On Hearing from Many Unhappy Husbands and Wives

IN an unguarded moment I invited letters on the subject "My Marriage"; and the letters came, not in hundreds, but in thousands.

I confess that the reading of them left me with a certain sense of depression—so large a percentage were from wives who do not like their husbands, and from husbands who wish they had never married their wives.

Of course, I might have expected that, if I had thought about it in advance; and there is in it no real cause for discouragement.

Happy nations, according to the old saying, have brief histories; and the same is true of contented couples.

"Oh, nothing ever happens to us," the happy wife or husband says, a bit wistfully. "We just float along from day to day; we hardly know where the time goes."

But the individual who is not happy supposes himself something unique in the world. He broods over his troubles; he wonders why Heaven has set him apart from all mankind to bear so great a disappointment. And, feeling thus, he embraces every opportunity to ease his spirit by complaint.

There are many men and women in the world, of course, who have no right to expect to be happily married.

They misinterpret marriage. They embark upon it as if on some sort of picnic; whereas a single moment's serious thought ought to convince them that it is the greatest and most difficult profession in the world.

They remind me of the man who was asked if he could play the violin, and answered: "I don't know; I never tried."

Marriage is not a pleasure excursion. It is a business to be studied; a kingdom to be conquered; a mine of precious treasure, which reveals itself only in response to patient work.

Men who study years to master the comparatively simple professions of law or medicine or journalism suppose that the mere accident of their being males is all that is necessary to make them successful husbands.

Girls who have never learned to carry through capably the simplest operations of life dance blithely into the most intimate and subtle and baffling of human relationships. And, naturally, there are wrecks.

Sorrow and disappointment in some degree come to all of us, deserving or undeserving: no couple can hope completely to avoid them. But there are certain rocks in the channel of the good ship Marriage that ought to be cleared away at the very start. The rock called Money, for example.

"I hate to ask John for money," said a wife to me last week, "because if I don't ask him I'll probably get more."

No woman ought ever to have to ask her husband for money.

She ought to have a salary—a fixed, regular part of her husband's income, deducted first, not last; and apportioned to her with the understanding that it is hers, not because he gives it to her, but because she has earned it by her contribution to their common life.

Until the world recognizes that the business of contributing children to the race and training them is the most splendid of all professions, far more important than anything that any man does in any office, and ought to be paid for accordingly, we shall continue to have wives "asking" their husbands for money, and marriages going into the discard on that account.

Most of all, no man or woman can be permanently happy unless each has within himself some green pastures on which his soul can feed; some reservoir of contentment and self-sufficiency, created by himself for his own refreshment.

The restlessness of the modern woman that we read so much about, the envy of men and women toward people who seem better off, rise largely from the false assumption that what is outside a man or woman has the power to create or destroy happiness.

Nothing outside yourself can make you happy, if you are barren inside.

"The kingdom of heaven is within you."

On that great undying truth successful marriages always have been and always must be built.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

WHAT MAKES MEN BRAVE?

By H. ADDINGTON BRUCE

FEBRUARY 1, 1915, in the brick-fields of Cuinchy. On this side the British. Yonder, quite close at hand, the Germans, barricaded behind brick-stacks, and masters of a trench taken by surprise from the famous Coldstream Guards, who had failed in an effort to retake it.

The Irish Guards, held in reserve, were ordered up to attempt its recapture—Number One Company assigned to form the storming party. In Number One Company was a certain lance-corporal, Michael O'Leary, off duty, hence under no compulsion to risk his life in the attack. But observe:

As the company started into the open, O'Leary started too. Not with his mates, however. Unnoticed by them or by the enemy, he slipped away to the left, descending into a railway cutting. Climbing nimbly up the opposite bank, he found himself in a direct line with the first German barricade, a brick-stack twenty feet high. With five shots he killed as many Germans, and threw the rest into a confusion that enabled the storming party to make short work of them.

Meantime down dashed O'Leary into the railway cutting once more. When he reappeared he was near the second German barricade. Here a captain was in the act of training a machine-gun on O'Leary's company, fighting at the first stack. One shot, and the captain joined the five Germans O'Leary had already killed. Two additional shots, and two more Germans would fight no more. Only five were left at this barricade, and up went their hands in surrender.

Picture the amazement of the storming party when they reached the second stack without casualties, and found O'Leary in possession, with a machine-gun and five prisoners to his credit. On the spot the commanding officer promoted him full sergeant. Then word went to England, and back came word that Sergeant Michael O'Leary had been awarded the Victoria Cross, Britain's most cherished guerdon of gallantry.

Another Example from the World War

IT was near Messines, and the Germans unexpectedly began to shell the British trenches. In one trench a dozen men were buried in the débris caused by an exploding monster. Their fellows scampered or crawled to safety, for, the trench now being exposed, the enemy poured in upon it rifle and machine-gun fire.

Through this inferno of shells and bullets a British soldier presently made his way to the ruined trench. On hands and knees he came, to drag a wounded comrade from the mass of earth and bear him to shelter. Back he ventured for another, and for still another. In the end he had thus defied death for six journeys, and had rescued from the wreckage and the débris every trench-defender left alive.

This was the exploit that won for Private Robert Morrow the Victoria Cross. In a similar exploit, less than a fortnight later, "Finis" was written to his life. The same day that his winning of the Victoria Cross was made known to the public, his death at the front was announced.

Listen also to another wonderful story of bravery under fire, as told by Michael MacDonagh, chronicler of exploits by loyal Irishmen who fought and died for Britain:

"Orders had to be given to a battalion holding an advanced position to fall back. The only way was to send a man with orders through a murderous fire. Volunteers were asked for from the Royal Irish Fusiliers. All wanted to go, but by tossing for it a selection was made at last.

"He was a shock-headed lad who did not look as if there was much in him, but he had grit. Ducking his head in a way that made us laugh, he rushed into the hail of shot and shell. He cleared the first hundred yards without being hit, but in the second they brought him down. He rose again and struggled on for a few minutes, was hit once more, and then staggered a bit before finally collapsing.

"Two more men of the Irish Fusiliers dashed into the fire and rushed across while the Germans were doing their best to pink them. One picked up the wounded lad and started back to the trenches, and the other, taking the despatch, ran ahead.

"Just as the wounded man and his mates were within a few yards of our trenches and we were cheering them, there came another hail of bullets, and both went down dead. Meanwhile, the man with the despatch was racing for all he was worth. He got through all right till the last lap, when he was brought down. He was seen from the other trenches, and half a dozen men ran to his aid. They were all shot. But the man with the message was now crawling toward the battalion in danger.

"With assistance he finally reached them, and the object was gained. They were withdrawn to a new position before the Germans succeeded in their plan of cutting them off."

Courage Born of Emergency

FROM every section of the long war frontier, east and west, from every land where the mighty conflict has been raging, tales of bravery such as these have come to us. But, indeed, we do not need to go abroad, or to the battle-field, to learn that under the stress of great emergencies men may rise to sublime heights of courage. In our own country, and in times of peace, bravery, heroism, and, if need be, self-sacrifice are of every-day occurrence. Page after page of this magazine might be filled with corroborative instances.

Bravery of the first order, for example, is seen in the splendid deed of Sylvester Mahan, an Indiana farmer, in saving from suffocation a young neighbor, John Bemis.

Bemis, who had hardly entered his twenties, had gone down into a well that contained dynamite fumes, and was almost instantly overcome. His father, the only person near by, suspecting what had happened, but unable alone to effect a rescue, rushed from the well, calling for help. Mahan responded to the call, and, although breathless from having run at top speed for nearly half a mile, insisted on being lowered into the well by a rope.

At the bottom he found young Bemis, inert, seemingly dead. Quickly he fastened the rope to him, gave a signal to haul up, and, though well aware that he himself was facing death, waited calmly until the rope could again be sent down. He still had strength to hook it to his body, and was drawn safely to the surface. But not until four hours later was it found possible to revive the youth he had rescued.

At Widewater, Virginia, a seventeen-year-old lad named Masters went swimming from a raft in the Potomac. At this point the water was only seven feet deep; but, for some reason, Masters got into difficulties and was in imminent danger of drowning. George D. Rowe, a teacher, seeing his plight, plunged in and swam to the rescue.

As often happens in such cases, Masters became panic-stricken and mentally confused. The moment Rowe touched him, he seized his would-be rescuer with a vise-like grip that meant disaster to both.

In vain Rowe shouted to him to break loose. In vain also were Rowe's attempts to swim and tread water. Then a happy inspiration came to him. With Masters still clinging to his shoulder, he sank beneath the surface, and, holding Masters up so that his head was above the water, staggered along the bottom of the river in the direction of the raft.

Half choked, nauseated, and dazed, he nevertheless managed to make headway until he actually reached the raft, which had been poled toward him by other bathers. Altogether he had been obliged to walk nearly twenty feet under water, with Masters' weight a crushing burden on him.

Pluck of a Nine-Year-Old Boy

FINALLY, having space for only one other instance, I would call attention to an even more remarkable display of pluck, shown by a nine-year-old Minnesota school-boy, Mark A. Nelson.

Nelson was on a float, about twenty-five feet from the shore of Lily Lake, from which several women were bathing—among them a Miss Agnes C. Anderson. A poor swimmer, Miss Anderson became exhausted in water ten feet deep.

Another woman swam to her from the float, only to be grappled and pulled under water by the drowning girl. With her own life thus imperiled, the second swimmer fought desperately to free herself, and at last succeeded, and swam back to the float, abandoning as hopeless any further attempt at rescue.

Little Mark Nelson saw all this. He was only nine years old. He weighed only half as much as Miss Anderson. He had been taking swimming lessons for only a week.

Yet he did not hesitate. Boldly he dived toward Miss Anderson. Approaching her cautiously from behind, he grasped the back of the collar of her bathing-suit and swam shoreward with her. Reaching shallow water, he was met by several women who had waded out and now helped him get the half-drowned bather ashore. It is pleasant to be able to add that for this truly valiant deed the little fellow was awarded a medal by the

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Do You Want Your Boy in Your Business?

"Don't Be a Druggist," Says the Druggist

MY father was for fifty years a physician with a large country practice; but, having been far less successful as a collector than a practitioner, he died a comparatively poor and, I may say, disappointed man. Naturally, therefore, he did not encourage any of his five sons to become a physician.

I, however, took up the business—or profession, if you please—most nearly related to it, that of a druggist; and, while I have not been entirely unsuccessful, the very modest degree of success I have enjoyed has not been at all proportionate to the time, expense, and brain-racking work necessary to fit me for my life-work; hence it is seldom that I lose an opportunity to advise any prospective student of pharmacy against taking up that study. Indeed, the further my experience and observations extend, the more firmly am I convinced that no other profession requiring approximately the same outlay of money, time, and study gives so little in return either of honor or profit.

Of course there are many druggists who have acquired or are acquiring comfortable fortunes; but for every one of these it can safely be asserted that there are at least twenty who, after taking the full prescribed course of four years in schools of pharmacy, never rise above the level of the plain plodders in the ranks of "drug clerks," whose emoluments are about on a par with that of the average dry-goods or shoe salesman, and who entertain no fond hope of ever becoming "proprietors." Furthermore, the druggist, though in reality a member of a learned profession, is never recognized as such. He is a "druggist"—nothing more—a public convenience to be imposed upon indefinitely.

Law, journalism, the ministry, engineering, mining, drafting—any of these, perhaps—but the "drug business," never!

W. P.

"A Hard Life," Says the Minister

THERE is no greater life-work than that of the minister, and I am glad I chose as I did. But I am not praying that my son will become a minister. I want him to be a Christian gentleman above all else, and to be able to make the fundamental adjustments of life; but, to speak the plain truth, I am not dead anxious to have him enter the ministry.

To-day it is expected and almost demanded of the minister that he shall be an orator, a diplomat, and a statesman; a genius as an executive; have a winning personality and be a leader of men; a thinker on all subjects under the sun; a business man, and a wizard as a financier. Then, as a rule, his salary is equal to that of a third-rate clerk or a day laborer. On this small amount he must dress well, support a family, buy books and periodicals, contribute to charity, educate his children, keep out of debt, and provide for old age. And by no means must he carry any side interests that will produce an additional income. He may give himself unstintingly to civic righteousness, Red Cross work, missions, charity organizations, temperance reform, etc., provided he does not do it for gain.

Most ministers have a great big wolf howling just outside the door nearly all the time, and there is never a time when he is entirely easy on financial matters. And likewise most ministers are in debt from the time they enter the seminary to the time they enter the pearly gates above.

If anything goes wrong in the church (and something always does), they usually blame it on the minister. He has as many bosses as he has parishioners. If he never shows any independence, they step on him; if he does, they make it hot for him. He is never looked on as a permanent citizen. He is as a stranger dwelling in a strange land—an alien in more ways than one. To-morrow he will pass on to a new set of masters.

The minister has his compensations in the joy of service rendered, duty well done, etc., and he attaches to himself a few friends who are far better than gold. I am not complaining—just stating facts as they exist.

If God wants him, I will gladly join in helping to make my boy a minister; but if he can be used better in some other field of endeavor, I shall be pleased.

ST. LOUIS MINISTER.

"Rather Have My Boy in the Trenches"

AS a lively young American kid I very early in life became disgusted with my father's line of business, and I am certainly glad that my boy did not take up the business his grandfather established, and that I was in turn obliged to follow, much against my will.

My earliest recollections were that I

as a youngster was not allowed the freedom that other children had. My father had an undertaker's shop, with his residence above, and when I used to run around the rooms I was told to stop, as it disturbed those below. I must always be sad; an undertaker's establishment was not a place for joy.

It seemed to me cruel, and as my father spent most of his time in his place of business, he did not take me around to places of amusement, as other fathers did, and all I heard as I grew up was about the dead: even when we were at the dining table, it was, "So-and-So died."

I wanted to learn the machinist's trade, but father wouldn't stand for it; so I became an undertaker. Hundreds of times I have had to crawl out of bed at midnight, go to the stable, hitch up the horse and wagon, and go out in the cold, bleak night to a house of mourning. It was the continuous sight of people crying that made my life indeed one of misery. I was on duty night and day, Sundays and holidays; I couldn't go anywhere unless I left instructions where to find me in case of a business call.

When I was about five years old father had a call to a house where a child died of scarlet fever, and from it he brought home to me scarlet fever, which left me with a permanent injury. So you can see how I dislike the undertaking business. I would rather have my boy take a chance on the battle-front in Europe, as he is training to do, than to spend his life as I have mine—as an undertaker.

A. S. V.

But the Farmer Says, "Yes, Indeed"

I AM a farmer, and I have a little boy three years old. Would I raise him to go into the same business I am in? I answer, "Most assuredly, yes"; and I'll tell you why.

The key-stone of a successful life is happiness. I have found happiness. Like Sir Launfal, I sought far afield and returned with empty hands. And then in my very grasp, here in the quietness of my country home, I found the Holy Grail.

Here I have all that Rockefeller has, and more! He has clothing to hide his nakedness; so have I. He has a roof to shelter him; so have I. He has food to eat, a home, and a loving family; and I have all of these. And oh, the things he has that I do not want: the enemies, the abuse, the money, the notoriety! And the things I have that he can not get: the sound body, the true friends, the liberty and independence, and contentment!

To-day I plowed my corn. Long before the dew was dried, I was guiding the team through the narrow green-lined paths. At ten o'clock I looked down toward the house and saw the little blue-clad boy coming with a "d'ink for papa." "Me 'ants to ride, too," he said. So up I took him in my arms, and together we went back and forth, through and through the aisles of growing corn.

"What makes the trees green, papa?" "What makes the old rocks grow so big?" "Why does old Jack eat corn?" He bombarded me with unanswerable questions all through the forenoon.

Then the sun was high, and we unhitched, the boy riding on old Jack's back, leaning forward like a giant locust and holding to the hames. Soon the hungry team was fed, and our faces washed, and we gathered round the freshly gathered vegetables, fruit, and home-made bread.

Here is real contentment. Here we have the joy of living and loving. That is what I have found on the farm.

It is this I want to teach my boy.

C. P.

The Saloonkeeper Speaks

FOR sixteen years I've been a rum-seller—not the proprietor of a "dive," but the owner of a clean, up-to-date bar-room. Six months ago I gave it up. Why? I have a son who will be six years old in January; he is the reason.

During the fifteen and a half years in which I was in the business before the boy came along, I had no conscience. I saw clean young men, the sons of respectable parents, come into my place and drink until their friends carried them home; but still I thought nothing of it. Probably I have seen hundreds of clean young men ruined in my place, but still it never once occurred to me that I was the one who was responsible. If I thought about it at all, I probably decided that the boys themselves were to blame.

One spring after the child was born, a very bitter political campaign was waged in which the leading issue was "liquor"—and in passing it is proper to state that I was always called upon and did contribute liberally to the campaign fund of the "wets." In going by the square on my way to the store from home, I was attracted by the unusual eloquence and earnestness of an orator for the "drys" who was lecturing on the evils of the rum traffic. In the course of his remarks he spoke of the feeling of contempt a child of a rum-seller must have for his father. It was then the truth was brought home to me, and I discovered I had a conscience.

For five years after the child was born my wife had persistently pleaded with me to give up the business "on account of the boy"; but each time I had stubbornly refused. But after thinking all the afternoon about what the lecturer had said, I went home that night determined on the following day to close the doors of my shop for good. I told my wife of my decision, and her exclamation was: "At last you have been convinced!"

The following day the doors were closed, and to-day, so far as it can be, my conscience is clear.

Do you think I would want my boy to follow the business I followed for sixteen years? I have tried to give you my answer.

The Real Answer

I DID not follow the occupation of my father. My brother did. I believe each of us chose the work he could do best. Now that we have made our choice, we are satisfied. Being satisfied with one's work adds immeasurably to one's happiness in doing it. Father taught us largely by example to be satisfied with our work, to make the best of the disagreeable things that are a part of any business.

If father had habitually expressed dissatisfaction with his business, my brother, who has talent for that kind of work, might never have taken it up.

In my own work of teaching, I feel that if my father had been a teacher I could have received much help by hearing his experiences. On the other hand, there has been a sense of satisfaction and a joy in solving my own problems and making my own way in the world. I feel free to do the best that I can and to be the best teacher that it is in me to be.

I believe that it is of the utmost importance that a man choose the occupation he is by nature fitted for. It seems to me that the advantages and disadvantages of one's father having the same occupation are about equal.

It is what a man does, not what his father did, that counts.

I chose my life-work without regard to what my father's work was. If I had the choice to make over again, I should do the same thing.

If I had a boy who was considering what occupation to follow, I should tell him to choose the occupation that seemed to him best adapted to his ability and his training, without regard to whether I chose that kind of work or not. I should want him to give my occupation no more weight than others with which he was familiar. I should try to help him understand both the good and the bad points of every trade he was considering, have him make his own choice, and encourage him to do his utmost in whatever occupation he chose.

M. T. G.

FAITH

By RICHARD WASHBURN CHILD

Illustrations by M. L. Bower

THE safety-deposit vaults of the old and inconspicuous Forty-second Bank on Fifth Avenue always contain the same hush that one might expect to find in the chancel of an empty cathedral.

Down the green-carpeted stairs into the outer chamber—from which one looking through the massive silvery bars of the inner inclosure can see the interior of the vault with its non-committal faces on the tiers of locked metal boxes—came Charity Garvice.

George Farrelly did not recognize her.

In fact, after glancing at her, he had closed the door of one of the little mahogany closets in which an old lady, senior representative of one of New York's oldest families, had come to clip her semi-annual coupons with her own wrinkled and perfumed hands. He thought Charity was merely a new face among the visitors to the vaults.

The short, searching inspection-look which the employees, like guardian dogs, learn to give any stranger had shown him a young woman not over thirty, tall, straight of nose, with a healthy complexion tinted by the sharp wind and fine stinging snow which had been falling on the Avenue where over his head traffic rolled on with its purrs and snarls of motors. She was dressed with some severity in black, and a brown fur stole was still wound about her neck. Out of the corner of his eye he saw that the melting snow from her rubbers had made a little dark spot on the green pile of the noiseless carpet. The clock in the outer waiting-room showed that it was exactly twelve o'clock.

Farrelly was startled when he heard her inquire for him. He came to the great burnished steel gate to meet her with the formal bank manner which he had acquired in the service. This manner was not all the service in the bank had given him, for even his appearance had changed during the six years he had been there. His figure, naturally lanky and drooping, had straightened as a soldier's or a lackey's might straighten in constant meetings with superiors; and his rather long, grave, shaven face, once sensitive, now, with the gray hair beginning to show above his ears, had become cold and formal, unchanging, grim and metallic—like the faces of the deposit-boxes in their tiers.

For some reason not defined, one who was observant and sympathetic might have discerned that, after all, this set expression was only a business mask; such a person could have known that human and passionate fire burned somewhere behind the depth of blue in his eyes.

"You do not remember me?" she asked.

"No-o," he said, shutting the gate of the inclosure behind them.

"I am Charity Garvice," she said; and as the corners of her mouth turned upward in an indulgent smile, suddenly he remembered that once he had kissed those lips.

"Gad!" he exclaimed in a suppressed voice. The bank manner had slid away from him. "Come into one of these little rooms. Sit down, please. Well, well! How many years!"

"A good many," she admitted. "I had a time of it finding you, George Farrelly. Tell me what you've been doing, and then I'll tell you why I came."

HE leaned back in his chair and looked across the desk top with its blue blotter, its coupon scissors, pens, and the other paraphernalia put out for the use of squirrel patrons who came to bury their worldly nuts in this hole beneath the New York streets.

"Short tale," he said in a pleasant, ingratiating voice. "After I left the school—"

"Do you remember the man who used to come over from Fourth Avenue during recess and sell crullers?" she interrupted. "Children don't have digestions like that nowadays. I know, because I am a schoolteacher."

"You are?"

"Yes. After I left I went to normal school. I was quite young. I have taught and taught and taught ever since."

"No romance?"

"No romance," she admitted, with a laugh. "I suppose that means, from the man's point of view, that I'm thoroughly disgraced."

"We had one."

"Yes," she said cheerfully. "I had almost forgotten that. It was when you were in that trouble with the principal. Somehow, then—when you were in trouble—"

SHE stopped. The safety-deposit vault was very silent. One of the attendants outside cleared his throat.

"Well, my heart went out to you—" she finished. "I was so young, and I thought I was very lonely myself. My heart went out to you. You seemed to me so much alone."

"I was always in trouble," he said reflectively. "I was one of those boys who are always in trouble. My family didn't understand. I thought so then, and, honestly, I think so now. But it is funny that a boy who was always taking risks and loving adventure without principle should have led such a humdrum life. I went in for expert accounting. Imagine that! Then my eyes blew up, and I came in here. I am as much alone as ever. Very poor—very conservative—very machinesque."

"Isn't it strange! And nothing out of the workaday life? Not one thing?"

He leaned forward as he looked at her; and suddenly, for a moment, the cold mask slid down over his expression.

"How can you think so, Miss Garvice?" he said in his formal manner. "I set myself to be everything I was not—that is, a conservative, trusted individual spending his labors in a round of work that dealt with safety, accuracy, and cold figures—all that is inflexible and matter-of-fact; and my leisure has been devoted severely to—what is it they call it?— self-improvement. I've overdone it. Sometimes I feel the call of my own ghost—the devil-may-care, adventuring, self-indulgent boy who used to be in your class at Public School Number 42. But it's too late. I have a room and bath, a pair of slippers, a reading lamp, and a dressing gown, and my evenings are wholly mine. Youth is slipping away; even if I wanted to cut loose, I am much too poor to do it; and the biggest adventure of this year was when you came in. I don't dare to ask you why—you might say it was to rent a box, and spoil all my hopes for a thrill from you."

"I have no thrill for you, I suppose," she said. "I want to enlist your help."

"Red Cross?"

"No; Martha Owens."

"Martha Owens? Martha Owens? Miss Owens? Why, she was the teacher! Why, she was the woman who said—who said: 'Remember this, George. I do not know why I feel as I do. There is no accounting for the heart. Why, among all the children who have been here, you are the one who seems to be my boy I do not know. But you will go away from this school to-day, and where you will go God only knows. You will not understand, because you are still a boy; but some day you will remember that I, a tired, worn-out school-teacher, said that, wherever you went and whatever mistakes you made, at least my love would be yours and my faith that you will always do right in the end will last forever and forever.'"

He stopped, gazing at the ground-glass of the mahogany partition.

"Why, I remember her very words, I believe!" he exclaimed suddenly. "I suppose I've thought of them often—but not lately."

"You don't know where she is?" asked the girl.

"No-o."

"I suppose not one of the children she taught knows, except me. I just happen to know because I'm a teacher too. She has a room—quite all alone—quite deserted—no living relative or family. It's not seven blocks from here. She has been retired for six years, and totally blind for more than eighteen months. The doctor says—it may be a week or a month more."

"You mean that old soldier—" he exclaimed. "Soldier? Well, that's an insult to her service. You mean she is having an end like that?"

"Yes."

Farrelly was thoughtful.

"She was a thin, sweet-smelling person," he said at last. "Yes, I remember she would never polish her spectacles with anything but a dollar bill. Gracious, how this brings back the pictures! The wooden stairs with the treads worn down! The sound of the bell! The smell of spring coming in over the window-boxes filled with geraniums on their last legs.

"And I remember the wistful look she had. I think she carried a great big loneliness around with her. Lord! She was so faithful to our interests, and children are an ungrateful lot of brats. We never saw much in her but some sort of an enemy. There are glories, though, in a life like hers, aren't there?"

"I hope so," said Charity, pulling the fur through her ungloved hand, the white skin of which still glowed with the bite of the cold.

FARRELLY understood suddenly that, after all, she was living the same life that Miss Owens had lived. For her there was the same loneliness, the same round of faithful service, perhaps the same end, and not any reward worth consideration unless it was clothes for the back and food for the mouth or else the service itself. Well, with her—with Charity Garvice—it could only be the ideal of service. He remembered noble traits in her—a great, generous soul expressing itself back yonder when her hair was down her back, and now too, in the expression of her large dark eyes and the tender contour of her pink mouth.

"My stars!" he said, with a laugh. "Do you remember that once you said that Miss Owens was not the only one who had faith that in the end I would always do right? We were in the coat-room—remember? Remember the smell of galoshes and wool that was always there on wet days? I wanted to kiss you then. You seemed the only one friend and lovely person in the world. You let me kiss you. Your hands were warm and trembling in mine."

Miss Garvice smiled indulgently, and then straightened as if to indicate that she must now attend to the business on hand.

"I will tell you why I came," she said. "The reasons why we have drifted into living lonely lives are partly our own. But Miss Owens is simply left—left almost without a human soul to take an interest in her or say a word to her. I wish you would go around with me now to see her. To-morrow—"

"What of to-morrow?"

"It may be too late," said Charity.

He smiled in his formal bank manner.

"Too bad," said he. "I can't get away to-day even for lunch."

Charity stared at him without reproach, but with her disappointment plainly visible.

"Besides, I do not think she would remember me—"

"Remember you!"

"She doesn't remember me? And, if she did, she would remember only a boy who was a great deal of trouble to her."

"She said to you once, 'You are the only one who seems to be my boy, and, wherever you go or whatever your mistakes, you must know you have my love and my faith that you will do right in the end.' And the wonderful part of it is that she has never forgotten. She says that, of all the children who have gone by in a long procession, you are the one she thinks about—you are the one."

"Somehow, what she said has stuck in my mind; but you don't mean that she remembers too?" he asked incredulously.

---

Miss Garvice wet her lips with the tip of her tongue. With a little embarrassed laugh, she said:

"She is very old. I suppose I ought to tell you that, though her mind is active and clear, no doubt old age is creeping into it. She has at least one fixed idea and notion. Of course it is absurd—"

"What is it?" Farrelly asked.

"It is that you are still in need of her—that you are in trouble. She said to me, 'The boy responds to faith in him. And I have it—an abounding faith in that boy.' She said that she had been thinking of you so much, and that for a long time it had been clearer and clearer to her that you were in some trouble."

"But I am in no trouble," Farrelly protested, with one of his mechanical smiles. "It is just a little amusing. I can not oblige her in that way. I think you can tell her that you found me—that I am now the essence of old bachelor, quite alone, quite unloved, but most conservative, and with the soul of a typewriter and an adding-machine."

Miss Garvice said: "That sounds so natural. You were always hiding your real self, even back in those old days."

"Except from you—and from her," he said solemnly. "That's funny, isn't it? Just her—and you."

"I thought perhaps—"

"That I could pretend to be in trouble?"

"For her sake."

"Yes: to let her think her faith—after all these years—had won again."

"Yes. You might pretend—" Miss Garvice paused.

Suddenly out of the chill of his expression there sprang up a fire of emotion. He leaned forward over the desk with his eyes fixed upon hers, as if he wished to send forth to her something of a real deep buried self.

"I'll do it!" he said quietly. "I'll go with you to see her. I owe her a lot. I'll let her think her faith has won again. Let's go now!"

THEY came to the boarding-house in which she had lived for years; and, admitted, they began to climb the stairs with the worn red carpet clamped to the old black-walnut treads, which creaked as they ascended. The warm odor of furnace heat and the doubtful aroma of yesterday's vegetables had been somewhat disturbed by the invasion of cold air that had accompanied their entrance.

As they walked past the closed and forbidding doorways rising high in black walnut pretentiousness, they might well have reflected upon the determination with which the old house had clung to respectability. At one time it might have been the nest of elegance to which some New York heir of a day now gone had brought his bride on their return from Niagara Falls. Births and deaths had fallen inside these closed apartments now given over to the lonely abode of lonely individuals who had presented the "best of references." Parties and funerals had been here once. Children's laughing voices from long ago, and the coughs of the aged! Ghosts of the past stalked through these halls while the lodgers of to-day snored in virtuous and isolated unimportance.

Charity Garvice, walking in front of Farrelly, appeared so young and fresh and fair that the passage of time since the day when her family had moved to Philadelphia, and the seventeen-year-old boy had said a heartaching good-by to the first real romance of his life, seemed unreal. After all, there was the illusion that she had not changed, that she was still sixteen, and young and fresh and fair as sixteen. He felt on his lips the ghost of that one kiss of long ago—and there struck into his heart the pain of realization that he had let the warmth of rich living, outside self, die out.

"She is here," whispered Charity, stopping before a door on the third floor. "Remember—she has come to the state of illusions of one who is failing. She is obsessed by the idea that you are in trouble; but that if she can only reach you—you whom she still calls 'my one boy'—she can tell you of her faith. She thinks you need her, and that she can save you."

"Do you think it is right to deceive her?" he asked.

"Be careful—her sight is gone, but her hearing is very keen," Miss Garvice whispered. "Yes. To allow her to think her faith has not been wasted is to do the one kindness we can do."

"Wait a moment: I must think," Farrelly answered.

"Can you play the part?"

"I will try."

He drew in a great breath, sighed, and nodded.

"Yes."

Charity opened the door.

IT opened on a room filled with the white radiance of winter sunlight, which fell from the clearing sky upon the snow-covered house-tops across the back yards. This cheerful light illumined brightly the square room, with its books along the walls on either side of a marble mantel. The furnace heat, pouring up through an iron register fixed into this old mantel, stirred a silk scarf draped along the shelf upon which an old mahogany clock was ticking in an expression of its importance. There were two tables by the windows, upon which were worn but immaculate white linen covers, crochet needles, a bottle of medicine, books and papers, as if their owner still clung to the illusion that sight would suddenly be restored to her.

The old school-teacher sat in a winged chair against a background of green denim upholstery. She was clad, just as Farrelly had conceived unconsciously that she would be clad, in a gray gown with white cuffs and collar. Her lids were closed over her useless eyes. Deeply wrinkled, her face still was the familiar face he had known many years before. There came back to him vividly the picture of her sitting at her desk at the end of the term, when the scholars had said good-by, and he, returning furtively on some unknown impulse from the coat-room, had seen her with her eyes closed—tired, at the end of another round of her service, and with a calm upon her face which had caused him wonder and sudden awe that he could not understand.

Her expression now was the same. And as he stood, in the moment's pause, impressed again by the same wonder and sudden awe, he saw over the top of her thin gray hair, clinging so closely to her head, a picture on the mantelpiece of a young boy whose face wore a suggestion of the sheepish smile of raw youth facing the photographer. It was the picture he had given her. Until this moment, its existence, and the incident of presenting it to her with blushes and stammerings, and the weeks of embarrassment every time he had remembered this bit of sentimental folly, had been blotted from his memory. So that was he! With seeing eyes and strange, persistent affection, she had preserved the portrait of this old self of his. Sightless and with the fog of age settling over her mind, she preserved it still. He almost uttered an exclamation.

"Charity Garvice!" said Miss Owens, as she heard the door close. "Dear girl—I thought you would come to-day. I was about to rap on the floor with this faithful old cane of mine and call my landlady. I wanted a drink of water."

"I will get it," the young woman replied, and indicated by a movement of her finger to her lips that Farrelly was not to speak until the errand was done.

CHARITY had started to pick up the glass, when the old lady leaned forward.

"Charity."

"Yes, Miss Owens."

The reply was made in the same tone of formal deference with which she addressed her teacher nearly twenty years ago.

"Is there somebody with you?" asked the trembling voice.

"Yes, Miss Owens."

"You don't mean—you found him? Is it he? You don't mean—"

Farrelly put his hand over the white and withered hand on the chair-arm. Her other hand found its way across to cover his.

"George Farrelly!" the old woman gasped, clutching the air as if to seize the lapels of his coat. "George Farrelly! You have grown up to be a man. Let me touch your face."

He knelt beside her chair and allowed her to put her finger-tips on his hair, his ears, his cheeks, his twitching mouth.

"You always seemed to be dearer than all the rest," she said, with a comfortable sigh. "This is the greatest joy I could have. George Farrelly—you were always in trouble, and yet always my boy."

"I did not know. Of course I never thought," he stammered. "I am in a bank not half an hour's walk from here, Miss Owens. It is strange that we were so near and yet so far."

The old teacher did not seem to hear. She was whispering to herself, and Farrelly looked up at Miss Garvice and smiled.

"But you are trembling," said the old lady. "Why do you shake so? You are in trouble—you are in trouble again?"

"Yes," he said in a tragic voice; "I am in trouble."

"Charity, you see I was right," she asserted triumphantly. "You tried to reassure me, but I told you sudden trouble had come to this boy. I told you he needed a friend. I said if he could only come to me he would find that which we all need—kindness and faith."

The bank employee bent his head as if simulating shame.

"It is not sudden trouble," he said. "It seems as if it were centuries old."

"Tell me, George Farrelly," said Miss Owens, leaning over him and thrusting one of her arms about his shoulder. "Charity Garvice was your good friend once—a good friend with a pure, true heart. You need not mind her. So tell me as you came and told me that other fault so many years ago."

"I will tell," he said in a tired, broken voice which startled the young woman, who, with half opened lips, waited breathlessly.

SHE found an increasing admiration for the humane qualities which, under the formal bank manner of the cold young man, could burst their bonds and find unselfish expression in making him humble and in accepting the needs of a situation out of which joy might be brought to a deluded mind almost at the end of life.

---

"There, there," said Miss Owens, patting and smoothing the rough wool of his coat sleeve. "Don't worry about it now. You tell me. I have lived so many more years. I will know what to do. And if you had thought about it all you would have known that somewhere was Martha Owens—not very spry, as they say, to be sure, but with all her affectionate memory for her boy, and faith that he will always do what is right when he has the chance."

Farrelly looked up into Charity's eyes, a frightened expression in his own, as if he feared to go on, lest the art that he could bring to this piece of acting would fail to carry conviction.

She nodded to him reassuringly.

"I've tried so hard, Miss Owens!" he said in a thick voice. "I had so much to overcome. No one to understand. That's where I have made my mistake. I shut myself up inside myself. I've never loved anybody. I've never married. But I tried to put out of my life all temptations. And now I am so much alone."

"No, no," crooned the old teacher. "Not alone—you have me. And you have Charity."

Miss Garvice waited for Farrelly to look up at her; but he did not, and, sensing his embarrassment, she herself blushed.

"There, there," Miss Owens said, comforting him. "There, there. Tell me all."

"I WORK now in the safety-deposit vaults of a bank," he said. "It is under the street. It is like a tomb; and sometimes I seem to be an animal shut into a cage of great shining steel bars. And the door of the vault has a time lock, and sometimes when I wake up in the morning I think I am waking for another day of mechanical service just as that time lock awakes the thick door. And I am hinged to life, as that door is hinged to the wall.

"I have a room, and a path to the bank over the bricks, and a path back again. And sometimes I used to almost cry out because there was nothing but day after day of the same thing, and I was a slave to it, and a slave to my salary. There was just enough to live on and a little more; but all the time I saw rich people who came down sticking their keys into their deposit boxes. And they lived. They saw strange lands, and they ate in places all sparkling with life, and they could afford to put gay clothes on the women they loved—and it all seemed to mock me."

"Of course it did," said Miss Owens. "I thought the same thing often, for years and years. But, after all, my work was most important; and it was well done, I think, and faithfully done."

To his credit, Farrelly gave forth a sob.

"I wish I had been contented," he muttered. "I wish I had never listened to those voices that asked me what I gained by trying so hard. They used to say to me, 'Family, when you were a boy you had a wild streak in you, but you have lived it down splendidly. And yet, Farrelly, what have you gained but loneliness and the prospect of earning a living until, alone and forgotten, you crawl away to die?'"

"Like me," said Martha, nodding her head. "I heard those voices, my dear boy. So many do. But, after all, work is so comforting—looking forward to it, doing it, and remembering it when it is done. Poor boy! You forget that."

"I did not forget it!" he exclaimed, springing up and pacing up and down with his hand clenched. "It was only for a moment. The thoughts of how useless I was to anybody, how alone I have been—they prepared me for that moment, damn them!"

"Tell me what happened, boy," commanded the old lady.

Farrelly stopped his pacing back and forth like a caged animal. He smiled at Miss Garvice helplessly and was silent. In spite of the fall of snow of the morning, a hurdy-gurdy had come into the street below and was playing a merry tune.

"Tell me," repeated Miss Owens firmly.

Her thin old lips were shut tight so that the lingering tenderness of her patient life had disappeared, for a moment, in a show of authority. Farrelly found himself staring helplessly into her eyes— sightless, but none the less fixed upon him.

"Tell me," she said, moving as if trying to arise from her chair. "All will be well. You will do what is right—never fear."

"Well, it was almost closing time one day last April," he said. "One of our depositors is Mrs. Albert Hetherington. She is the wife of the banker. You've heard of her. She is fifty and still thought beautiful. She came in to get to her box. She was going to Japan for many months. She took out her jewels. They are famous. Of course, she retired with them into one of our little rooms. I suppose, the winter season being over, she wanted to put away some of those she had exhibited at the opera and at balls. Somehow, I remember every detail of that fifteen minutes. I can smell her perfume. I smell it a dozen times a day. It haunts me."

Miss Garvice managed to catch his eye, and he smiled as if the effort were painful.

"Tell us more," she said softly, and Miss Owens nodded.

"She told me she was leaving for Japan on the following day, and I said good-by. I can remember exactly how she was dressed, and exactly how she looked with her back turned, going up the stairs. It had been a warm day, and the fans were still buzzing down in our vaults. Well, she had put away her jewels and had locked the box and gone away satisfied, and so I went into the little room she had occupied to look around: for that is one of our rules. I had done that, and I reached over to put out the electric light, when my foot came down on something hard. We have to wear rubber-soled shoes in the vault, and I thought I had stepped on several English walnuts."

Charity Garvice uttered an exclamation.

"They were the Hetherington rubies. Every stone man of note in New York and Paris knows of them. They were bought in Berlin in 1897, and they are called the 'Maharajah string.' I had seen them before—they were said to be a thirty-eight thousand dollar collection which she wears once a year!"

Farrelly sighed, and stopped as if to invent further details.

"There they were in my hands. What color and size! They were mounted on this string in a most artistic and ingenious fashion, so they almost seemed to be a handful of detached loose stones, weighing, it seemed to me, about ten pounds. I said, 'Well, there's a nice little trinket to be kicking around on the floor. They slid out of her lap. She closed the box they were in, put it in the safe—and here they are.' Sometimes I wake up and think I hear my own voice saying the words. And the next thing I thought was that all the time the Hetheringtons were away the Maharajah string would not be missed. And then I said, 'Well, Mr. Carter has not gone home. There he sits in the outer office, and I'll take these in to him. It will open his eyes, and he'll say, "Well, we'll put them in the bank's safe and notify her by telephone."'"

Martha Owens folded her hands.

"But when I went to look, Carter had gone," Farrelly said, with a little cry in the back of his throat—and he looked up at Miss Garvice as if to receive her congratulations. "The vault had been locked. I heard the doorman on the floor above calling out to the scrubwoman, 'Come on in here, Maggie; they've all gone but Mr. Farrelly down here.' Then I could see his feet on the stairs and I dropped the rubies into my side pocket. I tried to think what I could do, and something kept saying over and over, 'Thirty-eight thousand dollars, and they won't be missed for months!'"

THIS time it was the old school-ma'am who exclaimed. "Poor boy!" she muttered. "My poor boy."

"The doorman, who used to be with one of the detective agencies, said to me: 'What's the big idea of staying so late, Mr. Farrelly?' And, can any one believe it, he frightened me. I said to myself: 'What if these things are found in my pocket?' So I took my hat and rushed out.

"I walked for blocks, and I could feel those things against my side and when my hand touched my coat. I never ought to have left the bank, Miss Owens. I got into a panic and went into a doorway. As I said, it was April twenty-ninth, and the daylight was still strong. I was frightened, but I stepped into a doorway and changed the rubies from my pocket to a leather cigarette-case I carry inside my coat."

"Come here," said Martha Owens. "Come here by my knee. I can't see you, George Farrelly."

She put her arm about his shoulder and patted his coat sleeve.

"And so—"

"And so there came the idea that, after all, the worst of appearances had come to me withered thoughts of wrong: and then and not before I began to think of what I could do if I had thirty-eight thousand dollars. The necklace was worth much more, but I didn't know it then. I thought it was worth thirty-eight thousand because some one in the vaults who had seen it said so. I thought of the travel, the luxuries, and the start in life it would buy if I only went to some other part of the world. I found, suddenly, that I was telling myself that when the stones were taken apart and recut here and there no one could trace the property. There was seven months and more in which it would not be missed. I had never had anything, and now in my inside breast pocket I had all I wanted.

"I laughed to myself for thinking that way, but 1 didn't laugh when I began to wonder how I could return the thing. I had gone without dinner. It was growing late. I had taken the necklace from

Continued on page 21

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

NO GERMAN PRISON COULD HOLD THIS MAN

WITH the aid of a dictionary and a comrade who knew a little English, a French soldier named Carnot spent the long evenings in barracks, writing out by candle-light the miraculous story of his escape from German prison camps.

His narrative, unaltered in its broken, picturesque phrasing, was published in the Atlantic Monthly, under the title, "Carnot's Story."

Carnot was wounded in 1914, captured, and, as soon as he was sufficiently recovered, sent to a German prison camp. "I have only one idea in the head: the escape," he writes. "Prisoner always dream of the liberty."

With two of his friends he formed a plan to creep under the three belts of wire, charged with heavy volts of electricity, which surrounded the camp, taking advantage of the fact that heavy storms had washed away the earth in places beneath the wire.

He and one comrade succeeded in getting past all three deadly barriers; but the alarm was sounded, police dogs were loosed on them, and they were brought back, terribly bitten by the dogs, and more dead than alive.

They were notified that they would be shot. Instead they were kept for a time in chains, and later transferred to a camp far in the interior, to prevent any further attempts to get away.

No one had ever escaped from this camp. Nevertheless Carnot and a companion named Lefevre managed to get hold of some workingmen's clothes, slip away from their guard on their way from work, and get out of town, disguised as a hunchback and a lame old man. For a week they walked by night and hid themselves in the woods by day. Only a few hours' journey separated them from the Holland frontier, when they fell one night into an ambuscade, and were again captured by police dogs. In spite of their efforts to pass as Hollanders, the two discouraged and exhausted men were taken to a fortress and chained in a small room, preparatory to being passed around among the different prison camps and identified.

"I am crying like a child, and Lefevre is sick. 'You see you bungle this!' he shout to me; and nearly we are going to fight. We are both two miserables."

After this, in order to mark the two men, half of their head was shaved on one side, half their mustache on the other, and they were placed under special regulations.

Nevertheless they tunneled out of their boundaries and were off again across the fields toward Holland, walking by day, hiding by night, and living on chance carrots, potatoes, and cabbages that they found.

"It is peculiar how we were able to distinguish from very far all kind of different sounds at night. The ear becomes very exact when one is walking for his life."

At last, one dawn, they swam the Ems River, and were in Holland.

"Our joy, our madness, were indescribable. In spite of the opposite temper between Lefevre and me, we kiss each other like we were brothers. For the first time in all our travels together, we agree completely to the same idea. We look across the bridge and see the Boches! They regard us in a very strange way, like they hungry for us.

"It was a great privilege and joy to be on this side of the bridge and not on the other. We bless the little distance which separates us."

HOW DO YOU TAKE YOUR AIR?

IN 1858, during the Sepoy rebellion, 146 English men and women were shut up overnight in a room that had only one small window. When morning came, only twenty-three were alive. After the battle of Austerlitz, 300 prisoners were crowded into a cavern. In a few hours two thirds of them were dead. Not many people are killed off quickly, as in these two cases, by bad air, says John W. Ritchie in his Primer of Physiology (World Book Company). But a good many persons are like the kind-hearted old gentleman who could not bring himself to cut his dog's tail off all at once, and so cut off an inch each morning until the tail was gone.

They go to churches, lecture halls, and theaters where the air is so foul it gives them headaches. They sleep in rooms with windows and doors closed, breathing the same air all night again and again. They work or study in badly ventilated offices, factories, or school-rooms, until their blood is so vitiated and their body so weakened that they go down easily before an especially virulent germ.

Stale air—that is, air with too little oxygen and too much carbon dioxid—is injurious; but worse than stale air is over-heated air. A hot, dry atmosphere is injurious to the eyes; it makes people subject to colds; and it makes them extremely nervous.

Keep the temperature down, and keep the air moving. In England, as an experiment, a group of students were closed in a small room and watched through the glass in the door.

At first they laughed and joked; but soon they began to show signs of distress. Formerly it would have been concluded that they were suffering from a lack of oxygen or were being poisoned by carbon dioxid. When an electric fan was started in the room, however, the students became comfortable again, without the introduction of fresh air.

THE FIRST THING TO KNOW ABOUT A BABY

EVERY year in the United States 375,000 babies die mainly from diseases that could have been prevented if the mothers had known how, writes Charlotte Aikens in the Home Nurses' Handbook (W. B. Saunders Company). That is why motherhood is rightly called the "unskilled profession."

The most important thing to know about a baby is how to feed it. It takes a good deal of dirt and neglect to kill a healthy baby, providing it is fed properly.

On the other hand, there is no easier way to turn a well baby into a sick baby than to experiment promiscuously with its food. "There are parents who would not think of experimenting with the mechanism of a ten-dollar watch who nevertheless experiment with the delicate machinery of a baby's digestive apparatus in a manner that is simply appalling."

Here is some of the writer's advice to mothers:

Nurse the baby if possible; the breast-fed baby has ten chances to the bottle-fed baby's one.

Establish regular hours for feeding. Every two and a half hours during the day is often enough, and after the first three months the daily feedings should be three hours apart.

When your baby cries, do not jump to the conclusion that it is hungry. It may cry from indigestion; from being too cold or too warm; because its clothing is wrinkled or wet; or because it is lonesome.

Never give any kind of medicine to your baby, except on a doctor's definite prescription. Hundreds of babies are killed every year as a result of promiscuous drugging on the advice of neighbors and friends.

Give the baby no solid food until it has teeth.

WHAT DOES JAPAN REALLY THINK?

"IS it not extraordinary," says Professor R. M. Johnston, in a letter to R. B. Price, "that there is a tacit conspiracy in this country to avoid mentioning that Japan is coming out of the war immensely strengthened and holding the Pacific at her mercy, because this might be thought unfriendly and precipitate trouble? It is the policy of the henpecked husband evading domestic infelicities; but as a state policy I can find no historical precedents, save those that have ended in disaster."

With the letter Mr. Price sends us a reprint of an article published in a Japanese magazine in October, 1916, from which the following quotations are taken:

"Fifty millions of our race wherewith to conquer and possess the earth! It is indeed a glorious problem! Rome built an empire with less; Napoleon nearly did it with less; and England will have done it with less, if she wins—if she wins! And therefore I ask, shall we let her win? Need we with any one divide the earth? And if needs be, shall it be with England? The matter must with care be weighed.

"As for America—that fatuous booby with much money and much sentiment, but no cohesion, no brains of government, stood she alone we should not need our China steed. Well did my friend speak, the other day, when he called her people a race of thieves with the hearts of rabbits. America, to any warrior race, is not as a foe, but as an immense melon, ripe for cutting. But there are other warrior races—England, Germany. Would they look on and let us eat our fill? Would they?

"North America alone will support a billion people; that billion shall be Japanese with their slaves. North America, that continent so succulently green, fresh, and unsullied,—except for the few chattering, mongrel Yankees,—should have been ours by right of discovery: it shall be ours by the higher, nobler right of conquest.

"But is it wise to pluck, even at first, but half the fruit? to take only to the Rockies, or to the Rockies and Andes? Now, after delaying so long to take the Philippines until we could have Hawaii also, and waiting for Hawaii until we were ready to take with it both California and Panama, is it best to take so much until we can pluck the whole? I repeat, we must make no mistakes now."

Of all the nations in the war, Japan has suffered least and gained most. What is her plan for the future? What does she really and truly think?

WOMEN WHO KNOW TOO MUCH

ARE men afraid of women who "know too much"? Do they instinctively shun such women when they come to choose their mates? The question is raised by a report published in the Journal of Heredity showing the exceedingly low percentage of marriages among the women graduates of medical schools.

In the years between 1897-1907 sixty women received the degree of M. D. from Johns Hopkins University. Three of these have since died: of the remaining fifty-seven only twenty-one have married. In other words, the marriage rate among them is only 36.8 per cent.

Among all college women the birth rate is below the average: and these figures would seem to show that the higher the education the fewer the marriages.

---

NOTHING TAKES THE PLACE OF BREAD

MILK is the first and most important part of a nation's food supply. Without milk it can not go on—can not bring up its children. Second to milk—and also indispensable—is bread. The diet of the whole Western world is built around bread and milk. Keep up the normal ration of these two things, and a nation will thrive, even though suffering great deprivation as to all the rest of its diet; but cut down the bread ration seriously, and it begins to starve. So great is the psychological importance of a sufficient bread ration that during this war nations have preferred to lower the quality of their bread by making it of barley, rye, and potato flour, rather than greatly to reduce the quantity. (The Food Problem, by Vernon Kellogg and A. E. Taylor; published by the Macmillan Company.)

The indispensability of bread rests not only on its nutritive qualities, but also—and very largely—on the fact that it can be prepared in large lots of uniform quality and appearance and can be kept for some time. Up to a certain point, cereals in other forms can be substituted for it; but they can not take its place, and nations differ widely in their power to adapt themselves to this change. Germany and Italy have gone farthest in reducing their bread ration. In Italy bread has been reduced one third, large classes being content to eat corn, rice, and macaroni in its place. In England bread has been reduced among the middle and upper classes. Only in France has it been found impossible to reduce the bread ration, which is to-day practically what it was in peace times.

The reason for this is that there is no such thing in France, practically speaking, as the domestic baking of bread. Bread is always purchased from the baker. The substitution of rice, cornmeal, or oatmeal for bread would mean a new burden for the Frenchwoman, who is already worked to the limit of her time and strength; for these things would have to be prepared in the home.

The Frenchwoman is already carrying on the agriculture of the country and in the cities all the odds and ends of labor that normally fall to masculine hands. On top of this, is it to be regarded as possible to ask the Frenchwoman to spend an hour a day in the preparation of rice, corn, or oatmeal? Certainly no American who understands the meaning of the war can possibly justify such an imposition upon the women of France.

A TERRIBLE ACCIDENT

IT PAYS TO WEAR GOOD CLOTHES

LINCOLN once remarked to a friend that he never felt his own utter worthlessness so much as when in the presence of a hotel clerk or a waiter. His whole early career was marked by a failure to value himself highly enough: he felt often ill at ease and inferior in the company of men to whom he was in every sense superior.

It would be interesting to determine how much of this self-depreciation was due to the unfavorable impression that Lincoln often made upon those who saw him for the first time, says Alonzo Rothschild in Honest Abe (Houghton, Mifflin). "He probably had as little taste about dress and attire as anybody that ever was born," writes an attorney who saw him often in those days. "He simply wore clothes because it was needful and customary. When I saw him first, his hat was innocent of a nap. His boots had no acquaintance with blacking. His clothes had not been introduced to a whisk-broom. His carpet-bag was well worn and dilapidated. His umbrella was substantial, but of a faded green, well worn, the knob gone, and the name 'A. Lincoln' cut out of white muslin and sewed in the inside."

In spite of all this, Lincoln made his success. Yet it was an undoubted handicap in the early days. On one occasion, when his partner, Major John T. Stuart, could not attend a trial and sent Lincoln to represent the firm, the client, John W. Baddeley, "gave one glance at the letter, and one at the ungainly, ill dressed bearer of it. That a man who presented so unpromising an appearance should come offering to be his representative in the august precincts of the law irritated him beyond measure. He discharged a volley of abuse at the astonished Lincoln, paid his respect in similar terms to John T. Stuart, and straightway hired another lawyer, James A. McDougall, to defend the suit."

IT REALLY IS HIS ARMY

SOMETIMES we may have the suspicion that the Kaiser is being a bit presumptuous in referring to "my" army and "my" navy. As a matter of fact he is speaking by the book: literally, the army and the navy are his. It is so stated in that very convenient and carefully planned document, the Prussian Constitution. Paragraph 108 of the Constitution reads: "A swearing in of the army upon the constitution of the country does not take place." Instead the army swears, as stated in paragraph 64, to "render unconditional obedience to the orders of the Emperor."

"Wilhelm II feels so intensely that he is the personal owner of the army," says Herman Fernau in The Coming Democracy (Dutton), "that on every occasion of the swearing in of recruits he perpetually reiterates: 'You have sworn me the oath of allegiance.' And on November 23, 1891, he declared to the newly sworn recruits: 'More than ever before, unbelief and dissatisfaction lift their heads in the Fatherland, and the occasion may arise when you will have to shoot down or bayonet your own brothers and relations. Then seal your allegiance with the sacrifice of your heart's blood.'

"Again, at Breslau on December 2, 1896, he says: 'The more people shelter themselves behind catch-words and party considerations, the more firmly and securely do I count upon my army, and the more confidently do I hope that my army, either without or within my realms, will wait upon my wishes and my behests. You are called upon, in the first place, to protect me against internal and external foes.'"

THE CZAR HAS LOST HIS FAVORITE DOG

HOW MUCH HAVE YOU SAVED THIS WEEK?

IT may help a little to encourage the difficult habit of thrift if you will stop once in a while and ask yourself, "Where shall I be ten years from now?" For that question, to the average American man, raises a picture that is by no means pleasant.

According to S. W. Straus in Forbes' Magazine, Surrogate records show that only 3 per cent of the men who die in this country leave an estate of $10,000; 15 per cent leave from $2,000 to $10,000; and the remaining 82 per cent die leaving no tangible assets.

What about the widows of these men? For wives ordinarily outlive their husbands in this as well as in other countries. Only 18 per cent of the widows of these men are left in comfortable circumstances; 47 per cent are compelled to go to work; and the remaining 35 per cent become charges either on the state or on their relatives.

Not a very pleasant picture of the results of the average life, is it? The husband dying with no estate, and the wife becoming a public charge? And not a necessary picture, either, if thrift only began in time.

A LETTER TO MARK TWAIN

ONE evening a few years ago Brander Matthews and Francis Wilson were dining together at the Players Club in New York, when the former made the suggestion that they should write a letter to Mark Twain.

"But," objected Mr. Wilson, "we don't know where he is," for it was at a time when Mr. Clemens was always traveling somewhere.

"Oh," said Professor Matthews, "that does not make any difference. It is sure to find him. I think he is in some place in Europe, so we had better put on a five-cent stamp."

So the two sat down and composed a letter which they addressed to "Mark Twain, God Knows Where."

In due time they received a reply from Mr. Clemens which said briefly:

"He did."

(From The House of Harper, by H. J. Harper.)

THE GOLDEN SNARE

By JAMES OLIVER CURWOOD

Illustrations by George Giguère

PHILIP had entered Bram Johnson's cabin from the west. Out of the east the pale fire of the winter sun seemed to concentrate itself on the one window of Bram's habitation, and flooded the opposite partition. In this partition there was a doorway, and in the doorway stood a girl.

She was standing full in the light that came through the window when Philip saw her. His first impression was that she was clouded in the same wonderful hair that had gone into the making of the golden snare. It billowed over her arms and breast to her hips, aflame with the living fires of the reflected sun. He caught the white gleam of her bare shoulders under her hair. And then, with a shock, he saw what was in her face.

It turned his blood cold. It was the look of a soul that had been tortured. Agony and doubt burned in her eyes. They were like violet amethysts. Her face was dead white. It was beautiful. And she was young. She was not over twenty, it flashed upon him—but she had gone through a hell.

"Don't let me alarm you," he said, speaking gently. "I am Philip Brant, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police."

It did not surprise him that she made no answer. His heart choked him as he waited for her lips to move. It was a mystery to him afterward why he accepted the situation so utterly as he stood there. He knew that he would kill Bram Johnson when the moment arrived.

The girl had not seemed to move, but now she drew in her breath in a great gasp. Suddenly she ran to the window, and Philip saw the grip of her hands at the sill as she looked out. Through the gate Bram was driving his wolves. When she faced him again, her eyes had in them the look of a creature threatened by a whip. As he advanced a step she cringed back from him. Her face was like the face of an angel filled with a mad horror. She reached out her bare arms to hold him back, and a strange cry came from her lips.

The cry stopped him like a shot. He tore open his coat, and the sunlight fell on his bronze insignia of the Service. She had feared him, as she feared Bram, until she saw the badge.

"I am Philip Brant, of the Royal Northwest Mounted Police," he repeated. "I have come up here especially to help you, if you need help. I could have got Bram farther back, but there was a reason why I didn't want him until I found his cabin. That reason was you. Why are you here with a madman and a murderer?"

She was watching him intently, and into her face—white a few moments before— rose swiftly a flush of color. He saw the dread die out of her eyes in a new and dazzling excitement. Outside they could hear Bram. Then she began talking, swiftly and eagerly, in a language that was as strange to Philip as the mystery of her presence in Bram Johnson's cabin. She saw that he did not understand, and suddenly she came up close to him, and put a finger to his lips and then to her own, and shook her head. The astounding truth held him dumb. She was trying to make him comprehend something—in a language that he had never heard before in all his life. He stared at her—like an idiot, he told himself afterward.

AND then the shuffle of Bram's heavy feet sounded just outside the door. Instantly the old light leaped into the girl's eyes. Before the door could open she had darted into the room from which she had first appeared, her hair floating about her in a golden cloud as she ran.

The door opened, and Bram entered. At his heels, beyond the threshold, Philip caught a glimpse of the pack glaring hungrily into the cabin. Bram was burdened under the load he had brought from the sledge. He dropped it to the floor, and, without looking at Philip, his eyes fastened themselves on the door to the inner room.

They stood there for a full minute, Bram as if hypnotized by the door, and Philip with his eyes on Bram. A curtain had dropped over the entrance to the inner room, and beyond that they could hear the girl moving about. A dozen emotions were fighting in Philip. If he had possessed a weapon, he would have ended the matter with Bram then, for the light that was burning like a strange flame in the wolf-man's eyes convinced him that he had guessed the truth. Near the stove was a pile of firewood. A stick of that would do—when the opportunity came.

And then, in a way that made him almost cry out, every nerve in his body was startled. The girl appeared in the doorway, a smile on her lips and her eyes shining radiantly—straight at Bram! She partly held out her arms, and began talking. She seemed utterly oblivious of Philip's presence. Not a word that she uttered could he understand. It was not Cree or Chippewyan or Eskimo. It was not French or German or any tongue that he had ever heard. But the look in her face that had at first horrified him was no longer there. She had braided her hair, and the coloring in her face was like that of a rare painting.

The wolf-man was transfigured. His strange eyes were shining, his heavy face was filled with a dog-like joy.

Was it possible that he understood her? Was the strange language in which she was speaking common between them? At first Philip thought that it must be so—and all the horrors of the situation that he had built up for himself fell about him in confusing disorder. The girl seemed glad that Bram had returned; and, with a heart choking him with its suspense, he waited for Bram to speak and act.

When the girl ceased speaking, the wolf-man's response came in a guttural cry that was like a pæan of triumph. He dropped on his knees beside the dunnage bag, and, mumbling thickly as he worked, he began to empty its contents upon the floor.

Philip looked at the girl. Her hands were clutched at her breast, and in her face and attitude there was now a wordless entreaty for him to understand. The truth came to him like a flash. For some reason, she had forced herself to appear that way to the wolf-man. And now she was

trying to tell him what it meant, and, pointing to Bram as he knelt with his huge head and shoulders bent over the dunnage bag on the floor, she exclaimed in a low, tense voice:

"Tossi—tossi—han er tossi!"

It was useless. He could not understand, and it was impossible for him to hide the bewilderment in his face. An inspiration came to him. Bram's back was toward him, and he pointed to the sticks of firewood. His pantomime was clear. Should he knock the wolf-man's brains out as he knelt there?

HE could see that his question sent a thrill of alarm through her. She shook her head. Her lips formed strange words, and, looking again at Bram, she repeated: "Tossi—tossi—han er tossi!"

She clasped her hands suddenly to her head then. Her eyes dilated—and understanding flashed upon him. She was telling him what he already knew—that Bram Johnson was mad. He repeated after her the word, "Tossi—tossi"—tapping his forehead suggestively and nodding at Bram.

Yes, that was it. He could see it in the quick intake of her breath. She had been afraid he would attack the wolf-man. And now she was glad that he understood he was not to harm him.

And then he saw her staring at the things which Bram had sorted out on the floor. In her eyes was hunger. It was for a moment a part of her—as surely as Bram's madness was a part of him. In a way, the look that he saw in her face shocked him more than anything that he had seen in Bram's. It was as if a curtain had lifted before his eyes, revealing to him an unbelievable truth and something of the hell through which she had gone. She was hungry—for something that was not flesh! The thought flashed upon him why the wolf-man had traveled so far south, and why he had attacked him for possession of his food supply. It was that he might bring these things to the girl. Her eyes met his, and a crimson flood swept into her face. The feminine instinct told her that she had betrayed herself and that he must have seen in her fora moment something that was almost like Bram's own madness.

He stepped forward quickly and laid a hand on her arm.

"I am going to get breakfast," he said. "Will you help me?"

Until he felt the warm thrill of the girl's arm under his hand, Philip did not realize the hazard he had taken. He turned suddenly to confront Bram. He would not have known then that the wolf-man was mad, and impulsively he reached out a hand.

"Bram, she's starving," he cried. "I know now why you wanted that stuff! But why didn't you tell me? Why don't you talk, and let me know who she is, and why she is here, and what you want me to do?"

He waited, and Bram stared at him without a sound.

"I tell you, I'm a friend," he went on. "I—"

He got no further than that, for suddenly the cabin was filled with the madness of Bram's laugh. It was more terrible than out on the open barren or in the forest, and he felt the shudder of the girl at his side. And Bram continued to laugh—and as he laughed, his eyes blazing a greenish fire, he turned to the stove and began putting fuel into the fire. It was horrible, Bram's laugh—the girl's dead-white face, and her smile!

He no longer asked himself who she was and why she was here. He was overwhelmed by the one appalling fact that she was here, and that the stricken soul crying out to him from the depths of those eyes that were like wonderful blue amethysts told him that Bram had made her pay the price. His muscles hardened as he looked at the huge form bending over the stove. A single leap and he would be at the outlaw's throat.

The girl must have guessed what was in his mind, for her fingers were clutching at his before he could move, and she was pulling him away from the wolf-man, speaking to him in the language that he could not understand.

Bram turned from the stove, picked up a pail, and, without looking at them, left the cabin. They could hear his laugh as he joined the wolves.

AGAIN Philip's conclusions toppled down about him like a thing made of blocks. In the next few moments he knew that the girl was telling him that Bram had not harmed her. She seemed almost hysterically anxious to make him understand this; and at last, seizing him by the hand, she drew him into the room beyond the curtained door. Her meaning was quite as plain as words. She was showing him what Bram had done for her. He had made her this separate room by running a partition across the cabin, and in addition to this he had built a small lean-to outside the main wall, entered through a narrow door made of saplings that were still green.

"I guess—I begin to get your meaning," he said, looking straight into her shining blue eyes. "You want to impress on me that I'm not to wring Bram Johnson's neck when his back is turned, or at any other time, and you want me to believe that he hasn't done you any harm. And yet, you're afraid to the bottom of your soul. I know it. A little while ago your face was as white as chalk; and now—now —it's the prettiest face I've ever seen. Now, see here, little girl—"

It gave him a pleasant thrill to see the glow in her eyes and the eager poise of her slim, beautiful body as she listened to him.

"I'm licked," he went on, smiling frankly at her. "Maybe I've gone loony, like Bram, and don't realize it yet. I set out for a couple of Indians, and find a madman; and at the madman's cabin I find you, looking at first as if you were facing straight up aginst the door of—of—well, seeing that you can't understand, I might as well say it—of hell! I saw what was in his eyes. You saw it—and that pretty pink went out of your face so quick it seemed as if your heart must have

Continued on page 15

THINGS MEN WON'T DO

YOU JUST CAN'T KEEP THEM DOWN

---

UP FROM SLAVERY—QUITE SOME DISTANCE

Continued from page 10

stopped beating. And yet, you're trying to tell me he hasn't harmed you. My God—I wish I could believe it!"

In her face he saw the reflection of the change that must have come suddenly into his own.

"You're a good fifteen hundred miles from any other human being with hair and eyes and color like yours," he continued, as if in speaking his thoughts aloud to her some ray of light might throw itself on the situation. "If you had something black about you—but you haven't. You're all gold—pink and white and gold. If Bram has another fit of talking he may tell me you came from the moon—"

He paused, and she smiled at him. There was something pathetically sweet in that smile. It brought a queer lump into his throat, and for a space he forgot Bram.

"You don't understand a cussed word of it, do you?" he said, taking her hand in both his own and holding it closely for a moment. "Not a word. But we're getting the drift of things—slowly. I know you've been here quite a while, and that morning, noon, and night since the chasse-galère brought you down from the moon you've had nothing to put your little teeth into but meat. Probably without salt, too. I saw how you wanted to throw yourself down on that pile of stuff on the floor. Let's have breakfast!"

HE led her into the outer room, and eagerly she set to work helping him gather the things from the floor. He felt that an overwhelming load had been lifted from him, and he continued to tell her about it while he hurried the preparation of the breakfast for which he knew she was hungering. He did not look at her too closely. All at once it had dawned upon him that her situation must be tremendously more embarrassing than his own. He felt, too, the tingle of a new excitement in his veins. It was a pleasurable sensation—something that he did not pause to analyze just then. Only he knew that it was because she had told him as plainly as she could that Bram had not harmed her.

"And if he had I guess you'd have let me smash his brains out when he was bending over the stove, wouldn't you?" he said, stirring the mess of desiccated potato he was warming in one of his kit-pans. He looked up, to see her eyes shining at him and her lips parted. Suddenly he straightened himself and tapped his chest, an inspiring thought leaping into his head.

"I am Philip Brant," he said. "Philip Brant—Philip Brant—Philip Brant—"

He repeated the name over and over again, pointing each time to himself. Light flashed into her face. It was as if all at once they had broken through the barrier that had separated them. She repeated his name slowly, clearly, smiling at him; and then, with both hands at her breast, she said:

"Celie Armin."

He wanted to jump over the stove and shake hands with her, but the potatoes were sizzling. Celie Armin! It was decidedly a French name—but half a minute's experiment with a few simple sentences of Pierre Breault's language convinced him that the girl understood no word of it.

Then he said again:

"Celie!"

Almost in the same breath she answered:

"Philip!"

Sounds outside of the cabin announced the return of Bram. Following the snarl and whine of the pack came heavy footsteps, and the wolf-man entered. Philip did not look at first to see what effect Bram's return had on Celie Armin. He even began to whistle; and then, after a final stir or two at the potatoes, he pointed to the pail in which the coffee was bubbling, and said:

"Turn the coffee, Celie. We're ready!"

He caught a glimpse of her face then. The excitement and color had partly died out of it. She took the pail of coffee and went with it to the table.

Philip faced Bram.

The wolf-man was standing with his back to the door. He had not moved since entering, and he was staring at the scene

before him in a dull, stupid sort of way. In one hand he carried a pail filled with water; in the other a frozen fish.

"Too late with the fish, Bram," said Philip. "We couldn't make the little lady wait. Besides, I think you've fed her on fish and meat until she is just about ready to die. Come to breakfast!"

He loaded a tin plate with hot potatoes, bannock-bread, and rice that he had cooked before setting out on the barren, and placed it before the girl. A second plate he prepared for Bram, and a third for himself. Bram had not moved.

SUDDENLY he came to the table. With one huge hand he seized Philip's arm. It was not an ordinary man's grip. There was apparently no effort in it, and yet it was a viselike clutch that threatened to snap the bone. And all the time Bram's eyes were on the girl. He drew Philip back, released the grip on his arm, and shoved the two extra plates of food toward her. Then he faced Philip.

"We eat ze meat, m'sieu!"

Quietly and sanely he uttered the words. In his eyes and face there was no trace of madness. Yet even as Philip stared the change came. The giant flung back his head, and his wild, mad laugh rocked the cabin. Out in the corral the snarl and cry of the wolves made a savage response to it.

It took a tremendous effort for Philip to keep a grip on himself. In that momentary flash of sanity Bram had shown a chivalry which must have struck deep home in the heart of the girl. Bram, in his madness, had been good to her. Philip caught Bram's hand and shook it. And Bram, his laugh dying away in a mumbling sound, seemed not to notice it. As Philip began preparing the fish the wolf-man took up a position against the farther wall, and Philip brought him half of the fried fish. He might as well have offered the fish to a wooden sphinx. Bram rose to his feet, mumbling softly, and, taking what was left of one of the two caribou quarters, he again left the cabin.

His laugh and the snarling outcry of the wolves came to them a moment later.

Scarcely had the door closed when Celie Armin ran to Philip and pulled him to the table. In the tense half hour of Bram's watchfulness she had eaten her own breakfast as if nothing unusual had happened; now she insisted on adding potatoes and bannock to Philip's fish, and poured a cup of coffee for him.

"You don't want to see me beat out of a breakfast, do you?"

He smiled up at her, feeling all at once an immense desire to pull her head down to him and kiss her.

She sat opposite him while he ate, and he had the chance of observing her closely while his meal progressed. It struck him that she was growing prettier each time that he looked at her, and he was more positive than ever that she was a stranger in the northland. Again he told himself that she was not more than twenty. Sometime he might have seen the shade of violet-blue that was in her eyes, but he could not remember it. She was lost—utterly lost at this far end of the earth. And there she was, sitting opposite him, a bewitching mystery for him to solve. And she wanted to be solved. She was fighting, with him, to find a way to tell him who she was, and why she was here, and what he must do for her.

He thought of the golden snare. That, after all, he believed to be the real key to the mystery. He rose from the table, and drew the girl to the window. At the far end of the corral they could see Bram tossing chunks of meat to the horde of beasts that surrounded him. In a moment or two he had the satisfaction of seeing that his companion understood that he was directing her attention to the wolf-man and not to the pack.

Then he began unbraiding her hair. He felt his face flushing under his beard, and he knew that her eyes were on him wonderingly. A small strand he divided into three parts and began weaving them into a silken thread only a little larger than the wolf-man's snare. From the woven tress he pointed to Bram, and in an instant her face lighted up with understanding.

She answered him in pantomime. Either she or Bram had cut from her head the tress that had gone into the making of the golden snare. And not only one tress, but several. There had been a number of golden snares. She bowed her head and showed him where strands as large as her little finger had been clipped in several places.

PHILIP almost groaned. She was telling him nothing new, except that there had been many snares instead of one.

He was on the point of speech, when the look in her face held him silent. Her eyes glowed with a sudden excitement—a wild inspiration. She held out her hands until they nearly touched his breast.

Philip Brant—Amerika!" she cried.

Then, pressing her hands to her own breast, she added eagerly:

"Celie Armin—Danmark!"

"Denmark!" exclaimed Philip. "Is that it? You're from Denmark? Denmark?"

She nodded.

"Kobenhaven—Danmark!"

"Copenhagen, Denmark," he translated for himself. "Great Scott, Celie—we're talking! Celie Armin, from Copenhagen, Denmark! But how in heaven's name did you get here?" He pointed to the floor under their feet, and embraced the four walls of the cabin in a wide gesture of his arms.

Her next words thrilled him:

"Kobenhaven—Muskvas—St. Petersburg—Rusland—Siberien—Amerika."

"Copenhagen — Muskvas, whatever that is—St. Petersburg—Russia—Siberia —America," he repeated, staring at her incredulously. "Celie, if you love me be reasonable! Do you expect me to believe that you came all the way from Denmark to this God-forsaken madman's cabin in the heart of the Canada barrens by wavy of Russia and Siberia? You! I can't believe it."

---

He thought of his pocket atlas, supplied by the department as a part of his service kit, and remembered that in the back of it was a small map of the world. In half a minute he was holding the map under her eyes. Her little forefinger touched Copenhagen.

From Copenhagen it went to Moscow (which must have been Muskvas), and from there it trailed slowly to St. Petersburg, and thence straight across Russia and Siberia to Bering Sea.

"Skunnert," she said softly, and her finger came across to Alaska.

It hesitated there. Evidently it was a question in her own mind where she had gone after that. And now, seeing that he was understanding her, she was becoming visibly excited. She pulled him to the window, and pointed to the wolves. Alaska—and after that dogs and sledge.

He nodded. He was jubilant. She was Celie Armin, of Copenhagen, Denmark, and had come to Alaska by way of Russia and Siberia—and after that had traveled by dog-train. But why had she come, and what had happened to make her the companion or prisoner of Bram Johnson?

OUT in the corral, Philip heard Bram Johnson's laugh. It was a mockery—a challenge. He sprang to the stove, snatched up a length of firewood, and in another moment was at the door. As he opened it and ran out, he heard Celie's wild appeal for him to stop. Before he had taken a dozen steps from the cabin he realized what the warning meant. The pack had seen him and from the end of the corral came rushing at him in a thick mass.

This time Bram Johnson's voice did not stop them. He saw Philip, and from the doorway Celie looked upon the scene while the blood froze in her veins. She screamed—and in the same breath came the wolf-man's laugh.

Philip heard both as he swung the stick of firewood over his head and sent it hurling toward the pack. The chance accuracy of the throw gave him an instant's time in which to turn and make a dash for the cabin. It was Celie who slammed the door shut as he sprang through. Swift as a flash she shot the bolt, and there came the lunge of heavy bodies outside. They could hear the snapping of jaws and the snarling whine of the beasts. Philip had never seen a face whiter than the girl's had gone. She covered it with her hands, and he could see her trembling.

He drew in a deep breath and gently uncovered her face.

"Celie, I've discovered something," he cried huskily, holding her hands so tightly that it must have hurt her. "I'm almost glad you can't understand me, for I wouldn't blame you for being afraid of a man who told you he loved you an hour or two after he first saw you. I love you. And I must be careful and not let you know it, mustn't I? If I did you'd think I was some kind of an animal-brute—like Bram. Wouldn't you?"

Philip could hear the snarling rebellion of the wolves as they slunk away from the cabin, and he drew Celie back from the door. Suddenly she freed her hands, ran to the door, and slipped back the wooden bolt as the wolf-man's hand fumbled at the latch. In a moment she was back at his side.

When Bram entered, every muscle in Philip's body was prepared for action. He was amazed at the wolf-man's unconcern.

Celie's little fingers dug into Philip's arm, and he saw in her eyes a tense, staring look that had not been there before. It was as if in Bram's face and his queer mumbling she had recognized something that was not apparent to him. Suddenly she left him and hurried into her room. During the few moments she was gone Bram did not look once at Philip. His mumbling was incessant. Perhaps a minute passed before the girl reappeared.

She went straight to Bram, and before the wolf-man's eyes held a long, shining tress of hair!

The mumbling in Bram's throat ceased, and he thrust out slowly a huge, misshapen hand toward the golden strand.

Her hair still fell loose about her in a thick and shimmering glory. And Bram's eyes were on it as he took the tress from her fingers. Was it conceivable that this madman did not comprehend his power? And was it possible that the girl did not guess her danger as she stood there?

The giant was turning slowly toward the window, and after a moment or two, in which they could hear him mumbling softly, he sat down cross-legged against the wall, divided the tress into three silken threads, and began weaving them into a snare. The color was returning to Celie's face when Philip looked at her again. She told him with a gesture of her head that she was going into her room.

After she had gone, he dug his shaving outfit out of his kit-bag. It included a mirror, and the reflection he saw in this mirror fairly shocked him. No wonder the girl had been frightened at him! It took him half an hour to shave his face clean; and all that time Bram paid no attention to him, but went on steadily at his task of weaving the golden snare.

Celie did not reappear until the wolf-man had finished and was leaving the cabin. The first thing she noticed was the change in Philip's face. He felt himself blushing.

From the window they watched Bram. He had called his wolves and was going with them to the gate. He carried his snowshoes and his long whip. He went through the gate first, and one by one let his beasts out until ten of the twenty had followed him. Then the gate was closed.

Celie turned to the table, and Philip saw that she had brought from her room a pencil and a bit of paper. In a moment she held the paper out to him, a light of triumph in her face. At last they had found a way to talk. On the paper was a crude sketch of a caribou head. It meant that Bram had gone hunting.

And in going Bram had left half of his bloodthirsty pack in the corral. There was no longer a doubt in Philip's mind. They were not the chance guests of this madman: they were prisoners.

FOR a few minutes after the wolf-man and his hunters had gone from the corral, Philip did not move from the window. At no time since Pierre Breault had revealed the golden snare had the situation been more of an enigma to him than now. Was Bram Johnson actually mad—or was he playing a colossal sham?

Out of the past a voice came to him distinctly, and it said: "A madman never forgets!" It was the voice of a great alienist with whom he had discussed the sanity of a man whose crime had shocked the country. Once possessed by an idea, a madman will not forget it.

If Bram Johnson was mad, would he play the game as he was playing it now? He had almost killed Philip for possession

of the food, that the girl might have the last crumb of it. Now, without a sign of the madman's caution, he had left it all within his reach again.

Philip was positive that Bram had not harmed the girl. Physical desire had played no part in the wolf-man's possession of her. Celie had made him understand that.

He faced Celie with the gleam of determination in his eyes. She had been watching him intently, and he believed that she had guessed a part of his thoughts. His first business was to take advantage of Bram's absence to search the cabin. He tried to make Celie understand what his intentions were as he began.

"You may have done this yourself," he told her. "No doubt you have. There probably isn't a corner you haven't looked into. But I have a hunch that I may find something you missed—something interesting."

SHE followed him closely. He began at each wall, and went over it carefully, looking for possible hiding-places. Then he examined the floor for a loose sapling. At the end of half an hour his discoveries amounted to nothing. He gave an exclamation of satisfaction when, under an old blanket in a dusty corner, he found a Colt army revolver. But it was empty, and he found no cartridges. At last there was nothing left to search but the wolf-man's bunk. At the bottom of this he found what gave him his first real thrill—three silken snares made from Celie Armin's hair.

"We won't touch them," he said after a moment, replacing the bearskin that had covered them. "It's good etiquette up here not to disturb another man's cache, and that's Bram's. I can't imagine any one but a madman doing that. And yet—"

A commotion among the wolves drew him to the window. Two of the beasts were fighting. While his back was turned, Celie entered her room, and returned a moment or two later with a handful of loose bits of paper. The pack held Philip's attention. He wondered what chance he would have in an encounter with the beasts that Bram had left behind as a guard.

All at once the thought of how they might work out their salvation flashed upon him. They could starve the wolves! It would take a week, perhaps ten days; but with Bram out of the way and the pack helplessly imprisoned within the corral it could be done. His first impulse now was to impress on Celie the necessity of taking physical action against Bram.

The sound of his name turned him from the window with a sudden thrill.

Spread out on the table were the bits of paper she had brought from her room. There were eight or ten, and on each was sketched a picture.

A glance was sufficient to show him that with the pictures Celie was trying to tell him what he wanted to know. They told her own story. This, at least, was the first thought that impressed him. He observed then that the bits of paper were soiled and worn.

"You drew these pictures for Bram," he said, scanning them more carefully. "That settles one thing. Bram doesn't know much more about you than I do. Ships and dogs and men, and fighting—a lot of fighting—and—"

His eyes stopped at one of the pictures, and his heart gave a sudden excited thump. He picked up the bit of paper, which had evidently been part of a small sack. Slowly he turned to the girl, and met her eyes.

"That is you," he said, tapping the central figure in the sketch and nodding at her. "You—with your hair down, and fighting a bunch of men with clubs. Now—what in heaven's name does it mean? And here's a ship up in the corner. That evidently came first. You landed from that ship, didn't you? From the ship—the ship—the ship—"

"Skunnert!" she cried softly, touching the ship with her finger. "Skunnert—Siberien!"

"Schooner—Siberia," translated Philip. "It sounds mightily like that, Celie. Look here—" He opened his pocket atlas again at the map of the world. "Where did you start from, and where did you come ashore? If we can get at the beginning of the thing—"

She bent her head over the crook of his arm, and her finger was once more tracing out its story on the map. The ship had started from the mouth of the Lena River, in Siberia, and had followed the coast to the blue space that marked the ocean above Alaska. And there the little finger paused, and with a hopeless gesture Celie intimated that was all she knew.

Celie Armin had traveled from Denmark through Russia to the Lena River in Siberia, and from there a ship had brought her to the coast of North America. At the end the girl drew for Philip another sketch in which a giant and a horde of beasts appeared. It was a picture of Bram and his wolves, and at last Philip understood why she did not want him to harm the wolf-man. Bram had saved her from the fate which the pictures only partly portrayed for him.

HE looked again at one of the pictures that he had partly crumpled in his hand. On it were sketched two people. One was Celie; the other was a man. The girl had pictured herself close in the embrace of this man's arms. Her own arms encircled the man's neck. From the picture Philip looked at Celie, and what he saw in her eyes and face filled his heart with a leaden chill. It was more than hope that had flared up in his breast since he had entered Bram Johnson's cabin. And now that hope suddenly went out, and with its extinguishing he was oppressed by a deep and gloomy foreboding. He went slowly to the window and looked out.

The next moment Celie was startled by the sudden cry that burst from his lips. Swiftly she ran to his side. He had dropped the paper. His hands were gripping the edge of the sill, and he was staring like one who could not believe his own eyes.

"Good God—look! Look at that!"

They had heard no sound outside the cabin. Yet under their eyes, stretched out in the soiled and trampled snow, lay the wolf that a short time before had been gnawing a bone. The animal was stark dead. Not a muscle of its body moved. Its lips were drawn back, its jaws agape, and under the head was a growing smear of blood. It was not these things—not the fact but the instrument of death that held Philip's eyes. The huge wolf had been completely transfixed by a spear!

Instantly Philip recognized it as the long, slender, javelin-like narwhal harpoon used by only one people in the world—the murderous little black-visaged Kogmollocks of Coronation Gulf and Wollaston Land.

Suddenly he sprang back from the window, dragging Celie with him.

(To be continued next week)

She Solves Men's Business Problems

ON the outside cover page of Modern Methods, a publication with a circulation of close to 60,000, is typed the following:

A MONTHLY MAGAZINE
FOR BUSINESS MEN
EDITED BY
L. E. THURSTON

This magazine is read by business men from Maine to California. It goes into the offices with an appeal to the workers there, as well as to the executives. Of the 60,000 subscribers it is doubtful whether more than one per cent are acquainted with the fact that L. E. Thurston, the person who answers their letters and solves their problems, is—

A woman!

Think of a woman holding a blue pencil over subject's such as these:

"Selling American Goods to the World," "Profits and Patriotism," Coöperation and Loyalty in Business," "Useless Inquiries that Yield Big Profits."

Miss Thurston has been editing for three years, and she does a thorough job. Nothing goes in the publication that has not passed through her hands. She has her assistants, but to them is assigned the detail work of minor correspondence.

Before she became an editor Miss Thurston was a bookkeeper and all-around office assistant for the firm that puts out the magazine. Things had not been going any too well, so one day the general manager called her in, saying:

"Miss Thurston, would you mind going into the office of Modern Methods and sticking around just to see what you can see?"

"I have no objection," she answered.

The discussion that followed was brief. Miss Thurston, putting on her hat, walked out of one office and into the other.

She remained in this capacity for several weeks. One day the editor was missing. She was asked to fill in—for a short time. She has been on the job ever since.

"In the beginning I had some doubt as to my ability to edit a business man's magazine and to solve a business man's troubles," says Miss Thurston. "But I determined I could do it. The fact that I was to get out something that would appeal strictly to men frightened me a bit and I hid myself behind my initials. I worked slowly and with caution. I sought hints, and I tried in every conceivable way to familiarize myself with the problems of every-day business life. I believe I succeeded, for I began to get letters from business men thanking me for my suggestions, and telling me that, many times, I had led them out of financial difficulties.

"Common sense is all that is necessary in business, as in nearly everything else; and in meeting situations I sought to look upon them all in an impersonal way and to apply the test of hard thinking. If I have succeeded, this is the only secret there is. There is no reason why other women can not do as much.

"Of course most of my letters are addressed Dear Sir, or Dear Mr. Thurston. That is only natural, I suppose. One day, though, I was given some of my own medicine.

"For months I had been receiving business letters signed 'John F. Boyle.' I always answered by leading my letters with 'Dear Mr. Boyle,' and occasionally, just to show how free I could be, I would write 'Dear Boyle.'

"One morning I was sitting at my desk, and I received a telephone call that 'Mr. Boyle is in town and on the way to see you.'

"'Won't he be surprised,' thought I, 'when he discovers I am not a man?'

"Not long afterward a young lady stepped into the office.

"'Is Mr. Thurston in?' she inquired.

"'There is no Mr. Thurston here,' I replied. 'I am Miss Thurston.'

"'You are? Well, I'm John F. Boyle.'

"The surprise was mutual. We immediately went out to the Y. W. C. A. for lunch."

N. B. Beasley.

A Paragraph in the Old School History Saved His Farm

D. S. ADAMS couldn't stand the confining work of a store clerk. The doctor ordered him to get into the country and stay there. Adams had a bit of money saved up and he decided to try farming.

Five miles from town was a ten-acre tract of ground covered with the wreckage of an abandoned ore plant. The owners were preparing to move this stuff away, and wanted to get rid of the ground.

Farming land in the vicinity was selling at one hundred dollars an acre, and Adams thought he was getting a bargain when the owners of the abandoned mine offered to let him have the tract for three hundred dollars cash.

Adams spent a good part of his remaining capital for a span of mules, a wagon, a plow, and various other farming materials. He had finished plowing and harrowing, and was about to start planting corn, when a farmer of the neighborhood walked up and buried Adams's bright hopes with a very few words.

Not knowing anything of the effects of mining (zinc and lead) on the agricultural prospects of the land, Adams was taken completely by surprise when told that the alkali poison from the mines had so impregnated the soil that corn, or anything else, would not grow on it.

Adams made other inquiries, and soon found that the old farmer was right. Disgusted, the "city farmer" hooked up his team and, taking his hired man, drove to a new mine three miles below, with some hazy idea of hauling ore to the railroad.

At the mine, the first thing they noticed was that in a long, narrow lake or slough, into which the refuse water from the mine flowed, was a mass of floating dead fish. There were tons of them. Apparently the alkali in the water from the mine had killed every fish in the slough.

Through Adams's brain flashed a long-forgotten paragraph in his school history: "Samoset became a great friend of the Pilgrims. He taught them to plant their maize when the oak leaves were the size of a mouse's ear, and to drop a herring in each hill."

It was an unsavory job, but the two men did it. The mine owners, of course, were more than glad to have the dead fish removed free of cost to them. Three wagon-loads of dead fish were hauled to the Adams farm, and five or six ounces of fish was placed in each hill of corn.

It happened to be a bad year for corn in that immediate neighborhood, but the field of Adams is still the "talk of the county." While other farmers with good land thought themselves lucky to get from thirty-five to forty bushels an acre, Adams's whole field averaged ninety-seven bushels to the acre—and everybody knows to what height the price of corn went. In addition, he figures that the fodder (the heaviest ever known) was worth fifty dollars to him as stock food.

A Monument to the First Man

WITH monuments to all sorts of fellows, it's a shame that there has never been a monument to the first man who was responsible for all the rest. At least, that was the idea of a Baltimore man; so he put up on the lawn of his country home this simple but dignified memorial. Hats off to Adam. On account of his rough work at the apple tree we have to work; but we have a soft spot in our hearts for him just the same.

The Coming of the Trillion

REMEMBER the boy who lived next door—the one you made so many wagers with? None of them was ever paid; or even decided; but all of them started off something like:

"'Tain't, neither; betcha uh million dollars 'tain't."

"'Tis, too; betcha uh billion."

"'Tain't, 'tain't; betcha uh—uh terrillion."

"Aw, git out; they ain't no such number."

But there is such a number. The trillion is on its way. Before long, in all probability, we shall be bandying it conversationally as freely as we deal with mere billions to-day.

"Mere" billions, eh? Why, it was only yesterday—or a few days before it—that we were all wrought up over the idea of the first billion-dollar Congress.

And it was only a very short time ago, too, that a million—just one insignificant million—looked as big as a couple of mountains. "If I had a million dollars," we used to say—and then imagination would fail us as to how to spend it all.

To-day a million dollars is only small change—petty cash. No trouble about spending it quickly now. Just be patriotic and turn it over to the United States government to help pay for the war. In less than an hour the last penny would have vanished, leaving you with a strong sense of loyalty and the knowledge that you had financed the fighting expenses of the United States at the rate of $16,666.66 a minute, or $277.77 every time the clock ticked off a second.

Remember how the teacher used to say: "Johnny Jones, go to the blackboard and write a billion dollars"?

Johnny would go up and put down a dollar mark and a one, and then start writing ciphers. And you were trying it out on your slate, and when you and Johnny both got to a million dollars you stopped. You both knew that a billion was more than a million, so you added another cipher. It didn't look just right, but you knew there couldn't be any more money than that, so you quit.

And then teacher told you that a billion was a thousand millions, and wrote it out for you, and there were nine ciphers in it.

As for the trillion, even teacher had no idea that a practical knowledge of that figure would ever be of any use to you; but here we are to-day almost face to face with the new numerical monstrosity.

Let's see what the dictionaries say about it:

The number denoted by a unit with twelve zeros annexed.

A thousand multiplied by itself three times.

Not much to kindle the imagination in definitions like that. Let's look at it from another angle. A trillion is:

A thousand billions.

A million millions.

A billion thousands.

Or, better yet, let it stand up in type and speak for itself, going the dictionary gentleman two better in the matter of "zeros."

$1,000,000,000,000.00.

It's almost time for the adding-machine men to turn out some new models with an additional bunch of keys on them; for the trillion is a factor to be reckoned with in more senses than one.

Yes, the trillion is on its way. The world conflict will probably be its creator, and it is, perhaps, not unreasonable to expect that the struggle of nations will go down in history as the Trillion Dollar War.

Only the other day an English writer, in an exhaustive study of war costs, placed the total up to August 1 last at $107,500,000,000; and that figure did not include America's expenditures, which are likely to reach $20,000,000,000 for the first year of this nation's participation.

So, even now, we are within measurable distance of that "thousand multiplied by itself three times." More than a hundred billion dollars already gone through the war, the daily cost of the conflict increasing every day, and the arrival of peace problematical—these are all steps on the road trillionward. Nine more of those hundred billion dollar expenditures, and the million million dollar mark will be a reality.

And if it ever comes to paying the piper for his trillion, that musical debt collector's annual income will make Mr. Rockefeller's yearly spending money look like the coin you drop in the blind man's hat. For, at an average rate of five per cent, the nations of the world will be paying in interest alone $50,000,000,000 yearly, $136,986,301.37 daily, $5,707,762.55 an hour, or $95,129.37 every second.

But, even if we do not witness the coming of the trillion in dollars, it is already with us in a minor degree. "Ten cents make one dime; ten dimes make one dollar." Over one hundred billions is calculated as the cost of the war already. One hundred billion dollars is just one trillion dimes.

The trillion has arrived.

Henry C. Wiltbank.

The Only Time He Smiled

By ALAN SULLIVAN

Illustrations by Reginald Birch

IT was no doubt the scent of the hyacinths. Jennifer had always hated them. The room was, he assumed, full of flowers; but of them all only one faint suggestion of cloying odor had reached him.

What part of him was reached he was puzzled to determine; but, tucked away somewhere inside him, a minute section of vital mechanism still beat faintly, with an intermittent whirr like that of a run-down clock endeavoring to strike. Jennifer himself had no ambition to strike, or in any way to attract attention. He just wanted to lie there passively for a while. When the time came for action, it would be, he reflected, painful enough for all concerned—himself included.

The thing inside him settled down into a tiny hum, and he found that he could hear. It was perhaps not so much hearing as catching at intervals fragments of sound that filtered in from a great distance over a threadlike wire. In one of these periods he caught voices. One was that of his wife.

"He was a good husband," she was saying quite steadily. "I see it now much more clearly than before."

Jennifer did not catch his breath, for there was no breath in him to catch; but, as a matter of fact, he had not been a good husband. Getting, so to speak, a bird's-eye view of the immediate past, he saw himself as a mean, grasping skinflint; and it was kind, more than kind, of Maud to view the matter so leniently.

"My dear," vibrated the threadlike wire again, "I sometimes used to wonder whether he really understood and appreciated you."

Jennifer wanted to grin, but that was out of the question. He had never hit it off with Maud's mother. The voice was her voice.

"But now," it continued, "something tells me in a curious way that he felt he would be taken first, and so devoted himself to making things as easy as possible for you afterwards. They will be easy now—won't they?"

"Yes"—Maud seemed to brighten a little. "I feel very upset now, but I do realize that they will be easy."

"Then is not that how we should remember him—as one who went about it in his own way, even though sometimes we didn't understand or approve? Have you thought at all what you will do?"

It was signaled to Jennifer that the two women had moved quite close and were looking down at him. He could, of course,

see nothing, but it was borne to him unmistakably that the face' of Maud's mother was not distorted by grief.

"Confound you for a henpecking, home-destroying old shrew!" he thought viciously. "You wait till I get up out of this and—"

Just then the thing inside of him set up a pigmy clatter, reminding him that for weeks the doctors had been issuing warnings against undue excitement. He must be calm—above all else, calm. But, he reflected, the doctors had never reckoned on this kind of excitement. Came another breath from the hyacinths, then a rustle, and he was alone.

A LITTLE later the atmosphere vibrated again. This time it was Spragge, Jennifer's partner. In the back of his head Jennifer had disliked Spragge almost as much as he disliked hyacinths; but Spragge had come with the business, and he couldn't get rid of him. He was a big man, with a round red face, full lips, and bright blue eyes. Privately Jennifer had considered Spragge a trifle gross; but he noted that when country customers dropped in, it was Spragge they asked for.

Now the thick, mellow voice drifted over the seawall of isolation and reached Jennifer's inner self:

"It's going to be mighty hard to do without him. You see, Mrs. Jennifer, he was a sort of balance-wheel to the business, and it did me good just to look across and see the old man at his desk and feel there was his shrewdness and judgment to bank on. I'm pretty impulsive myself, but he was never carried off his feet by anything."

"I know, I know. He was a sort of rock. He was always just there."

"That's it; that's what everybody felt about him. Many's the time when I've wanted to do a certain thing in a certain way, and your husband would swing me round into something quite different, and as it would turn out there was always more in it." Spragge paused. "I've just brought a few flowers, and perhaps you wouldn't mind if I laid them quite close to him—like that."

He put a freshly cut spray of hyacinths squarely on Jennifer's flat chest, then concluded thoughtfully:

"I've got to find another partner now, but I won't get one like him."

SILENCE fell once more, and Jennifer, writhing impotently, knew he was alone. The machine inside him was ticking furiously. He longed to roll over and crush those infernal blossoms, but for the moment was rather caught up in what Spragge had said. It was quite true that he had usually twisted his partner into his own way of doing things. That was because he himself had always known instinctively how to get the last fraction of per cent. profit. Spragge hadn't been keen on that. He was too big-hearted, and a bit casual. Now, in retrospect, it was quite clear that Spragge had more friends than himself, and he wondered whether, after all, that last fraction were worth the chasing. If he hadn't chased it his wife's interest in the firm would not be quite so valuable; but perhaps that might have been as well for his wife.

It began to dawn on Jennifer that when he did get up and reënter his affrighted family circle, his work would be cut out for him. And just then Beaverton came in, and with him some one else who radiated an influence that reached the motionless figure very distinctly, but whose identity he could not guess.

"He was always a fair man," Beaverton said, as if continuing a conversation commenced outside, "and a fair master. Twenty-five dollars at every Christmas and holidays, as regular as the clock. One knew where one stood with Mr. Jennifer, didn't one?"

"I'm afraid, Peter, that sometimes you knew too well," came a soft and rather rich voice. There was no accusation in it, but just a very simple and direct quality of truth.

The machine inside of Jennifer paused for a second. He was intensely interested to catch the answer. This was Beaverton's wife.

"Perhaps so," replied the little man,—Beaverton was a very little man, with a thin face and small, tired eyes,—"but isn't that better than uncertainty?"

There was no response, and Jennifer tried to form a vision of Beaverton's wife looking musingly about at the masses of flowers. She would wonder, he concluded, how far her husband's salary would go toward paying for them. As for Beaverton himself, Jennifer could see him vividly, his narrow shoulders rounded over his desk, his long fingers clasping a pen, his white and rather sunken face tense with abstraction, his delicate mouth murmuring balances and credits. Beaverton knew all about the books and the firm's business, but he had not known enough to demand what Jennifer inwardly admitted he was worth.

"If it had not been for Mr. Spragge it would have been very hard, almost impossible," the soft voice sounded again.

"Yes, I know; but, after all, Mr. Jennifer was the balance-wheel." Beaverton answered patiently and without a trace of resentment. "You know, Jane, people are born different."

"The flowers," she said irrelevantly—"aren't they beautiful?"

Jennifer could make out that they moved noiselessly round the room and then went out, and it seemed that the thing inside him went out so closely after Beaverton that it tripped on his heels. Twenty-five dollars every Christmas for twenty-five years! That had been Jennifer's compromise with the fact that Beaverton's knowledge of the books and the business was as invaluable as his own. If the little accountant had only had spunk enough to demand what he was worth, he would have got it; but Jennifer had twisted the fact that he could not brace himself up to demand it into an additional evidence of his own shrewd and successful management. He saw now that it was anything but fair—it was rotten. The first thing he would do was to put Beaverton on his feet—no, carry him off his feet—by a new and most liberal arrangement. But he did not quite like Spragge's way of doing things, and he wondered sulkily how much it had cost him.

From this he slid off into a curious flight in which forgotten things came back with startling distinctness. The first was Mary Hepworth. He admitted having once been very fond of Mary, and

they saw each other oftener and oftener till Maud dawned on the horizon. And since Maud had had a few thousand dollars,—just sufficient to acquire an interest in the business which had grown so sturdily, while Mary had nothing but her gentle self,—they had insensibly drifted apart. A year or so later Mary had taken up nursing. She was still a nurse, with silvery hair, but the same responsive, honest eyes. Just then he became aware that Mary had entered the room.

FOR a little while he was conscious only of the silence and that Mary was standing beside him. If his lips had been compressible he would have pressed them tight, and had it been possible a hot flush of shame would have mounted to his cheek. But externally Jennifer was to all human knowledge dead. There did actually survive, however, a flicker of life—so faint that it eluded recognition, but that stirred nevertheless in its rigid casement. The amazing thing about it was that he had achieved a sixth sense, kindred apparent to that of smell, and by this was able to distinguish a fourth dimension in which forms and voices were recognized without sight or hearing.

"I'm a miserable devil," he thought, "and it will be all I can do to set things straight when I get up out of this. In the meantime I'll lie quiet and catch what pickings of information I can, since it's a small chance I'll have the opportunity a second time. But what I'm going to do about Mary beats me altogether, for it's Maud who will have her own say in the matter."

With that motionless presence beside him, he fell into another dream. What would life have been like if he had married Mary? He wouldn't be so rich, he decided; but then, perhaps he wouldn't have wanted riches. There would have been children. He was sure of this; for always there had moved in Mary's eyes that which he now recognized as a hunger for motherhood. Maud hadn't wanted children. And just as he was weakly striving to picture what his own flesh and blood would have been like and looked like, there passed over him or rather through him something swift and cool and healing, and he knew that Mary Hepworth had kissed him.

At this the mechanism inside him gave a sudden flutter. It was thirty ears since Mary had kissed him last. He experienced first a gush of gratitude, then realized that what he had just felt was going to make the future more difficult than ever. It was about time to get up and out of the thing that held him, but he had no desire to face a difficult moment with so many problems unsolved.

He was groping in a quandary, when Bridget, the cook, sidled in. She was black Irish and came from Tyrone.

---

Jennifer settled back to listen. He had an idea that this time it would be the unvarnished truth.

For a little while he could hear only the cracking of knuckles as the big red hands gripped each other; but after a moment Bridget began, thinking inconsequently and half aloud, as is the habit of the folk of Tyrone:

"'Tis dead you are, Mr. Jennifer, and maybe now you'll be getting better attention than you said I ever gave you in life. 'Tis not for the likes of me to be railing at the likes of you, stiff or breathing, but many's the time when a kind word would have meant more than my wages, and a smile in your eye more than an afternoon out. I've worked for you and you've paid me regular, and, glory be to God, there's no debts unsettled between us this day. There's Mrs. Jennifer, and she'll be able to shake her foot without raising a frown on your face, and there's few that will think the wind colder because you've slipped off. 'Tis wrote that the time is set for all, but, God save us, I'd sooner have a dog howl when I die than lie in a house bulging with flowers that's sent by them that will draw a long breath and pay the bill and say, 'Thank heaven, that's done with.' There's two things, Mr. Jennifer, that I'm not blaming you for, because 'twas yourself had nothing to do with them, and one's coming into the world and the other is going out of it. You were as dry as a stick and as hard as a bone and as sly as a poacher's

ferret, and it's God's mercy you didn't father a child to grow like you."

Now, it will be understood that of all this Bridget Malone did not utter a single syllable; but Jennifer was perfectly conscious that it was in her mind, word for word. So, when she stumped out and descended to her own domain, he blinked in a curious and phantomlike fashion—for of course he was unable actually to blink—and began laboriously to weave all his varied information into some kind of design, in order that he might construct from it the type of man he proposed to be in the future. And while he groped for a similitude of this complex and seemingly impossible person, he caught an aërial signal that his brother Jim had come to express his last respects.

IT was easy to picture Jim as he always used to be, with a flower in his buttonhole, a twinkle in his eye, and a somewhat careless appearance of general attire. The difference between the two Jennifers began far back. At school it was always Jim who was late and got licked, and went fishing and got licked again. When one adds to this the fact that he was generally at the bottom of the class, and at the same time the most cheerful and popular boy in the school, the gulf that yawned between the brothers was even more evident. Jennifer senior was careful, punctual,—painfully punctual,—and abnormally well behaved. Jim was none of these; but he never walked home alone, while George always did.

Later on, while George was plugging hard and putting by twenty per cent of his salary, Jim was strolling gaily along the highway of life, making friends with tramps and stray dogs, whistling casual and melodious airs that woke an answering twitter in the hedges, and having apparently not a care in the wide and sunny world.

Later yet, when George was quite established and married, Jim was still single. His visible means of support was a host of people with whom his welcome never wore out. The point was that Jim asked so little from them and never tried to make anything out of them.

Years ago Jennifer had made up his mind about Jim after a long talk with Maud, during which the latter, somewhat to his surprise, took definitely opposite ground. Jim, she had argued, deserved help and should get it, not being constituted by nature to make money for himself. Jennifer had combated this with his customary tightness, and carried his point. The next day he made his will, and Jim's name did not appear. And after that they had gradually drifted apart, meeting only in those ceremonial but festively burdensome seasons in which relationship is the sole reason for putting one's legs under the same mahogany, and a surfeit of food is presumed to dispel every natural and personal antipathy. Thus it was that the older brother waited, so to speak, on the tiptoe of dissolution till his tiny and internal receiver picked up the thread of Jim's unspoken reflections. And when, after a while, he cut in, he made out something like this:

"Well, it's all over with you now, George, and there's no use in saying much; but, though you were a successful man and I'm still a scapegrace, I would never have changed places with you. You got all you went after, and so did I, for I never went after anything; and I got a sight more pleasure out of other folks' things than you did out of your own. There's times when I've thought you might have been more decent to me, but you took hold so hard you couldn't let go."

Just here Jim's thoughts became a little confused, and for an instant Jennifer lost the thread. But his attention was riveted by what followed, and he wondered whether when he got well he would be able to see inside people like this and read off the fleeting record of their minds. It would be invaluable for business purposes.

"But now," continued Jim pensively, "you've let go of the whole shooting-match at once. You never reckoned on that, George, did you? And after you get across Jordan you'll meet a pile of people you've beaten down or made money out of, and it will be a queer thing if you don't hear about it. When I was a boy I knew you were set on getting ahead of me, but that didn't trouble me much. Looking back at old times, it troubled you a sight more, and as for the future, why—"

AT this precise point the thread broke, and it was transmitted to Jennifer that Maud had come back into the room and was standing silently beside Jim. He could visualize them quite distinctly. The somberness of Jim's surroundings had not affected his general air of cheery good nature, and it was evident that Maud found a grain—perhaps two grains—of comfort in his debonair and portly person, for quite unconsciously she slipped her arm into his.

And it was while they stood thus, linked as it were in not unendurable depression, that there flashed to Jennifer that which would have made his heart sink, if it had not sunk long before.

"Dear old Jim," said Maud under her breath, "I'm so glad you're here."

Jennifer's receiver began to tick at a prodigious rate. In one instant the whole scheme for the future had been upset. In the last two or three hours he had made a good deal of progress in his plans. The Spragge matter had been thought out, and the Beaverton affair, and he had decided to make a generous contribution to Mary Hepworth's hospital. He would grin periodically at Bridget Malone if it made her any happier, and Maud's mother was to be shown her place once and for all.

But this affair of Maud and Jim upset the whole program. Maud expected to have money, his money, and now he decided that Jim would probably have it too—Jim, who was as ignorant of business principles as is an oyster of interstate commerce.

Jennifer's wildest dreams had not reached so extreme a possibility.

THE idea caught him up and whirled him along like a leaf, and in the soundless storm that followed he caught an amazing glimpse of what the world would be to these few if he decided to stay where he was.

Drifting into a strange rhapsody, he mounted to greater heights than had ever been attained by George Jennifer, vertical and vociferous. He saw Spragge free from an irritating partnership. He saw the atmosphere of the office transformed, and Beaverton bending over his desk with a new light in his eyes. He heard Bridget Malone chanting austerely to her pots and kettles, as is the habit of the black Irish. He saw Mary Hepworth endowing himself, as time passed, with the tender attributes of a dim romance.

And, last of all, he saw Maud and Jim putting their money—his money—to uses of which at one time he never would have approved, but that now he regarded with a strangely lenient view.

Opposed to this was the program he had so carefully pieced out; but now that he stood off, so to speak, and analyzed it critically, it seemed a weak patchwork of impossibilities. So that, when he caught the vibration of new and heavier footsteps approaching, he decided the show wasn't good enough, and just closed his inside eyes, and drew a long, breathless breath, and lay very quiet.

And when Bridget came in for one last peep, she started and, crossing herself, hastily ejaculated:

"God save us all! but the master do be smiling for the first time in his life."

Try This on Your Boy

IN our love for the boy, his mother and I had been persuaded to grant many of his requests, even though oftentimes it was against our better judgment. We often came face to face with the undisputable fact that our son was daily demanding things of us that did not tend to make him a manlier boy or a more lovable child; but because we feared his open condemnation—formed, it is true, by an immature mind—the effort to hold out was often beyond us, and we would give in to his argument that "Every other fellow in the class can do it but me."

For some time we blamed the parents of those "other fellows." If they wouldn't let their boys do so and so, it would be an easy matter rightly to govern ours. But when the lad we loved and cherished was submitted to humiliation by his classmates because we refused some request, we reconsidered and gave up the reins of leadership to governing circumstances.

The storm broke one day when I was nonchalantly requested to hand over five dollars to finance a trip to a near-by city. Upon inquiry I learned that there was nothing special going on: "The bunch just wanted to have a lark." I realized that an out-and-out refusal would mean the deluge at once, so I told my son that I would consider it. This was only Thursday morning, and by Friday night he would know my decision.

Faces, even familiar ones, failed to attract my notice as I walked the distance to my office that morning. I knew that my decision meant either lasting benefit or possible future ruin. As I paid the small "newsy" for my morning paper, the jingle of coin that he so deftly handled gave me the thought that even these penny sales made many a lad's living.

My stenographer made out several sheets of work that morning that had no bearing whatever on the business of the firm. During the day I held telephone interviews with the fathers of five of the boys that made up the "bunch," and secured promises from all that they would hold a half-hour council with me that evening.

"Capital idea!" exclaimed one father, when he had read one of the typed sheets that I handed him. It was a carefully tabulated list of articles placed under the heading: "What Five Dollars Will Buy for You."

The list included a pair of shoes, twenty pairs of cotton hose, three shirts, ten days' board (at home), ten neckties, four or five good books, and subscriptions to several magazines.

Another sheet that I asked him to glance over was headed: "What I Did to Earn Five Dollars." From an account book that my son kept I had had copied various amounts that he had received for after-school service: "Cut Jones's lawn—50 cents." "Errand for Miss Hanson—25 cents." "Vulcanizing auto tire for father—30 cents." "Raking and cleaning home lawn—75 cents."

I added to this list until the amounts totaled five dollars. The different items represented a number of hours of real work.

After each man had gone over these lists, I said:

"I suppose that each one of us has under consideration the same problem. The solution, I feel, does not only mean the approval of our sons' plans for the coming Saturday, but means the grasp these boys get of the wise expenditure of money. Since my decision has in the past been greatly influenced by what I thought your decision might be, I am going to tell you frankly what I intend to do with this newest and last request. Tonight I shall place on my son's dresser fifty dimes, together with a copy of 'What Five Dollars Will Buy for You' and 'What I Did to Earn Five Dollars.'

"It strikes me," I continued, "that a bill representing five dollars may not mean nearly so much to these lads as fifty pieces of silver does. I shall let my son do his own deciding."

The conference ended. When the day for the planned-for "lark" came, not a boy took the train for the city. When the matter had been presented to them from this new angle, their own better judgment told each one of them that such unnecessary extravagance was utter foolishness when all that was to be gained was a "lark."

What Makes Men Brave?—

Continued from page 3

Carnegie Hero Fund Commission and a donation of two thousand dollars for educational purposes.

But whence came his valor?

Whence came the valor displayed in all the other instances narrated, from Michael O'Leary, risking his life in the brick-fields of Cuinchy, to George D. Rowe, risking his in the waters of the Potomac? These are questions plainly of more than academic interest—questions which we should try to answer.

To behave as they did, they had to suppress, for the moment, the instinct of self-preservation. What enabled them to do it?

Effect of Stories and Games on Childhood

RECALL, if you please, the time when you were a little boy. Recall the stories that you heard in the home circle—stories of redoubtable forebears who laughed at danger, stories of brave deeds by patriots fired by love of country. Recall the stories of heroism and self-sacrifice commemorated in your school-books and praised by your teacher. Recall, further, the attitude of your playmates when you first joined in group games.

If, falling, you hurt yourself and cried, you met with more jeers than sympathy. If, in rough-and-tumble play, you discreetly kept in the background, the full weight of group scorn was brought to bear on you. By the general attitude it was drilled into you that you were expected to be bold, venturesome, and plucky.

"The Battle of Waterloo," the Duke of Wellington once said, "was won on the cricket ground at Eton." What he had in mind was something many people forget—the marvelous formative influence of play in laying a foundation for efficient and courageous behavior in later life.

To be sure, in your childhood there may have been other influences at work, making for the development not of courage but of fear. Perhaps you were afflicted with over-solicitous parents, who perpetually fussed over you and were plunged into torments of anxiety if the least mishap befell you. Perhaps you were unduly protected by them from the enlarging discipline of hard knocks. Perhaps servants—ignorant and superstitious maids—filled your tender mind with terrifying tales of ghosts, goblins, and evil spirits.

If you suffered from any of these conditions, it would be difficult—though not impossible—for the educative influence of group play and tales of heroism to save you from becoming a moral weakling. But the probability is that your upbringing was that of the average school-going boy, that your parents were sensible enough in their handling of you. In that event, you would draw, from home and school and playground, ideas which, taking deep root in your mind, would tend to make you behave in times of stress and crisis with self-forgetting bravery.

You grow older, leave school, and go to work. Perhaps you become a broker, perhaps a lawyer, perhaps a clerk or a blacksmith or a farmer. Life runs for you in a quiet, routine way. There is nothing really to tell how you would act in a situation unexpectedly developed offering opportunity for a display of bravery. If confronted with an emergency, you fear you would play the coward's part.

Well, perhaps you would. But let me mention an interesting psychological fact of which you may not hitherto have been aware.

The mental trends formed through the stories and games of childhood and boyhood still hold sway deep in the recesses of your mind. The stories you then heard, the experiences you then underwent, may have faded completely from your conscious recollection. But, no matter how much you may seem to have forgotten them, their influence over you is by no means ended, and, given the occasion, they may reassert themselves.

Bravery, in fine, is basically a resultant of conscious and unconscious education during youth. Hence the possibility of its manifestation in all manner of men from the physical giant to striplings like the shock-headed volunteer of the Royal Irish Fusiliers, "who did not look as if there was much in him, but had grit."

Indeed, one of the most impressive features of the World War has been the efflorescence of bravery in men to whom one would not naturally be inclined to attribute heroic qualities. Men fresh from the drawing-room, the club lounge, the desk, the counter, the delivery wagon, the peddler's cart, have proved themselves the equals in bravery of seasoned soldiers. Take this official record of a feat that justly earned for its performer the Victoria Cross:

Sergeant James Somers. For most conspicuous gallantry. On the night of July 1, 1915, in the southern zone of the Gallipoli Peninsula, where, owing to hostile bombing, some of our troops had retired from a sap, Sergeant Somers remained alone on the spot until a party brought up bombs.

He then climbed over into the Turkish trench, and bombed the Turks with great effect. Later he advanced into the open, under heavy fire, and held back the enemy by throwing bombs into their flank until a barricade had been established. During this period he frequently ran to and from our trenches to obtain fresh supplies of bombs. By his gallantry and coolness Sergeant Somers was largely instrumental in effecting the recapture of a portion of our trench which had been lost.

What was this hero's pedigree? He did not come from a long line of British commanders. His father was a sexton, and he himself had been a footman before he gave his services to his country.

Michael O'Leary, of Cuinchy fame, was born and reared in a humble farm-cottage, and until he turned soldier his principal occupation had been tending his father's stock. Private William Keneally, another Victoria Cross winner, volunteered from a coal-pit to help save England from the Germans. Private Edward Dwyer, also a winner of the Victoria Cross, was only eighteen when he gained the great distinction, and a short time before had been a grocer's errandboy. In one illuminating collection of letters, written by an American nurse in a war hospital, we find this record:

"Gaston is of the stuff that will make France victorious. He's a little fish-dealer of Paris, staunch and sane of soul and limb, the kind that goes out alone on patrol and brings down his Boche every time, and wears the cross at nineteen without bragging."

This list might be continued indefinitely. From every walk in life heroes have unexpectedly emerged, and their emergence as heroes is in truth mysterious and baffling unless one takes into account the marvelous fact of the power of ideas latent from childhood to serve as hidden springs of conduct in after years.

Of course, other influences are at work to reinforce this basic influence in the development of bravery. In the case of the soldier, some credit must be given to the psychic contagion of example, as provided by the behavior of his mates. Credit must also be given to the uniform the soldier wears and the way he is taught to wear it.

Psychologists now know that posture has a real influence in the shaping of character. The posture of the trained soldier is essentially the posture of virility and courage, and by reflex action it helps to increase in a soldier sentiments of virility and courage. So, too, the healthy, hygienic, outdoor life of the soldier, merely by stimulating the vital forces, contributes something to the production of bravery. Other things being equal, the man who is physically fit is more likely to be courageous than the physically unfit—though heroism is by no means unknown among those so much below par physically as to be chronic invalids.

Gambling Instinct and the Religious Influence

AGAIN, if the instinct of self-perservation, hostile to bravery, is among the strongest of human instincts, so is the instinct for "taking chances." Every normal man, some one has said, is at heart a gambler. This must be borne in mind in explaining bravery, which, as already pointed out, involves a temporary suspension of the instinct of self-preservation. But the gambling instinct, as far as it relates to the development of courage, is undoubtedly secondary to the influence exercised by childhood's training. In many cases it is not present at all. In many, moreover, instead of reinforcement from the gambling instinct we find reinforcement from a very different source—the influence of sincere and profound religious conviction.

Read carefully the records of achievement narrated in many of the books bearing on the World War, and you will appreciate how true this statement is. The man who firmly believes in God, and in the survival of the soul after the death of the body, has within himself an acquired resource enabling him to rise, it may be, to almost incredible heights of heroism.

When the Aboukir was torpedoed, there were among the sailors hurled into the water one named Brumpton and another named Ross. It happened that, while swimming about, these two caught hold of a spar which, buoyant enough to support the weight of one, sank when both clung to it. For a time they took turns in swimming and in clinging. Then Brumpton, who was a member of the Salvation Army, noticed that his compainon was rapidly losing strength. At once he said:

"Good-by, mate. Death means life to me. But you are not converted. Keep hold and save yourself."

These were his last words. Letting himself drift away, he was swallowed in the turmoil of the waves, never to be seen again. Nor was his sacrifice in vain. A little later Ross, still alive, was found clinging to the spar. And among his first acts, on reaching England, was a visit to a Salvation Army hall to enroll himself as a convert.

This sacrifice of Brumpton's will be among the outstanding deeds of self-effacing devotion recorded in the war. But it is, after all, only one of many heroic deeds with religious fervor as their motive force. Once a man becomes truly religious, it is safe to say that he is from that moment a potential hero. For the matter of that, as made very clear by the rescues of civil life and the exploits in the trenches and on the open fighting-ground, every man is a potential hero who carries within himself a sufficient fund of conscious or subconscious memories of bravery-breeding discipline given him in early life by enlightened parents, wise teachers, and rough-and-ready playmates.

The Henry Ford of France

IN the spot where three years ago a truck garden flourished now towers one of the largest munitions factories in the world. It is situated in Paris, and owned by André Citroën, who is the Henry Ford of France without Ford's humane idealism.

Citroën was originally in the chain business, and of no particular prominence; but when the war broke out he so well demonstrated his organizing imagination and his mechanical inventiveness that he was given a free hand by the government and backed by the Bank of France. The result is that he performs the colossal task of getting out one thousand tons of ammunition daily.

Even with his genius, this would have been impossible in time of peace, because labor laws would have seriously interfered. And it would have been impossible in time of war but for the fighting women of France, who work with white-hot metal and high explosives ten hours a day. In some divisions experts work eight hours without rest or food.

Among the six thousand women workers I saw many prospective mothers. Upon inquiry I found that six babies are born a week (nearly thirty a month) in the factory. The mothers of the very young ones have ten minutes every three hours in which to nurse them. At night the babies are given cow's milk. These babies never leave the factory. There were two hundred and ten in the big nursery when I visited it in July.

There is nothing "swank" about the women who bear the burden of the war in France. They do not wear smart uniforms or seek the easy jobs. They go clad in ragged black or unbleached linen dresses, and their faces are tired and haggard. One sees them in every possible kind of work.

André Citroën is a little dark man about thirty-five years of age. He has sharp eyes and quick, bird-like gestures. He is very close to the people in his factory, and drives them to the utmost without at all seeming to do so. He does not sit quietly at his desk directing, but runs all over the enormous plant with a note-book, forever jotting down, correcting and improving. Nothing escapes his notice. He works all day with his vast army of employees, and eats with them in the great dining hall at noon.

Business men in France call him "the marvel of the age."

Faith—

Continued from page 7

the bank, notified no one, done nothing an innocent man would have done. When they asked me, I could not answer. I began to weigh the chance I would have of being arrested. Surely they wouldn't keep me at the bank.

I went home and locked the door of my room, and took out the rubies and looked at them. They burned with strange fires and glows of light. Before I had crawled into bed I had made up my mind that, at least for the present, I would keep them. They were in the leather cigarette-case under my pillow."

FARRELLY had pumped out these sentences, stopping after each one for a moment as if to devise his story as he proceeded.

"And no one knows?" asked Miss Owens, with a quavering voice.

"No one knows. And no one knows what it has meant. At first I wanted to keep the thing. I not only feared I would be found out, but I was afraid that some one would steal the rubies from me—those accursed red stones! I carried them with me everywhere, always in that case.

And then, when I had a chance to take a vacation, I thought of going to Europe, where I could sell them. No one in the bank knew or cared where I went for my vacation in the summer. I could go, and come back rich. But I meant to say nothing—to go back to work, jaunty and tanned as if from the country. And in the meantime Mrs. Hetherington would forget who had helped her that day in the vault. There would be an empty jewel-case—that would be all. She might believe that she never had brought her rubies to the bank."

He paused.

"But I didn't go away on a vacation at all. I stayed in New York. I walked every evening miles and miles. Once I stood on one of the bridges, looking down on the East River, and I looked at the electric signs in the cities on both sides, and up at the stars, and wondered how I could have been discontented before with the dull life I had led—dull, but without all these contending voices whispering in my ears and all these fears. I took out the cigarette-case and I almost threw it with its heavy precious stones into the black night between me and the water below.

"And then some mornings I would wake and think, 'Well, Farrelly, you are rich. All you have to do now is to wait two or three years, after the loss is forgotten, and then you can resign and go to Buenos Aires.'

"I've always wanted to go to Buenos Aires.

"And sometimes I would be walking home, and I would come to a particular crossing where there was a red-faced traffic policeman, and I would say to myself: 'How his eyes would open if I went up and put those rubies in his hand and told him who I was and what I had done!'"

Suddenly Charity saw Miss Owens' old fingers, shiny with the parchment quality of their skin, close over Farrelly's wrist.

"You still have the rubies. Tell me you still have them!" the school-teacher pleaded.

"Yes; I have them."

Miss Owens sighed contentedly.

"You see, Charity?" she said in a calm voice. "I was not wrong—he will always do what is right in the end."

"And what shall I do?" asked Farrelly. "What shall I do?"

"Has Mrs. Hetherington come back?"

"Yes."

"Where does she live?"

"On the corner of Madison Avenue and Olmstead Park—the old Van Dorp house."

"She has not come to the bank—to the vault to open her deposit-box?"

"Not while I have been there."

"No one else has a key?"

"No one else."

"Then it is all settled," Miss Owens said comfortably. "You will go at once from here to her house, and ask for her. Have you the rubies with you?"

Farrelly looked at Miss Garvice as if to seek her counsel about making this admission. It was as if he feared Miss Owens might ask to have him produce a cigarette-case in which could be found the famous "Maharajah string."

"Yes, I have them," he said, sighing.

"Then you will take them to her and tell her exactly all that you have told me. Could anything be more simple, George Farrelly? Could anything be more like you?"

For a second Farrelly leaned his cheek against the withered hand upon the chair-arm.

"Oh, I have not had any doubts about my boy of the old days," said the old lady cheerfully. "I said to you that my love and faith would always be yours. Why it should be so I can not tell. There were thousands of children, but you were the one I could never forget. So now all is right again."

"All is right again," he repeated in a broken whisper. "Your faith—well, it is the loveliest thing in all the world!"

He arose and picked up his hat.

"Good-by," he said, taking the almost fleshless hand in his own.

"Walk a little way with him, Charity—that's a good girl," said Miss Owens. "He needs us both, dear. Good-by for now. Good-by."

AT the door he turned to look at her again.

Miss Martha Owens had leaned back in her chair. Once more her thin hands were folded in the lap of her gray gown; once more her face had taken on an expression of calm repose, of patient waiting, of tenderness and peace. The lids of her sightless eyes were closed.

"Faith," he said to himself. "Her faith."

Charity preceded him down the stairs.

"Gracious!" she exclaimed, as she stopped in the lower hall. "George Farrelly, that was magnificent! I could not believe the most practised actor in the world could have done better."

He smiled.

"And I want to tell you how fine it was of you to go through with all that for her. Can't you see that it will be the triumph of her last days—that she has not wasted all her foolish old fears and hopes, those delusions about you which were an irritating mania for her when she should have been most at peace?"

He nodded.

"That was not hard," he said gravely. "Something more difficult remains, Charity Garvice. I had forgotten you, but I don't believe my heart had ever forgotten you. After all, the best thing I ever had in my life was your hand clutching mine in the coat-room of the school so many years ago. I think, right now, I would rather have your sympathy and your respect and your—"

"But I do not understand."

"Look!" said he.

HE drew from his inside coat pocket a handful of something, and in the light from the ground glass of the front door she saw that it was a gleaming string of great rubies.

She staggered back to lean against the wall, the palms of her white hands flattened against the dingy paper, and for several moments she stared into his motionless eyes.

"Well," she said at last. "Even then, Miss Owens is not the only one who has faith in you, George Farrelly."

"Do you mean that you too—?"

"Go on your errand," she said. "And then come back. I will wait for you here. I want to think first and to talk to you afterward. But I suspect I have not changed much from the girl of the school coat-room. Do you remember I said then that I too was very lonely and—"

"And—?"

"That my heart went out to you."

Are You Tired of Other People's Stairs?

FOR six years of our married life we had trodden other people's stairs. Then, one day, I rebelled. I reasoned to myself:

"This is not a home; it is just a roosting place. In six years we have paid our landlord $2,700. He is still the landlord; his property has increased in value, and we are—what? Just tenants."

I said to my husband:

"If we had started payments on a house six years ago we would have had a little home of our own now, wouldn't we?"

"But," said he, "supposing we had sickness, or that something happened that we couldn't make the payments!"

"And supposing," I answered, "that rent day comes around and we can't pay? What then? It would be the poorhouse for us, as you know. Now is the time to get busy on the home nest. I'm sick of climbing other people's stairs."

We looked around us and found a lot with a 120-foot front and a 125-foot depth. I took a pencil and began to figure. The agent asked $62.50 down and the balance in two years at $23 a month. That was less by $15 a month than our rent. If we carried out our plan we would save $360 in two years and be the owners of the lot. We found that we could build a comfortable bungalow for $1,800. Lot, bungalow, and all would cost us $2,450 at the outside, I figured—and in six years we had paid the landlord $2,700.

I kept on figuring, and also drew a diagram. Then I was ready for my husband's objections.

"Here on the rear of the lot I would have a chicken house with six runways," I explained. "It would hold seventy-five chickens. On the woven wire separating the runways I'd have grape-vines which would give us all the grapes we could eat and some for preserves. At the foot of the runways I'd have a lettuce bed. Over here would be cabbages, cauliflower, asparagus, and other garden truck. What do you suppose this garden would save us every year?"

He had no idea; but I knew, and when I handed him an itemized estimate he exclaimed:

"By George! The garden itself would pay for our home in six years. We have lost six years of our life! We'll buy and build at once."

We did, and to-day all that I planned has come true.

Here is an estimate of the value of our garden produce this year:

                         

Chickens and eggs	$150
Corn	20
Cabbage	10
Asparagus	10
Tomatoes	15
Currants	16
Cucumbers	5
Celery	5
Swiss chard	2
Turnips	2
Parsnips	3
Green peppers	2
Green beans	$4
Peas	3
Carrots	3
Beets	2
Onions	4
Radishes	2
Lettuce	2
Grapes	5
Rhubarb	4
Endive	3
Seed onions	3
	—
	$275

J. C. KILMERE.

Looks for Women

ENGLISH women are to be allowed an unobstructed view of the proceedings in the House of Commons. The famous iron grill through which they were formerly permitted to peer at the backs of the heads of Great Britain's statesmen is being torn down, and a part of it will be placed in the British Museum as a curiosity. (Cries of: "That's where it belongs!")

The proposal to admit women to the House of Commons was first made in 1836, when the houses of Parliament were reconstructed. Lord John Russell, leader of the House, opposed the radical move, and for a time held up the privilege. A petition presented with a bit of silver plate won the point, and the harem-like Ladies' Gallery was built.

Before that women were sometimes smuggled in to hear their husbands speak. The place in which they were usually hidden then was a small, dark ventilator chamber in the roof. There Mrs. Disraeli and Mrs. Gladstone heard their husbands; and there Elizabeth Fry listened to many a debate on prison reform. A mistake on the part of Maurice O'Connell caused the abandonment of the cubbyhole. He had placed his wife there, and after one of his brilliant speeches rushed to receive her congratulations. Seeing a woman in the half darkness, he seized her in his arms—and, to his horror, found that he had kissed the Dowager Duchess of Richmond, a powerful figure in Great Britain's petticoat politics.

Some of the legislators objected to the Ladies' Gallery on the ground that the presence of women would distract their thoughts from affairs of state. Privately, they told Grantley Berkeley that the real trouble was that a jealous wife could so easily find out whether her husband was on the benches. Berkeley suggested that "study in the library" would be an adequate alibi, and added:

"You see, you can do 'em yet."

Hooverizing Your Gasolene

By JEROME T. SHAW

EVERY time that you permit your car to stand at the curb or on the road with the engine humming away to a merry tune, you are wasting gasolene. You may scoff at this insignificant loss, but just multiply the half hour per day that you let your engine idle away by about 4,000,000, and you will appreciate the volume of gasolene wasted daily through this source alone by the car owners of the country.

It is figured that more than one sixth of the amount of gasolene produced is wasted—some 1,500,000 gallons daily. This is a really stupendous total when the daily increased demand for motor fuel is considered. If this gasolene could be saved it would be more than sufficient to meet the requirements of the army and navy, estimated at 350,000,000 gallons a year:

You can help to effect this saving. The idling of the engine should be eliminated. Most cars now are fitted with self-starters, which means that merely by the pressing of a button or a pedal the engine can be stopped or started. Besides, frequent use of the starter helps to keep the storage battery up to its proper mark. Assuming that your engine is getting a perfect mixture, don't interfere with the carburetor. This might be laid down as a golden rule for all motorists: "Don't fuss with the carburetor."

Be certain, however, that you are using as lean a mixture as possible, not only for gasolene economy but also to avoid carbon deposit, which is a voracious consumer of power. Have your carburetor adjusted by some one whose business it is to know just how to make the adjustment. Have the carbon removed from your valves and cylinder heads at regular intervals, and use a lubricant best suited to your engine.

For every dollar that you spend for gasolene you really get only ten cents' worth of power, ninety per cent of the energy developed by the engine being lost in its transmission to the driving wheels. This ten per cent is assured only when there is a minimum of lost motion. If your grease is too heavy you are wasting gas through a loss of horse-power. Friction consumes power and wastes gas.

Brake-bands that do not drag and all bearings running freely mean more power per dollar expended. Adjust the running gear, and see that all of its parts are properly lubricated. See to it that your ignition is working as it should to give the maximum of efficiency, and also see that the piston rings fit tightly and the cylinders hold compression well. Leakage of compression causes loss of power. A late spark increases gasolene consumption; so make it a point to have the spark timed correctly with the engine, and drive with the spark fully advanced. Have a hot spark; keep the plugs clean and the spark points properly adjusted.

The condition of your tires also has an appreciable influence on your gasolene bills. Under-inflation means rapid tire wear and lost power. Always have the tires carry twenty pounds pressure per inch of cross-section. This is a safe rule for all seasons. If your wheels are not in alignment, save gasolene by having them trued; but have this adjustment made by a competent repair man.

Clean gasolene is essential to good carburation, so it pays to pour your fuel through a strainer when filling the tank. A full gasolene tank also is an economy, for the greater the air space in the tank the more the loss will be through evaporation. Stop all gasolene leakage. Form the habit of shutting off gasolene at the tank or feed pipe, and make it a practice to open and clean the strainer at the bottom of the tank periodically or in the line leading to the carburetor.

The average car is most economical when driven at from fifteen to twenty-five miles an hour. Don't drive at excessive speeds, as power consumption increases at a faster rate than speed. Don't accelerate and stop quickly, for thereby you waste gas and wear out tires. Stop the engine and coast long hills. Also change gears rather than climb hills with the throttle wide open; it saves the car as well as the gasolene.

Automobile Questions and Answers

The storage battery from which starting and lighting are operated seems weak. Does it require recharging, and how can I determine this?

F. C. C.

You can determine the state of the charge by the use of a hydrometer. Full charge shows a specific gravity of approximately 1,285, and a gravity of 1,225 may be taken as representing the low mark for practical purposes, as anything less will not furnish the energy necessary to enable the starter to spin the engine.

Storage batteries should have their cells refilled about every fourteen days with either distilled or rain water, and the hydrometer reading should be taken before the operation of filling, as the water is lighter than the electrolyte and consequently has a tendency to remain at the top.

The electrolyte should never be permitted to fall below the tops of the plates, and a storage battery should under no circumstances be allowed to stand for any length of time in a discharged condition.

My car misses badly on high speeds. I can not trace where the fault, if any, lies, as everything on the car has been recently overhauled.

L. C. M.

Misfiring in this particular case may be caused by the commutator. Inspect this closely, and observe if the circle around which the roller travels is clean and smooth, and if the roller makes perfect contact at all points. If the roller fails on any one of the four contact points, it means that its corresponding cylinder will not fire.

If there is no other defect, such as worn fiber, it will be sufficient to clean these surfaces thoroughly.

If, however, other parts on your car are worn, it will be necessary to replace them with new ones.