This Man Saved Baseball

FANS, meet Mr. N. C. Wright. He's editor and one of the owners of the Detroit Journal, the Toledo Blade, and the Newark Star-Eagle. He is also the man who saved baseball.

Mr. Wright was night manager of the Associated Press, with headquarters in Chicago, when Ban Johnson, then a sports writer, started the American League in 1900. Interest in the game had been lagging for lack of competition; and Mr. Wright, believing that the new circuit would be the means of saving the game, gave the Americans a lot of attention.

The directors of the great press association did not agree with Mr. Wright, but he went ahead putting the box score on the wires—perhaps he, like Nelson, had a blind side for orders he thought best not to heed. But finally there came a positive mandate that the American League service to newspapers was to be discontinued. Mr. Wright was off duty when the order came in, and the service was chopped off at once. But in a few days the sports editors in half a hundred cities were bombarding the Associated Press with demands that the new baseball league's doings be treated as news.

Ban Johnson knew only that his baby league was out in the cold and like to die of inattention. He hurried around to see Wright.

"The American League will be ruined unless you carry its scores," he said almost tearfully.

"Stop worrying," answered Mr. Wright. "We'll carry the scores."

And that night the service was resumed. The directors had seen some of the caustic telegrams from baseball editors, and they decided to forget Wright's insubordination.

Fed on full rations of publicity, the new league grew rapidly. Let's see: wasn't it an American League team that won the world series last fall?

WAR-TIME $1 IDEAS

MY, what a lot of folks have ideas for saving a dollar to meet war-time needs! After we printed that piece from the man who was economizing by blacking his own boots, and invited confidences, our mail almost doubled. Something like 200 persons took it out on the barber by boosting home-made shaves. But there was variety as well as volume of ideas. Here are some of them:

Shave Yourself and Buy a Bond

Do you get shaved every day? At fifteen cents a shave? I thought so. Pardon me for relapsing into the statisticular, but it costs you $54.75 a year.

Suppose you buy a $5 safety razor with six extra blades, a strop and hone for a dollar, a seventy-five-cent brush, and a dollar's worth of soap. At a total cost of $7.75 you have equipped yourself with the apparatus to shave yourself for three hundred and sixty-five days, and if the fingers that rub in the lather are not perfectly clean it's only because you didn't wash them. All right.

Now subtract $7.75 from $54.75. Forty-seven dollars—nearly the price of one Liberty Bond—to the good. Isn't it worth while?

C. L. F.

Showing Your Heels to the H. C. L.

RUBBER heels at about a cent a pair—that is what mine are costing since this war-time idea occurred to me.

I purchased one rubber stair-tread of the best grade, and cut it into small squares just large enough to a trifle more than cover the heels of my shoes. I also bought a ten-cent bottle of good rubber cement and a few very short shoe-nails.

This outfit will keep my shoe heels rubber-shod for at least a year. It saves me many a half dollar at the shoemaker's.

After evening the heels, I attach the squares of rubber by means of the cement, turn the shoes over, and put a weight on them overnight. In the morning, if the cement has thoroughly hardened, I put in about four of the shoe-nails, evenly spaced, trim the edges neatly, and they are ready to wear.

M. C. C.

Longer Life for Shirts

I'M hard on shirts, especially on the cuffs, because I work at a desk all day and the cuffs wear out quickly. So my wife and I devised a scheme to double the value and service of the cuffs.

When the cuffs—I wear soft-cuffed shirts—begin to show signs of wearing through, the wife simply rips the cuff off the shirt, turns it over, and sews it back on, and there is a brand-new cuff to start with again.

The appearance of the shirt is not affected, and the life of the garment is just doubled by the simple process.

This idea is guaranteed to work on any brand of soft-cuffed shirts, from the dollar kind up to the most expensive silk ones.

H. G.

The Allies' Sugar-Bowl

SINCE the sugar shortage, I place a cracker-jar on the dining-table, and each one who is willing to give up a part of his usual portion of sugar puts it in the jar. We call it the "Allies' Sugar-Bowl." The contents are weighed and paid for, and the money given to the Red Cross.

MRS. J. C.

We're All in the Same Boat: and Can't Get Out

AMERICA was founded by people who wanted to get away from other people.

The Pilgrim Fathers decided that they would rather run the risk of starving to death in a new, clean, unpeopled land than to live any longer with their neighbors.

After them came men of various sorts: political offenders; Quakers who would rather emigrate than fight; Irishmen "ag'in' the government"; roving sons of settled households.

All sorts of people, but driven by the same common motive—the desire to live their own lives in their own way, free from the restrictions of an older social order.

We are the descendants of those daring pioneers: their vigorous individualism flows through our veins.

If, before the war, you had put your ambition into words, you would probably have expressed the wish to be absolutely independent.

I don't know what the war may have done to you, but to me it has revealed this one tremendous truth: that there is not, and never will be again, any absolute independence; that I, in my little home, am absolutely dependent, to some degree or other, on every other man and woman in the world.

In the Balkans, an Austrian prince of whom I never heard, and his wife, are murdered. A petty far-away event: what has it to do with me?

Nothing, of course. Nothing—except to throw my life into disorder, and change the whole thought and current of my days.

In Russia twenty million men are taken from the farms; and, behold, the loaf of bread in my little home feels their leaving and fades away. Millions of shoes are ordered for the men of Italy: and the shoes I purchase for my baby cost four dollars now instead of two.

Absolute independence! What a foolish phrase, indeed! The world has become a neighborhood, and the welfare of every single house along the street is conditioned by the welfare of every other.

There is hardly an item in the newspapers that doesn't, somehow or other, come straight home to me.

I read that the railroads are hard up and their stocks and bonds decline. I should worry: I own no stocks or bonds.

Ah, but don't I, though? The savings bank where my few dollars lie has invested them in railroad bonds; the life-insurance company that must look after my wife and family if I die has invested its funds in railroad bonds.

Whether I like it or not, the railroads can not be hurt without hurting me: for better or for worse, my prosperity is bound up with theirs.

When the Apostle Paul was being sent to Rome, the ship on which he sailed was tossed by storms.

At the moment of greatest danger Paul caught the sailors taking to the boats.

"Stop!" he cried; and to the Centurion he shouted:

"Except these abide in the ship, ye can not be saved."

To-day the good ship World is being tossed about by the greatest storm of its existence.

And now, in the time of greatest danger, I see some signs that are not good. I see some capitalists taking to the boats and saying to themselves: "We'll pull out and play safe, no matter what may happen to the ship."

I see some groups of labor taking to the boats and saying to themselves: "When the ship is sinking is a good time to strike for higher pay."

And if the lesson of the war means anything, it seems to me to mean just this:

That the time has passed in the world when any single group of men can advance its interests permanently at the expense of the common good.

Unless all of us, rich and poor, stick together in the ship, then all of us are lost.

Individualism, as we used to understand it, is dead.

"God hath made of one blood all nations." The same great life-giving current flows through the veins of every class and race and people everywhere. And the only way to advance the interests of any class permanently is to purify and strengthen the stream of life that ministers to all.

That, it seems to me, is one great lesson of this war.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

What They Think of Him in His Home Town

Number One: T. R.—By Loren Palmer

MICHIGAN AVENUE, Chicago, was crowded as it had never been crowded before. Down the narrow aisle left open—or, rather, opened by the menacing instrument of a slide-trombone-playing band leader—came an automobile entirely occupied by a short, thickset man and a smile. Twenty thousand, maybe forty thousand—the crowd was too vast to count—persons let loose the particular kind of noise that each individual fancied as an expression of welcome. The automobile drew up in front of one of the big hotels, the trombone performer played a path through the throng, and the man struggled through after him. The roar outside increased, and a moment later the man made his appearance on a balcony. He waved his hand, caught a moment of silence, and bit out one word: "Fight!"

"If Colonel Roosevelt had told that crowd then and there to go down to the Coliseum and throw his opponents out into the street, they'd have done it, and artillery couldn't have stopped them," said a man near me, witnessing the demonstration that followed.

That's what the folks in Chicago thought of Colonel Roosevelt in 1912. He seemed then—and when the votes were counted three months later—to have the greatest measure of popularity in all our 100,000,000.

The Hardest Test

BEFORE that day I had seen stiffly starched foreign ambassadors and near-ambassadors stare open-eyed as the Colonel—then President—rushed up from the tennis court to receive them at Sagamore Hill; and I had seen them come away smiling and ready to swear that the unconventional was the only way. I had seen the people of New York's slums and wholesome farmer folk alike respond to the Colonel's magic. I was ready to say that everybody, even his enemies, liked him. But recently I thought of another and the hardest test of popularity. "What do they think of him in his home town?" I wondered. So I went down to Oyster Bay.

And I found that in the little village that lies under the shadow of Sagamore Hill, just this side the sign of the Big Stick, the I-Knew-Him-When Club has about gone out of business. You know, the I-Knew-Him-When Club is a very ancient organization, and inspired the saying, "A prophet is not without honor, save in his own country."

Oyster Bay hasn't a Michigan Avenue, and if Main Street were to grow to big-town proportions they would have to call upon most of Nassau County to provide the crowd. They hadn't, and so that day there was only the usual automobile parked in front of the post-office, two women in front of Moore s grocery store, a colored edition of the village ne'er-do-well giving his daily imitation of a man doing nothing at all and liking it, and a yellow dog in front of the dry-goods "emporium."

Then the short, thick-set man with the toothful shade and the eye-glasses appeared. There wasn't any band, and the trombonist would have had the center of the stage had he been around. The Colonel was riding a likely looking horse, but it quit its prancing as the Colonel nudged its head in toward Moore's store. A nod and a word of greeting to the two women, and the horse had his head again; but there was time for a smile and salutation for the colored brother and a whistle for the yellow dog. No one bothered. It was only neighbor Roosevelt off for one of his eternal horseback rides.

That's about the way they regard the ex-President in his own home town. They've seen him grow up, and are proud of what he's done, rather insensible to his value to the town as an advertising medium, and like him most because he is a good neighbor.

It's really too bad that the Colonel shaves himself, for if he patronized the village barber I could have got one statesman's opinion of another. And maybe if he smoked, the cigar store headquarters of the pinochle club might have had some reminiscences; but the Colonel long ago confessed his sorrow that the joys of tobacco were not for him. At the church—Colonel Roosevelt is Dutch Reform by birth and preference, but you can't build a church for one man, even an ex-President, so he attends the Episcopal service —at the church the rector knows the Colonel as a good listener. He's a pretty regular attendant, tramping down from the Hill in Norfolk jacket and knickerbockers like as not to sit in the Roosevelt pew. The Colonel follows the sermon closely. When there are hymns to be sung, he does his part with the joyful vigor that is characteristic of him.

Failing the barber, I tackled the president of the bank. A bank president in a small town knows more about folks than any one else. It's part of his business. "What do we think of Colonel Roosevelt?" He pondered the question gravely.

"We all like him," he said. "Of course there are always a few who have an ill word for everybody, but they don't count for much. I've known the Colonel since he was a young man. He has always been the same. He doesn't try to boss things, but he is always interested in the town; and, busy as he is, he's never too busy to help out when he's asked. When we cut down the number of saloons here recently, the Colonel took an active part. And summer before last, when the infantile paralysis epidemic came and we had to get quick action, we called on the Colonel to help. He dropped everything else, came down to the town meeting, and it wasn't long after he got there before we had decided what to do and started doing it. What's that? A good neighbor? Yes, I think we'd all agree that describes how we feel about him."

But it was in another and quite different place that I found the most striking evidence of what his home town thinks of the Colonel. Tom O'Keefe is the Democratic leader of the district, ex-State senator, postmaster, and owner of the town's largest saloon. I dropped in to see Tom, and was aware of a new decoration in his bar. One wall had been stripped of the pictures usual to such a place, as if to give greater prominence to a large oil painting. From the frame looked out Mr. Roosevelt as he appeared twenty years ago as colonel of the Rough Riders. He was in uniform; in the background, horsemen, pistols in hand, galloped madly up a hill, and flanking the Colonel on one side was the shield of the United States.

Rescued T. R.'s Picture

NOW, Tom and the Colonel differ pointedly on most things ethical and political.

"Why the picture, Tom?"

He surveyed it with pride.

"Some fool bunch in a Republican club in the city kicked that picture out when T. R. cut loose from the party," he said. "A junkman picked it up and carted it down here. Maybe," he added darkly, "some one paid him to do it; thought it would be a good joke on the Colonel. I saw it being carted past, and told the man to bring it in here. It didn't look right for the man to be peddling it around the streets. I paid him his price for it—three dollars."

"It was damaged some," put in the bartender, "cracked across the face where some stiff who wouldn't dare stand up to T. R. for a minute took a swift kick at it; but I used to be a sign-painter, and I fixed it up as good as new."

When I told the Colonel about it a little later as he sat at work in his study at Sagamore Hill, he agreed with me that Tom had paid him a very nice compliment indeed. Colonel Roosevelt was lunching and working at the same time; that is, he had a bowl of soup and some crackers on his writing table, for he is a light luncher by habit. He was up to his ears in work, but he stopped long enough to hear the story.

"By George! That's fine!" he exclaimed. "I knew about that picture. It wasn't thrown out when I led the Progressives. Some of our hyphenated friends took revenge on it after reading what I had to say about the sinking of the Lusitania. But I never knew what became of it. Tom's all right! His lights may not be mine nor yours, but he's a born leader of men."

Outside from the veranda of the big, rambling house that tops Sagamore Hill hangs a service flag with four stars. They stand for Theodore, Jr., a major with General Pershing's forces in France; Kermit, a captain serving with a Canadian contingent in Mesopotamia; Archie, a second lieutenant with Pershing, and Quentin, nineteen and the youngest of the boys, who is in the aviation service. There would be another star in the flag if Colonel Roosevelt could have his way about it. The day I saw him, he was as restive as ever at being kept out of the fight.

What Oyster Bay thinks of the Colonel may have been reflected in the town's showing in the draft. Sagamore Hill was 100 per cent willing and 80 per cent accepted for service. The town didn't do quite so well, but the returns show something better than 40 per cent certified for service, and that's good enough to please even the Colonel.

Perhaps it was the example of the Roosevelt boys as much as the fear of neighbor Roosevelt's scorn that inspired the village, for the Colonel's sons have shared and abetted their father's popularity in his home town.

Those Roosevelt Boys

IN the village, the day I was there, they were laughing over a story about Quentin and Charlie Lee, the colored major-domo of the Roosevelt household. Charlie is devoted to the Colonel. He drove the fine pair of steppers that pulled the family coach on Sundays, and when the Colonel at last bowed to necessity and bought an automobile, Charlie shifted from coachman to chauffeur. Recently, when Quentin was training at the Hempstead aviation field, he flew home on a visit. Charlie Lee gazed at the machine in admiration, and Quentin offered to take him up. They had hardly cleared the treetops when Charlie exclaimed earnestly: "I'm sure I hear the Colonel calling me. I'm sure he's calling me. You'll have to take me right down, Master Quentin." And Quentin took him down as quickly as the laws of flying would permit. I have no doubt that Charlie would willingly follow the Colonel to France—but not into the aviation service.

Riding back to the station I got another look at Moore's grocery store, above which were the executive offices of the government when Oyster Bay was the summer capital, and across the street at the dry-goods store whose upper story houses the local lodge of the Masons. Colonel Roosevelt always made it a point to attend lodge once a summer when he was President. He comes down occasionally now, and although he is by no means a "clubbable man," he is a member in good standing. The Colonel's gardener was once grand master of the lodge, and the Colonel has said that one of the most enjoyable evenings of his life was spent there when his gardener presided.

Oyster Bay has lost its glory of being the hub of the United States in summertime, but it still has the Colonel and it is content, for they think mighty well of T. R. in his own home town.

FROM THE TRENCHES

"THE only tragedy, as I see it, would be to feel, as one lived on and grew old, that one had ceased to progress in soul—or worse, that one was actually slipping back, losing a part of what one had already gained by struggle and suffering.

"The last thing in the world that I want to do is to die. But if I ever lost the hope of going always forward, gaining a little more knowledge and a little more strength each year—I'd like to have one of these big noisy black things drop on my head toute de suite, and finish off at least with the credit of what I'd already gained. But even that would be a little bitter if I were not able to feel that I was still on the upward way. So here's to our ideals—and if we can't attain them in life, may we at least deserve them in death!"

Letter of Lieutenant Harry Butters, an American with the British forces,who was killed in action at the age of twenty-four.

A GREAT WAR POEM

I BELIEVE in the courage of our soldiers, in the science and devotion of our commanders.
I believe in the force of justice, in the crusade of civilized people, in France eternal, imperishable and indispensable.
I believe in the price of grief and in the attainment of hope.
I believe in the sacred vows of the old and in the all-powerful ignorance of children.
I believe in the prayers of women, in the heroic sleeplessness of the wife, in the pious calm of mothers, in the purity of our cause, in the immaculate glory of our flags.
I believe in our great past, in our great present, in our greater future.
I believe in the living of this land and in its dead.
I believe in hands armed with steel and I believe in hands joined.
I believe in us, I believe in God.

From the French of Henri Lavedan

Chaplains I Have Known at the Front

By CAPTAIN A. P. CORCORAN

IN broad daylight, out on No Man's Land, there lay a body of wounded Tommies. They had fallen in a counter-attack meant to punish the Boche for a surprise visit paid that morning. In an occasional lull in the roar of guns you could hear a voice calling for water or the scream of a man maddened by pain. But the enemy were on the alert. To go out after them would be little short of suicide. There is always a bullet for a man who appears in the light of day.

But bullets had no terror for the Padre.

This particular priest belonged to the Church of England. Unless my memory tricks me, his name was Dalton. But he can be found in the list of the honored: he was the first V. C. of his cloth.

Disregarding all warnings, he crawled over the parapet, seized one wounded man, and dragged him to safety. When he appeared the second time, the Boches were ready. His audacity probably had kept them quiet at first; but now the bullets began to fly. He got his second man back, and his third and fourth, before he came to a case so badly wounded that it was impossible to handle it as roughly as the others. This Tommy was lying on the edge of a shell crater, and as the Padre bent to tend him, he himself was hit by a bullet, and for a moment he collapsed beside his charge. But he recovered quickly. Then, still clinging to his burden, he managed to crawl down into the hole.

All day they lay there, until the sun went down, when help was sent out to him and his companion.

It comes easy to picture the Padre going his rounds of the hospital, cheering one man, consoling another, administering the last services to a soldier in his last agony. Extremely tiresome and trying work this can be, too, when a convoy of five or six hundred cases arrive and there is only one Padre of each persuasion to attend to all. And yet, this is the least onerous and certainly the least dangerous of all his duties.

To any man who has been in France it comes more easy, because it is more familiar, to picture the Padre walking up and down the trench, giving a cigarette or a slap on the back to some one who needs sympathy, reassuring one man as to the validity of that hastily made will, telling another not to worry—he'll see that his mother gets the news. He is well named the Padre, for he is the father of all, whether he be Protestant or Catholic. And his children turn to him most of all just before an attack.

Suppose the order to "go over" has been given for 4.30 A. M. The previous night the men begin their preparations. They tell a story of one Catholic priest who for seven consecutive hours sat in a wood close to the firing line, hearing the confessions of his men. And all the time the shells were crashing overhead.

It was the small hours of the morning when he was through with this duty, but his work was not yet done. Before five he was in the first-line trench, ready to say mass and administer communion. I have seen nothing more impressive than these ceremonies at the front.

Try to picture, if you can, the little altar on the firing step, or on some piece of wood hastily slung across the traverse. At this is the priest, and round him are his people, some grim, some smiling, some nervous, some calm, praying to the God whom they expect any moment to face. Truly war brings men close to the realities of life and death.

The attack begins. Where is the Padre? Gone behind to a place of safety to await the result? By no means! He still sticks to the front line. If his men are beaten, all the more need for his presence. If they win, there are still the wounded to attend to.

Of course, some people will tell you that the clergyman's very calling should teach him to hold aloof from the business of war. One parson, to whom I was speaking recently about the fighting, declared:

"I don't think of it. I simply pray for peace."

But, unfortunately, the war is a fact, and one that cannot be ignored. Likewise, it is a fact that thousands of men are going through agonies both mental and physical, and that through no fault of their own. Are they to be left unaided in their suffering?

But to come back to the fighting "men of peace."

It is true they get a captain's or a lieutenant's rating when they join the forces and the not too generous pay that goes with that honor. But what do most of them give up for it?

There was Canon Hannay, whom I met when I was stationed near St. Omer. Americans will probably remember him best as George Birmingham. He had given up the Deanship of St. Patrick's Cathedral, a rich and important benefice in Dublin, to live in the mud and smoke of Flanders. And there was the Bishop of London, that slim, strong figure whom we now remember best in his trim khaki uniform. And there are the hundreds of others, Catholic and Protestant, who have given up livings equally lucrative to join not merely as chaplains but oftentimes as privates in the ranks. It has been estimated that between 20,000 and 30,000 priests, once expatriated because of their religion by an atheist French government, are now fighting as poilus for France.

I am afraid my picture of the Padre has been dark, painted on a gloomy canvas. Like every other, though, it has its lighter side too. All fighting life is not grim.

They tell this story of an encounter between a Padre and a sentry:

"Who goes there?" demanded the stern one.

"Chaplain," sang out the other.

"Pass, Charley," came the quick reply.

SCOLDING THE ENEMY

IT happened in the Poelcapelle sector. The hottest fighting of Haig's most recent drive centered there. Stretcher-bearers were constantly being shot by the Germans. When a count revealed that one hundred and nine of them had been shot out of two hundred and fifty on duty, this particular British medical officer's sporting sense and indignation led him to act. He saw three out of a group of four stretcher-bearers shot down before his eyes. The Red Cross flag fell. The officer stepped out from behind a shelter, picked up the emblem supposedly regarded as inviolate by international agreement, and deliberately marched on to the German lines. The Germans, utterly astonished, stared at him. Standing alone in front of their guns, he read them a lecture in the choicest of German epithets. "Only swine," he concluded, "are capable of sniping Red Cross men engaged in rescuing sufferers from the mud."

Then he turned his back and slowly walked back to his own lines. The Germans were so taken aback they didn't fire until a contemptuously defiant wave of the officer's hand marked his last appearance from under cover.

The lecture could have been rather costly for him, but it manifests the spirit that German behavior is sure to arouse.

WORSE THAN WAR

THE hospital to which they took him on the north coast of France was in the hands of an Anglo-American unit. And in the particular ward where he was placed reigned a night nurse who understood but a few words of his language.

The poilu was suffering from a badly shattered leg. They had operated in the afternoon. It was night before he woke from the effects of the drug administered. Immediately he set up a great howl.

Over rushed the nurse to his side, and was met with a torrent of indignant French. She soothed, scolded him, gave him such nourishment as he might have. No use. Then she remembered a nurse who could speak French, and fetched her. There followed a long colloquy which left the poilu somewhat puzzled but more peaceful.

"Well?" asked the new arrival.

"They didn't explain to him about his arm."

To mend his leg, an expert surgeon had taken some bone from his arm to graft in the shattered limb. So the poilu, who had gone to sleep with only one wound, awoke to find himself with two! No wonder he had raged. He had seen nothing but brutality in the ways of expert modern surgery.

HOW WAR CHANGES MEN

WHEN a man goes down into the depths of war, he may come up the same man, but the chances are he will be some one entirely different. The effects of fear are as many as the men who are afraid. And, says Alexander McClintock in Best o' Luck (Doran), "if a man isn't frightened when he goes under fire, it's because he lacks intelligence."

Sergeant McClintock tells of some of his friends whom the war turned into new men. One of them was an amusing, hilarious boy during his whole time in training camp. "The war changed him entirely. He became extremely quiet, and seemed to be weighed down with the sense of the terrible things which he saw. He formed the habit of sitting alone and silent for hours at a time, just thinking. In action he was as brave as they make them, but the prospect of sudden death and the presence of death and suffering around him changed him utterly. From a cheerful, happy lad he was transformed into an old man, silent, gloomy, and absent-minded except for momentary flashes of his old spirit, which became less and less frequent as the time for his own end drew nearer."

Another man was worthless and unreliable while he was in training, He was in constant hot water for being drunk, absent without leave, late on parade. "In France this chap was worth ten ordinary men. He was always cheerful, always willing and prompt in obeying orders, ready to tackle unhesitatingly the most unpleasant or the most risky duty.

"Then there was a certain sergeant who was the best instructor in physical training and bayonet fighting in our brigade. When he got under fire he simply went to pieces. On our first bombing raid he turned and ran back into our own barbed wire, and when he was caught there acted like a madman. I don't think he was a plain coward. There was merely something wrong with his nervous system."

Most of these men, remade for better or worse, find somewhere the courage to go through with it. Says Sergeant McClintock: "It is the elbow-to-elbow influence that carries men up to face machine-guns and gas. A heroic battalion may be made up of units of potential cowards."

DON'T FORGET THE PHOTOGRAPHERS

THE STORY OF A SUBMARINE VICTIM

ROBERT GARWOOD was one of a crew of one hundred and thirteen men on the steamship Verdi, bound from New York to Liverpool. On the tenth day out the vessel was torpedoed by a German submarine. Fourteen men below decks were killed outright or trapped and slowly drowned. Most of the others escaped in life-boats, Garwood among them. In Scribner's Magazine he tells of the three days and nights that he and his seventeen comrades spent in a leaky open boat.

The Verdi did not sink until the Germans had hurled sixteen shells into her.

An indescribable feeling of loneliness came over them, says the writer, as they realized their situation. They were one hundred and sixty miles from the nearest land. They had two tins of sea biscuits, some corned beef, which they ate sparingly, as it was salty, and a very small cask of water. "Fortunately," he says, "the ship's doctor was in our boat, and he had been thoughtful enough to bring his valise with plenty of quinine, of which he gave us four grains twice nightly. This made the cold more nearly endurable, and kept down the fever which would have made our thirst unbearable."

They spent the most of the first night rowing and bailing. Once the electrician knocked out the plug, and water threatened to swamp them. While they hunted for it feverishly, he thrust his four fingers into the hole and thus held out the ocean. Several times they were drenched to the skin. But the morning sun warmed them and the ship's doctor produced some cigars from his valise, so that "for a few hours we smoked and joked as we glided over the clear blue seas." This cheerful mood was not to last, however. In the afternoon of the second day the wind rose and began to blow a gale.

"In my hours off the tiller I huddled in the bottom of the boat, soaking wet, and shivering from the cold which seemed unbearable. At times I dozed for minutes which seemed like hours, and always I wandered in the green fields at home, where clear, cold streams of water ran, and where I could drink; yet always was I thirsty."

Noon of the third day passed, and the men felt that there was small prospect of being able to ride through another night. Then at last land was sighted.

During their desperate attempts to land on the almost inaccessible coast, the boat finally went to pieces on the rocks. The men, however, succeeded in climbing out of reach of the waves, assisted by some of the natives. They were helped to the nearest cottage, and their burning thirst quenched with great bowls of buttermilk, while the kindly Irish people stripped off their own clothes to put on them.

"All of us would have been happy to stay for a month in that little bit of heaven," concludes the narrator.

THE OLD LADY'S LAUNDRY

ROUND the town of B— the German shells were very busy and amazingly accurate in aim. Ammunition dumps, camouflage batteries—not a day but some one of them went up in smoke.

Such unerring aim on the part of the enemy always indicates more than average "intelligence"; for no aviator can photograph things under the ground. So we were all put on the qui vive for suspicious characters; but, though the town was small, we failed to find any until—

One day a young airman, scenting for trouble from the sky, allowed his eye to rest on some bed-sheets spread on a lawn.

Of course white always shows up well against the dark background of the earth. That is why the landing stages are so painted, and that is why we laughed at this chap, who was not much more than a novice, when he came down with his story about the old lady's laundry. She was a very old lady, doddering and quite poor, we had decided, or she would not have remained quite so close to the front and taken in the washing of all and sundry visitors.

However, though we laughed at him, he received instructions from headquarters not to let that laundry out of his eye. He didn't. And one day he reported those sheets as lying in the position of the letter V. The next day they resembled an R. Every day they were there.

So we investigated. And the boy was right. Those sheets were being used as semaphores to point out to enemy airmen positions worth the shelling.

Soon the old lady ceased her signaling forever.

Told by Captain Corcoran.

A SCULPTOR OF LIVING FACES

ARTISTS have their uses. Before the war, Derwent Wood, A. R. A., was only a sculptor. Now, as cap- tain n the British General Service, heis a builder of human faces. In the Masks for Facial Disfigurements Department, Captain Derwent Wood takes the hideous, faceless relics of the war and turns them into men who can go about without the awful fear of making others afraid to look at them.

The work of this department is described by Ward Muir in the Nineteenth Century Magazine. Men go to Captain Wood after they leave the hospital and the surgeons have done their best. Minus noses, eyes, cheek-bones, or jaws,—often minus most of these,—they go and get new faces from Derwent Wood, the artist.

If possible, the soldier provides a portrait of himself before the war—this to give the sculptor a model. Then a plaster cast is made of his present apology for a face. The cast is put through various processes to make it a perfect basis for the artist's work. Then, modeling with minute care, he blinds up the patient's portrait.

"The eyeless socket is filled in and given an eye, eyebrow, and eyelashes which pair with their neighbors; the concave cheek is made convex to pair with the good cheek; the nose is restored, its shape reproduced from measurements and from comparison with the photograph.

The mask is made from electrotype plate, paper-thin. At first it is not tinted, but only shaped with infinite care. "Very painstakingly is the patient fitted. Then the plate is covered with an electric deposit of silver. Meanwhile the sculptor, turned painter for the moment, is painting on a slim oval disk of glass an eye which is an adroit reproduction, even to the veins in the white, of the patient's undamaged eye. Lastly, the silvered mask itself is painted. The patient's sound skin is matched with microscopic precision. The mask is so light that it needs little support.

"At a slight distance, so harmonious are both the molding and the tinting, it is impossible to detect the join where the live skin of cheek or nose leaves off and the imitation complexion of the mask begins. Figure what this means to the patient!"

Marking Up Your Personal Price-Tag

By WARREN EUGENE CRANE

A DISHEVELED man came into an office of a large firm in the Middle West with a soft hat drawn over his eyes and his feet dragging.

"You don't need a man to do anything, do you?"

"No," snapped the manager, without looking up from his desk, where he was examining some papers. The man turned around slowly and slouched out of the office without another word.

Many men apply for a position in the same half-hearted way. Usually they are defeated before they begin. The man who assumes that he will win has won half of the battle.

From the standpoint of unrelenting persistence, the case of Emmons was unique. He called on Moss, the city editor of a prominent Western newspaper, day after day for over two weeks in his efforts to become a member of the staff.

One day he came into the office a little later than usual. The other reporters had gone, and he took a seat on the visitors' bench to wait for the city editor, who was busy. The door opened, and Jackson, the staff photographer, rushed in.

"Big robbery planned at Danish American Bank in Jamestown! Auto load of police just passed at full speed! Give me a reporter quick! I'll take him in my machine and beat the Dispatch to the story."

"All of my reporters are gone," said Moss in dismay.

Emmons jumped up.

"I'll cover the story! I'll get you a good one!"

"All right, Old Persistency, go ahead," yelled the editor. "For heaven's sake, get everybody's name, address, and initials—and get them straight. "

The next morning a smile lighted the face of the city editor as he read the front-page story of the attempted bank robbery. And Emmons went on the staff.

A printer of the name of Jordan was employed in the composing-room of one of the leading papers of the Northwest. As work was slack, he was engaged only part of his time and was making only seventy-five dollars a month. He had a large family to support and his salary was insufficient to meet the continual rise in the cost of living, so he decided to get something to do in his spare time. He went down to the first floor and talked to the advertising manager.

"Let me put on a Fall Planting page for you," he said confidently. "I can do it."

The advertising manager looked up at him in surprise.

"Why, you are a printer."

"Yes, I know it; and for that very reason I can get you out a good-looking page. I will prepare one that will be a credit to the paper."

The advertising manager was hesitant.

"I can't add any more to my pay-roll now."

"Well," said Jordan determinedly, "I'll tell you what I will do. I will put this page on if you will give me a twenty-five per cent commission on what I sell."

"That's a bargain," said the advertising manager. "If you are successful, I will make arrangements to have this department pay you a salary for part of your time after the first of next month."

Jordan went immediately to the composing room and set up an attractive heading for his Fall Planting page. He struck off several page proof sheets, and then prepared a prospect card for every nurseryman in the city. Then he went out and sold the space in his spare time, and made thirty dollars in commissions in four days.

The advertising manager was greatly pleased with his work, and placed him on a salary for his department for part-time work. To-day Jordan is earning more than two hundred dollars a month from the paper.

A manufacturer in an Eastern City advertised for a sales-manager, and insisted that every applicant write him a letter. He received several hundred letters, each stating the applicant's past experience and containing the usual references.

Jones wrote a letter in which he gave not only his past experience, but also outlined a policy. He inclosed some sample cards of a system that he had devised so that one could find desired information at a glance.

At the close of his letter he asked for an appointment with the manufacturer, naming a definite time. This letter required an immediate answer, while the other applications did not; and, as the manufacturer liked the suggestions, he wrote Jones that he would interview him at the appointed time. The two men met, and the conference resulted in the appointment of Jones as sales-manager.

The ordinary man uses ordinary methods, and usually secures a mediocre position; while the unusual man uses original ones to attain a place of responsibility. In other words, he studies the other man's needs, and makes suggestions that show his value even more vividly than a long recital of his past performances.

Lincoln Was a Poor Financier

LINCOLN'S financial record, if submitted to any business firm without other evidence, would kill any chance of his getting a job. Judge Davis, who presided over the circuit court which Lincoln followed from town to town, says that, of all the lawyers who practised before him, Lincoln, though overshadowing all in ability, probably made less money than any. His charges were so ridiculously low that he once was brought up by the other lawyers before the judges in mock trial and accused of lowering the professional rates by being too easy. He pleaded guilty and paid his fine.

Even the few honest dollars that he did manage to get together seldom stayed by him. Any one with a tale of hard luck was sure to find him an all too easy mark. An instance is given in Alonzo Rothschild's Honest Abe (Houghton, Mifflin Company)—a slip of paper dated September 25, 1858. It reads:

My old friend, Henry Chew, the bearer of this, is in a strait for some furniture to commence housekeeping. If any person will furnish him twenty-five dollars' worth, and he does not pay for it by the first of January next, I will.

A. LINCOLN.

With this scrap of paper has been preserved the odious sequel:

HON. A. LINCOLN, Springfield, Ill.

My dear Friend: I herewith enclose your order which you gave your friend Henry Chew. You will please send me a draft for the same and oblige yours,

S. LITTLE.
Urbana, February 16, 1859.

Get Your Shoes at the Carpenter's

WITH eight lively youngsters in his family, Louis Waynai, a cabinet-maker of Syracuse, New York, had to buy a new pair of shoes every other week. Neither pocket-book nor patience could stand the strain, and when one of the boys stubbed out a new pair in two weeks' time Papa Waynai decided that shoe-last was a misleading term and he'd see what he could do about it.

He set to work on a block of beechwood, and it wasn't long before he had turned out a pair of wooden shoes—neat, dapper-looking shoes that will pass anywhere as the tan boot of commerce; for, while Papa Waynai's shoes are wooden, his ideas are not.

He added rubber heels to make the shoes noiseless, and cloth or leather tops to give them style, and now his neighbors are beseeching the cabinet-maker to turn shoemaker on a big scale. Shoes such as Mr. Waynai built for his children can be profitably manufactured, he estimates, for about fifteen cents a pair.

A Talk with Premier Clémenceau

WHEN the cable carried the news, the other day, that Georges Clémenceau had been made Premier of France for the second time, I thought of a talk a member of the staff had with the great French statesman in 1912. It was just after Colonel Theodore Roosevelt had declared his willingness to accept a "third cup of coffee"; and the "Old Tiger," as they call Clémenceau in France, while rooting hard for the Colonel, was wondering if he could "come back."

"It's a very, very difficult thing," he said, "for a statesman to regain his former once he loses office."

Perhaps he was thinking of himself as well as of the Colonel.

Clémenceau had held the premiership for four years, which was longer than any other man had under the Third Republic; but his ministry had fallen in 1909, the very year that Mr. Roosevelt left the White House.

Now Clémenceau has answered his own question. He is in the saddle again. After eight years,—troublous years for France, most of them,—in which the nation has tried out nearly a dozen prime ministers, he has been recalled to head the Cabinet.

And he is seventy-six years old. In spite of his long tenure of office, he is better known as a Cabinet-breaker than a Cabinet-maker. He is France's best scalp-getter, as many an ambitious statesman knows to his sorrow. It is interesting to recall that he was the bitterest of the opponents of President Raymond Poincaré, and has been unceasing in criticism of his administration. It is almost as if President Wilson had summoned Colonel Roosevelt to be his Secretary of State.

Clémenceau has kept his admiration for Roosevelt. Through the columns of his paper, months ago, he plead with the United States to "send us Roosevelt!" There is much alike in the two men aside from the fact that in opposing anything or anybody each fights with all his might.

The French Premier once lived in the Washington Square section of New York. That was in the late sixties. He practised medicine then, but the life was too tame for him. He returned to France declaring that "the Americans have no general ideas and no good coffee." He has revised his judgment about our ideas, but we forgot to ask him about the coffee.

He's a Whole Crew in Himself

IN the old days of wooden fighting-ships the questions put to the would-be recruit were few and simple. Could he "hand, reef, and steer?" Did he come under the heading of seaman, ordinary seaman, or just plain landsman?

To-day the sea fighters are floating machine-shops, little worlds in themselves, where men of many trades are needed.

William Sato calls himself an American, although he was born in Japan. Sato was working as photographer on a Chicago newspaper when he went to the Great Lakes Training Station to enlist.

"What's your occupation?" asked the recruiting officer.

"I'm willing to do anything in the navy," replied Sato.

"I mean, what are you best fitted for? Look over this list and check off what you can do."

This is what Sato checked off:

Aviator, blacksmith, cook, doctor, electrician, fencer, gunner, houseman, interpreter, jeweler, quizzer, reporter, steam-fitter, tailor, undertaker, vivisectionist, wrestler, yeoman, zoölogist.

He is a registered physician, a licensed aëroplane pilot, and an expert photographer. If Josephus Daniels, boss of the navy, is ever short-handed, he can page Mr. Sato.

THE LUCK OF CINGALO

By J. FRANK DAVIS

Illustrations by George E. Giguère

CLAY WHELTON was not bad, as the far frontiers define the word—merely wild. Yet, at twenty-one minutes past ten of a September night he was a care-free youth, reckless, to be sure, but innocent of any very serious sin; and at twenty-four minutes past ten he was a thrice guilty man-killer, desperate, law-hunted, backing out of the gambling-house with smoking, barking pistol, and even in that tragedy-filled moment half-dazedly wondering how it had all come about and why it had to happen to him.

It was, in a way, his own fault. He ought to have known better than to take a hand at poker in Montana Charley Ryan's place. He knew Montana Charley, and he knew Montana Charley's reputation. It had been common whispered rumor in Mullen City that players in the Merchants' and Miners' Social Club —which was the euphonious name of Ryan's joint—sometimes needed to buck not only fortune and skill, but certain other accessories that at their best consisted of artful "whipsaws," and at their worst—on rare and special occasions—of even so dangerous a thing as stacked cards and perhaps a mechanical "hold-out."

Strangers and drunks were said to be the specialty of Ryan's irregularities. Whelton was not a stranger, and he was not drunk. As a matter of fact, he was a temperate youth, and had not taken a single drink. Therefore, in the ordinary run of events, Ryan should not have been expected to try robbery to overcome bad luck. The explanation of his departure from his usual rule in this respect lay in two facts: first, that Whelton had made a killing at Ryan's roulette wheel, and, second, that fortune had been showing the gambler an icy shoulder of late and he could not afford to lose the money. A third fact also had an indirect bearing: Gil Burdick, the sheriff, had been elected by the sporting interests, and Montana Charley, coldly analyzing the chances, believed he could get away with it.

Ryan's roulette wheel was a square game. It costs a small fortune to rig a roulette wheel otherwise, in addition to which the "house percentage" at roulette may be depended upon, in time, to beat any average run of luck. But, on this particular occasion, the wheel had little chance, because Clay Whelton—in town with three months' wages and looking avidly for excitement—plunged recklessly, and the marble rolled and leaped and fell into the numbers he was playing as if the goddess of chance had suddenly become infatuated with his square shoulders, waving hair, and daredevil brown eyes.

"Twenty-one, and red, and odd, and second dozen," droned the dealer, raking in fifteen or twenty dollars of players losses in other places on the table and paying Whelton a hundred and seventy-five dollars for the five brown checks that he had planted squarely in the middle of the twenty-one square.

"Thirty-one, and black, and odd, and third dozen," he announced, as again the marble whirred and rattled and bounced and fell, and paid Clay a net increase to his winnings of another hundred and fifty.

"Go to it, kid!" a friend shouted, banging Whelton between the shoulders. "Pick the tiger's eye out and play marbles with it. Atta boy!"

CLAY fingered his chips. He was six dollars ahead. He had never possessed six hundred dollars at one time before in his life. Through his mind flashed an old saying as to roulette: "Play 'em fast, and lose or win 'em fast, before the house percentage beats you." He decided to make one more play and stop. It should be a hundred dollars; if he lost, he still would be five hundred winner.

"What's your limit to-night on one number flat?" he asked the croupier.

That pale-faced individual lifted his head and looked under his eye-shade to where Montana Charley himself stood at the end of the table, with the face of an unemotional, calculating, pig-eyed Sphinx. Ryan gave a sign, imperceptible to the others, and the man behind the wheel replied as he fingered the marble preparatory to its spin:

"There ain't any limit for a good player. Stack 'em from the green, green cloth to the blue, blue sky."

Whelton pushed forward five stacks of chips, each stack worth twenty dollars, with a vague idea of playing five numbers. Then, as the marble whirred musically and the croupier settled back against the wall to wait for its fall, he suddenly changed his mind. Swiftly he put two of the stacks on the zero and two on the double-zero, and the fifth one on the line between.

"After thirty-one comes one of the O's," he declared, as if he were stating an axiom of mathematics. "A hundred goes between 'em."

"A hundred goes between the O's," the attendant rhymed. "And seventeen to one says neither of 'em comes. Keep a-puttin' 'em down, men, until the little marble clicks. Everybody's beatin' us to-night, and this house likes to pay out money. All down!" as the sharp clatter of the marble presaged its fall.

Then the click of the settling sphere, a pause while all eyes sought to identify its place of lodgment, and again the voice, as dispassionate as ever:

"Single-O and green, and nobody wins but the great big hundred-dollar bet."

He raked in the other players' wagers. From his rack he deftly lifted a stack of chips of a design not previously in the game, dropped three off the bottom with a flip of his little finger, and shoved the remainder over as carelessly as if each represented a nickel.

"A hundred apiece—seventeen hundred dollars," he said. "Make your bets, gentlemen. It's a hard night for the house, and you might as well get the money."

Whelton pushed all his chips back across the table, including those that still rested on the zeros.

"Cash 'em in!" he said.

The croupier counted swiftly, while acquaintances congratulated Clay. "Twenty-three hundred and twenty-five dollars," he announced, looking at Whelton for verification before stacking the chips back in the rack. Clay nodded. The twenty-five represented his original investment.

The dealer opened the money drawer and emptied it. The total cash there was eight hundred and some odd dollars. He gestured to Montana Charley, who came behind the wheel and went into an inner pocket for the house roll, from which he counted out fifteen hundred-dollar bills to make up the deficit.

Clay looked about him at admiring, envious faces. To Montana Charley he said, in accordance with the etiquette customary on such an occasion: "I'd like to buy all the gentlemen present a little drink."

While the order was being taken, he glanced at his watch. He was surprised that it was only half-past eight; he had been at the wheel less than twenty minutes.

"What's yours?" a waiter asked him.

"Good cigar," replied Clay absently.

He felt curiously at sea. Never before had he made a sensational winning. He was confronted with the problem of how to spend the remainder of his evening. Inclination said, in renewed gambling; discretion warned him against further dalliance with roulette. He wished he knew where there was a nice, friendly little poker game with congenial players. He thought perhaps he would wander over to the Palace Hotel across the street, to see if any of his friends had happened to engage a room there for a private session.

While the drinks that he had ordered were being served, he drifted aimlessly across the room to a far corner, where a poker game was in progress. There were four men at the table, including Caspar Berg, Ryan's right-hand man, who was playing as representative of the house. Two of the men he knew quite well—both square enough citizens, neither of them a professional gambler. The third was a stranger.

One of Clay's acquaintances looked up while the cards were being dealt, and nodded.

"Somebody said you walloped 'em over at the wheel, " he remarked. "Better sit in here and get rid of it. This is the best place I know to lose what you make. I lost sixty dollars since supper, and I ain't held better than a pair yet. And we need another man to make it five-handed; four makes a rotten game."

Clay smiled without answering, and two or three hands were played while he looked on. An attaché came and told him how much his drinks for the company had totaled, and he paid the score. He continued to watch the poker players. The game began to lure him.

He would sit in for a little while, he decided. He didn't fancy poker in Ryan's place, but the table with its present occupants presented few dangers to the moderately skilled player. Besides, he could play cautiously. He thought, if luck ran against him, he would lose perhaps a hundred dollars, and then quit. Even if he were to lose as much as three hundred, he reasoned, he still would be able to go home two thousand dollars ahead on the night.

He slid into a chair and bought fifty dollars' worth of chips.

AT nine o'clock his fifty dollars had become a hundred. At nine-thirty it was nearer two. He hardly noticed when the friend who had invited him to play pushed back his chair, declaring he was broke, and left the game. He was not greatly interested when his second acquaintance cashed up slightly ahead, remarking that he had promised the wife he would come home early. The seats of the two were taken by men who did more poker playing than anything else, and the stranger remained.

Being entirely sober and a good player, Whelton followed his predetermined policy of conservatism. He was playing with professionals, and knew it. He took no more chances than a man is justified in taking when he plays with professionals.

At ten o'clock he had about three hundred dollars in chips before him; and Caspar Berg, while one of the other men was dealing, called across the room to

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Montana Charley Ryan. It was not within Clay's knowledge that the call was really in response to a signal Charley had made over the players' heads.

"Say, boss," Berg said, "will you take my seat for a little? Something I et for supper ain't agreein' with me, and I'd like to go out and walk around in the air a spell. Head feels a little light."

Ryan came over without a word and sat in Caspar's chair. He put on the eye-shade his lieutenant discarded, and the game went smoothly on.

The seat Ryan occupied backed fairly into a corner of the room; one could not stand behind the occupant while he played. Nor could one see that, ingeniously concealed beneath the table, was a "hold-out" that contained five carefully selected cards, ready for the slaughter whenever it should be decided, in the exigencies of a desperate occasion, that the time had arrived for the production of a "big mitt."

Within three minutes Ryan discovered a stain on the back of a card, which had the effect of marking it, and called for a new deck. The pack that was brought—as was the practice of the place under such circumstances—had backs that matched the backs of the concealed five.

WHEN Whelton, fifteen minutes later, opened a pot, stood a small raise, re-raised, and then played his hand pat, Ryan decided the time had come to put his system to the touch. Conditions were really ideal, because Clay himself was dealing and could not suspect sharp practice; and Ryan, with three treys, had raised him and then drawn two cards.

If chance had thrown the gambler another trey, he would have played the hand fairly and expected to win on its merits. But his cautious inspection of the cards he drew disclosed two entirely inconsequential pasteboards. With a clever naturalness, he upset his chips and knocked two or three of them to the floor. While he was picking them up he made the substitution with the deftness of a prestidigitateur. He straightened, his pasty face a little flushed from the exertion, with five cards in his hand, squared exactly as had been five other cards when he momentarily stooped beneath the table. Not a soul in the room had seen him do it. Neither Clay nor any other player had the slightest suspicion of it.

Clay's hand, held pat and dealt by himself, contained four queens.

Three minutes later, Ryan and Whelton had pushed into the center all the chips in front of them, and, without troubling to buy more, were betting real money. The other players were sitting back, expectant. Around the room a whisper had spread that two big hands had evidently got out together, and men were crowding up quietly to witness the play.

THROUGH Whelton's mind, as the persiflage that marked the first bet or two gave way to tense concentration on the business in hand, shot the thought that his four queens might have been planted from a cold deck—to be instantly dismissed as he recalled that he himself had dealt. Ryan had raised him and drawn two cards. He might have made a full house, and he might have made four—and his fours could not be kings, because one of the other players, throwing his hand into the discards carelessly, had faced a king. This left four aces the only probable hand that could beat Clay, with the chances a million to one against it. Under every rule of poker chances, Clay was justified in betting his queens forever, and he determined to do so.

Ryan knew, by the time the third bet had been made, that Whelton probably had four of a kind. He hoped they were big ones.

Each held his cards pinched tightly, face down on the table before him. Each stared into the other's eyes.

"There ain't no use jigglin' back and forth with little dinky bets," Ryan said. "I got a pretty good hand. I'm disposed to bet quite a little on it."

Clay waited in silence.

"I don't know's I want to shoot the whole bank-roll on it, or anything like that," the gambler went on, his voice low, hard, and cold, "but I sure like what I've got. I'll bet you—a thousand better."

"There's about two thousand left in my wad," Whelton replied, less coldly, because he was only twenty-four years old and not a professional. "Cover it."

He threw into the center the hundred-dollar bills that Ryan had paid him at the wheel.

Leaving his cards where they could be seen by all, the gambler reached into his pocket and matched the roll. He hesitated, when he had put in that much, then remarked:

"I'll go a little farther, if you want to borrow from somebody to back your judgment—or I'll let it go at that, just as you like."

"That's far enough," said Clay, spreading his cards on the table. "Beat four ladies."

"Here's your receipt," Ryan purred, displaying his hand. "The five to the nine—all clubs. That was certainly a lucky hunch of mine to play that three straight flush that way."

He reached leisurely to draw in the money, then sat back, hands on the table, close-set eyes glinting and alert, as Whelton came to his feet with a pistol in his hand.

"Leave that money alone!" the boy shouted. "That's too coarse work!"

He swept the pot toward him with his left hand, and began to pocket the bills.

"Look at my hand!" he cried to the other players, who were protesting, but sitting rigidly, their eyes on his waving gun. "Look at it! Everybody look at it. Four queens and what else? Look! A six of clubs. And he's got a six of clubs in that straight flush."

Ryan sat immobile, as stiff and dangerous as a coiled rattlesnake; but out of the tail of his eye Clay saw Caspar Berg, who had come back into the room and was behind him, reach toward his hip. He turned like a flash and fired, and Berg fell. He spun back to the table in time to see that Ryan, taking advantage of the diversion, had himself got to a gun. It was already in sight, coming up over the edge of the table. Clay fired again, full into Ryan's face. The gambler, his features a horrid blur, slipped slowly backward down his chair, and disappeared under the table.

There was shouting and confusion. Menacing them with his pistol, Whelton made for the door. He had nearly reached it when a shot came from over near the faro bank, and a man who was trying to get out of Clay's way grunted and fell, bleeding and cursing. The youngster turned to face the sound. The faro-bank dealer, no crack shot, fired again, and the bullet passed through Clay's hat.

Men were flattening themselves against the wall, diving under tables, falling over one another to either side. Whelton put two bullets into the faro dealer's body, one a fifth of a second after the other. The dealer stood swaying a second, seemed to be grinning foolishly, waved his pistol, fired a shot with apparent deliberation into the ceiling above his head, and collapsed, spread-eagled upon his layout.

In the doorway, backing out, Clay paused and threatened the room with his smoking weapon.

"If anybody comes out in the next five minutes, he gets it!" he called hoarsely.

He found himself in the open air, running, unhurt. Across the street, in front of the Palace Hotel, stood the little automobile of John MacCamish, owner of the Anne Bundy Mine. MacCamish had gone in merely for a drink, and the engine was running. Whelton leaped behind the steering-wheel and stepped on the clutch. As he gained speed, heading toward the near-by edge of town and the highway to Silver Lode, there was a popping of firearms behind him. He bent low over the wheel and gave her more gas. None of the shots hit either him or the car. He had the only automobile in Mullen City, and Mullen City was still too young to be connected with the outer world by telephone.

HE had killed three men: he knew where his bullets had struck, because his bullets always struck where he aimed. He who never before had shot at a man except legally, as a member of a sheriff's posse after some law-breaker, was now himself an outlaw. At this moment the sheriff was probably organizing the posse that would follow as fast as horses could bring them.

His mind ran back and forth over the lightning-like events that had made him a fugitive, resentful that Fate had selected him for such a rebuff. He visualized Ryan's face as he slumped down in his chair; the vacuous look of surprise in the faro dealer's eyes as he received the impact of the bullets. He wished he had not been such a fool as to play poker in that place.

Once he slowed the car down, half mindful to return and stand trial; he had killed solely in self-defense. Immediately, however, he put on speed again.

He must get as far away as possible. He had money with which to travel and to start life afresh at his journey's end—plenty of it. There must be at least four thousand dollars in the wads of bills in his left-hand trousers pocket, for he had pretty nearly cleaned the table when Berg went after a gun—and it was all his money, fairly won.

He gave up repining, or at least he pushed his regrets to the back of his mind, and set himself to planning. He would be at Silver Lode by midnight; the posse would get there not later, probably, than half past two. By virtue of MacCamish's flivver—it came to him that here was another criminal charge, the larceny of an automobile—he had out-raced the sheriff; now, in some manner, he must out-guess him.

He heard, as he stopped on the outskirts of Silver Lode, the whistle of a locomotive far off to the east—the westbound passenger train. He found a bit of paper in his pocket, and wrote upon it, in the glare of his headlight:

Mr. MacCamish: Sorry I had to take your car. Hope this will pay for the gasolene and wear on the tires.

He wrapped a ten-dollar bill in the note, and left it on the seat, weighted with a stone.

He boarded the passenger train at the head end, from the side opposite the station. He sank into a seat in the smoking-car, his hat over his eyes. When the conductor came through he paid a cash fare to the limit of the division—nearly a hundred miles west. But a half hour later, as the train slowed down for a water-tank, he slipped unostentatiously off. A freight train, east-bound, was waiting there for the passenger to pass. He found a car door open, and slipped in.

There was unusual light and noise at the Silver Lode station when the east-bound freight stopped there. From his

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place of concealment in the darkest corner of the car, Clay heard snatches of talk from prowling men. He made out that they were guarding the track on both sides to make certain, if he had not boarded the west-bound, that he should not get on this train. This was only a precaution, however. They were all reasonably certain he had caught the passenger, and he heard the opinion more than once expressed that the telegrams the sheriff was now sending would land him before morning.

The freight rattled, bumped, gained headway, slid out of Silver Lode to the east. He dropped out of his car unseen, just before daylight. Boldly he boarded a passenger local that came along soon after, and paid his fare, not to any large city, but to a small town less than two hundred miles farther on. Thus, riding short distances on unimportant trains, it took him five days to reach Denver. From there, after buying things he needed, he went in one jump to San Antonio.

At first he had thought he would go East, but they might expect him to head for Chicago or New York. After much cogitation he decided on Texas, because, while he had never been there, it also was a State not yet entirely settled and ordered, and he would feel more at home, and look, with his wide Western ways, less conspicuous. He had, too, in the back of his mind, the thought that it was well to be near a border. He got a map and studied the border counties in his hotel room, without much idea of where he wanted to go until, while he was muttering half aloud the names of some of the queer-sounding towns, he came to Cingalo.

Clay had no acquaintance with the Spanish tongue or its rules of pronunciation, and he repeated the word as "Single-O."

He said it again, and reached a decision while he said it. Here was his lucky number. "Single-O" was responsible for the roll of bank-notes in his pocket. He reflected grimly that it was also indirectly responsible for his being a fugitive. But he pushed that thought aside. He could have walked out of Montana Charley's with his twenty-three hundred dollars if he had not been such an idiot as to want to play poker.

He took a train to Cingalo. He had decided, after much weighing of pros and cons, on a new name and a new story to tell. He had a suit-case, and new clothes—but he sensibly had seen to it that his apparel was not all new. He had got a little mustache started. His hair was cut short on top and clipped on the back.

CLAY was conscious, as the train decanted him and his suit-case on the Cingalo platform at one o'clock of an October afternoon, that something unusual was taking place in the town. There was a knot of men in front of a one-story building a little way down the street who seemed to be in unexcited haste. Horses were standing there, and two or three small automobiles, and more men were coming. He observed that they were armed.

"What's the excitement?" he asked the hotel proprietor as he signed the soiled register.

"Greaser raid up the river," was the reply. "Sheriff he's raisin' a posse."

"What's the sheriff's name?"

"Rostron. Gus Rostron. Stranger around here, ain't you? Most South Texans have heard of Gus."

"I come from the West," said Clay, and went out to observe the formation of the posse.

A man on the outskirts of the little crowd told him the story. Mexicans—perhaps bandits from across the river, but as likely residents of Texas, with their naturalization papers in good order—had raided a small ranch, run off its horses, and killed the son of the owner. This had happened shortly before daylight, and the raiders had left no trail.

The sheriff came out of his building, in which the sign above the door indicated that he also conducted a real estate business, and surveyed the gathered group. He was a tall, lean man in the early fifties, with straightforward eyes, humorously wrinkled at the corners.

"It needs about seven different bunches of men," he said. "I wish there were a few more."

Acting on impulse, Clay pushed forward.

"Can I be of any help, sheriff?" he asked. "I don't mind sitting in."

He was a little excited at the realization that he was attracting a good deal of attention to himself. The sheriff appraised him swiftly, penetratingly.

"Why, I don't know," he said. "Every little helps. What's your name, stranger?"

"Wendell," Clay said glibly. "Harry Wendell."

"Texan?"

"Nevada," Whelton said.

He had decided it would be useless to lie about the State he came from. He knew little about any other, and probably would be tripped. His plan was to tell the exact truth about every non-essential.

"Ever shoot much? Ever serve on a posse back there?"

"I shoot a little. Yes, I've been on posses."

"Got a pistol on?"

Clay hadn't; he had been warned regarding the strict law against gun-toting in Texas.

"It's in my bag at the hotel," he said.

"Get it," Sheriff Rostron commanded laconically. "Wait a minute. Hold up your right hand. You're sworn in to serve as special deputy for to-day or until further orders. Now go hang on your pistol. Hurry, please, suh. We've got to start pronto."

AS Clay came running back, pistol in holster and extra cartridges in his pocket, the sheriff was again emerging from his office. The men of the posse were already divided into squads and were leaving in both directions.

"You ain't got a hawse, I reckon," Rostron said to him, "so you kin go along with me in my car." He squeezed in behind the wheel, and Clay jumped up beside him.

He devoted himself to the business of avoiding ruts and gullies and negotiating arroyos, which called for strict attention once they were clear of the village. It was some time before he spoke. Then:

"What part of Nevada you come from?" he asked suddenly.

"Thirty forty miles north of Silver Lode," Clay replied, without hesitation.

He had decided on this answer when the inevitable question should be asked, because Mullen City was south of Silver Lode.

"Silver Lode," the sheriff repeated, half to himself. "Seems to me I heard that name lately. Maybe it was a notice of some sort I got—somebody wanted, maybe. Been any killin's or hold-ups, or anything of that sort there, during the last month or so?"

"I guess maybe it was a shooting scrape over at a little place called Mullen City, a couple of days before I left up that way," Clay said promptly, although his heart thumped. "A young fellow shot up a gang of gamblers that tried to trim him. Whelton, his name was."

"That's him," said the sheriff. "Killed two or three men, as I recall it. Did they catch him?"

"They hadn't when I left." Then he added: "But they probably have by now. I heard in Silver Lode, as I came through, that he jumped a train there to the coast. It isn't very likely he could get away."

"That's so. What kind of an hombre was he? Ever meet up with him?"

"No. They said he wasn't bad, though. He just did this shooting, as I heard it, because the gang had him cornered and were drawing to get him. He didn't ever get in any trouble before." It occurred to him that he was making this defense a little too earnest. "But that's only what I heard," he added. "Maybe he had."

"Uh-huh," the sheriff agreed. "Bad men don't usually get bad all in a minute. But, at that, I've known some that did."

After a time a house appeared in the distance, miles from any other habitation. There was a man standing in front of it—a man with a high, rolling-brimmed straw sombrero.

"This is the hombre we've come to see," the sheriff remarked tersely. "Name's Flores—first name Pedro. Good Tex-Mex citizen: hear him tell it. I've had my eye on him quite some time. We'll see that he ain't totin' any pistol, and then we'll take him along with us and go take a look-see at what hawses he's got over in that corral of his."

The Mexican, hands hanging listlessly at his sides, stolidly observed their arrival. As the car came to a stop, Rostron slid out, his eyes watching the man alertly. Clay, in the absence of contrary instructions, remained in the car.

"Evenin', Pedro," the sheriff said. "You got any gun on?"

Flores, tall for his race, with Indian cheek-bones and straight jet-black hair, smiled with surprising pleasantness, displaying a row of even white teeth.

"No, Don Gustavo," he said. His voice was soft and polite. "I never carry peestol. You know, Don Gustavo, I'm good hombre."

"Yeah," replied the sheriff. "Let's see."

The Mexican seized the skirts of his coat with both hands and lifted them, displaying his belted waist, empty of holsters or firearms. He turned around.

"See?" he murmured. "No peestol. No, señor."

Rostron tapped him back and front, about the waist, to feel that no weapon was hidden. He let his own right hand drop from the butt of his pistol.

"All right," he said shortly. "Come along with me and let's take a look at your hawses."

THE sheriff's hand was no longer on his gun; the sheriff's eye no longer rested upon him—and down in the corral were horses, scheduled to go across the river after nightfall, whose brands would prove Pedro's ruin. He snatched the concealed Colt from his arm-hole, himself whirling so that its muzzle would bear on Rostron as it came clear.

Clay Whelton saw the motion, and shot the Mexican through the head.

The sheriff, pistol springing into his hand, wheeled like a cat. In the automobile was the stranger from Nevada, his gun trailing smoke. At his own feet lay the stiffening Mexican, a forty-five still gripped in the fingers of his clutching hand.

"He had it under his arm!" Clay exclaimed excitedly. "I had to do it."

"Snappy work, I'd say," Rostron replied quite calmly. He stooped over the Mexican. "Good, fatal shootin'," he approvingly commented. He rose. "It's hardly worth while, but we'll take a squint at the corral."

They found the stolen horses, and the sheriff decided to hasten back to town, to send men for them before dark.

"Was you aimin' to stay a while in Cingalo?" Rostron asked, as the town's houses came in sight.

"If I can find something worth while to do," Clay said. "I didn't mention it, but I was prospecting back there in Nevada, and I made a little strike and sold out. I've got a little money, two or three thousand, and I'm tired of mines. Mines are a gamble. I thought maybe I'd start a little store somewhere, if there was a chance. That's how I came to get off at Cingalo. I'm looking around."

"Well," the sheriff said, "it's kinds lucky you came, because I reckon Cingalo is just the town that needs you. Pete Williams, that run the general store, he died only last month. Miz Williams wants to sell out and go back to Oklahoma, where they come from. I could get you a right reasonable price on the store and stock. That's my business—handlin' real estate—when I ain't sheriffin'."

"I'd be mighty glad to look into it."

"And in the meantime"—they were

Continued on page 19

Who Is He?

HE was born, a poor farmer's son, on a rocky little farm in a midland county in New York State. He was one of several brothers and sisters. His mother had taught a country school in her girlhood, and he learned his first letters from her. By the time he was eight he had read the Bible from cover to cover. In those days that was an accomplishment of high merit. A quiet, thrifty boy he was, the neighbors said. He did chores and odd jobs for them, and the money thus earned he kept.

When he was twelve years old his father sold the unproductive little homestead and moved the family west to Ohio; friends had written glowing tales of that fertile State. He went to the public schools in Cleveland, and at the age of sixteen took a clerkship in a commission house.

By this time he was a tall, grave young man with a high, pale forehead, lips that he kept habitually glued, and eyes that nothing fooled. In two years he saved enough money to go into business for himself, and with a partner opened a rival commission house.

At the age of nineteen he was driving such clever bargains that old tradesmen and established firms sought his advice, with offers of coöperation. But—"It will not be to my advantage to accept your offers," said the young man coldly. He was a "steady" young man, with no bad habits, and he married early.

About this time a whisper of the new wonder of oil ran around the country. Fortunes were bubbling out of the ground daily. Men were becoming rich overnight. So the young man with the eyes that nothing fooled associated himself with an expert oil refiner, and a few years later built a large refinery, which he operated in partnership with his brother so successfully that five years later a great New York magnate affiliated himself with them and a corporation was formed, capitalized at $1,000,000. This was in the year 1870, when the young man was thirty-one years old. To-day that corporation is the most famous of its kind in all the world.

From that time on his energies were bent in obtaining control of the oil business of the entire country. To do this he needed the assistance of the railroads, which he secured by a shrewd system of rebates. Further competition was thus rendered impossible, and all rivals were quickly absorbed or driven out. Just twenty years after its formation the corporation stood alone in its field, and the farmer's son had become so rich that no fortune in the country could even be compared with his.

In the intervals of his unresting progress he devoted himself to many philanthropies and to religious enterprises, particularly such as were connected with the Baptist Church. His name became indelible on the records of organized "uplift."

To-day the farmer's son is an old, old man. He has no hair, and he has not eaten a square meal for years; but kings plead with him to lend them money and nations do his bidding.

Who is he?

Speed Work for Pipkin

By SEWELL FORD

Illustrations by F. Vaux Wilson

THERE was Pinckney and me and Mortimer Judders. Course, there was a hundred or two others on board the Southland Limited, not countin' the train crew and the minstrel aggregation in charge of the diner. But, bein' shut off the way we were, we didn't see much of the rest of the passengers. Oh, my, no! Judders couldn't have stood it to be mixed in promiscuous. So all we had was the drawin'-room and an adjoinin' compartment, which makes a real cute little two-room flat on wheels.

I don't mean we had a wheel-chair patient on our hands. No; Judders was just dead from the chin up. You know—one of the sleep-walkers. First few times I saw Judders, I thought he'd been doped. Maybe I've stated it a bit strong, but Judders wasn't what you'd call a real active member. Seemed like he was muscle-bound in the brain and was sufferin' from ossification of the temperament. And I never got over bein' surprised when he said anything on his own hook, or now and then revealed that he did have certain likes and dislikes.

Along in the late thirties, Judders was, and an old bachelor—of course. You couldn't imagine him ever havin' pep enough to try to get married, and I expect he never had. Whether or not he'd inherited this expensive system of livin' along with his preferred stocks and six per cent bonds, I never found out. But he had it. Oh, yes; nothing impulsive or offhand about Judders' program of life. Near as I could figure, he'd been followin' the same routine, year in and year out, ever since he'd come into his pile.

No, that's wrong. I did hear Pinckney mention how he changed his rooms at the club once, and one season he went to Bermuda instead of Piney Springs, Georgia. Outside of that, though, he'd stuck to schedule—startin' South right after the first two weeks of grand opera, comin' up in April, goin' to Tuxedo June 15, and landin' back at the club the Saturday after Labor Day.

Not such a poor order of events, I'll admit. Strikes me I could follow that and have more or less fun. But it does seem wasted on Judders. I should have said he'd been just as contented, providin' he'd started that way, if he'd been planted in dry sand about up to his neck, same as they keep some kinds of vegetables. Just as useful to society that way, too.

YOU might think it odd of Pinckney, trailin' around such a non-conductor, bein' about as much of a live wire himself as you'd find in a week's hunt. But that's Pinckney—always showin' up with some queer gink or other, and lettin' on how there's a lot more to 'em than any one suspects.

"Huh!" says I, after he's sprung Mortimer on me for the first time. "Is he all bone above the eyes, or what?"

"Nothing of the kind, Shorty, I assure you," says Pinckney. "My friend Judders has a mental equipment rather over than under the average."

"Hides it well," says I.

"Besides," goes on Pinckney, "he has an amazingly even disposition, as well as many excellent traits of character which I am discovering from time to time."

"You're some grand little explorer, Pinckney," says I. "It's a pity there ain't more poles to be located."

"Ah!" says he, lightin' another cigarette. "What is the finding of a certain point of latitude compared to the most trivial excursion into that vast uncharted mystery, the mind of man?"

"Eh?" says I, gawpin'.

"My latest theory about Judders," says he, "is that he lacks merely the subconscious initiative. It is there, of course, but dormant."

"Meanin'," says I, makin' a wild stab, "that he needs a jolt somewhere to make him come out of the spell?"

"Quite so," says Pinckney. "And I have an idea, Shorty, that between us we can supply the necessary psychic urge."

"Ah, come!" says I. "Lay off ringin' me in. I'm dizzy now."

But a day or so later Pinckney tows him in again. His new hunch is that what Judders needs most is some of my physical culture work—a half-hour boxin' lesson every day.

"After all," says Pinckney, "it may be an indolent liver."

"Sometimes it is," says I.

As a matter of fact, Mortimer does look a little yellow. But say, you might as well try teachin' a guinea-pig to play Kelly pool. Mortimer's notion of boxin' is to hold the gloves out rigid, like he was offerin' 'em for sale, and gaze at me amiable. No good rappin' him on the beak, or steamin' one in on his ribs. He just acts surprised and puzzled. The wand drill and medicine-ball stunts was more in his line. He got quite interested in that work, specially when I made kind of a game of it. Did him good, too, so far as his general health went. But when it came to developin' what Pinckney calls the psychic urge, there's nothin' doin'.

"It's higher up than the liver," says I. "Where he's torpid is between the ears."

THEN it came time for Judders to go South, as per schedule, and he staggers both of us by proposin' that I go along and relieve the monotony of the trip by givin' him his usual exercises.

"Where?" says I. "On the Pullman roof?"

"Couldn't we manage something of the sort in a drawing-room?" he asks. And when he suggests that he'll pay fifty a day and expenses, I figures I can't afford to stay at home.

"By Jove!" says Pinckney. "If you two are going to do traveling gymnasium work all the way to Georgia, hanged if I don't trot along, too. It ought to be worth watching."

So that's how we come to be sportin' around in all this transportation space. And by openin' up the two compartments we did have quite a lot of room to step around in. Anyway, I managed to give Mortimer enough exercise the first afternoon out so he got in a good night's sleep.

IT was about nine o'clock next mornin', and we was just finishin' breakfast in the dinin'-car, when we notices that the train is makin a longer stop than the usual water-tank halt. The word is passed around that an air-couplin' had gone bad and the brakes on the rear sleeper have been set. A lot of passengers was pilin' off, so we follows.

And you know how good it seems to get out of them stuffy cars, where they use the same air from November to June, and pump in a fresh supply that ain't loaded with dust and cinders. Besides, we'd left half a foot of slush on Broadway, with more snow bein' added, while down here the warm sun was dryin' up a light frost and the grass alongside the tracks was still green. Over in a field to the right some darkies was doin' a little late cotton-pickin'. On the other side is what passes for a town, I suppose. There's a wooden station that might have been painted once, a general store with a couple of mule teams hitched in front, maybe a dozen frame houses, and a two-storied shack that somebody's had the nerve to call a hotel.

"Cunnin' little metropolis, ain't it?" says I. "Wonder what they call it?"

"This," says Pinckney, "is the fair village of Pipkin, South Carolina."

"Pipkin, eh?" says I. "Looks it. I hope we ain't tied up here for any length of time."

That remark seems to stir something in Mortimer's mind. He glances around disapprovin' on Pipkin in general, and then taps Pinckney on the arm.

"I say," says he, "what if one did have to stay in such a place for—well, for a week or so?"

"But why not?" demands Pinckney.

"Don't!" protests Mortimer. "That's too absurd."

If he'd known Pinckney as well as I do, he wouldn't have put it just that way. I could tell he'd made a mistake the minute I saw that flicker in Pinckney's black eyes.

"My dear Mortimer," says Pinckney, "to be absurd now and then is the high privilege of man alone. Also, it is that which adds the fine savor to existence. Now, neither of us has the vaguest idea as to what living in Pipkin is like. Here is our opportunity to find out. Let's."

"Oh, I say!" gasps Mortimer.

"Your own suggestion," comes back Pinckney. "An inspired impulse! Who knows? And we've just time to do it. Here, porter! Get those bags of ours off, right away."

"But—but, Pinckney!" wails Mortimer, that long, vacant face of his suddenly registerin' seven kinds of agitated emotion.

"Quit your kiddin'," I puts in.

NO use. Pinckney is shovin' a fiver at Rastus and urgin' him to get a jump on. When I sees that he means it I takes a hand at helpin', gatherin' up stray articles that we'd left layin' around. Meantime the train crew has mended the air-pipes, there comes a warnin' whistle from the engine, and as I dashes out on my second trip the last of the passengers was climbin' aboard. So I drapes an overcoat on Judders' right arm, jams his shavin' kit and a couple of collars into his hands, and balances his derby on top of his travelin' cap. As he sees the train movin' off without him, he lets out a desperate groan, and we fairly had to hold him from runnin' after it.

"But I—I simply can't stay here," he moans.

"How do you know until you've tried?" says Pinckney. "Which is precisely what what we are about to do."

"But this—this is awful," insists Judders.

"Mortimer," says Pinckney, backin' him against a heap of kit-bags and suit-cases and makin' him sit down, "allow me to correct your point of view. You seem to think life is a fixed, cut-and-dried affair—a tread-mill. Well, it isn't. It is a glorious, splendid adventure."

Mortimer tried to crash in with some gulpy remark about not carin' for adventure, but Pinckney cuts him off:

"You think it essential to your comfort and happiness that you should go, at this exact date every year, to that inexpressibly dull Piney Springs of yours. I know perfectly well what you do there, for I've watched you at it. Every forenoon you play a wretched game of golf with some other duffer, and for the rest of the day you sit around trying to convince yourself that you're not horribly bored. While here—here you have before you Pipkin—fresh, untried, unexploited; new surroundings; a new manner of life; perhaps the most entertaining of episodes awaiting. Then ho for Pipkin!"

Course, it's a nutty line of talk, but with Mortimer's face to watch I couldn't help enjoyin' it. If he'd been dropped on a desert island he couldn't have looked more dazed or desperate. He just sits there on the baggage, clutchin' his razor-strop and shavin' brush, starin' down the track after the disappearin' train.

"Don't quite seem to get that

Concluded on page 15

LOST, STRAYED, OR KIDNAPPED

WHAT BECOMES OF FOOTBALL HEROES?

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IT PAYS TO BE KIND AND GOOD

Continued from page 10

adventure stuff, does he?" says I. "Acts more like he thought life was a term in jail."

"Oh, give him time," says Pinckney. "Now suppose we see about accommodations."

THAT didn't take long. The landlord of the Pipkin House was snoozin' in a porch chair not two hundred feet away. He wasn't keen at first about bein' roused up, but Pinckney finally got him to show us what he had in the way of rooms. Anyway, he called 'em rooms. They looked more like box-stalls to me. I expect a finicky mule-buyer or a real particular fertilizer agent would have put up a holler over 'em; but Pinckney only gives me the grin and says how we'll take 5, 7, and 9.

"Of course," he adds, "you will have them thoroughly cleaned and aired. I would suggest fresh sheets, too; and I am sure you can find some water pitchers that are not cracked."

"Excuse me, Mister," says the landlord, "but what you-all think yer gittin' fer a dollar'n a half?"

"Ah, ha! Your error," says Pinckney, pokin' him playful in the ribs. "We are paying three dollars a day each—perhaps four. It depends upon how good a dinner you can get for us. I am leaving that entirely to you. But please try to make it worth four."

"Ah suttinly will, suh," says the landlord.

When he gives his whole attention to it he's some jollier, Pinckney. And slippin' a five or a ten here and there along with his josh he surely can get things done. When we struck the Pipkin House it hardly looked like a goin' concern. Half an hour later it was fairly hummin' with busy hands. Two darkies were sweepin' off the front porch, another was scrubbin' the office floor, others was shakin' rugs from the upper windows, and out back we could hear some women-folks directin' a chicken chase. By the squawks I could make a good guess as to what might happen for dinner. Honest, when we come to lift Mortimer off the baggage and lead him up there was hardly any quiet spot to put him. So we started out on a sandy road that wanders off into the tall longleaf pines and walked him about four miles.

And you know it ain't half so bad as it looks from the car windows, this South Carolina section of the map. Specially on such a mellow January day as this. For one thing, you get reg'lar breathin' air—clean and piny smellin' and full of pep. Then, there's so many things to see—little coffee-colored brooks meanderin' across the road, quail whirrin' up from the bushes, and white woolly clouds floatin' lazy in the blue sky.

In the clearin's we came across little groups of darky cabins with mud-chinked walls and mud chimneys and groups of pickaninnies playin' around. At one place Pinckney bought a live turkey and sent it back to the hotel. At another he bargained for a roastin' pig, to be delivered next day. Even Mortimer almost smiled as he stood watchin' the antics of them little razor-backs.

"How odd!" says he. "Do you know, I

never knew before that pigs—er—came in such small sizes."

"They don't on Fifth Avenue," says I. "How's your dinner appetite about now?"

"Really," says he, "I am getting quite hungry."

He was more than that before we landed back at the hotel, and he had begun askin' Pinckney if one could manage to get a decent meal at such a place.

"One never knows," says Pinckney. "But that makes this sort of thing all the more interesting."

I'll confess the dinin'-room didn't look promisin'—a dingy table-cloth, thick crockery, and a full assortment of ketchup bottles, pickle jars, and vinegar cruets starin' at us. But say, when the fried chicken and sweet potatoes and hominy cakes was set on we forgot such trifles as nicked plates and damp napkins. We went to it like hired hands after a twelve-hour day.

"That's what I call a reg'lar meal," says I, finishin' my third hominy cake with honey.

"Thankee, suh," says the landlord. "Every one around heah allows th' missus is some cook when she spreads herself."

Then we loafs around outside in the sun until Pinckney suggests we do some more explorin'.

"I say," he asks the landlord, "what are the principal objects of interest in your town?"

"Well," says the landlord thoughtful, "there's Grimes's brickyard, down the road a spell."

"Good!" says Pinckney. "We will inspect it."

"Oh, I say!" protests Judders.

"Mortimer," says Pinckney, "did you ever visit a real brickyard? Ah, I thought not! No more have I. Then here is our opportunity."

So off we tramps again until we gets to this huddle of tumble-down sheds surroundin' a smeary hole in a clay bank. I must say, it ain't much of a sight; but Pinckney pretends to get real thrilled over it.

"Just think!" says he. "Here is an important industrial process of which we are utterly ignorant. If we could only find this Mr. Grimes, now— Ah, I wonder if this can be the man?"

IT could and was. He's a picturesque old patriarch with a full set of long-staple whiskers and jutty eyebrows. He's sittin' on a stump watchin' three slow movin' darkies who are shovelin' red clay into wheelbarrows and trundlin' 'em up out of the pit on a string of rotten planks. He admits that his name is Grimes and that he owns the outfit. Also, bein' urged by Pinckney, he sketches out how the clay is handled, from the time it's dug out until it leaves the firm' kilns for the stackin' sheds.

"And then," says Pinckney, "the bricks are ready to be shipped off and made into homes and factories and garden walls. How interesting!"

"Mebby," says Mr. Grimes. "But fer a man who's tryin' to pile up enough to carry him back to Schenectady, York State, it's a mighty poor business proposition."

"But, my dear sir," says Pinckney, "why leave such a charmingly named town for a city with so unlovely a name as that?"

"Names don't count much with me," says Grimes. "Besides, my old friend, Jeb Snyder, lives in Schenectady; and now that my daughter's married and moved off, and the old woman's gone—well, I kinder got a hankerin' to see Jeb onct more. Don't look like I'd fetch it, though."

"Then I am to understand," says Pinckney, "that you find the brick business unprofitable?"

"Make enough to keep alive, that's about all," says Grimes, tampin' down his old pipe. "Wisht I could sell out, that's what I wish."

"Ah!" says Pinckney, his eyes sparklin'. "You would sell? And at what figure?"

"Why," says Grimes, "if I could git fifteen hundred cash I—I'd— But say, stranger, you don't happen to know anybody that'd want to buy, do ye?"

"Yes," says Pinckney prompt. "This gentleman here, Mr. Mortimer Judders, would be delighted to purchase your brickyard."

"Wha—what's that?" gasps Mortimer.

"See how enthusiastic he is?" says Pickney, nudgin' Grimes. "I suppose it has been one of his secret ambitions for years, and now that the happy chance has brought the thing actually within his reach—"

"Please, Pinckney!" breaks in Judders. "Really, you know, I don't wish to own a brickyard."

"Yesterday, Mortimer, I might have believed you," says Pinckney. "But you've given yourself away. Who was it suggested stopping off at Pipkin? You, Mortimer. No use denying it. And I presume you thought we would not notice how eager you were to get out here. But we did, didn't we, Shorty? Well, there is nothing unmanly about such a desire, nor any good reason why it should not be gratified. Perhaps you have a special, heaven-sent gift for brickmaking. Who knows? Thus far it has been latent, lying hidden in the bud. But now—well, all that is necessary for you to enter on your chosen career is the mere writing of a check. Professor McCabe, let Mr. Judders take your fountain-pen."

"But, Pinckney, I—I—" begins Mortimer.

Whatever he meant to say, he couldn't get it out. I don't know if you'd call it mesmerism, or what. Maybe it was just that it's so seldom he has a new proposition batted up to him sudden that he's simply stunned. And then, he'd been so used to followin' Pinckney's lead that I expect he didn't know how to duck. Anyway, he acts like he was in a trance. And the next thing I know, he's taken the pen and is writin' what Pinckney tells him. As for Grimes, he's almost as much staggered as Judders.

"There!" says Pinckney, handin' over the check. "Now make out a bill of sale, Mr. Grimes, and to-morrow the deed for the land can be transferred. Congratulations, Mortimer. You are now a captain of industry."

I don't know what move Pinckney looked for from Judders. Ten to one, all he saw was a chance to put over something foolish on him, just for the sake of seein' how Mortimer would take it. Well, for a while there you'd think he'd been gassed in the trenches. Honest! We didn't get a word out of him for more'n two hours. And then, as we're sittin' around a pine-knot fire in the hotel office, waitin' for supper, he murmurs once or twice, sort of to himself:

"Bricks! Making bricks in a brickyard!"

"Quite so," says Pinckney. "Beautiful thought, isn't it?"

"I—I don't know," says Judders, starin' at the fire.

HE turned into the feathers early that night, before nine o'clock, leavin' Pinckney and me gassin' with the landlord and old man Grimes. Mortimer must have been up an hour or more when we came down in the mornin', for he'd finished breakfast and was waitin' for us in the dinin'-room.

"Do you know," says he, "I've been thinking a lot about this brickmaking business."

"Naturally, Mortimer," says Pinckney. "Being in it, you're bound to."

"I don't see," goes on Judders, "why it shouldn't be made to pay."

"Eh?" says Pinckney, gazin' across the table at him.

"I happen to know a chap," says Mortimer, "who gets quite a large income from brickyard interests—up the Hudson somewhere. Manages the business himself, I believe. Harkley is the name—Joe Harkley."

"Oh, yes," says Pinckney. "I've met him at the club, haven't I?"

Mortimer don't seem to hear the question, but rambles along.

"Now, it occurs to me," says he, "that Mr. Grimes may not be using the best methods. Those darkies with wheelbarrows—such a slow way. There ought to be— I say, Pinckney, if I could get Harkley to lend me a few men—a foreman and some brickmakers who know their job thoroughly—and with some up-to-date machinery, I—I believe I could make a go of it!"

It's Pinckney who's gaspin' now.

"By George!" says he. "You—you really mean to try it? You are going to stay—here?"

"Of course," apologizes Mortimer, "I am no business man. I have never done anything of the sort. But, as you mentioned yesterday, this may be precisely the one thing I can do. It—it would be rather interesting to try, wouldn't it? And, while this hotel is somewhat crude, I think I could fix up some decent quarters here. I might buy a half interest, you know, put in a few baths, enlarge some of the rooms, set up a small electric light plant for the town, get the railroad to run a spur track out to the brickyard, and—"

"Stop!" says Pinckney, holdin' up both hands. "Are you joking, Mortimer?"

Judders gives him an injured look.

"Certainly not," says he, gettin' up and startin' for the door.

"But—but where are you going?" asks Pinckney.

"To telegraph Harkley," says he.

"Fancy!" gasps Pinckney, as the door slams. "Mortimer!"

"Listens like you'd started something for Pipkin, don't it?" says I.

And he sure had. We stayed on long enough to see the first gang arrive, a superintendent with half a dozen men, who reports that two car-loads of machinery was followin'. Also we saw the carpenters start work on Mortimer's three-room suite, and looked over his plans for the new power house.

When we left, he was pacin' up and down the hotel office, dictatin' letters to a stenographer, while outside were two county commissioners, some railroad men, an automobile agent, and four contractors, all waitin' to see him. And we had to dodge painters, paper-hangers, and steam-fitters as we struggled through the front door.

"Think of it!" says Pinckney. "Mortimer! I would hardly recognize him as the same person."

"He ain't," says I. "And if that psychic urge stuff holds out for six months you won't know Pipkin, either."

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

THAT CURIOUS FELLOW NORTHCLIFFE

ALL the year round he takes care of himself like an athlete. He is fifty-two now, and as hard as nails. He goes to bed every night at nine o'clock, and is up promptly in the morning at six. And from that moment to the end of the day he is constantly on the move, says the Arkansas Gazette.

In 1899 Lord Northcliffe—plain Alfred Harmsworth then—drew up a series of rules for his own success:

Concentrate your energies, and work hard.
Launch out in new experiments.
Never be afraid to have the courage of your opinions.
Fix the lines you want to travel along, and keep on them.
That's all.

At sixteen he went to London. The papers were full of the new process for making cheap paper from wood-pulp. Harmsworth figured that all of the then existing publications were edited for a comparatively few people, never reaching the masses at all. At twenty-one he launched a weekly paper called Answers, printed on cheap paper and filled with short articles. It would never go, people said: it was too strange, too different. Yet some years later Harmsworth sold it for $6,000,000.

When he bought the Daily Mail he threw out the former system of paying reporters for the amount of space they filled. Instead he paid the highest rate to the man who could get a big story into small space. It was to be a "tabloid" paper.

To-day it has the largest circulation of any paper in England: and Harmsworth is England's most influential as well as one of England's richest men.

From the Man Who has Interviewed More Millionaires than Any Other Writer in America

"THE more I dig into the lives of successful men, the more convinced I become that they all have to travel the same sort of hilly road, sweating brow and brain, meeting and overcoming obstacles, but never losing sight of their lode-star, no matter how great the provocation. The scale that weighs success and mediocrity, I verily believe, oftentimes is tipped by an extra ounce or two of energy, an additional hour or two of labor, an added hour or two of foresight."

B. C. FORBES.

DRINKING AT THE FRONT

WHEN our boys get "over there," many of them will be quartered in French homes. They will immediately be confronted with the problem of French wines, and on this problem Colonel Azan, a French officer now in this country to train recruits, has this to say in the Survey:

"The idea that our French wines, ranging from 10 to 23 per cent of alcohol, are harmless, is worse than nonsense. I have been at the front for months now, and have had my men drunk again and again from drink known as our light French wines. The fact is, men are not satisfied with a thimbleful of wine. They drink one bottle, two bottles—before you know it they have really drunk as much alcohol as when they take whisky; and the result is the same—drunkenness.

"I tell you, drunkenness at the front is an abomination, and if you want to prevent it you have got to stop wine drinking just as much as distilled liquor drinking."

The Colonel strongly advises the American soldier to say to his French host: "My commander-in-chief has forbidden me to drink anything while in France." The French have a strong regard for discipline, and will respect that attitude; and after a bit the abstinence of the Americans will be understood, and wine will not be offered.

While the "rum ration" is still given to men before they go "over the top," Colonel Azan doubts the practical value of this also. An artificial courage is temporarily evoked by the rum; but the men who do not drink it generally take greater precautions and have a better chance of coming through alive.

WHAT TO DO WITH A TALENTED CHILD

MOST great men—especially those who have developed extraordinary talents along certain lines—have been notoriously bad pupils, says Dr. Arnold Lorand in his book, Building Human Intelligence (F. A. Davis Company).

If you want your son, who is stupid at his lessons, to become a great man in spite of this, study him carefully to find out what he likes to do best, and then help him to develop along those lines. Do not be like Michelangelo's father, who tried to compel him, even by physical punishment, to relinquish his inclination for modeling; or like Pascal's parent, who hid from his son all geometrical figures. Pascal could not be suppressed, however, and drew on the floor of his room all kinds of geometrical figures with charcoal. Handel, when a child, could play only secretly because of his father's prohibition.

"That such pupils were distracted by their preference for other subjects, and did not follow the lessons, is quite natural," says Dr. Lorand. "They became absent-minded, and thus, although otherwise very talented children, were bad pupils."

Often talents become manifest in children by some accidental event that awakens in them a great desire. Something like this happened to Dr. Lorand himself.

"There came into my home town in Hungary a committee of Turkish students, and in the streets we heard hurrah cries in Turkish: "Csok Jasa." These exclamations greatly excited my curiosity, and so I bought with my meager spending money a Turkish grammar. When my mother found me twice at two o'clock in the morning studying it, she took it away from me. When I found the book and went to studying again, she burned it. I then acquired a Spanish grammar and studied Spanish, and then a Russian grammar. Thus, in spite of all the whippings I received, I learned several languages simultaneously."

DON'T ARGUE WITH YOUR EMPLOYER

"DON'T argue with your employer," says Margaret B. Owen, the world's champion typist, in The Secret of Typewriting Speed (Forbes & Company), even if he is wrong or unjust or in need of advice. "Let him have his own way. He is running his business, and if he makes a mistake because of his judgment, it certainly is not your fault. Remain silently agreeable unless you are absolutely sure that something you know is of the greatest importance."

If you are seeking a position, do not tell your prospective employer how many words you can write a minute. Your "words per minute" record is of more interest to you than to him. What he wants is the finished transcript, neatly, perfectly, and quickly written. Follow his dictation exactly, unless he makes a mistake, in which case correct it yourself without calling his attention to it.

Be sure to get everything down clearly in your shorthand notes. When your employer asks you what he "said last," quote the entire sentence from the preceding period, so he will get the sense of what he is dictating. Be glad to rewrite the letter rather than try to convince him that he "dictated it that way."

KIND WORDS FOR THE CROW

THE crow, which has had a bad name for generations, now finds a defender in Norman Criddle, a scientist, who writes in the Agricultural Gazette of Canada.

That the crow does eat corn and otherwse make trouble, he admits. But he points out that the crow also follows the plow as closely as he dares, and is death on worms and destructive insects.

"A remarkable example of how crows sometimes aid farmers was witnessed near Treesbank, Manitoba, in September, 1915," says Mr. Criddle. "There was a destructive outbreak of army-worms at this time, which, having eaten all the available vegetation in the close vicinity, were marching over a roadway in enormous numbers to attack a field of oats. Here it was that the crows found them, and soon caused a very appreciable reduction in their numbers. This flock of crows, which was estimated at 3,000, had previously been frequenting a locust-infested area, which they speedily forsook for the more palatable army-worms. Apart from their value as destroyers of noxious insects, crows also kill mice and young rabbits."

---

KEEP THE CHILDREN ON MILK

ONE thing to make sure of is that the children are getting enough protein, in these days of Hooverism; and protein does not necessarily mean meat and eggs, says the Bulletin of the New York Health Department. Milk supplies not only easily digested protein and indispensable mineral salts, but it actually provides more energy-producing substances (fuel food) than do either meat or eggs at the same price.

This is well brought out in the following comparison:

Bottled milk at 14 cents a quart. One cent buys 46 calories (fuel food), including 1-15 ounce of protein (building food).

Porterhouse steak at 35 cents a pound. One cent buys 30 calories (fuel food), including 1-15 ounce of protein (building food).

Eggs at 60 cents a dozen. One cent buys 16 calories (fuel food), including 1-30 ounce of protein (building food).

At the above prices, one quart of milk supplies as much food as 10 ounces of porterhouse steak or 8 eggs.

THEIR MAJOR

FROM one of the hottest spots along the British line in France comes a heartening story told by Cecil Somers in Temporary Heroes (John Lane Company):

"The people over the way are Saxons, a peace-loving band. The other day at 'stand to' in the morning we discovered that during the night they had put up a notice on the parapet of their trench. As it became light we were able to make it out. Here it is:

WE ARE SAXONS
YOU HAVE KILLED OUR MAJOR
HE WAS A PRUSSIAN
THANK YOU

DOES IT TIRE YOU TO WORK?

DO you feel fagged and exhausted at the end of your day's work? The trouble is likely to be, not that you've had too much work to do, but that you've wasted too much energy in doing it. In Fatigue Study, by Frank B. and Lillian M. Gilbreth (Sturgis & Walton Company), the authors prove that a given task can be accomplished with much less fatigue if you have the right sort of a chair to sit in, the proper arrangement of your desk or work-bench so that you waste no motions, lights that do not glare into your eyes or cast a dazzling reflection, and frequent rest periods.

"The effects of fatigue are more difficult to overcome as the fatigue becomes greater. A little fatigue is easily overcome if the proper rest is supplied. Twice the amount of fatigue requires more than twice the amount of rest, and so on, until finally a state of excessive fatigue requires a rest period that might have to be prolonged indefinitely."

THE SOLITARY CONFINEMENT CLUB

CATHERINE BRESHKOVSKY, the "Little Mother of the Russian Revolution," is not a peasant. Her father was the son of a Polish aristocrat, and her mother, too, was of noble blood. She was born in 1844. All around her, in her youth, were evidences of the oppression of the old régime. She grew up with the pleas of peasants in her ears, and the time came when she could leave home and, in the city, join herself with the group of young idealists who were laying the foundation for the revolution.

She was working in the country districts, distributing revolutionary literature and talking privately with the peasants, when the police took her. She was led away to a sinister-looking building, and down into the Black Hole.

"I was pushed in, the heavy door slammed, and bolts rattled in total darkness," she is quoted as saying in the new book about her edited by Alice Stone Blackwell (Little, Brown & Company). "I took a step forward and slipped, for the floor was soft with filth. I stood still until, deadly sick, I sank down on a pile of straw and rags. A moment later I was stung sharply back to consciousness, and sprang up covered with vermin. I leaned against the walls, and found them wet. So I stood up all night in the middle of the hole. And this was the beginning of Siberia."

She was kept two years in solitary confinement in Petrograd:

In solitary confinement? No. I joined a social club. On that first night I lay in my cell motionless, and solitary confinement began to work on my mind, as the System planned it should. Suddenly I sat up quickly. I could hear nothing; but as I started to lie down, my ear again approached the iron pipe supporting my cot. Tick, tick, tickity, tick, tick. I felt along the pipe and found that it went through to the next cell. I had once heard a code planned at a meeting in Moscow, but I could not recall it. At last I had an idea. There are thirty-five letters in the Russian alphabet. I rapped once. Then twice. Then three times. So on until for the last letter I rapped thirty-five. No response. Again, slowly and distinctly. My heart was beating fast. Steps came down the corridor. The guard approached and passed my door. His steps died away. Suddenly—tick—tick—tick—and through to thirty-five. Then slowly we spelled out words, and by this clumsy code the swifter code was taught me.

Our club had over a hundred members in solitary confinement; some in cells on either side of mine, some below, and some above. Did we tell stories? Yes—and good ones. Young students—keen wits—high spirits. How some of those youngsters made love! A mere boy, two cells to my right, vowed he adored the young girl of nineteen five cells to my left on the floor above, whom he had never set eyes on. I helped tick his gallant speeches and her responses continually along.

WOMEN AS BANKERS

EVEN before the war began to take men away, the great banking institutions of the country had begun to recognize the peculiar fitness of women for a business requiring so much of accuracy and fidelity as do banks. A recent canvass of the banks of New York made by a committee of women indicates that the opportunity for women will be steadily larger.

"In the National City Bank," says the report, "325 women are already employed; in the Guaranty Trust Company, 200; the Chase National Bank, 56; Farmers' Loan and Trust Company, 76; Bankers' Trust Company, 160; National Park Bank, 75; Equitable Trust Company, 100; Corn Exchange Bank, 70 in one department; Brown Brothers, 60.

"The percentage of women to men employed runs as high as one to three or four. In only two of the banks visited were the investigators told that women would not be employed under any circumstances."

THE MARRIAGE MARKET IN GERMANY

MARRIAGEABLE men are growing very scarce in Germany, and girls, who before the war waited coyly to be won, are now going vigorously about the important matter of marriage, using the modern machinery of advertising.

"One afternoon I was giving a message to one of my patients, a very high German officer," says Adele Blenau in A Nurse's Story (Bobbs-Merrill). "I had been with him but a few minutes when, putting his finger to his lips, he whispered in French, 'They're letter-writing in the next room—if we are quiet I think we can hear; it's very funny.' I listened; the men were talking about matrimony, discussing it as a pure question of market value. They were reading matrimonial advertisements from a German newspaper. General von T— said to me: 'The war has changed the attitude of young girls, and older ones too, who have means and are seeking suitable mates. They have greatly increased their efforts, while marriageable men are becoming correspondingly shy. The women are getting less particular in their requirements,' he chuckled. 'A girl with twenty-five thousand marks would hardly have advertised before the war for anything less than an officer of the army or navy; now she will gladly accept what is technically described as a "better gentleman."'

"A moment later we heard the nurse reading:

"'Well born, tall, pleasing in appearance, thirty-two years old, seek suitable companion for life, having in my own right large fortune; no anonymous communications and no agents.'

"We fancied that advertisement sounded interesting to the soldier to whom it was read, for he lowered his voice and seemed to be dictating an answer."

MISTAKES

Are They Liabilities or Assets?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

JIMMIE worked that night till half-past nine, getting out the final figures for the year, and the general manager waited to see them. But when Jimmie brought in the sheets his face was ghastly green.

"Mr. Rowan—my God! I've made a mistake somewhere! I'm two thousand dollars short!"

The manager looked up quickly and asked one question:

"Was it an honest mistake, Jimmie?"

"Yes, sir—absolutely. How can I face the board to-morrow?"

"You don't have to face them," was the reply. "I face them. That was my mistake."

"But you don't understand! It's two thousand dollars, and I can't find the money."

"I don't want to understand," said the manager. "I simply did it, and the mistake is on me. Now go home and go to sleep."

That was five years ago. Jimmie has never made that kind of mistake since; and his error—due to taking something for granted in a turnover of half a million dollars—has been worth many hundreds of thousands since to the house and himself, to say nothing of the manager, who understood the money and moral value of a properly utilized mistake.

There is more to be learned from one clean, honest error, as a rule, than from a dozen successes. But not everybody in the business world comprehends this. Men like to discuss their successes but hide details about their errors; and the business world loses much valuable information thereby. Worse yet, men in authority hold subordinates to a petty and short-sighted conception of mistakes, regarding them as wrong and useless, whereas they are a natural accompaniment of efficient work, and highly valuable in maintaining good standards.

The common attitude toward mistakes is still much like that of the railroads ten years ago, when the employee who made a blunder was brought up "on the carpet" for a lecture, or lost his job. That made every error a dread liability.

The "Batting Average"

BUT the right attitude is found in the present railroad system of merits and demerits, under which each commendable performance is entered to the employee's credit, along with his length of service; and these balance his account when there is a blunder to be charged against him. That system may not transform an error into an asset, but it provides sound assets of service that offset a blunder. It is the idea of the batting average, which judges a man, not by a single shortcoming or temporary "bonehead play," but weighs his whole character, and his length of service.

Blunders are turned into actual assets by one of the most successful managers of men in this country—a corporation executive.

This executive is suspicious of a man who apparently makes no blunders, especially if he is a new man. For he knows that it is human to blunder, and suspects that mistakes are being cleverly hidden. The first big chance he ever had at management was in a factory where thousands of dollars' worth of merchandise was being concealed in rubbish every year because the former superintendent penalized spoiled work without discussion or investigation.

The new man stopped all that by bringing spoiled work out into the open, to be remedied by better team-work between men and management.

This taught him to encourage openness about blunders, and to regard mistakes as valuable danger signals.

For example, Tom comes into the organization—a new man and an unknown quantity. He soon demonstrates dash in selling, which is good. Suddenly, just when Tom ought to be arriving among the star travelers, he makes an awful blunder—an error in figuring prices or supplying credit information that causes loss and trouble.

If the boss had no philosophy of mistakes, that would probably be the point at which Tom dropped off the pay-roll altogether. But this executive had been watching for such an error. Knowing that Tom is a wonder at dashing individuality, he is on the alert to find out where he may be weak. This blunder shows like a lightning flash. Tom is weak at details, such as figures or the gathering of credit information, and so must be watched on those points.

What Tom needs, very likely, is to be hitched up for team-work with Sandy, who is canny about figures and credits, but lacks the dash to land difficult orders which would be easy for Tom.

A Mistake is Sometimes a Danger Signal

NOT only the newcomer's blunders are assets in the eyes of this executive, but those of old-timers as well. A little slip may be the danger signal of worry or overwork, or of some other curable condition.

To demand that there be no blunders at all is to aim at the impossible—nothing less than human perfection!

But to profit by reasonable human errors is to do what astronomers learned to do years ago. Astronomers found that several different observers would each arrive at different results in making an observation, and that each observer's errors, though slight, were part of himself and not to be eliminated. So this personal margin of error was taken into account as the "personal equation," and calculated for each man. Then, when the final results had been corrected by the personal equations, the observation stood out mathematically exact.

War Didn't Scare Selfridge

ONE merchant in England refused to lose his head when the war broke out; refused to cut salaries or slash expenses; refused to believe that the end of the world had come. That merchant is an American, Gordon Selfridge; and last year his store paid the government an excess profits tax of $200,000.

"When the war broke out," Mr. Selfridge told George T. Bye of the Nation's Business, "it was the general opinion that the end had come for business. Many merchants reduced staffs and cut wages. The second or third day of the war I was waited upon by a committee of our buyers, who informed me that they were sure of heavy losses, and that they wished to see it through with me on a half-salary basis.

"But I wasn't sure business was going to be bad, and, with thanks for their loyalty and good spirit, I told every one in the house that Selfridge's would make no changes for the present. To that stand we owe something of our present prosperity. By keeping on our brightest face, spending more money for advertising, and serving our patrons with greater attention, we have increased our business to a volume of over $15,000,000—a gain of $2,500,000 in one year."

Mr. Selfridge took advantage of every twist in the war situation. He advertised that every person in his store during any German aëroplane attack was insured free, without preliminary registration, to the amount of $5,000 for death resulting directly from the raid. The result was to make every woman turn to his store as a safe place to shop and lunch; and to direct public attention to its solid concrete construction. He has consistently sold "war bread" a cent or two cents a loaf lower than any one else in London—another great trade attracter.

But most important has been the maintenance of his personnel, and the adaptation of his line of goods to meet the changed conditions brought about by the war.

As fast as men have been called away, he has substituted women workers; and many of these, he says, will never be replaced by men. And he has foreseen each shift in the public demand, and provided for it. The luxuries of the rich early ceased to be a factor in his trade, as social life in London quickly diminished: but the luxuries of the poor—inexpensive pianos and jewelry and the like—have rapidly grown more important as the wages of workers have risen under the greater demand.

To the American merchant Mr. Selfridge's message is:

"Keep business going at high pressure. Watch with the greatest care your organization, and your ability to fill with women or men above enlistment age the posts vacated by men called away. Watch the market, and if you discover a likelihood of shortage in woolen goods, silk goods (especially hosiery), or in leather, make your stocks as full as business can possibly warrant. Supply paper and twine for a long way ahead. Difficulties will come, but they come gradually; and if they are foreseen there is no reason why your stores—like mine—should not be thronged as never before."

How Armour Develops Big Men

YEARS ago J. Ogden Armour was ofered $130,000,000 for his company; but he unhesitatingly declined it.

"What would I do with $130,000,000?" he asked.

The incident is quoted by B. C. Forbes in Men Who Are Making America.

"Do you let sentiment enter into the running of your business?" Mr. Forbes asked him.

"Enter into running it?" Armour repeated. "Why, I run it on sentiment. If I didn't it wouldn't be successful, and it wouldn't be worth while running. What is it that makes an organization successful? Isn't it the loyalty and the enthusiasm of the many men that are engaged in running it? And how can any man inspire these sentiments if he has no sentiment in his own make-up? No one man can run a big concern; he must depend upon others for the actual doing of almost everything.

"To get the right kind of men, we begin early. We are more particular about the hiring of office-boys than about any other thing connected with Armour & Company; for the office-boys of to-day will be the department heads of to-morrow. We select them with that in view. We practically never go outside for a high-priced man. Just as the fellow who starts with the Pennsylvania Railroad as a brakeman may some day become president, so young men who start with us at the bottom may hope to rise to the top."

Mr. Armour happened one day to remark, in the presence of a bright youth, that the one greatest pleasure of his life was developing young men.

"Mr. Armour," spoke up. the young man, "you need not look any farther. You may start right here," pointing to himself.

Mr. Armour did start right there. To-day the youth is vice-president of Armour & Company, Mr. Armour's right-hand man and trusted associate, Robert J. Dunham, director in Chicago banking and business enterprises, and enjoying the income of a princ—eall at forty.

Do You Sit Correctly?

YOU can be more efficient if, by sheer will power, you train your body to sit or stand correctly.

Square your shoulders.

Make yourself as tall as you can and slightly sway-backed.

Keep the lower ribs expanded at the sides.

Expanding the lowest ribs at the sides expands the lungs; they should be kept expanded except in so far as may be necessary to let them fall slightly inward during each expiration. The effect of this is that in breathing the lungs will expand and contract from maximum to medium instead of from medium to slight expansion, as is usual.

"The results of this are soon realized in the shape of better physical welfare and endurance along with their spiritual counterparts of greater buoyancy and will power." (Dr. Silas Wright Geis in the Medical Record.)

Jobs in Which Selfridge is Employing Women

MUCH of the work of carrying on the great department-store of Selfridge & Company, in London, is now being done by women: and Mr. Selfridge expects to retain women permanently in the jobs listed below, most of which were formerly held by men.

The list is interesting as indicating the sort of opportunities that are likely to open to American women as the war goes on.

Bookkeepers, cashiers, and accountants
Elevator girls
Cleaners
Drivers of motor-delivery wagons (but not as drivers of horse trucks)
Engineers
Electricians.

The Luck of Cingalo—

continued from page 9

coming into the village street—"you are comin' over to my house to supper. The eats are better there than at the hotel."

They stopped a moment while Rostron directed a deputy sheriff to go out and bring in the stolen horses from the late Flores' farm, and then continued on to a house with a broad gallery.

A free-moving girl of twenty, with dark hair and an adorable chin, came out.

"Mary," the sheriff said, as they alighted, "meet Mister Wendell, from Nevada. He's goin' to stay to supper. Cook something nice for him, Mary, because we owe him a little something." His voice was light, but there was a very real appreciation in his eyes as he concluded: "We got into a little hole, bein' old and careless, this evenin', and Mister Wendell he sort of saved your daddy's life."

"Oh, dad!" the girl cried. "Who was it?"

"That greaser Pedro Flores. I searched him careless, and he pretty near got the drop on me. But this Mister Wendell, honey, he's shore some quick with a pistol, and Pedro he passed over pronto. So we come home hopin' it would be beaten biscuits an' chicken."

"It will be," she said, "if you can give me a little time."

She stretched out a warm hand to Clay and looked straight into his eyes.

"Whoever does my father a good turn does me one. I hope we'll be friends."

Whelton took the hand with embarrassed pleasure.

"I certainly hope so, ma'am," he said.

"Biscuits an' chicken! Biscuits an' chicken!" cried the sheriff, with good-natured impatience. "Let's go! You're goin' to have plenty of time to get acquainted; Mister Wendell is fixin' to remain permanent in our midst."

He rolled a cigarette, proffered Clay his "makin's," and tipped a chair back against the gallery wall.

"This store I was tellin' you about," he said, "has got a pretty good stock on hand, but there's some things you'd want to put in, I reckon. When Pete Williams come here and started it, the town was pretty small, and—"

Their talk, dealing with the steady growth of Cingalo and the opportunities for a hustling merchant in the community, lasted until supper-time, and was resumed after they had again taken seats on the gallery, joined now by Mary. Clay was gratified that neither the girl nor her father delved curiously into his past, but not especially surprised. He did not avoid the subject of his life in Nevada, but he did not dwell upon it. He sought to leave the impression that he had prospected much, at a distance from towns and cities.

They bade him good night with warm hand-clasps when, at nine o'clock, he departed for the hotel. Just before he went away, the sheriff asked him a customary question of hospitality:

"Have a little drink before you go to bed? I got some red liquor here that's better than you'll find at the hotel."

"Thank you; I don't often use it."

"Prohibitionist?"

"No; but I leave it alone, mostly."

"So do I—mostly. About one drink a day is my idea of boisterous conduct. Don't take offense at my askin'."

IN his bare room Clay slowly unpacked his suit-case, and his thoughts tangled themselves strangely. He had killed another man, but this did not worry him: it had been lawful and to save the life of another. His mind dwelt principally on the new friends he had made, and on the attractiveness of dark hair, an olive-tanned skin of feminine youth, and a rounded chin. He sighed, as he undressed, several times.

Why couldn't this meeting have taken place when he was Clay Whelton, with no stain on his name and no criminal indictment to be dodged forever?

He bought the general store of Mrs. Williams the following day. He wrote for a drummer to come down from San Antonio, and added to its stock within a week. Neither the late Pete Williams nor his Oklahoma-homesick relict had been much interested in stock attractiveness and window displays. He had to make radical changes in the appearance of things, and, as many of the articles he carried were for women, he had to have much advice from Mary Rostron. The sheriff took an interest, too, and gave him much valuable information about the demands of the section and its people.

The current of this advice and help was partially broken for ten days, when the sheriff, only a week after Clay's arrival, had to go North on business connected with land in which Rostron was interested as agent for the St. Louis and Chicago owners. Whelton—busily trying to get used to his new name, his new environment, and his new business—was sorry to see him go and tremendously glad to see him return. He told himself that this was because he liked the sheriff immensely, which was true as far as it went; but the real cause of his gladness, when Rostron descended from a west-bound train, was relief that he could again spend his evenings at the Rostron home. He was still trying to ignore a fact; and youth can argue very speciously with itself. He did not admit the whole truth, even in his private thoughts, for a long time.

THE store gave him a living from the start. Within three months he was by way of becoming one of the town's prominent citizens. More important and desperately tantalizing, he was by way of being very, very much in love with Mary Rostron; and ordinary common sense told him that she was never displeased to be in his company.

There had been no other suitor to be "cut out." The people of the village, at first impressed favorably by the sheriff's story of his performance in emergency, seemed to have come to like him cordially for himself; and he was not unaware of the fact that Cingalo looked upon him and Mary as due to be engaged,—if, perhaps, they were not already secretly so,—and that this attitude on everybody's part did not seem to disconcert either Mary or her father.

At times he thought he would ask her to marry him, keep his secret forever to himself, and chance the exposure that probably would never come. At others—although this idea never lasted for long—he seriously considered quitting the town as suddenly as he had come. On two or three occasions he was on the verge of confessing his past to Mary and the sheriff, and of throwing himself upon their mercy.

This last he knew in his heart would be a fatal thing to do. He had many chances to observe the sheriff in the discharge of his duty; neither pull nor friendship was ever allowed to interfere with it. He believed it would grieve Rostron deeply to have to arrest him and send him to Mullen City to be tried for his life, but he never doubted that Rostron would do it.

Harry Wendell, merchant, by winter had become a well liked member of the community; but this was cold comfort for Clay Whelton, who was dead and must forever remain dead. Not Harry Wendell, but Clay Whelton alone, could marry Mary; and Clay Whelton could never be resurrected. He told himself this over and over.

So then, one night, quite without premeditation, he resurrected him.

MARY and her father had been down to the post-office one night, and dropped into the store at closing time. Rostron, remembering some papers he had left at his office that he wanted to look over at home, went on, calling to the young people that he would see them later. Clay locked up, and he and Mary wandered slowly through the warm, still January night along a dusty street that glistened fairy white in the brilliance of a great low-hanging, sub-tropical moon.

The village street lights were not used on moonlight nights, and there were

---

bright spots and black shadows. People were sitting on the galleries of the houses that they passed, the hum of their voices coming out musically. From somewhere came that haunting melody from the "Tales of Hoffmann." The witchery got into Clay's blood beyond all resistance, and he told her, just as they came to her father's house, that he loved her. He blurted it, without computing the cost.

Then, while yet she swayed toward him and he knew he had only to reach out his arms to clasp her in them, he was smitten with horror at what he had done.

"Wait!" he cried. "I shouldn't have said that. Not that I didn't mean it—I never meant anything more—but— There's nothing in the world I want to do this minute so much as ask you to marry me—and I can't."

"Why?" she asked simply.

"I'll tell you after a while. I've got to see your father. Mary! Listen, dear! I must sound crazy, but I'm not. There's something I've got to tell him—right away—this minute. Will you stay out here on the gallery while I go in and see him? I've got to—now. Will you?"

She hesitated. Then: "Go in. I'll wait."

HE went quickly, nervously, through the door of the room where Gus Rostron sat under a light, a sheaf of papers in his hand. As he caught the first glimpse of the boy's face, the sheriff let the papers drop on the table, and waited, eyeing Clay with direct, encouraging gaze.

"Mr. Rostron," Whelton started doggedly, "I just told Mary—I want to marry her, and I can't because—"

He swallowed, and then said it quickly:

"You'll think I'm a poor pup, all right; but I've been in this town under false pretenses. I'm—my name isn't even Wendell."

"No?" the sheriff said, with a calm that Clay felt was ominous. "What is it?"

"Whelton—Clay Whelton. Do you remember, the day I came here, that we talked about a man at Mullen City that killed three men in a gambling house? There was a notice out that the sheriff wanted him for murder. Well—I'm the man."

Rostron's face was devoid of expression.

"Why mention it now, seein's you've got by this far?" he asked. "See somebody in town that used to know you?"

"No. I haven't any reason to believe I'd ever be identified. But—I wanted to marry Mary."

"That's a reasonable want, way it looks to me. Why don't you want to now?"

"But I do! And of course I can't. I couldn't let her marry me without telling. I couldn't ask her to take an assumed name."

"That's so, of course. What's the matter with going back to your real one?"

"But, sheriff, you don't understand. I'm wanted, back in Nevada, for murder."

Rostron's reply was staggering.

"Bet you ten to one you ain't," he said calmly.

"You yourself got a notice from Sheriff Burdick that—"

"Bet you any odds he ain't sheriff now." The whimsical note that had come into his voice changed. "Sit down, son," he said. "Or, if you kain't sit down, stop walking up and down like a tagger in a cage. You make me fidgety."

Clay stopped and stared at him, confused.

"Seems to me I heard something more about that Mullen City killin'," Rostron went on. His eyes did not look stern, as they usually did in moments when he was face to face with duty. "Seems to me somebody said the good people in that town had been gettin' pretty sick of the way Burdick had been lettin' that Ryan and some other crooks get away with bein' bad, and after that little shootin' match they just natchully decided it was time to stop it. So they went to this Burdick two three days later, and showed him good and sufficient reasons why he'd better resign. Then they elected another feller sheriff, and he cleaned the town up. His name—now what was his name? His name was MacCamish.

"John MacCamish! But he'd want me just the same. He—"

"Maybe—and maybe not. That old Scotchman thinks right highly of you, son. He says you paid him ten dollars, once, for less'n two gallons of gasolene. They all seem to think pretty well of you in Mullen City. Kinda funny, ain't it, after the way you run wild that night? But that town seems just natchully to regard you as a sort of public benefactor."

Clay dashed with his fingers at a moist forehead. His mind was awhirl as the sheriff raised his voice.

"Come in, honey!" he called. "He's done confessed."

She came hurrying, her eyes smiling through a mist.

"I told you he would," she surprisingly declared.

"Well, I didn't say he wouldn't, did I?"

The youth looked from one to the other, and his eyes remained upon the girl, who had come very close to him.

"You knew?" he gasped.

"Maybe I ought to have spoken about it," the sheriff said, "but I wanted to see how you made out. Some fellers, gettin' bad that-a-way, stay bad. I wanted to see whether you would drink too much; I notice you haven't. And I hear you ain't ever accepted any invitation to sit into a little game of draw, either—although draw ain't any sin, as I see it, unless carried to excess. Mostly I was waitin' for the big test: I wanted to see whether you'd ask her without tellin'. Well, that's settled."

He held out a sinewy brown hand.

"Son," he said, "I reckon it's been kinda tough; but you don't need to worry no more. It won't be any harder for Mary to get used to bein' called Whelton than Wendell. And your first name was Henry—Henry Clay—all the time, you know.

"But the murder charge?" Clay could not seem to adapt his mind to this train of revelations.

"Oh, yes. Well, there ain't any. When I went to Mullen City— It was when I went North in October, and I wanted to know for myself, first hand, just what happened that night, because I owed you that much for what you did—and maybe because I thought you looked like a pretty good boy. Well, while I was in Mullen City we thought we'd better clean the thing up. So MacCamish and I—good ol' scout, that MacCamish—we got a grand jury to hear—the evidence, and they called it justifiable homicide and brought in 'no bill.' That settles that for keeps."

"You knew it back in October?"

"I recognized you that day when you horned in on the posse, son—the day you come. The notice that you was wanted laid right on top of my desk at that minute, and it had a pretty good picture of you. It told, too, about that little twitch you've got in your jaw when you're excited; and your jaw was twitchin' when you hollered to me, there in front of the office, and said you wanted in. So—after goin' back and hidin' the notice while you were gettin' your pistol—I took you along with me personal, so I wouldn't have any trouble findin' you after I got back. Of course, when you got that Mexican, that made things look a little different.

"That was good shootin', that evenin', when you beat that Pedro hombre to it; you shore do throw a pistol right pretty. But that night up in Nevada must've beat that all to pieces. One man in front of you, and one man behind you, both drawin' at once, and you got 'em both. And another. And never got a scratch. Man, man, but I should have admired to see that fight! Tell me, son—I been achin' to ask you this for 'most three months: When that Montana Charley made the shift out of his holdout and started to bet—"

Mary Rostron, both hands clasping Clay's arm, where one of his had found and covered them, interposed laughingly but firmly.

"To-morrow," she said. "He can tell you that story to-morrow, daddy. To-night there's a story he wants to tell me.

THE EDITOR ANSWERS

HERE'S a letter from a man who wants us to muckrake the administration:

Dear Editor:

Why not send a correspondent to Washington and write up the conditions of inefficiency and graft in the handling of this war? They say that the graft that went on in Civil War days was nothing in comparison with what goes on to-day: and the way the whole war business is wound up in red tape is enough to make the average business man weep.

C. P. H., Syracuse.

I've heard what "they say," C. P. H., and I have no doubt that a very sensational story could be written about the way the war is being run. On the other hand, I made up my mind a long time ago that there is no business office in the world—not excluding my own—where a muckraker couldn't make a very good story by picking out all the mistakes and magnifying them: and I've decided to pass the muckraking along to some one else.

There are some very encouraging things about the Washington situation. The influx of business men into Washington has stirred those old departments in a wonderful way. I talked the other day with a big steel manufacturer who was down there bidding on shells. We are going to use the French artillery; and the French require their shells to be "heat-treated"—an expensive process that causes them to break up into finer fragments when they explode.

The government experts demanded that our shells be also heat-treated. The manufacturers explained that it could be done, but would cost more money and take a good deal of time, as they would have to equip their plants with special machinery. The man in charge decided the question in these words:

"I guess we'll cut out heat-treating. While a heat-treated shell is undoubtedly better than a non-heat-treated one, still I think a non-heat-treated shell that explodes in the German trenches is much more valuable at this time than a shell that won't be ready to ship until the war is done."

Plain, common-sense business talk—the kind you hear more and more of in Washington.

A School-Teacher's Good Luck

Dear Sir:

You may be interested in my experience. I took a magazine out of the hands of one of my boy pupils, who was reading it in the study-room. It was your magazine: I had never seen or heard of it before. That night, in going home,I glanced through its pages, and I have bought it regularly ever since. I want to take this opportunity to tell you that it has become a really refreshing and worth-while part of my life.

L. H. O., New York.

Apparently EVERY WEEK in popularity is getting into the class with Mary's lamb—following the children to school, which was against the rule. If we can catch the readers at that age, we ought to be secure for a long while to come.

Lloyd-George Please Copy

Dear Editor:

If you had it in your power to make peace in Europe, what kind of peace terms would you propose?

J. L. McH., Peoria, Illinois.

There is one very hopeful thing about this war, and that is that everybody—except the Germans—recognizes that peace must be made with due respect to the rights of the peoples concerned. In no other war in history has that been true. Napoleon never considered for a minute that peoples had any rights. He set up governments and overturned them and transferred peoples from one nation to another at will. After he was overthrown the victors got together and sliced up the map of Europe to suit themselves.

This war must be concluded by a peace that recognizes that the people of any nation have the divine right to determine their own destinies. And, because this is true, it must be a peace concluded between peoples—not between free peoples on one side and an autocracy on the other.

Granted this main condition, and I am willing that the other conditions should be made just as easy for Germany as possible. I would neither accept any of her colonies nor a penny of indemnity. I would do nothing to make the scars any deeper, or leave the kind of resentment that is the seed of future wars. The Germans will have a long debt to pay, and a long, hard road to travel back to prosperity. Plenty of time in which to repent of all that needs repentance, and to contrast the blessings of democracy with the blessings of the Kaiser and his kind.

We Are Discovered

Gentlemen:

Be pleased not to send your magazine any longer to my address. You solicit editorial contributions, and what is the result? You have a tribe of infernal idiots on your staff, who cater, undoubtedly through your instigation, to money and power, and the unknown has no opportunity whatever. After all, Kitchin's bill which passed Congress may be nothing but a just retribution. I hope it knocks your concern higher than a Ciproni can fly.

G. S., Philadelphia.

We are humbled and depressed. All we can say in reply, George, is that if the material which you submitted to us had been one half as interesting and forceful as your letter (a large part of which we have had to suppress out of deference to Mr. Burleson) we would have given it a chance, and gladly.

From Dr. Garfield

Dear Sir:

One hundred million tons of coal more than is normally produced in the United States is needed this year for war purposes. The possible increase of production is fifty million tons. The remaining gap of fifty million tons can be filled only by the most unusual measures of conservation on the part of the American people.

Will you do what you can to get your readers to help?

H. A. GARFIELD, Washington.

A war correspondent just returned from Europe told me the other day that Stockholm will be entirely cold this winter—no heat even in the big hotels. The plain truth is that there is not enough food and coal in the world. You can't take forty or fifty million men away from mines and farms and shops at a time when you are increasing the demand tremendously, and not have world-wide shortage.

Don't heat any extra rooms this winter. Reduce the temperature in your house five degrees: you'll be better for it. And sift your ashes.

Books at a Nickel

After the present supply of our books is exhausted we shall have to raise the price. Postage and paper and everything cost more. But, as long as they last, you may have all six of them for a quarter, or any one for five cents.

Here is the list:

"Making Your Money Work for You," by Albert W. Atwood.

"Eating for Health and Efficiency," by Edwin F. Bowers, M. D.

"Seventy-five Dollars' Worth of Vegetables for Less than Ten Dollars," by Herbert Durand.

"Running Your Car at a Minimum Cost," by Ernest A. Stephens.

"First Aids to Beauty," by Edwin F. Bowers, M. D.

"How to be Better Dressed at Less Expense," by T. E. Oliphant.

And the address is 381 Fourth Avenue, New York City.

This is His Week

Several people have spent long life-times trying to prove that the plays of William Shakespeare were written by Francis Bacon. No one, to our knowledge, however, has spent any time at all trying to prove that the works of Francis Bacon were written by William Shakespeare. The cause of all this controversy—and to which, when all is said and done, he owes his greatest fame—was born in London, January 22, 1561. He died in 1626.

WHILE Shakespeare was a lad in rural Stratford, learning the wisdom of Nature from Nature herself, another boy, Francis Bacon, three years older, was learning the ways of the world and the wisdom of men in the most interesting city on earth at that time—London.

But there is no reason to believe that the two ever met, either then or in after years, when one had become a writer of plays and the other a maker of philosophies.

Bacon's father was the keeper of the Great Seal of England.

To his house came all the interesting people of the day—statesmen, scientists studying the secret ways of nature, champions of the new religion for which thousands were giving their lives in the Netherlands, men of adventure, and men of letters. Young Francis met them all.

At nine he deserted his playmates to discover for himself what an echo really was. It took him months to do it, but he finally found out.

At fourteen he compared Cambridge University to a becalmed ship which moved only by a breath from the outside.

At seventeen he said that most people in the world were sitting in cells spinning cobwebs.

At twenty he published a volume of essays treating of almost every subject of interest to man.

The book was widely read, and has much interest even to-day.

A few years later great fame came to him when he overturned Aristotle's doctrine which held that a law must first be laid down and then proved.

"How much more intelligent to prove a law first and then lay it down," said Bacon.

No one had ever thought of such a thing before, and people were almost as astonished as they were when Columbus discovered America. This theory is known now as the inductive or Baconian theory.

Bacon spent much of his life writing a great tome which he never finished, known as "The New Atlantis," in which he pictured his dreams of a model world where all men were brothers and each was given a fair and equal chance.

After years spent in angling for the favor of Queen Elizabeth, the philosopher was made Attorney-General of England.

He caught cold inventing the first "cold storage," an ice-house for the preservation of meats, dying of pneumonia at the age of sixty-five.

A desire to shine in high places and for court glories, he tells us, was his besetting weakness, and dying he laid blame on it for the fact that he never finished "The New Atlantis."

Songs She Couldn't Sing in Jail

WHEN Mme. Schumann-Heink visited a Western penitentiary not long ago, the warden asked her to sing to the prisoners. "Sing them the lullaby you sang last night at the concert," he suggested.

"Oh, no; I would not sing a lullaby to those men," she said. "Some of them have children they have never seen and perhaps never will see."

"Home, Sweet Home" was the warden's next suggestion; but again the great contralto shook her head.

"I couldn't sing that song where there are men who will never see their homes again."

There was no trace of sentimentality in either voice or look. But there smiled out from her honest, kindly eyes the large mother-love that has bound so many friends to her. She had come to sing to them as if they had been her boys—erring but still hers.

When the warden led the way to the stage, she shook her head and walked down among the men.

"She sure is giving us a square deal, all right," whispered one.

There was a sudden wiping of eyes, blowing of noses, coughing, wriggling in seats; the tension was broken, and they were all her friends.

"I have a warm spot in my heart for boys," she said in her charming broken accent. "I have six of them myself. I am going to sing some songs you will like to hear.

Then followed song after song—more than she had sung at the concert the night before.

Later she visited the men in their cells. The prisoners were of many races; but Mme. Schumann-Heink is a linguist, and for each there was a greeting in his own tongue. Last of all she came to the prison librarian. He was an Austrian, like herself, and spoke her own dialect. Presently he was telling her about himself. He was

a "lifer," and had served twenty-two years. Since an operation on the back of his head he had been called the model prisoner of the Northwest.

Mme. Schumann-Heink made further inquiries, and learned that a blood clot at the base of the brain had been the apparent cause of his evil doing. As a result of her interest, his sentence was commuted, and a little later he was pardoned.

The Crab Who Came Back

By JOHN PAUL GIVLER

CAN an animal—or a man, for that matter—"come back" into a better, stronger life after fate or evolution has put the stamp of the down-and-outer on him? Scientists may be slow to admit it, but there are on record indisputable cases of down-and-out animals that have shown this power of regeneration.

There's the cocoanut-crab, known to naturalists as Birgus. He is found wherever the nut from which he takes his name grows—and that's pretty much everywhere in the tropics. He is a vegetarian, a strong and hearty crab, armed with two big claws, one larger than the other. With the big claw he breaks open the cocoanuts on which he feeds. He is said also to climb the trees to cut off the nuts, and so is independent of windfalls.

Only a few crabs have one claw much larger than the other, and that telltale big claw lets us into the secret of Birgus's past. It is like the claw of the hermit-crab. The hermit was once a regular, independent crab, able to take care of himself. But fear clutched him: he lost confidence in himself. Instead of standing out boldly against the world, he withdrew from active life, and crawled into a cast-off snail-shell for refuge. So we find him to-day inhabiting cast-off shells.

And Nature has taken her revenge on him. She has let one of his claws shrivel up; she has taken away the hard armor that once incased him, and deprived his swimming legs of their strength. For it is the rule of Nature that any organ that is not used is lost. What happened to the hermit happened once to Birgus.

And then, somewhere in the great spaces of evolution, the miracle happened. Birgus, who had been down and out,—a weakling and a coward,—gathered courage and "came back." The hard, armor-like plates protecting the abdomen, which had dwindled to soft membrane in the hermit, broadened and thickened again into fighting armor.

In almost every feature of this crab's stalwart frame is written strength and fighting power. From those parts that his ancestors had made weak and despicable by fear and cowardly living he has rescued strong and valuable organs. The flattened claw which the hermit had used merely as a barrier to close the opening of his snail-shell has become a mighty hammer for cracking nuts; the useless tail a reservoir for oil; and the once weakened armor an adequate protection for this treasure.

Birgus is no exception to evolution's rule. There is a member of the flounder tribe which, although his fish forebears ignominiously turned over on their sides and warped their heads into a grotesque caricature, has again lengthened out his body like an eel and gained the advantages open to that style of fishes. And, among those low and primitive mammals, shrewlike creatures that lived in the trees in past eons, similar and startling possibilities are found; for from them have come the forms which through many changes have led, finally, to man himself.

If there are barriers to reasonable hopes and ambitions for a brave and noble life, the scientist does not know what they are; for with effort and perseverance all barriers are overcome.

Why Some Children Fail to Resemble Their Parents

"LIKE begets like" is a common expression. It is all that we usually mean when we talk about heredity. But like does not always produce like.

Take the race of chickens called the Blue Andalusian, and you have a clear case of what really happens in heredity. Breed two of these blue chickens together, and only half the brood will be blue. The other half will be made up of white chickens and black chickens. In other words, like has produced like in only half the children.

Now take one of these black chickens and breed him to another black one, and all the children will be black: breed a white one to another white one, and all the children will be white. But breed a black to a white, and the children will resemble neither parent: they will be blue, like their grandparents.

Every human being is a blue Andalusian; that is to say, a mongrel. He is a combination of many different kinds of ancestors, just as the blue Andalusian is a combination of white ancestors and black ancestors. And, just as only half the children of the blue Andalusian resemble their parents, the other half taking after their grandparents, so children may, instead of resembling their parents, bear a resemblance to a grandparent or even a more remote ancestor.

It was Gregor Mendel, an Augustinian monk of Brünn, Austria, who first found all this out. Fifty years ago he was experimenting with the common garden pea. He found that when he crossed a tall race of peas with a dwarf race the offspring of the first generation were all tall, not medium in height, as we might expect; the fact that they had a dwarf parent was entirely concealed or "dominated" by the one tall parent. When he bred together these hybrid talls, there were dwarfs among the progeny and the proportion of talls to dwarfs was almost exactly three to one. The dwarfness of the grandparent had been hidden for one generation, only to appear again in the children.

It is highly probable that the same thing often takes place with us human folk. In some cases a good trait from one parent will dominate a less favorable one from the other. Sometimes a child will look like its mother and behave like its father. In other cases the good and bad traits of either or both parents will be hidden for a generation, only to appear in the next. In some fortunate persons the favorable traits of the parents combine, in others the unfavorable; but it is a happy law that to most of us a general assortment of qualities is meted out.

Mendel's discovery turned the mystery of heredity into an exact science. Its practical as well as its scientific value is tremendous: for not only is the wizardlike genius of Burbank and other plant-breeders due to their use of the Mendelian principle, but through it we are led to clearer understanding of the development of man and the importance to our children and our children's children of what we are to-day.

J. P. G.