of them unmarried, and many of them—because of lack of opportunity or because of legal restrictions—cut off from marriage. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? asks the Journal of Heredity.

If women are to teach, on eugenic grounds, preference should be given to married teachers rather than to single ones, and single ones should be encouraged to marry. This requires (1) that considerable changes be made in the higher education of young women, so that they shall be fitted for motherhood rather than for nothing except school-teaching, and (2) that social devices be brought into play to aid them in mating—since it can not be doubted that a large proportion of celibate schoolteachers are single from necessity, not from choice, their profession not being favorable to finding mates.

BRAVE DEEDS IN THE AIR

IT is safe to say that there are no cowards in the air service. Here are two stories from the collection of Thrilling Deeds of British Airmen, told by Eric Wood (Thomas Y. Crowell Co.):

Second Lieutenant Malcolm Henderson was detailed to fly over the enemy's lines, carrying with him an observer to photograph their positions. The work involved keeping his machine at low altitude, within range of the German anti-aircraft guns. Suddenly there was a terrific shock. A shell had struck the nacelle of the aëroplane, crashed through the floor, and cut off one of Henderson's legs just below the knee. For an instant the machine hung disabled, then gave a downward lurch. The slip might have ended in a nose-drive, except for the pilot's tremendous assertion of self-control. Losing blood as he was at a fearful rate, every nerve affected by the shock, he yet succeeded in getting his machine into equilibrium again, and, before the astonished German gunners could return to their guns, had driven it out of range. Holding gamely on through the pursuing shells, he presently volplaned to earth within the British lines, bringing back his companion and the photographs unscathed.

Sub-Lieutenant Oxley and Flight Lieutenant Dunning, D. S. C., were flying a long way from their own lines when they sighted two enemy machines and decided to attack, Oxley working the machine-gun while Dunning steered. During the fiercest part of the fight Dunning felt a burning pain in his left leg, and simultaneously the petrol tank was pierced by bullets.

They succeeded in beating off the Germans; and then Oxley, who knew that Dunning would probably bleed to death before they could get home, improvised a tourniquet and passed it over to his companion, with a scribbled note telling him to fix it on his leg and relinquish control of the machine so that he himself might take charge. The two men managed the difficult exchange of seats as the aëroplane whirled through the air. Then Dunning, having tied up his wound, turned his attention to the leaking petrol tank. He succeeded in stopping the leak by keeping his thumb pressed over the hole. In this way they got the riddled and battered machine back to their own lines, and made a successful landing.

GETTING WOOLWORTH TO TALK

"MR. WOOLWORTH will see you at his home for fifteen minutes from eight-fifteen to eight-thirty this evening."

This was the message that Frank W. Woolworth's secretary telephoned to B. C. Forbes, who has had more experience in interviewing millionaires than any other man in America. His protest that fifteen minutes was too short a time brought no hope from the secretary. Nor was Mr. Woolworth, when Forbes met him that night, disposed to forget the limits that he had placed on the interview.

He was sorry, he said, that he could not give Mr. Forbes what he wanted, but he had made it a rule never to be interviewed.

"The clock was rushing toward eight-thirty," says Mr. Forbes, telling the story inForbes' Magazine. "What must I do? What must I try?

"I can understand exactly how you feel, Mr. Woolworth," I essayed, "but I have found during my newspaper career that so many of the people who have not succeeded feel rather sore towards men like yourself who have made millions. They seem to think—in fact, they often say—'Oh, these rich guys just happened to be lucky and we weren't.' They seldom stop to think that most of the men who have built up great businesses had to suffer hardships and overcome innumerable difficulties in the early years of their life. As I understand it, you had your own share of difficulties to overcome?"

"Difficulties!" repeated Mr. Woolworth, leaning forward on his chair and for the first time showing the slightest animation. "I should say I had. Why, I was as big a boob as there ever was when I started out. There never was a greener hayseed than I was. Instead of having my pay increased I once had it cut because I was such a failure at selling goods. I know what it means—"

The builder of the five-and-ten-cent stores was off. It was nearly midnight when he finished and Forbes rose to go. All of which teaches the valuable lesson that, if you would get a man interested, get him to talking about himself—his early struggles, his family, his ambitions.

"What is your ambition?" was Forbes' last question.

"To open a store in every town in the civilized world," answered Woolworth.

He has nine hundred stores already—a reasonably good start.

---

THE MAKING OF A BOSS

ONE by one, the old-time political bosses have disappeared from the face of American politics, until only one outstanding figure remains. Charles Francis Murphy, ruler of Tammany Hall—where did he come from? How did he win his way to power?

He was the son of a New York Irishman, and his first job was in an East Side shipyard. When he was in his early teens he organized and headed a club of boys of his own age who formed a sort of juvenile Tammany Hall, and became a leader in what was known as the "Gas House District."

Later, through political influence, he secured a job as driver on a cross-town horse-car line. He was a manly youth, according to Gustavus Meyers, whose History of Tammany Hall has just been published by Boni and Liverwright. He was noted for his filial care, a solicitous son, turning in the bulk of his earnings to his mother. At the same time, he put by enough money—said to have been $500—to establish himself in the saloon business.

From littler saloons to bigger he moved, until in 1890 he was the owner of four prosperous establishments. In 1892 he was elected Tammany leader of the Gas House District; and his benefactions to the poor were so marked, the orderliness of his place such a contrast to the majority of saloons, that even Dr. Rainsford commented on it from the pulpit of St. George's Church.

A few years later he was appointed a Dock Commissioner, and his fortune at that time was estimated at $400,000. So thrifty was he that out of the modest salary of his position he was able in a short time to raise the sum to more than a million—all by what he and his associates were pleased to term "honest graft."

Unlike Mr. Croker, he never cared to make the Democratic Club his headquarters. Every night, when he was a district leader, he could be found from seven-thirty to ten o'clock leaning against a lamp-post at the northwest corner of Twenty-third Street and Second Avenue. Everybody in the district knew that he was there, accessible to anybody that wanted to talk to him. He had none of the ordinary vices. He drank liquor occasionally, it is true, but his drinks were few. In smoking he did not indulge; neither did he swear nor gamble at cards.

A CHANCE FOR DEAF WOMEN

WOMEN who are hard of hearing, and would like to do something to help in the war, will have their opportunity, according to the New York Medical Journal. And, incidentally, it may open up to them the way to permanently profitable employment.

Reports from the war hospitals indicate that a considerable number of soldiers suffer from complete or partial deafness as a result of shell-shock or head wounds. Because they look strong and well on their discharge, these men seldom receive the same consideration as other incapacitated soldiers. The best service that can be done them is to teach them lip-reading: and this work women who are themselves hard of hearing are peculiarly adapted to undertake.

Such women, desiring further information, are directed to the Volta Bureau, 1601 35th St., Washington. The Bureau does not itself teach lip-reading, but will refer any inquirer to a qualified teacher near his or her own home.

SHE WAS SHOT AT SUNRISE

BRIEF notices appeared in American newspapers a few months ago announcing that Mata Hari, a well known woman dancer, had been shot as a spy for giving information to the Germans.

The story of this woman is remarkable.

Mata Hari was born in Java, the daughter of a Dutch planter and a native woman. When she was six years old the child was entered in Buddhist temple, to be trained as a sacred dancer. Later the dancers were taken to Burma for a religious festival, and Mata Hari, then a beutiful fourteen-year-old girl, came under the notice of a young English officer, Sir Campbell McLeod, who fell desperately in love with her, eloped with her to India, and married her.

The pair had two children, a boy and a girl. One day the boy died suddenly. His mother, believing that he had been poisoned by a gardener she had beaten, hunted the terrified wretch out in the bazaars, and with her own hands cut his throat. Later it was proved that the child had died of ptomaine poison, and Lady McLeod was given three hours to leave India. She went to Paris, and her unfortunate husband followed her there. A little later he blew out his brains at Monte Carlo.

The episode that wrecked Sir Campbell's career only began that of his half-savage wife. As a dancer she became the fashion in all the great capitals. She also became one of the most valuable woman spies in the Potsdam system.

In 1915 she managed to discover the secret of the British tanks, and conveyed it to the Germans. It was nearly a year before the police traced the betrayal to her. When she was finally caught, she had already made her way on foot through Switzerland nearly to the German border, disguised as a peasant woman, living on raw carrots out of the fields. She was immediately sentenced and shot.

"Life is an adventure," are said to have been her last words.

KINDNESS PAYS ON THE FARM

"THE loud-mouthed, cursing hired man, with an ever-ready kick or blow for the cows, is a losing proposition n the stables," says a writer in Farm and Home. "Cows are nervous animals, and harsh treatment readily shows itself in the decreased flow of milk.

"Absence of fear and a feeling of security and contentment help largely to put weight on a hog. Swine may have the appearance of a phlegmatic disposition, but they dread the approach of a brutal keeper.

"Sheep should be handled with gentleness, if the desire is to produce the largest possible returns. Hens that have the feeling of security which prompts them fearlessly to gather around the owner's feet at feeding time are the ones that do the most to keep the egg basket full.

"Summing it all up, the brutal man has no proper place on the farm. If he is a hired man, get rid of him. Your orders may be followed while you are in sight; but as soon as the vicious person is alone with your valuable stock he satiates that desire to beat something, which, expended on the live stock, can only result in the decrease of the farm efficiency.

PRECIOUS STONES IN AMERICA

NOT every one knows that sapphires are found in Montana; rubies and emeralds in North Carolina; and diamonds in California and Alabama. The most characteristic American precious stone, however, is the turquoise. It is the stone that the Indians have always prized above all others, says Professor J. E. Pogue in the Pan-American Union. It is the stone that the Spaniards first found, incrusted in beautiful barbaric ornaments, when they came to the New World.

Occurring as it does in arid desert regions, its color suggested verdure and water to the Aztecs and Indians. It had a deep symbolical meaning for them, and was used in all their religious ceremonies. The Aztecs made wonderful masks of cedar, and covered them with mosaic consisting of thousands of tiny polished slabs of turquoise carefully fitted together.

Only twenty-four of these priceless mosaics have come down to our time, and of those only one is in America. The rest have been carried out of the country.

BOOKS WORTH SENDING FOR

Any of the following books may be secured by sending a money order to the Superintendent of Public Documents (mentioning the department indicated), Washington, D. C.:

The Geological Survey is continually receiving inquiries about the merits of "divining rods." This pamphlet answers them. (Geological Surgey, Water-supply Paper 416). Price, 10 cents.

(Public Health Service, Bulletin 81.) Price, 15 cents.

(Bureau of Foreign and Domestic Commerce, Special Agents' Series 129.) Price, 15 cents.

(Department of Agriculture, Farmers' Bulletin 808). Price, 5 cents.

WHO IS ENVER PASHA?

WE find his name frequently in the newspapers. We know that he is one of the little group in Constantinople who are responsible for Turkey's alliance with Germany, and under whose direction the horrible massacres in Armenia have been carried out. But who is he? Where did he come from?

Well, he's not a Turk at all, says Answers, but a Polish Jew. He is a handsome, apparently polished gentleman, to all outward appearances: but underneath are the evidences of the hard, coarse upbringing, and the years that he spent as a brigand and outlaw in the Albanian mountains.

From such a man little mercy is to be expected. He knows that the defeat of Germany will doubtless mean the end of his life; and he is not likely to give in until the last shot.

He is credited with a larger list of deliberately planned murders than any other European "statesman."

THE GOLDEN SNARE

By JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

Illustrations by George Giguère

PHILIP was not unaccustomed to the occasional mental and physical shock which is an inevitable accompaniment of the business of Law in the northland. But never had he felt quite the same stir in his blood as now—when he found himself looking down the short tunnel into the face of the man he was hunting.

There come now and then moments in which a curious understanding is impinged upon one without loss of time in reason and surmise—and this was one of those moments for Philip. His first thought as he saw the wild face in the door of his tunnel was that Bram had been looking at him for some time—while he was asleep; and that if the desire to kill had been in the outlaw's breast he might have achieved his purpose with very little trouble. Equally swift was his observance of the fact that the tent with which he had covered the aperture was gone, and that his rifle, with the weight of which he had held the tent in place, had disappeared.

It was not the loss of these things, or even Bram's appearance, that sent through him the odd thrill which he experienced. It was Bram's face, his eyes, the tense and mysterious earnestness that was in his gaze. In it there was no sign of hatred or of exultation. Rather it was the study of one filled with doubt and uneasiness, and confronted by a question which he could not answer. There was not a line of the face which Philip could not see now—its high cheek-bones, its wide cheeks, the low forehead, the flat nose, the thick lips. Only the eyes kept it from being a terrible face. Straight down through the generations Bram must have inherited those eyes from some woman of the past. They were strange things in that hunted creature's face—gray eyes, large, beautiful.

FOR a full minute not a sound passed between the two men. Philip's hand had slipped to the butt of his revolver, but he had no intention of using it. Then he found his voice.

"Hello, Bram!"

"Boo-joo, m'sieu!"

Only Bram's thick lips moved. His voice was low and guttural. Almost instantly his head disappeared from the opening.

Philip dug himself quickly from his sleeping-bag. Through the aperture there came to him another sound, the yearning whine of beasts.

In spite of the confidence which his first look at Bram had given him, he felt a sudden shiver run up his spine as he faced the end of the tunnel, his revolver in his hand. What a rat in a trap he would be if Bram loosed his wolves!

He began crawling toward the opening, and again he heard the snarl and whine of the beasts. He reached the end of the tunnel and peered out through the door he had made in the crust.

From his position he could see nothing—nothing but the endless sweep of the barren and his old trail leading up to the snow dune. The muzzle of his revolver was at the aperture when he heard Bram's voice.

"M'sieu—ze revolv'—ze knife—or I mus' keel you. Ze wolve plent' hungr'—"

BRAM was standing just outside of his line of vision. He had not spoken loudly or threateningly, but Philip felt in the words a cold and unexcited deadliness of purpose. Bram had more than the bad man's ordinary drop on him. If Philip had doubted this, his uncertainty was swept away by the appearance thirty feet in front of his tunnel of three of Bram's wolves. They were giants of their kind, and as the three faced his refuge he could see the snarling gleam of their long fangs. A fourth and a fifth joined them, and after that they came within his vision in twos and threes until a score of them were huddled straight in front of him. They were restless and whining, and the snap of their jaws was like the clicking of castanets. He knew that it was Bram who was holding them back, and yet he had heard no command.

"M'sieu—ze revolv'—ze knife—or I loose ze wolve—"

The words were scarcely out of Bram's mouth when Philip's revolver flew through the opening and dropped in the snow.

"There it is, old man," announced Philip. "And here comes the knife."

His sheath-knife followed the revolver.

"Shall I throw out my bed?" he asked.

He was making a tremendous effort to appear cheerful. But he could not forget that last night he had shot at Bram, and that it was not at all unreasonable to suppose that Bram might knock his brains out when he stuck his head from the hole. A moment later, when he thrust his sleeping-bag out through the opening, Bram was possessing himself of the revolver and the knife. Seizing the opportunity, Philip followed his bed quickly, and when Bram faced him he was standing outside the drift.

"Morning, Bram!"

His greeting was drowned in a chorus of fierce snarls that made his blood curdle.

From Bram's throat there shot forth at the pack a sudden sharp clack of Eskimo.

Then he looked steadily at his prisoner. For the first time Philip saw the look which he dreaded darkening his face. The thick lips were set tightly, the flat nose seemed flatter, his huge naked hand gripped his club until the cords stood out like babiche thongs under the skin. In that moment he was ready to kill.

In the same thick guttural voice which he used in his half-breed patois he demanded:

"Why you shoot—las' night?"

"Because I wanted to talk with you, Bram," replied Philip calmly. "I didn't shoot to hit you. I fired over your head."

"You want—talk," said Bram, speaking as if each word cost him a certain amount of effort. "Why—talk?"

"I wanted to ask you why it was that you killed a man down in the God's Lake country."

The words were out before Philip could stop them. A growl rose in Bram's chest. It was like the growl of a beast.

"Ze poleece," he said. "Ka, ze poleece like kam from Churchill an' ze wolve keel!"

Philip's hand was fumbling in his pocket. The wolves were behind him and he dared not turn to look. They were waiting—watching—their animal instinct telling them that the command for which they yearned was already trembling on the thick lips of their master. The revolver and the knife dropped from Bram's hand.

Philip drew forth the wallet.

"You lost something—when you camped that night near Pierre Breault's cabin," he said, and his own voice seemed strange and thick to him. "I've followed you—to give it back. I could have killed you if I had wanted to—when I fired over your head. But I wanted to stop you. I want to give you—this."

He held out to Bram the golden snare.

IT must have been fully half a minute that Bram stood like a living creature turned suddenly into dead stone. His eyes had left Philip's face and were fixed on the woven tress of shining hair. He did not seem to breathe. At the end of the thirty seconds his hand unclenched from about the whip and the club and they fell into the snow. With his eyes still fixed on the snare, as if it held for him an overpowering fascination, he advanced a step, and then another, until he reached out and took from Philip the thing which he held. The lines in his heavy face softened and his thick lips lost some of their cruelty. It was then that Philip saw that which nature must have intended for a smile in Bram's face.

Still this strange man made no spoken sound as he coiled the silken thread around one of his great fingers and placed it somewhere inside his coat. He seemed, all at once, utterly oblivious of Philip's presence. He picked up the revolver, gazed heavily at it for a moment, and, with a grunt that must have reflected his mental decision, hurled it far out over the plain. Instantly the wolves were after it in a mad rush. The knife followed the revolver; and after that, as coolly as though breaking firewood, the giant went to Philip's rifle braced it across his knee, and with a single effort snapped the stock off close to the barrel.

"The devil!" growled Philip.

He felt a surge of anger rise in him, and for an instant the inclination to fling himself at Bram in the defense of his property. If he had been helpless a few minutes before, he was utterly so now. In the same breath it flashed upon him that Bram's activity in the destruction of his weapons meant that his life was spared, at least for the present.

The futility of speech kept his lips closed. At last Bram looked at him, and pointed to his snowshoes. His invitation for Philip to prepare himself for travel was accompanied by nothing more than a grunt.

The wolves were returning, sneaking in watchfully and alert. Bram greeted them with the snap of his whip, and when Philip was ready motioned him to lead the way into the north. Half a dozen paces behind him followed Bram, and twice that distance behind the outlaw came the pack. It was, first of all, quite evident that Bram had not accepted him as a traveling companion, but as a prisoner; and he was equally convinced that the golden snare had at the last moment served in some mysterious way to save his life.

It was not long before he saw how Bram had out-generaled him. Two miles beyond the big drift they came upon the outlaw's sledge, from which Bram and his wolves had made a wide circle in order to stalk him from behind. The fact puzzled him. Evidently the wolf-man had expected his unknown enemy to pursue him. Why, then, had he not attacked him the night of the caribou kill?

HE watched Bram as he got the pack into harness. The wolves obeyed him like dogs. He could perceive among them a strange comradeship, even an affection. Bram spoke to them entirely in Eskimo—and the sound of it was like the rapid clack—clack—clack of dry bones striking together. It was weirdly different from the thick and guttural tones Bram used in speaking Chippewyan and the half-breed patois. Again Philip made an effort to induce him to break his oppressive silence. With a suggestive gesture and a hunch of his shoulders he nodded toward the pack.

"If you thought I tried to kill you night before last why didn't you set your wolves after me, Bram—as you did those other two over on the barren north of Kasba Lake? Why did you wait until this morning? And where—where are we going?"

Bram stretched out an arm. "There!"

It was the one question he answered, and he pointed straight as the needle of a compass into the north. And then, as if his crude sense of humor had been touched by the other thing Philip had asked, he burst into a laugh. It made one shudder to see laughter in a face like Bram's. It was this laugh, heard almost at his elbow, that made Philip suddenly grip hard at a new understanding—the laugh and the look in Bram's eyes. It set him throbbing, and filled him all at once with the desire to seize his companion by his great shoulders and shake speech from his thick lips. In that moment, even before the laughter had gone from Bram's face, he thought again of Pelletier. Pelletier must have been like this.

Bram was not yet mad. And yet he was fighting the thing that had killed Pelletier. Loneliness. The fate forced upon him by the law because he had killed a man.

His face was again heavy and unemotional when with a gesture he made Philip understand that he was to ride on the sledge. Bram himself went to the head of the pack. At the sharp clack of his Eskimo the wolves strained in their traces. Another moment and they were off, with Bram in the lead.

Philip was amazed at the pace set by the master of the pack. They must have traveled eight miles an hour. For a few minutes Philip could not keep his eyes from Bram and the gray backs of the wolves. They fascinated him, and at the same time the sight of them—straining on ahead of him into a voiceless and empty

Continued on page 15

CHRISTMASES WE HAVE KNOWN

YES, THEY'RE REALLY SISTERS

SUPERLATIVE PEOPLE

Continued from page 10

world—filled him with a strange and overwhelming compassion. He saw in them the brotherhood of man and beast. It was splendid. It was epic. And to this the Law had driven them!

His eyes began to take in the sledge then. On it was a roll of bear skins—Bram's blankets. One was the skin of a polar bear. Near these skins were the haunches of caribou meat, and so close to him that he might have reached out and touched it, was Bram's club. At the side of the club lay a rifle. It was of the old breech-loading single-shot type, and Philip wondered why Bram had destroyed his own modern weapon instead of keeping it in place of this ancient Company relic.

The club, even more than the rifle, bore marks of use. It was of birch, and three feet in length. Where Bram's hand gripped it the wood was worn as smooth and dark as mahogany, and it was discolored by suggestive stains. There was no sign of cooking utensils and no evidence of any other food but the caribou flesh. On the rear of the sledge was a huge bundle of pitch-soaked spruce tied with babiche, and out of this stuck the crude handle of an ax.

Of these things the gun and the white bearskin impressed Philip most. He had only to lean forward a little to reach the rifle, and the thought that he could scarcely miss the broad back of the man ahead of him struck him all at once with a sort of mental shock. Bram had evidently forgotten the weapon, or was utterly confident in the protection of the pack. Or—had he faith in his prisoner? It was this last question that Philip would liked to have had answered in the affirmative. He had no desire to harm Bram. He had even a less desire to escape him. He had forgotten that he was an agent of the Law—under oath to bring in to Divisional Headquarters Bram's body, dead or alive. He was like Pelletier, and through him he was entering upon a strange adventure which held for him already the thrill and suspense of an anticipation which he had never experienced.

HAD the golden snare been taken from the equation—had he not felt the thrill of it in his fingers as it lay unbound on Pierre Breault's table, his present relation with Bram Johnson he would have considered as a purely physical condition, and he might then have accepted the presence of the rifle there within his reach as a direct invitation from providence.

As it was, he knew that the master of the wolves was speeding swiftly to the source of the golden snare. From the moment he had seen the strange transformation it had worked in Bram that belief within him had become positive. Was it possible that Bram was striking straight north for Coronation Gulf and the Eskimo? He had noted that the polar bear skin was only slightly used—that it had not long been taken from the back of the animal that had worn it. He recalled what he could remember of his geography. Their course, if continued in the direction Bram was now heading, would take them east of the Great Slave and the Great Bear, and they would hit the Arctic somewhere between Melville Sound and the Coppermine River. It was a good five hundred miles to the Eskimo settlements there. Bram and his wolves could make it in ten days, possibly in eight.

If his guess was correct, and Coronation Gulf was Bram's goal, he had found at least one possible explanation for the tress of golden hair.

The girl or woman to whom it had belonged had come into the north aboard a whaling ship. Probably she was the daughter or the wife of the master. The ship had been lost in the ice—she had been saved by the Eskimo—and she was among them now, with other white men. Philip pictured it all vividly. It was unpleasant—horrible. The theory of other white men being with her he was conscious of forcing upon himself to offset the more reasonable supposition that, as in the case of the golden snare, she belonged to Bram. What a monstrous fate for a woman! He shivered. For a few moments every instinct in his body fought to assure him that such a thing could not happen. And yet he knew that it could happen. A woman with hair like spun gold—and that giant half-mad enormity of a man!

He clenched his hands at the picture his excited brain was painting for him. He wanted to jump from the sledge, overtake Bram, and demand the truth from him. He was calm enough to realize the absurdity of such action. Upon his own strategy depended now whatever answer he might make to the message chance had sent to him through the golden snare.

FOR an hour he marked Bram's course by his compass. It was straight north. Then Bram changed the manner of his progress by riding in a standing position behind Philip. A dozen times Philip made efforts at conversation. Not a word did he get from Bram in reply. Again and again the outlaw shouted to his wolves in Eskimo; he cracked his whip, and twice there rolled out of his chest deep peals of strange laughter.

They had been traveling for more than two hours when he gave voice to a sudden command that stopped the pack, and at a second command—a torrent of shrill Eskimo accompanied by the lash of his whip—the panting wolves sank upon their bellies in the snow.

Philip jumped from the sledge, and Bram went immediately to the gun. He did not touch it, but dropped on his knees and examined it closely. Then he rose to his feet and looked at Philip, and there was no indication of madness in his heavy face as he said:

"You no touch ze gun, m'sieu. Why you no shoot when I am there—at head of pack?"

The calmness and directness with which Bram put the question after his long and unaccountable silence surprised Philip.

"For the same reason you didn't kill me when I was asleep, I guess," he said. Suddenly he reached out and caught Bram's arm. "Why the devil don't you come across?" he demanded. "Why don't you talk? I'm not after you—now. The police think you are dead, and I don't believe I'd tip them off even if I had a chance. Why not be human? Where are we going? And what in thunder—"

He did not finish. To his amazement, Bram flung back his head, opened his great mouth, and laughed. There was no humor in it. The thing seemed beyond the control of even Bram himself, and Philip stood like one paralyzed as his companion turned quickly to the sledge and returned in a moment with the gun. Under Philip's eyes he opened the breech.

The chamber was empty. Bram had placed in his way a temptation—to test him!

There was saneness in that stratagem—and yet as Philip looked at the man now his last doubt was gone. Bram Johnson was hovering on the borderland of madness.

Replacing the gun on the sledge, Bram began hacking off chunks of the caribou flesh with a big knife. Evidently he had decided that it was time for himself and his pack to breakfast. To each of the

wolves he gave a portion, after which he seated himself on the sledge and began devouring a slice of the raw meat. He had left the blade of his knife buried in the carcass—an invitation for Philip to help himself. Philip seated himself near Bram and opened his pack. Purposely he began placing his food between them, so that the other might help himself if he so desired. Bram's jaws ceased their crunching. For a moment Philip did not look up. When he did he was startled. Bram's eyes were blazing with a red fire. He was staring at the cooked food. Never before had Philip seen such a look in a human face.

He reached out and seized a chunk of bannock, and was about to bite into it when with the snarl of a wild beast Bram dropped his meat and was at him. Before he could raise an arm in defense his enemy had him by the throat. Back over the sledge they went. In another moment the giant had hurled him clean over his head and he struck the frozen plain with a shock that stunned him. When he staggered to his feet, expecting a final assault that would end him, Bram was kneeling beside his pack. A mumbling and incoherent jargon of sound issued from his thick lips as he took stock of Philip's supplies. Of Philip himself he seemed now utterly oblivious. Still mumbling he dragged the pile of bear skins from the sledge, unrolled them, and revealed a worn and tattered dunnage bag. At first Philip thought this bag was empty. Then Bram drew from it a few small packages, some of them done up in paper and others in bark. Only one of these did Philip recognize—a half pound package of tea such as the Hudson's Bay Company offers in barter at its stores. Into the dunnage bag Bram now put the supplies, even to the last crumb of bannock, and then returned the articles he had taken out, after which he rolled the bag up in the bear skins and replaced the skins on the sledge.

AFTER that, still mumbling, and still paying no attention to Philip, he reseated himself on the edge of the sledge and finished his breakfast of raw meat.

"The poor devil!" mumbled Philip.

The words were out of his mouth before he realized that he had spoken them. In Bram's face, as he had covetously piled up the different articles of food, he had seen the terrible glare of starvation—and yet he had not eaten a mouthful.

Again Bram seemed to be unconscious of his presence, but when he went to the meat and began carving himself off a slice the wolf-man's eyes shot in his direction just once. Purposely he stood in front of Bram as he ate the raw steak, feigning a greater relish than he actually enjoyed in consuming his uncooked meal. Bram did not wait for him to finish. No sooner had he swallowed the last of his own breakfast than he was on his feet giving sharp commands to the pack. Instantly the wolves were alert in their traces. Philip took his former position on the sledge, with Bram behind him.

Never in all the years afterward did he forget that day. As the hours passed it seemed to him that neither man nor beast could very long stand the strain endured

---

by Bram and his wolves. Hour after hour it surged steadily onward over the endless plain, and whenever the wolves sagged for a moment in their traces Bram's whip snapped over their gray backs.

Philip was convinced that some unusual excitement was urging Bram on, and he was equally certain that this excitement had taken possession of him from the moment he had found the food in his pack.

The gray world about them was darkening when at last they stopped.

And now, strangely as before, Bram seemed for a few moments to turn into a sane man. He pointed to the bundle of fuel, and as casually as though he had been conversing with him all the time, he said to Philip:

"A fire, m'sieu."

The wolves had dropped in their traces, their great shaggy heads stretched out between their paws in utter exhaustion, and Bram went slowly down the line speaking to each one in turn. After that he fell again into his stolid silence. From the bear skins he produced a kettle, filled it with snow, and hung it over the pile of fagots to which Philip was touching a match. Philip's tea pail he employed in the same way.

"How far have we come, Bram?" Philip asked.

"Fift' mile, m'sieu," answered Bram.

"And how much farther have we to go?"

Bram grunted. His face became more stolid. In his hand he was holding the big knife with which he cut the caribou meat. From the knife he looked at Philip.

"I keel ze man at God's Lake because he steal ze knife—an' call me lie. I keel heem—lak that!"—and he snatched up a stick and broke it into two pieces.

His weird laugh followed the words. He went to the meat and began carving off chunks for the pack, and for a long time after that one would have thought that he was dumb.

NIGHT shut them in, and in the glow of fire Bram scooped a hollow in the snow for a bed, and tilted the big sledge over it as a roof. Philip made himself as comfortable as he could with his sleeping-bag, using his tent as an additional protection. The fire went out. Bram's heavy breathing told him that the wolf-man was soon asleep. It was a long time before he felt drowsiness creeping over himself.

Later he was awakened by a heavy grasp on his arm, and roused himself to hear Bram's voice close over him.

"Get up, m'sieu."

It was so dark he could not see Bram when he got to his feet, but he could hear him a moment later among the wolves, and knew that he was making ready to travel. When his sleeping-bag and tent were on the sledge he struck a match and looked at his watch. It was less than a quarter of an hour after midnight.

FOR two hours Bram led his pack straight into the west. By lighting an occasional match Philip continued to keep a record of direction and time. It was three o'clock, and they were still traveling west, when to his surprise they struck a small patch of timber. The clump of stunted and wind-snarled spruce covered no more than half an acre, but it was conclusive evidence they were again approaching a timber-line.

From the patch of spruce Bram struck due north, and for another hour their trail was over the white barren. Soon after this they came to a fringe of scattered timber which grew steadily heavier and deeper as they entered into it. They must have penetrated eight or ten miles into the forest before the dawn came. And in that dawn, gray and gloomy, they came suddenly upon a cabin.

Philip's heart gave a jump. Here, at last, would the mystery of the golden snare be solved. But as they drew nearer, and stopped at the threshold of the door, he felt sweep over him an utter disappointment. There was no life here. No smoke came from the chimney and the door was almost buried in a huge drift of snow.

It was eight o'clock—two hours after they had passed the cabin—when they came to the edge of a clearing in the center of which was a second cabin. A thin spiral of smoke was rising from the chimney. He could see only the roof of the log structure, for it was entirely shut in by a circular stockade of saplings six feet high.

Twenty paces from where Bram stopped his team was the gate of the stockade. Bram went to it, thrust his arm through a hole even with his shoulders, and a moment later the gate swung inward. For a space of twenty seconds he looked steadily at Philip, and for the first time Philip observed the remarkable change that had come into his face. There was a strange glow in his eyes. His thick lips were parted as if on the point of speech, and he was breathing with a quickness which did not come of physical exertion.

"M'sieu, you go to ze cabin."

He held the gate open, and Philip entered. He paused to make certain of Bram's intention. The wolf-man swept an arm about the enclosure.

"In ze pit I loose ze wolve, m'sieu."

Philip understood. The stockade enclosure was Bram's wolf-pit, and Bram meant that he should reach the cabin before he gave the pack the freedom of the corral. From the gate to the door ran a path worn by many footprints, and his heart beat faster as he noted the smallness of the mocassin tracks. Even then his mind fought against the possibility of the thing. Probably it was an Indian woman who lived with Bram, or an Eskimo girl he had brought down from the north.

He made no sound as he approached the door. He did not knock, but opened it and entered, as Bram had invited him to do.

From the gate Bram watched the cabin door as it closed behind him, and then he threw back his head and such a laugh of triumph came from his lips that even the tired beasts behind him pricked up their ears and listened.

And Philip, in that same moment, stood face to face with the mystery of the golden snare.

(To be continued next week)

He Filled the Kaiser's Teeth

ACCORDING to Ambassador Gerard's book, the Kaiser "showed great bitterness against the United States" for our shipment of munitions to the Allies: but in one matter he was compelled to rely on a Yankee, no matter what his feeling toward the race. For years an American has taken care of the Kaiser's teeth.

The first to enjoy that distinction was the courtly Dr. Sylvester, whose practice in Berlin included a very large number of the nobility, among them the Kaiser's entire family—almost enough in itself to keep a dentist busy. As years passed, Dr. Sylvester found it impossible to do the work himself, and, coming to America, discovered Dr. Arthur N. Davis, a young man with skill and—equally important—a good strong nerve.

For it takes nerve to bend back the head of the Supreme War Lord and poke a drill into the left lower molar of the All Highest. It was only a day or two after Dr. Davis's arrival that Wilhelm showed up with an aching tooth. Nothing daunted, Dr. Davis went to it; and for an hour Wilhelm sat holding on to the sides of the chair while the cavity was prepared and the gold hammered in.

At the end of the operation, however, the Doctor was considerably done up; and the Kaiser, noting his exhaustion, laughed and advised him to go out and eat a "beefsteak as thick as that," indicating the thickness with his fingers.

Doubtless the Kaiser has frequent occasion these days to remember that advice, and to wish that he had had that beefsteak put into his own refrigerator.

Have You Ever Had an Experience that You Could Not Explain?

A MORE truthful man than my Uncle Jim never lived. He was so careful in being correct that some of his neighbors bestowed upon him the name of "Honest Jim"; but I never called him that, for it's too much like wearing a big brass badge.

"While I was back on the farm," he told me once, when we were talking over strange occurrences, "little Ruth came to cheer Mary and me. She was as pretty as a picture, and the happiest day of my married life was when she lisped 'daddy' to me.

"One afternoon late in the spring I was plowing, and hurrying to beat the band to get my corn in, for the season had been mighty slow. I was on the last round and farthest from the house, and I was feeling glad that the job was as good as done, when I glanced up—and right in front of the horses and almost under their feet I saw little Ruth. I pulled back on the lines, and the team stopped.

"'Why, Ruth!' I exclaimed. 'What does mother mean by letting you come away out here by yourself?'

"She disappeared just as I spoke. She just seemed to melt into space right before my eyes; and it was so sudden it sorter took me back. Then a feeling of fear came over me.

"I dropped the lines right out there, and left the horses standing in the furrow. I hit it for the house, cutting across the plowed ground; but it seemed like my shaking legs would never get me there. I don't know what I thought as I went. I felt dazed.

"In the lane I saw Mary coming. She was waving her hands and crying and screaming all at once. I knew something had happened, and then I heard her voice wailing:

"'Baby's dead! She's dead!'

"Somehow, I knew it before she spoke—and I'd been knowing without being able to understand. She'd been playing with an ear of corn she had for a doll. A grain fell off, and she'd choked on it.

"But what do you reckon it was I saw out there in the field in front of my team? I must have seen her about the time she died, for Mary hadn't had time to ring the bell when I got there. When the neighbors came, they found the horses just as I had left them."

I have never been able to explain my uncle's strange experience. I never was able to explain my own, which happened to me at a séance in the Odd Fellows' Hall.

It was just before Christmas. The medium went about giving messages here and there, and at last she came my way. She paused directly behind my chair and said:

"A tall woman with high cheek-bones and a Roman nose would tell you—wait, she is your aunt, sixty years old. Her name is Sarah. She lived in Oklahoma. She says that you will hear of her death soon."

I recognized the woman that the medium had mentioned. She was my mother's sister. In the next morning's mail my mother received a letter telling of her sister's death.

"Just a minute," the medium continued. "Here is a man, tall and gaunt—your Uncle Jim. He is the husband of the woman who spoke first. He has been dead ten years. He says:

"'Do you remember what we talked about on the bench out under the old elm tree the last Sunday we were together? Will, you made the gravest mistake of your life when you did not heed my advice that day. You should have done as I said. I can't get over the disappointment I felt when you refused to be a lawyer and said you wanted to study medicine instead. You were too frail for that, and you have found it out now. I would have helped you in the law. I would have'—I can't hear any more," the medium faltered.

No one but my uncle and I ever knew of that talk under the elm tree that last Sunday. He had said:

"Will, I'll do all I can for you if you'll take up law. I'll pull the wires, and I've got friends and influence. I'll see that you get started right, and I'll make you prosecutor of the county, and I'll get you re-elected, and some day you'll hold down the judge's chair in the court-house."

But I was a smart young fellow, and old age could teach me nothing. I studied medicine, and I put out my shingle; but the family inheritance of lungs, unequal to the task, forced my withdrawal from the profession I had just entered.

I know nothing more about my uncle's experience, nor about mine. I know only what happened to me, and his veracity has never been questioned before his death and never after.

W. J. Campbell.

How to Reject a President

THE first President to bring a bride to the White House at Washington was John Tyler, who married Miss Julia Gardiner in New York City during the summer of 1844. She was nineteen and he was nearly three times her age.

In after years Mrs. Tyler did not hesitate to tell the circumstances surrounding the proposal. Her gray eyes invariably beamed as she recalled the days of her girlhood and narrated the story.

"I often think now how frivolous I was then," she would begin as she sat in an easy chair at her home in Richmond, Virginia. "There was a grand reception held in the White House on Washington's Birthday. All the people of note were there, and it was very brilliant. I had been dancing with a young man who was not pleased with the attention the President had been paying me. We had just stopped and were walking about when the President came up and, drawing my arm through his, said to the young man: 'I must claim Miss Gardiner's company for a while.'

"The young man drew off and looked as if he would like to say, 'Well, you are impudent,' but he didn't. I walked around with the President and he proposed then. I had never thought of love, so I said, 'No, no, no,' and shook my head with each word, which flung the tassel of my Greek cap into his face at every move. It was undignified, but it amused me very much to see his expression as he tried to make love to me and the tassel brushed his face.

"I did not tell my father. I was his pet, yet I feared that he would blame me for allowing the President to reach the proposing point, so I did not speak of it to any one."

The loss of her father changed her attitude toward the President. She said:

"He seemed to fill the place and to be more agreeable in every way than any younger man ever was or could be. He composed a very pretty song about me then, 'Sweet Lady, Awake.' At last he proposed again and I wrote him I was willing this time, if my mother would consent. She told him that she would never consent to my marriage, but if I was determined she would not object."

DONALD HONORE.

He's Never Asked to Call Again

EVER since the pelican stuck his bill through the hatchway of Noah's ark, those with a bill to present have been searching for a way of preventing debtors from saying airily:

"I haven't the money to-day: just call around to-morrow." Joseph Spuller, of Middletown, Connecticut, has found the way. He has a plan that strikes debtors dumb with the "call again to-morrow" frozen in their throats. His idea isn't patented. Here it is:

As he starts on his rounds Mr. Spuller is clad in brilliant red, a suit of corduroy dyed as red as a western sunset on July 3. His hat is a red one with a metal plate bearing the inscription, "Bill Collector." His shoes are as red as the rest.

Solomon in all his glory was not arrayed like Joe Spuller, and his raiment strikes terror to the hearts and loose change pockets of Middletown members of the Bad Pay Club. When they see Spuller coming down the street they hasten to come across even though he may not have their particular claim in hand at the time.

Mr. Spuller works systematically. He doesn't spring the red suit on everybody. At first he makes a call or two and shows a fair amount of patience. But they know that after a call or two Collector Spuller will descend upon the house in his brilliant attire at an hour when the street is its busiest. The result is that most of the claims handed him are paid promptly, although not infrequently Little Johnny or Sister Sue races up the street and intercepts him on his approach with a hurried:

"Papa says to wait around the corner and he'll be right out."

Merchants of Middletown declare that never have bills been paid so promptly and never has there been less charging of accounts. Mr. Spuller is the greatest asset the merchants have, and they wouldn't release him or allow his suit to fade for a king's ransom.

"The idea certainly works," says Mr: Spuller. "How did I hit on it? Well; I knew that 'Come around to-morrow was the greatest dodge a collector had to put up with. I realized that if I could think of some scheme to make people cut this out the rest would be easy. I thought at first I'd wear a red hat, but decided to go the limit and get after the bad debts in a full regalia of red, so everybody would know who I was and what I was after.

"Believe me, if every person who owed a bill knew that the neighbors knew when a bill collector called, there would be less putting off.

"Not one single person has asked me to call again since I donned the red regalia; in fact, in most cases all I need to do is to walk by a house and give it the 'once-over.'"

Here's the Secret of Eternal Youth

I GET tired at times; every one does. But it is always a physical or mental weariness; never disgust or distaste. The following morning after a good night's rest I am always glad to go back to work. If you really like your work there is no sting attached to it. Years ago I extracted the sting from mine, and it has been a pleasure ever since. Of course you can argue: "How is it possible for me to really like my work—I, who by talent and inclination am suited for the very things I am not doing, and in all probability will never have a chance to do?" It was my argument once upon a time. Let me tell you:

Long ago when I was a young girl there were almost no openings for that large class of females which called itself, with the pathetic simplicity of the late eighties, "gentlewomen," when the exigencies of life made it necessary for such a one to earn her own living. Teaching was about the only occupation for a "lady" in those prehistoric days. So into teaching I went perforce. I didn't have any enthusiasm on the subject. As a matter of fact I would much rather have trimmed hats. But I accepted the dictum of the family, went to normal school and in due course got my diploma and a position.

Oh, that first position! At eighteen with none of the bloom rubbed off my girlhood I had over a hundred wee tots who should have been in kindergartens—only that was before there were any except for the rich—and whom I was supposed to put through the very definite course of instruction laid out by the department of public schools. I was surrounded by hard-featured, shrill-voiced harridans who shrieked at their pupils, and spent their time when not teaching in telling vulgar stories. I spent ten cents a day car-fare, taught from 8:30 A. M. to 4 P. M., and received the lordly sum of $408 a year. But it was a lady's job!

I admit that my heart sank as I saw this sort of thing stretching before me, years and years of it, and pictured myself the crabbed old schoolmistress I must inevitably become. I determined to get out of teaching as soon as I could.

That was over thirty years ago. I am still teaching—but with a difference. I am not a shrew. And I love my work.

I discovered almost at once that the reason why most of the other teachers associated with me were hateful and on the verge of going to pieces was that they didn't really want to teach. They came to work in the morning with a protest and took out their hatefulness on the poor children, who loathed school and schoolteachers as cordially as the teachers loathed the work. So I made up my mind to call teaching a pleasure. I said I liked it. I began to think I liked it. I ended by really liking it better than anything else—though I still think I could have trimmed hats if fate had made me a milliner!

I forced myself to make teaching my hobby. I studied every book I could on the subject. I investigated new methods. I experimented. I went into its history. I laid out courses for myself. Before I knew what was happening I was fascinated with my work. My work was my hobby. It became a game—with human souls, human personalities as the goal. I wondered how I could ever have wanted to play with cotton roses—here was the whole garden of life before me.

And right here let me say that one of the joys that came into my work was the discovery from time to time of the child with a soul. Every now and again there comes into a family of materialists a creature of fire. Father is a hard-headed business man, mother is a housekeeper, brother and sister are like their parents—and then there is the odd one: a creature with ideals of love and beauty, with dreams and visions that money and food are not all-sufficient to satisfy. And in their awakening these misplaced young people need a confidant. Much of the satisfaction I have had in my teaching experience has come from my intercourse with such as these. Long years after they have ceased to need any other judgment but their own to lean on, they come back or write to me. I share the joys and sorrows of their successes and failures. This has been the best reward of taking the "sting from my work."

At fifty I do not have to renew my youth. I have never lost it. When, as sometimes happens, my body is sick and weary, it is only my body. My heart sings at its labor. That is the surest sign to me that I have conquered. I believe that, no matter what trade you take up, you can make yourself master of yourself and it by loving it. No matter how you hate it at first, you can make yourself love it by making it your hobby. For not one of you girls seemingly doomed to pound a typewriter or sell ribbons to troublesome customers can have any more loathing for your work than I had at first for teaching.

R. O.

Hastening the Horseless Age

SINCE the war began, over 5,000,000 horses, or one twentieth of the world's supply, have been killed in battle or died in Europe from disease or other causes. Of this immense total, the United States has contributed 1,000,000 horses and in addition about 300,000 mules having an aggregate value of some $260,000,000.

The horses exported to Europe, according to the Government figures, have averaged in value well over $210 apiece as against an ante-bellum price of $148.

The end of the export movement is not yet in sight, as more animals will be needed as long as the war lasts. Military authorities place the life of a horse actually at the battle front at about ten days. Exposure and lack of proper care claim as many victims as do the enemy's bullets.

On the basis of the 5,000,000 horses killed since the beginning of the conflict, about 140,000 are lost every month, so that the purchasing commission for the Allies is forced to keep up the supply of new animals at this rate or as close to it as possible. About 5% of the horse population of the United States have been fed to the war god and nearly 7% of the mules.

Lincoln's Way with His Wife

DIPLOMACY finds its finest test in the relationships of every-day life. Many a man who might get along very well representing his country at a foreign court is a complete fizzle in representing himself in the court presided over by his wife.

They came to Lincoln one day asking for subscriptions for the support of a volunteer fire department in Springfield. He at once expressed his sympathy with the project, says Alonzo Rothschild in Honest Abe (Houghton, Mifflin Company), but thought it best, before setting down any amount, to consult "a certain little woman" about it.

"I'll do so, boys," he continued, "when I go home to supper—Mrs. Lincoln is always in a fine good humor then—and I'll say to her, over the toast: 'My dear, there is a subscription paper being handed round to raise money to buy a new hose-cart. The committee called on me this afternoon, and I told them to wait until I consulted my home partner. Don't you think I had better subscribe fifty dollars?' Then she will look up quickly and exclaim, 'Oh, Abraham, Abraham, will you never, never learn? You are always too liberal, too generous! Fifty dollars! No, indeed; we can't afford it. Twenty-five dollars is quite enough.'"

Mr. Lincoln chuckled as he added: "Bless her dear soul, she'll never find out how I got the better of her; and if she does she will forgive me. Come around to-morrow, boys, and get your twenty-five dollars."

Millions from the Scrap Heap

By JOHN O'CONNOR, JR.

RAYMUNDUS LULLIUS, an alchemist who lived about 1300, is reported to have said: "If the sea were of mercury, I would change it into gold." He held that this gold would be better than gold from the mines. The doctor would no doubt be just a little skeptical if he were now alive and were told that tin cans, rubber tires, rope, burlap, bones, sawdust, the waste water from cloth factories, tanneries, and mines, and even fish-scales, can be turned into gold by the industrial chemists of to-day.

If he were to hear the amount of gold—"better than gold from the mines"—which can be secured from these waste materials, he would stagger. It is said that a year's accumulation of scrap iron amounts to $50,000,000. Scrap metals, such as tin, copper, brass, lead, and zinc, amount to more than $50,000,000. Scrap rubber alone produces nearly $20,000,000. And other waste materials, which were once considered useless and fit only for the dump, now yield nearly $100,000,000.

With these figures in mind, it is no surprise to read in the Report of the Twelfth Census of the United States:

"This science [chemistry] has been the most fruitful agent in the conversion of the refuse of manufacturing operations into produce of industrial value. Chemistry is the intelligence department of industry."

About 275,000 tons of rubber scrap are collected annually throughout the world. Some 125,000 tons are collected in the United States alone, and about 20,000 tons are imported. This gives the reclaimers in this country something like 745,000 tons as material for their operations. It would probably be a conservative estimate to place the value of the waste rubber collected annually in the United States at $17,500,000. The value of the reclaimed product, including the 20,000 tons of waste from abroad, would be from $25,000,000 to $28,000,000.

Save Your Worn-Out Tires

IT is estimated that during this year more than 10,000,000 automobile tires will be manufactured in the United States. When these are worn out they will sell as scrap at five or six cents a pound.

There is a firm in Milwaukee that puts new life into the rubber of these old tires. When they come to the plant of this firm, they are carefully washed, and sent to a room where a long row of refining machines are at work. The rubber is placed between the rollers of these machines, and is chewed and twisted until it is taken out in neat slabs. Remade rubber lacks some of its original "pep"; therefore it does not go back into pneumatic tires. It is used largely in the manufacture of rubber heels and soles, vehicle tires, horseshoe pads, pump valves, and other mechanical rubber goods, for which it is really more suitable than new rubber. A motorist must not be surprised to find that his old tires have been transformed into a pair of rubbers or a rubber toy for the baby. There are even factories that do nothing but reclaim the rubber cement contained in rubberized cloth, such as clippings from raincoats and automobile tops.

Old tin cans, which tradition would have people believe were a delicacy to the palates of goats, are now utilized in a number of ways. There are several large concerns that are reclaiming the solder from them. The tin is converted into stannic chloride, which is used in weighting silk, and the iron that remains is made into window-weights. The tin from tin-plate scrap, which consists either of old tins that have done duty or of clippings produced in the manufacture of tin-plate articles, is now recovered by a number of methods, chief among which is the detinning process devised by Dr. Goldschmidt of Essen. The iron that remains is made into billets and sold to iron foundries. In 1912 it was estimated that 15,401 tons of tin were recovered from scrap and alloys in the United States, the value of which was more than $10,000,000. Before the war, some tin-plated iron cuttings were exported to Germany, and came back as tin soldiers.

A whole industry has grown up around the wastes of corn. The first product that was manufactured from corn was starch. This was done by one Thomas Kingsford at Oswego, New York, about seventy years ago. At that time corn was cheap and there was no incentive to develop by-products. Now gluten, bran, oil cake, oil, and derivatives such as glycerine and fatty acids are obtained. Even the so-called "steep water," in which the corn is immersed and softened prior to grinding, has been made to yield returns. This water, together with wash water from starch, was formerly run into the river. This method had to be abandoned because the "steep water" contaminated the river. To-day the waste is recovered by collecting it, concentrating it "in vacuo," and adding to it the gluten feed in the form of a syrup, with which it is subsequently dried. This former waste now furnishes an annual gross income of approximately $1,500,000.

In this connection it is interesting to note that the possibilities of the utilization of muds and scums which are developed in the sugar-refining process are now being considered. It is asserted that valuable fertilizer elements, such as phosphoric acid and nitrogen, which are now entirely lost, may be recovered.

It is said that the waste attending the logging and milling industries in this country is the most colossal ever recorded in the history of manufacture. In these industries there is no less than a sixty per cent. waste. Here is an opportunity for conservation methods such as occur in no other industries in the country. Mighty efforts are being put forward to cut down this waste. The University of Wisconsin has connected with it the Forest Products Laboratory, one of the objects of which is to develop practical ways and means of using wood that under present conditions is being wasted. For a long time the only use for wood was as a fuel for the production of power at the mill. Now it is yielding charcoal and useful products of distillation, as tar, wood alcohol, and pyroligneous acid, and, by extraction, resinous matter, turpentine, and wood pulp.

Utilizing Sawdust

SOME unique uses have been found for sawdust. It is being used for burning black clay pipes, for the making of artificial wood and flooring, for the manufacture of oxalic acid, for the production of bottle-stoppers; and, because of its non-heat-conducting property, it is being utilized for lining ice safes.

It has been found that the stalks of the cotton plant, which hitherto have been considered as absolutely worthless and even a source of trouble and expense to cotton-growers, can be converted into pulp which for many purposes is a satisfactory substitute for wood pulp. Because the fibers of the cotton stalk pulp are long and strong, paper made from it is stronger and tougher than paper made from ordinary wood pulp.

Besides furnishing a valuable paper-making material, this pulp can be used in the manufacture of gun-cotton and artificial silk. For making the latter, it is converted into a viscous liquid by treating it with an acid. The liquid is then spun into threads which can be woven into various kinds of fabrics. Artificial leather is also manufactured from this viscous liquid, as are motion-picture films.

For every ton of cotton produced there are approximately five tons of stalks. Heretofore it has cost the growers an average of a dollar a ton merely to have these useless stalks gathered and removed from the fields. It is estimated that some tons of the stalks have been destroyed annually in the past few years. This would provide raw material for the manufacture of a large amount of pulp.

We are Learning Thrift

PITTSBURGH is the home of an institution which, in addition to the many original research problems that it investigates, studies those that have to do with the utilization of waste materials. It is known as the Mellon Institute of Industrial Research of the University of Pittsburgh.

The Mellon Institute is a monument to the genius of the late Robert Kennedy Duncan, who began what has become known as the "Industrial Fellowship System" at the University of Kansas in 1907. In 1911 he inaugurated the system at the University of Pittsburgh. Dr. Duncan saw, as perhaps no other man of his day, the necessity of utilizing modern knowledge for the solution of manufacturing problems. He held that the efficiency of American industry would be promoted by harnessing the new knowledge of the university, through "industrial fellowships," to the workshops of the country.

The Mellon Institute gives a manufacturer or individual the privilege of founding in the university an industrial fellowship for the investigation of a specific problem the solution of which would materially and mutually benefit the manufacturer himself and the public. The manufacturer contributes a definite sum of money to the Institute for a period of one or more years. Practically all of this money is used to pay the salary of the man or men who work on the assigned problem. The Institute houses the research, affords library and consultative facilities, gives careful direction to the progress of the work, and, what is very important, offers an atmosphere sympathetic to research. In the past year industrialists have contributed more than $125,000 to the founding of fellowships in the Institute.

One man working in the Institute discovered a method of utilizing stale bread; another man found uses for orange peels and fruit wastes in general; and a third man worked out a method for utilizing leather scrap as a fertilizer. A research on which a number of men are working has invented a cheap and practical method of extracting high-grade gasolene from petroleum waste. Another fellowship developed, on a commercial scale, a process for obtaining gasolene from natural gas by an absorption method.

It has long been said that the United States is the most wasteful nation in the world. In the early years of its industrial development the very idea of utilizing what was then called industrial wastes seemed to have been distasteful to manufacturers. It was beneath their dignity to concern themselves with what were mere incidental features of large-scale production. As has been indicated in what is now being done with waste materials, a new point of view has been reached. The idea now is to take odds and ends, shavings, clippings, and stuff formerly thrown away, and convert them into useful byproducts.

The Milk Route to Health

I WAS nearly "down and out" physically. I had gone to every doctor in town, and had been told that I had everything from valvular heart trouble to auto-intoxication. The latter was probably correct. I got no relief from either medicines or diet, and was fast getting to the place where either working or eating was out of the question.

A friend of mine asked me why I didn't try the milk cure. At this stage I was willing to try anything. I began by ordering eight quarts of milk a day, drinking a glassful slowly every half hour from the time of rising until retiring. I took no other food, excepting a little lemon juice whenever the milk became nauseating.

I stuck to this diet for six weeks, never losing a day from work. At the end of that time I began to eat a little solid food, gradually increasing it each day until I was able to discontinue the milk altogether.

After finishing my "milk cure" I was much stronger and had gained eleven pounds in weight. I have never had a return of my old trouble.

C. A. G.

More Letters About Marriage

Continued from page 3

girl from the streets. Did I love her? No, I did not. Did she care for me? Not in the least; but something seemed to tell me that I was doing the right thing. Our first difficulties arose in our conversations and ideas. Her idea of life was concentrated around cabarets, road-houses, and dim dance-halls, while my interest was centered around everything that nature has provided for us—fields, forests, and streams.

Gradually I could see my wife's views of life change, and we started to love each other. I came to the opinion that marriage without love is the same thing as a river without water—impossible.

After being married about a year, I thought it time to find out if my wife was really contented with her new environment, or if she was only fighting down the craving for the old Bohemian life. We went to New York, from one place of so-called amusement to another, where she had ample chance to see girls of her former standing; and what I expected and hoped happened when, on the third evening, she asked me to go back to our home on the farm again, as the surroundings in the slums were sickening to her. She could not understand how she had liked a life like that.

Home we went after this, and I confessed that it was not my longing for Broadway that took us to New York, but that it was a test for her. My wife was broad-minded enough to take the confession in the spirit it was given, and I can truthfully say that our real married life began after that episode.

The happiest moment in my married life was only a few weeks ago. My wife was playing with our little baby boy when I came home; and, looking at the boy and me, my wife told me that she thought herself the happiest girl on earth. To speak in her words, she said: "I have the best husband in the world, for you not only married me, but you saved me out of the black water that spelled nothing but worry and disgrace."

I can not help but love and admire this woman. To me it seems as though there is many a gem covered with mud, and its brilliancy will never be discovered until—well, "until" never comes in most cases.

H. W.

The Man Who Married a School-Teacher

I KNOW you will smile—I can hardly help smiling myself—when I begin my story with the statement that I married "Teacher."

Teacher, about the time I fell in love with her, was a little soft-voiced, smiling, dimpled girl of nineteen, with the loveliest eyes in the world. She dressed in soft frilly clothes that she made herself out of cheap muslins from the country store, and wore a palmetto hat. She was, in the opinion of our community, a genius. She read a great deal, and apparently knew all about everything in the world.

In the part of the country where we lived everybody was poor. Teacher was the minister's daughter, and he couldn't afford to send her to school. But he taught her himself, and she passed a county examination, got a certificate, and opened a public school in a log cabin right on the edge of our hickory grove, under the big persimmon tree. I was a year older than she was, but I attended school. I was as ignorant as she was learned, and didn't even know enough to be ashamed of my deficiencies.

You see, my father died when I was a kid of twelve or thirteen, and there were three younger than I, two of them girls. Our family was a good one, as good as the minister's; but we were poor, and I had to go straight to the plow. I worked like a Trojan, and I soon had my little brother working alongside of me. By the time I was twenty I had paid the mortgage on our little farm, bought a few cows and sheep, and built my land up, ditched and fenced it, till it was the wonder of an unambitious countryside. Mother and the little girls were very well taken care of, and not badly off as we looked at things in those days.

I was a strapping fellow, six feet tall, and something of an athlete. You would have thought I might have been sensitive about learning the rudiments of English from a little fluffy creature I could have put away in my pocket. But I wasn't; I liked it, and so did she, and we made it a great success. She even said I was one of the brightest pupils she ever taught.

She always made the best of things. Now, some people think you can't be happy living with in-laws, mothers especially. My girl married me at the end of her first year's teaching, and came to live in our home. She never took a bit of authority there, and yet she revolutionized things.

She made me put all sorts of improvements in the house for mother, and the old farmhouse began to look as pretty as the parsonage had always looked. She taught Jim, my brother, and coaxed and worked him until she got him up to winning a scholarship in an agricultural college. What she had in her mind was that when Jim had had the chance that had been denied me, he must take over the farm, and

leave us free to go out into the great world and seek our fortune.

All the while she was teaching me, and I caught fire from her ambition, and studied and read to beat the band. Also I took one or two correspondence courses with which she helped me.

Sometimes I think the education she gave me was better than any I could have acquired in the conventional way, by going to school as a boy. You see, I would never have taken the same interest in learning.

Well, the time came when we were free to go. My brother finished his course of study, and took my place on the farm. And my girl and I were foot-loose and free, and still happy and young, when we started out into the world to seek our fortune. We have found it, and we are still hand in hand, heart to heart, and shoulder to shoulder.

I don't say there haven't been hard times, rough places, cruel trials. Everybody has to have them, I guess. But I do say that we have come out on top, after a series of adventures too long to recount here. We have had a wonderful time together, and life has seemed full of romance to us. We have enough of this world's goods; a pleasant home, where our friends like to come; four splendid children: one girl married, one at home, a boy in training camp, and one—our eldest—somewhere in France.

You see, I have much to be thankful for; but one thing above all—my marriage. Without that, or marrying differently, I am afraid I should have made a poor business of life, and have had much on my conscience to trouble me.

Wives like mine are not easy to find, I know. But I advise all young men who marry to look for girls who have kind hearts and sweet dispositions; who don't expect to have good times always and everything their own way, but rather to take things as they find them and make of them the best.

N. J.

"Life is a Compromise"

I DID not marry until I was thirty-two—surely an age when a woman is supposed to know what she wants and to accept that or nothing. What I had always wanted for a husband was a "big man," vital, energetic, honest; successful through sheer force of character and personality. What I married was a bashful, unambitious lawyer, self-effacing to a fault, who neither smoked nor drank, whose interests were Boy Scouts, unpopular political reforms, and the Presbyterian Church, and concerning whose ability to support a family satisfactorily I had grave doubts. Moreover, I did not love him. But I married him, and perhaps a short account of my own life will explain why.

When I was twenty-one my father failed in business and my only brother lost his health. I went to work, but even with father's and my own desperate efforts we could not earn enough to give my brother the chances he needed, the abundance of food, the comforts, the different climate that two years before would have been his as a matter of course. A year later he died.

I suppose that it was part of the bitter grief that made life seem a pitiless, terrible thing if one had no money. I felt that I could never have a fearless moment until I had a sure income with a bit of surplus tucked away.

Through "pull" I got a position with an advertising company. I had studied art in the old days and was supposed to have had "talent" for it. But now I labored night and day to hold my job. When I had grown up to it, I looked to the one ahead.

Nine years slipped by. I had one nervous breakdown. Also my "big man" came along, I fell in love with him, and he married a richer woman. With these two exceptions, I had stifled all the feminine in me. I was a working machine—a

successful one. My old horror of poverty had disappeared with my growing income, and I began to ease up a bit.

Suddenly I seemed to myself the loneliest creature God ever made. My parents had moved to another city, and the memory of a summer when I sat alone, night after night, in the still warm dark, listening to footsteps tramping by on the cement walk, footsteps that never turned in, will haunt me forever. I had come to a place that many a man reaches after a number of years of business success—he suddenly wakes up to the need of some one to relax with after his hours of concentration, and wonders what on earth he is working for. Only, such things hit a woman much harder, and in my case there were belated longings for love and children—it seemed I would eat my very heart out for them.

I don't know how it happened that Dick came to see me at this time. I had known him always, and now he told me that he loved me. Perhaps no other man would ever tell me that—surely no other whom I could more thoroughly trust. And so I married.

The first year I gave up work completely because Dick wished it. I thought his pride selfish, for the petty economies were hard, but I had gone into the game to get the most out of it, and I decided the first step was not to complain. The second year little Dick came, and no hardships could have dimmed my sense of glory. After that there was a girl. Then little Dick took diphtheria, and we nearly lost him. After the siege was won, the doctors and nurses had departed, and we ourselves had recovered somewhat from the strain, I came upon Dick one night, his head buried in his hands, utterly discouraged. Beside him were enough bills to keep him snowed under for life.

I had never been disappointed in my husband. He had never fallen below—indeed, had risen above in so many ways—my first estimate of him; had been so tender and loyal, so splendid through the hardest places. Now I put my hand on his shoulder.

"Let me help you," I said. "We not only have these bills, but we'll have to be starting a college fund pretty soon."

The very next day I got in touch with my old firm, and turned the nursery into a studio. I had not lost my skill, and in a year had work to keep me occupied from morning until night. Gradually my field broadened to magazine and book illustrating. Our debts dissolved, our bank account swelled merrily. But as the children grew our expenses likewise increased. I wanted the best for them, and so I kept to my crayons and brushes.

I have been married seventeen years now, and it has mostly been hard grind. I have not had time to make a social place, or personally to supervise my home, or to spend enough hours with my children. But life at best is a compromise, and I never look at my tall son and my flirtatious daughter without knowing that it has all been worth while. As for Dick, I did not dream when I married of the bond that can grow between two people.

I would advise any common-sense woman who has the opportunity of marrying a good man to try it, even with love and finance under handicap, as I did. It's so much more fun than going it alone.

E. K.

On $12 a Week

I HAD been in college two years and a half when my body and soul grew so weary of it that I left and went to the country to recuperate. At the end of a two months' vacation I was married.

You know more than my mother knows when I tell you that my husband was earning twelve dollars a week at the time. Twelve dollars a week to support a college girl! If that had been the measure of his ability I should not have considered him, I suppose; but as it meant only giving up a better paying job, with no future, to start at the bottom of a line where he had all the chance in the world, I was not afraid to take the risk. At the end of two years of pinching and scrimping, we are

---

still pinching and scrimping along on twenty-one dollars, but we have made a start. It's all coming just as we planned, yet I am sometimes staggered at our boldness.

During my husband's last year at night-school we lived in two steam-heated rooms, so near his work that he could be at home for his meals. I had thought that light housekeeping would leave me plenty of time to find out whether I could really write or not. At college, I had been encouraged to think I could. But even light housekeeping was a puzzler to me. By the time I got used to it, I gave up thoughts of writing for the far more fascinating task of making baby clothes. I bought the finest of materials and made them entirely with tiny hand stitches and fine embroidery, though we ourselves had next to nothing. I am not sorry, either, for those serene days of preparation for the wonderful firstborn.

He is fifteen months old now, and I have to write against time to get this done before he wakes up from his afternoon nap. If he were awake he would just as surely be standing behind me on my chair, pulling the hairpins out of my hair. Then I'd have to turn around and squeeze the breath nearly out of his little fat body. He will be eighteen months old when sister comes, and then I suppose I shall not even have time to go to bed, but shall have to sleep while I am washing flannels.

Am I sorry I married when I did, instead of waiting a few years until my husband had a good income, and I could have got a start at a "career"? I am not! Would I marry the same man over again? I certainly would—dear, true-hearted, helpful companion. There will be those who say that two years are too short to tell whether a marriage is a success, but I think two years can hold about all the disillusionment there is. There are times when I am abominably irritable and hard to live with. There are times when I am longing for petting and cuddling, and my husband forgets even to kiss me. There have been times also when my husband has come home tired and hopeful of a good dinner waiting for him, to be met with the tearful statement that the baby had been so cross I couldn't do a thing, and the request that he wheel him to sleep on the street while I get dinner. Gloves are to be the extent of my purchase of winter clothes, and my husband is going without an overcoat rather than wear his old one again. Last night the baby kept us awake with a distressing new tooth, so we both started on a hard day's work tired and spiritless. Cheerless, isn't it—disorderly and uneasy on the surface—yet below there is happiness and calm peace. We have the precious bond of one baby and the promise of another—both welcome. Though we are once in a while distinctly "cranky" with each other and often neglectful, yet there are soul-satisfying moments of exquisite understanding of each other and our great love—moments which alone would make living worth the pain, and memory a blessed possession.

D. M.

"Unconventional"

I MADE an "unconventional marriage"! I was thirty-nine years old when I became a wife, and my husband was sixty-two; a "day laborer," uneducated as the world sees it, having had less than two years of schooling in all his life; and with less than five hundred dollars to his dear name! I, on the contrary, had been most carefully and tenderly brought up, with every advantage of a liberal education, and had been teaching school for fifteen years.

My family was shocked and amazed, my dear mother almost heartbroken, and my friends of a lifetime plainly disgusted! So much so indeed that they immediately considered me no longer eligible as a member of the society to which I had been accustomed. I even heard that I was " queer" and "not quite right in my mind," but none of those things, except my dear mother's state of mind, troubled me in the least. It is one of the great comforts of my life, however, to look back to the last year of my mother's life and recall the loving greeting she always gave my husband, and the love she felt for him after she realized that I hadn't made a mistake.

I was first attracted to my beloved on account of his loneliness and the accounts of his sad life. He had been twice married (the second marriage was a most unfortunate one and ended in divorce after a very short time), and had brought up a family of children, having lived most happily for almost thirty years with their mother. I say happily because he loved her very dearly, but it was a life of terrible toil and sickness and death, and fatal accidents. When I met him he was alone, and had the saddest face imaginable and the bent shoulders of an old man who has nothing to live for. Right here I must tell you that to-day his form is erect and strong; his face shines with joy and perfect health, and he gives courage and strength-to all who know him.

My pity for him at first soon turned to love, for the maternal side of my nature is very strong. His long life at sea and the stories of adventure, which he could relate most graphically, fascinated me. It became a serious time of reflection and deep thought for me, as I seemed to see at once

the direction in which I was drifting. Indeed, my beloved told me frankly that I would be his wife soon after I had met him.

We were married just five years ago. I shudder when I think of my wedding day! Not even one tiny flower bloomed for me on that day, and not one member of my family or one of my friends stood with me. We were married in a strange town at the home of a strange minister, with only a dear old lady and her son and his wife as witnesses.

The first two weeks were heaven to us both, and then the tests and trials came thick and fast. My husband has a very sensitive mind and he began to question his right to "take me out of my sphere," as he put it. His fear for my future peace of mind became so deeply rooted in his heart that he ended in less than a month by bringing on an attack of nervous prostration which developed into multiple neuritis, and for nearly two years he was almost a helpless invalid. I did not give up at once to sad thoughts about myself, I was too filled with sympathy with his sorrows. Then I became bread-winner, nurse, and comforter all in one.

Our marriage was most unusual, I will admit, but we each needed the other. I asked him, of course, as most women do, why he cared for me, and his reply touched me to the heart: "Because, my dear, I saw in you an educated woman who could teach me the things I had been thirsting for all my life."

When I began to explore my husband's mind, I was amazed at the things I found there! In one short year he had absorbed the contents of my library, and my set of Emerson is worn and frayed with his constant study. It seemed as if he were trying to get the studies of a lifetime into his brain in one short year. Scientific books particularly attracted him. I realized then that education was more or less a question of opportunity. When my husband's little brothers and sisters were going to

---

school and his widowed mother was working hard to keep the home together, he was at sea earning for them, and running the farm "between voyages."

My beloved got back his health and gradually was able to take up very simple employment. He worked for the town in which we lived at that time, and swept the streets! At first it was terrible when I saw him, and thought of all the men I had been brought up with and their fine white hands, but oh, I loved my husband so dearly that I felt he ennobled whatever toil he took up!

To-day we are in perfect health, growing young in body and mind. My husband goes out every day to work (he has a good position now), and I am occupied with literary matters which bring in a comfortable bit. We keep house in two rooms within sight of very beautiful homes where there is plenty of money, and I am very sure there are no two people in the entire town who enjoy a deeper joy in living than my husband and I.

I have never seen one moment even in the midst of our greatest trials that I was not glad that I had married my husband.

E. O'L.

Marriage with a Foreigner

I MARRIED a foreigner, and I am the daughter of a family American to the core. There had to be some adjusting to make our marriage a success.

My parents-in-law were middle-class people who came from Europe soon after their marriage. In my husband's home the notion prevailed that the father was the head of the family. He was served first at table, and all the choicest bits went to him. The extra piece of pie, the choicest cut of meat, the largest dish of pudding were father's. The children accorded him respect, in the European sense. They hushed their voices when he was in the house. They trembled at his frown, literally. They expected neither tenderness nor comprehension from him.

Now my husband is not a replica of that stern old father. He was educated in American schools and colleges. Handsome, of attractive personality and manners, he was popular among the young people, and rubbed off most of the European angles in bachelorhood. But the generations-old tendency was stamped deep. When he married he imagined that he was the head of the house, also the foot, and all that went in between. He expected to tell me what to wear, what we should eat, how the house should be cared for and furnished, how the children should be brought up, and all the minutest details of living. He was not ugly tempered nor nagging. He just knew best, and it never entered his head that I could disagree with him.

And I did not.

How would a young woman from a typical American family meet such a situation? Our men waited upon us, deferred to us, never meddled with our province of of home-making. My husband was just the reverse.

I could have wrecked our marriage in the first few months if I had given expression to the exasperation within me. But I loved my husband. And he loved me. Surely that ought to be a big enough fact to make one ignore the pin-pricks. Then, almost all men of large caliber, I have found, are very open to suggestion. My husband is adamant on principles and big issues. On small matters he is so open to suggestion that he can be led anywhere. Our home is furnished as he likes. But he didn't know he liked the quiet Colonial tone until it was tactfully suggested to him in the tour of the stores. He is keen for a balanced diet. He thinks it is his own idea. I dress to conform to his taste, but it wasn't his taste before a gentle course in suggestion. I do not expect to run my husband's business, to pick out his friends, to guard his morals; and I expect similar liberty for myself. But I had to "manage" to get it.

As I look at marriage from my own experience I think the rock of disaster is the determination of one or both in the partnership to make the other one over. They take with enthusiasm the dictum, "They twain shall be one." And they add, "And I'll be the one."

Marriage is indeed a union of hearts, lives, aims, and aspirations. But there should be individual liberty within the union. If husband and wife can leave each other free, the marriage promises more happiness. But if a woman marries as I did and finds she is expected to give up her own personality and conform absolutely to her husband, she will have to do as I did—manage by suggestion. She will not help matters either by yielding supinely or by quarreling stubbornly.

M. W.

For a Home of Her Own

IT is necessary to tell you something of my life before I met my husband to make you understand just how much my marriage has meant to me.

There were five of us children. When my parents died the two youngest children were sent to a charitable institution and the overseer of the poor found homes for the other three of us with farmers in the neighborhood, where we were supposed to earn our "board and keep."

In the Pennsylvania Dutch village where my parents had settled it was certainly considered a disgrace to be poor, and we children were made to feel we were pretty shiftless, no-account members of society.

The farmer and his wife who had charge of me told me I could remain with them only so long as I could make myself useful; that their house was not my home, only a place to stay. With the exception of the shoes which I wore only about seven months of the year, my clothes cost them practically nothing, for the wife simply put tucks and deep hems in her own old clothes for me. I had nothing to call my very own—I belonged nowhere and to no one.

One day I heard about the manager of an employment agency who had come to the village to find strong, healthy country girls to take to the city with him; so the next day, when the farmer's wife and I had a debate as to whether I should be beaten or no, and the ayes won, I took to my heels.

The agency man found me a good investment, so he took me away as soon as he could. I went to work for real wages as soon as we arrived. But the hard life I had led soon demanded its toll, for the bones of my spinal column refused to stay in place, and I was sent to the city hospital. For the first time in my life I knew real kindness and felt real gratitude. In the hospital I found books.

About two years after that I met the man who is my husband. The second time I met him he asked me to marry him. No one had ever asked me anything like that before, and I felt pretty sure no one would again, and in the two seconds it took me to decide I had a great big vision of home, a place in the world. When I had known him just six weeks we were married.

No one condition had ever lasted very long in my life, and I half expected my husband to vanish as everything else had done. But I gradually grew accustomed to the thought that this was permanent—that I really meant something to some one, and with the realization came real happiness. I remember I used to sit and look at my husband and say to myself, "He is mine," and I would plan how best I could serve him and keep him happy. I don't think he ever had a suspicion how he was being worshiped, for he went on eating, working, and sometimes grumbling just the same as before.

I wanted to learn everything good wives know how to do, and I fully made up my mind no other woman should have a more wonderful home than mine. I had no great desire for fine furniture or luxuries, but I did so want my home to be a happy one. I had listened to so many harsh words on the farm, I made up my mind they would find no place in my home if I could help it. I found that most troubles would adjust themselves if I let them alone.

We have been married ten years and we are very happy. Our home is all I wanted it to be. Our one extravagance is books and magazines. We have a few good friends, but we care little for society. Next to reading we love pets. My husband had always longed for a dog, but until we were married had never possessed one; now he brings home about every dog he sees that looks as though it needed a home.

Of late we have felt that we lead a very selfish life, so we are going to adopt two children.

Life is such a wonderful, beautiful thing. I have so much to do—so much to learn. I wonder if I shall have time to accomplish all I want to? One thing I know: no matter what happens, I shall never be unhappy or lonely again "so long as we both shall live."

M. M.

The Best Grouch

LOOKING back over fifteen years of married life, I believe that I would not marry my husband again.

I say this with regret, for he has been a good husband and a kind father, with none of the so-called "bad habits."

In view of all these virtues, I realize that I shall subject myself to a vast amount of unkind criticism when I say that the only reason for my first statement is his abominably bad manners—his lack of the finer courtesies which women love.

Is it some petty over-niceness in me which makes me forget that he does not drink whisky or stay out late at night when I hear him chew and drink audibly or reach three fourths of the way across our table to "stab" a piece of bread with his fork?

Am I foolish and over-exacting if my cheeks burn when he forgets to remove his hat upon meeting or talking leave of me and when we meet our acquaintances on the street?

He never thinks to carry my parcels or umbrella, or to step behind rather than ahead of me. He remains seated when women callers enter our home, and it never occurs to him to rise when they are taking their leave.

I do not wish it understood that our married life together is wretched; we have many congenial tastes; nor do I believe that my husband suspects my feelings. I am half ashamed of them myself as I see them here before me.

His faults seem small and unimportant when written down in this cold-blooded fashion; but as I have lived with them year after year and day after day it has required every ounce of grit and grace I could summon to endure.

Without unduly blaming him or excusing myself, if I honestly answer the question, "Would you marry your husband again?" my answer must be, I would not.

X. Y. Z.

How I Kept My Family Together

SHE is a minister's daughter, and this is the story she told me, while she was blacking my shoes:

"Woman's work? Well, maybe it isn't, according to the old traditions. But I long since passed the point of looking too critically at work. A job's a job, when one has five little mouths to feed; and even a hard, unpleasant job, I've found, isn't always to be had when you want it most. I bundled my pride together and hid it away a long time ago, and it will stay hidden until we six are far enough on along the road to comfort so that we can afford a luxury like pride.

"When the crisis came, and I was thrown on my own resources, I found—like thousands of other women—that I had no training that the world was willing to pay real money for. All I was good for was waiting on table at a boarding-house. Yet for two years I fed and clothed my little folks with that.

"One day I met a wealthy couple who took me as a maid in their home. And after a time I summoned courage enough and borrowed money enough to open a tiny bakery in a good residence district.

"I sold forty loaves of bread the first day. It was hard work—fearfully hard. I used to get up at two o'clock in the morning to set my bread for the day.

"The business grew, and I sold it finally, at a profit of $300. I had more ambitious plans. There was a chance for a tea-room in the little college town, I believed—an attractive, home-like sort of place where students could get their breakfasts and women their tea in the afternoon. So I opened the "Blue Willow." Business came to me right from the start. The children were well and happy. Life looked very good indeed. And then, suddenly, while the sun was shining in at all of our windows, the crash came. I was sent to bed with typhoid fever. And when I came to myself again, it was to find my cook gone, the business demoralized, and a debt on my hands.

"It was very bitter. People came to me with advice. The thing to do was to put my children in a home, they said. I had fought off the suggestion for three years; but I was too weak to fight any more. We went to St. Louis, where there was a home recommended by my pastor—and from St. Louis we came back here to Cedar Rapids, our old home town.

"I couldn't stand the home; I couldn't give up my children; I couldn't bear to have them grow up without a mother's love and care. So we came back, and I persuaded a big downtown concern to let me open this shoe-shining parlor. It was a novelty—and of course some people criticized. But trade is coming now—more of it every week. And we think that our fight is almost won—the five little folks and I. We've managed to keep together, and we're on our way."

This is the Place Where—

HERE lived the tailor who became President. Although there were six other tailors in Greeneville, Tennessee, on a fine May morning of the year 1826, this fact did not deter the seventh—Andrew Johnson—from hanging out his shingle about an hour after he arrived in town, having also in the meantime found a boarding-place for his raw-boned nag, which he had ridden the entire distance from "Nawth C'linah." He had also selected his wife in this brief hour of the installation of his future fortune—but he was not yet aware of it, although Eliza McCardle was.

She married him, and taught him to read and write. It didn't hurt his tailoring a bit, but it mightily helped his speech-making—and Andrew had some views on national topics. He aired them down at the tannery one court day, on the subject of the Cherokee Centralization Scheme, and they elected him mayor because of it.

Lewis Self, who worked under him while he was taking the measure of the public, said that not a suit made by the President tailor ever darkened the door to complain of a misfit. It may be that a good tailor was spoiled in the making of a President, but it would have been difficult to convince Eliza McCardle of the fact.

She Helped Her Husband to Success

ALL of our married life, my husband has worked in the post-office in our home town. When he first started work as assistant postmaster, there were few clerks, and most of the work of all branches fell to him to perform.

At the end of each month, and at the end of each quarter especially, I have spent hours and hours writing out reports and keeping accounts of different kinds in his office books.

When the many long accounts were set down in columns, to be added after hours of search and technical work, I have relieved him of much labor and worry by swiftly and accurately adding these columns and proving the answers to the satisfaction of the postal authorities. Much tedious grind and worry, which would necessarily be added to his ordinary day's labor, was thus disposed of by my labors.

When he was mailing clerk, it was necessary for him to pass an examination, making at least seventy-five per cent, on placing cards with the different post-offices of the State in their proper county. When I tell you that California has fifty-eight counties and more than seventeen hundred post-offices, you may know that it was a great task to learn to throw all of these post-office cards where they belonged.

In this work I proved myself quite a helper by writing stories. Each county formed a separate story, and each county's story contained all the offices of that county. This was a big task, but it proved almost invaluable.

The stories were studied out so that the name of one office, when used, would bring to mind the following office used in the story. By learning these stories my husband was able to throw the offices in their proper county correctly.

In about six weeks of studying these stories, he passed an examination on placing the offices in their proper county, for the whole State, with a percentage of ninety-nine and three fourths.

Another way that I assisted my husband was by retouching negatives for the three photographers of our town. I earned over a thousand dollars in this way in my own home, at the same time doing my own housework, and becoming the mother of two children.

Another way that I made a small amount of money was by raising chrysanthemums. They were planted in the spring, and carefully cultivated and watered until October, when the perfect blossoms came forth. The white ones took first prize at the county fair. The rest I sold to a florist, netting me quite a sum of money.

Eighteen years we have worked together. We have been happier than most of the people we know—largely, I think, because we are real partners.

Here are a few paragraphs from one of the stories I wrote for my husband:

Macdoel, Hutton, was sick with the Ager. It had long been known that Hawkinsville was not a Happy Camp for him. Even the Bray of Horse Creek, the Blackbear, and Gazelle, no longer appealed to him.

Being no Walker, he seldom visited Sawyers Bar, and was often heard to declare, "Mine Gottville, the wines of Scotts Bar are so Bogus that, unless Somes Bar comes a Rollin' my way soon, I'll have to depend on Hamburg, and Forks of Salmon, to keep me alive."

His daughter Dorris worked in the Etna Mills, and gathered the eggs from his Henley. When it Snowden, the tar Weed no longer made a Greenview, he would lie on his Shasta Springs, in a Thrall, waiting for her home-coming. (And so on, using the names of all the towns in Siskiyou County.)

MRS. J. E. A.

Christmas Stocks for Christmas Stockings

By CHARLES R. BROWN

IT was a highly popular slogan in Wall Street a few years ago—Christmas Stocks for Christmas Stockings. And certainly there is added reason for reviving it this Christmas.

Economically the country is facing a reaction from the pell-mell activity and huge profits that preceded our entry into the war. We are realizing that the amount of money necessary to carry on the war is greater than we had any previous conception of—so great that it can be raised only by the most rigid economy on the part of all of us. Therefore every dollar that is invested this Christmas, instead of merely spent, helps to support the industries that are the foundation of the nation's life, and so helps to win the war.

The average Christmas present has its day and is soon forgotten: a bond or a share of stock carries the memory of the giver through many years, renewing it with every coupon clipped or dividend check cashed.

Suppose your Christmas presents for the various members of your immediate family usually amount to $400. Suppose that this year, instead of spreading that over half a hundred trivial things, you lump the whole sum and buy five shares of Southern Pacific Railway—a 6 per cent stock.

Every three months, taking it for granted that the company will continue in sound and prosperous condition, there will be a dividend check for your household amounting to $7.50. The purchase will total, figuring the stock around eighty (which is the quotation at the time of writing), just about $400—and it will carry its dividends into your home year after year for a long time into the future.

Other important considerations favor investments as Christmas remembrances. By becoming a partner (as you do when you are the owner of shares of a corporation) you at once broaden your vision. You take an interest in the conditions that make for the improvement of your property. You recognize that our great corporations are merely the arteries through which the activities of the nation flow; and you view affairs as a whole in the light of the effect they will exert upon the progress of your country.

This in itself is an education that accompanies thrift which can not be obtained so practically in other ways. The greater the number of owners of stocks and bonds representing the industries of our country, the better by long odds will be our average citizen—the sturdier and sounder will be the great body politic.

"What shall I buy?" is the next question.

The most necessary caution is to purchase stocks and bonds that are regularly listed on the stock exchanges located at the large centers. Numerous commission houses, members of these large exchanges, advertise in high-grade periodicals that they make a specialty of small investments.

These can be consulted freely and no obligation has been incurred if you ask them to forward a list of investments that they recommend. They will attend to all matters such as having the securities transferred to the name of the purchaser or of the new owner in order to prevent loss.

There is, as I have pointed out in previous articles, no mystery in purchasing securities. All that is really necessary is to avoid financial sharks.

Here are a few suggestions for Christmas gifts showing the quotations and the percentage of return on the investment available at the time this article is written (the middle of November):

BABY BONDS ($100)—

     

	Due	Rate	Price	Income
United States Liberty	1942	4%	$100	4%*
Anglo-French	1920	5	90	8¾*
City of New York	1957	4½	100	4½*
Norfolk & Western R. R.	1996	4	88	4½*

BONDS ($1,000)—

  

Chesapeake & Ohio convertible	1930	4½	70	9*
Chicago Great Western	1959	4	60	7½*

INDUSTRIAL PREFERRED STOCKS ($100)—

   

American Sugar		7	95	7½
American Tobacco		6	173½	11¾
Central Leather		7	61¼	8⅛

RAILWAY PREFERRED STOCKS ($100)—

   

Southern		5	55	9
Atchison		5	85	6
Union Pacific		4	73	5½

RAILWAY COMMON STOCKS ($100)—

   

Atchison		6	85	7
Southern Pacific		6	80	7½
Northern Pacific		7	85	8¼

*If carried to maturity.

Free Booklets You May Have for the Asking

How customer-ownership is strengthening public-utility securities is interestingly shown in a 24-page pamphlet entitled "Rational Public Ownership" which is being distributed by H. M. Byllesby & Company, Inc., 218 South La Salle Street, Chicago, 1219 Trinity Building, New York City.

If you are interested in the investment of your savings in sound securities, write to John Muir & Co. Ask for their booklet entitled "The Partial Payment Plan." A copy will be sent upon application to their main office, 61 Broadway, New York City.

"Practical Thrift for Millions of Practical Men" is the title of an interesting article in the "American Investor" for December, which should be read by every one interested in the nationwide thrift movement. Free copies may be obtained on request for "American Investor" N-12, from E. F. Coombs & Co., 120 Broadway, New York.

Prices of all securities have declined to so low a level that many good investments can be bought at the lowest prices for years, and such purchases will produce a high interest return. A recent number of the Bache Review contains a selective list of such investments showing present price, dividends, and yields compared with the high price since 1906. Copy sent on application to J. S. Bache & Co., members of the New York Stock Exchange, 42 Broadway, New York City.

You can bank by mail with the oldest and largest Trust Company in Ohio and get 4 per cent interest on your money. Write the Citizens Savings and Trust Company, Cleveland, Ohio, for free booklet "P."

When confronted with a mass of technical and statistical information concerning stocks and bonds, have you ever wanted a terse and readable publication with honesty and ability in which you could have confidence? The Odd Lot Review, published weekly, aims to fill this field. Sample copies will be sent on request to the Odd Lot Review, Inc., 61 Broadway, New York City.

In these days of disturbed investment conditions the discriminating investor particularly appreciates the safety and liberal interest furnished by first farm mortgages. The Oklahoma Farm Mortgage Company of Oklahoma City specializes in mortgages of this kind and will furnish detailed information on request. Ask for list No. 208.

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

The safety of the first-mortgage loans of Perkins & Company, of Lawrence, Kansas, has been fully established by over forty years of successful business. Interest paid promptly each six months. Our saving certificates, yielding 6 per cent, are convenient for small investors. Write for circular No. 721.