Why Not Run Our Governments the Way We Run Our Jobs?

PROBABLY each of us has his own pet reform which he hopes to see realized in that blessed period "after this war."

For myself, I would like to see a whole lot of sunlight and fresh air let into those musty rooms where governments conduct their foreign affairs.

I ask not for the millennium.

I shall be satisfied if only statesmen will quit talking in long-sounding, meaningless words, and begin to say just what they mean, as grocers do.

If state papers shall come to be counted great, not because they will "live in history" as fine bits of writing, but because they are written so simply that "wayfaring men, though fools, shall not err therein.

If ambassadors can become as sensible and plain-spoken as the average carpenter whom they represent.

"An ambassador," said Sir Henry Wotton, "is an honest man sent abroad to lie for his country."

And once upon a time this was strictly true.

It was the ambassador's business to discover all the weakness and sore spots in the lives of the people who were his hosts.

He must learn who could be bought, and buy him; and who could be flattered, and flatter him.

And when flattery and money proved inadequate, he must resort to love.

The wise old mother of Catherine II once wrote to Frederick the Great advising him to dismiss his elderly ambassador and send a "handsome young man of good complexion."

A handsome young man would have a better chance to persuade the heart of the Empress to betray her intelligence and her country.

We have made considerable progress away from that type of diplomacy: but we have still a good way to go.

Look, for a minute, at its record in this war.

Twenty-five days elapsed between the assassination of the Austrian Crown Prince and the despatch of Austria's ultimatum.

Were the diplomats of the world on the job, alive to the possibilities of a world crisis?

They were not. Most of them were playing golf at country houses. The men whom trusting peoples maintain to preserve the peace were sound asleep on the job.

Recently Mr. Lansing has published some unsavory diplomatic correspondence: and a certain Mr. Trotzky has published many secret treaties which the nations that made them ought to be ashamed of.

When a secret agreement is discovered between two big business men to secure an illegal advantage, they are haled into court and a hullabaloo is raised.

But big nations execute secret agreements that are shady, to say the least, and we call it statesmanship and let it go at that.

Say what you will about Trotsky, he may yet be remembered in history as the man who first printed treaties on the front pages of the newspapers, which is where all treaties belong.

We common folk have taken down all the padded partitions in our offices. We don't maintain paid spies in our competitors' establishments. We do business right out in the open, and anybody who wants to can stop in front of the window and look in.

And we have an idea that state departments can be run in the same way, with the windows open and the light pouring in on all sides.

"Who, then, makes war?" asked the London Times on November 23, 1912. "The answer is to be found in the Chancelleries of Europe, among the men who have too long played with human lives as pawns in a game of chess."

Something tells me that there are going to be a lot of very experienced chess-players out of jobs when this war is done.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

"IF"

The Prize Story

IT was a perfect day for an automobile trip, but our car had shown surprising disinclination to start that morning, delaying us nearly three hours, in spite of the fact that we had about two hundred miles to make in the day. I was especially concerned over the delay because of my two children, who needed an early bedtime each night in order to make a succession of visits bearable.

After we were well started, however, the car made such speed that I soon lost my concern, and gave my attention entirely to my baby, who was fretful. Toward the latter part of the day she fell asleep. I was arranging the blankets to enable her to sleep comfortably, when my little daughter cried out, "Oh, mommie, 'ook, 'ook!" As I did not turn, she insisted shrilly, "Mommie, mommie, 'ook out dare!"

Fearing that she would waken the baby, I carefully turned in the direction she was pointing, and looked just in time to catch an instant's picture of a child in a second-story window of the house we were passing. She was sitting astride the window-sill, swinging one chubby little leg back and forth. My heart seemed to miss a beat or two. Then I blurted out, "There's a baby hanging out the window!" Such, an insane remark, when I should have cried out a command to stop instantly and go back.

When I finally made myself understood, the others all pooh-poohed the idea of going back. They said that lots of children were allowed to play in windows; that we were more than a mile beyond then, and that the child wouldn't even be there by the time we could return; that I would not have so much as a "thank you" for my pains; and, most convincing of all, that we would be so much later reaching our destination and that the stopping would waken my peevish baby.

"Oh, all right," I said; and on we sped, faster than ever.

I settled back in my seat, when suddenly I seemed to see my little Lucia falling helplessly out of that very window. I jumped up and clutched my husband's shoulder, crying, "We've got to go back to that house right away. We must hurry, hurry—hurry!"

Back we flew nearly four miles. A young woman sat by the door, knitting. I jumped from the car before it had stopped, and, running to her, jerked out breathlessly, "Your baby will fall out the window."

A moment she sat motionless, looking at me in abject terror.

"Run!" I shouted, pointing in the direction of the window.

As I stood alone on the porch, the importance of the whole affair suddenly palled upon me—it seemed somewhat silly and rather dramatic.

I felt a little ashamed of my wildness. I laughed apologetically as I stepped back into the car, exclaiming, "Well, that's off my mind, anyway." Then how they laughed.

In retracing that four miles we had two punctures, and also had to wait for a long freight train. Of course we were late in reaching our destination. My babies were cross, and all were weary, though they laughed good-humoredly over my moving-picture episode, as they called it.

A month later I received the following letter:

As I thought of those "ifs" I shuddered; then I reverently bowed my head and thanked God they were really "ifs" and had not become actualities.

L. W.

If the Oyster Stew Had Not Been Hot

IF is a small word in the English language, but sometimes it fills a large place in human affairs.

In the winter of 18— I was a locomotive engineer on the P. H. R. R. hauling the through freight between S— and P—, making the trip from S— to P— one day, and returning the next. One cold, frosty morning, on my way to the yards, I stepped into a restaurant to get something warm to eat before starting on my trip. I ordered a hot oyster stew, placing emphasis on the "hot."

The place was filled with patrons, and the waitresses were hurrying back and forth with loads of food and empty dishes. The waitress bringing my order allowed the dish to slip from her fingers as she passed it over my shoulder, and the contents of the bowl mostly went down my neck inside of my collar. She had remembered my instructions and served it hot. I think that was the hottest bowl of oyster stew ever served.

I was tearing at my collar, endeavoring to get the steaming clothing away from my scalded neck, while the waitress was doing her best to repair the damage by wiping away the soup from my clothing and flesh with a napkin—and with every swipe of

the napkin across my neck she took a portion of scalded skin. The manager got on the job, and, berating the luckless waitress for her carelessness, told her to report to the cashier for her money.

"Look out, my friend," I addressed the angry manager, "set your brakes. This young lady is not at fault," I lied. "I hit her arm and caused the accident."

The doctor found my neck badly scalded. A substitute was sent with my train. Two hours out the engine struck a broken rail on a bad curve, turned turtle, and the engineer and fireman were both scalded to death.

If that waitress had not scalded my neck with the oyster stew, I would have been scalded to death in less than three hours afterward.

If I had not lied about the accident I would never have become acquainted with the best little girl ever.

From acquaintance we traveled over the rock-ballast, double-track road, passing the station of Friendship, and going on to the single track at Marriage.

A. C. M.

The Most Wonderful Night of Her Life

IF I had not been threatened with total loss of eyesight, and if I had not fallen over a can in an alley, I would not be the contented and happy woman I am to-day.

My father had given me an excellent practical education. More far-sighted than most men of his time and surroundings, he realized the fairness of equipping a woman with power to earn her living, and, at a personal sacrifice, he enabled me to fit myself for the position of a secretary. He lived to enjoy the comforts that my salary provided. We were happy and comfortable. When his last sickness came I was able to get him every luxury.

After his death the years passed quickly. I was engrossed in work, too busy to realize how lonely I was. My savings account increased.

It took me all too long a time to realize that something was seriously wrong with my eyes, to seek expert advice, and to obey the overwhelming verdict, "Stop all work at once!" Pain brought me back to my sense—agonizing, lasting pain! I will not dwell on the next twelve months,—the dwindling of resources (specialists are expensive), the closing of the apartment, and the climb down from one boarding-house to another less expensive, and then a cheaper, and a still cheaper one,—nor dwell on my hopelessness and dismay.

On the most wonderful evening of my life, I was living in a tiny room in a wretched part of New York. I started for the nearest grocer's, taking the darkest route (all light hurt my eyes), and as I stumbled along the alley I fell, and down came my hand on a warm little heap—an abjectly scared and sick little Airedale pup. I carried her home and communicated with her owners, for her collar had an address.

The family had gone South, but the pup had been left with the cook to keep—or get rid of. I bought it for $5.

No words can tell what the companionship of that dog meant to me—nor the completeness of her response to my care. They say the Airedale creed is, "I live and die for those I love." It is true. I began to take an interest in life, and long for a country home for my little friend. This eventually led to my getting a position as caretaker of a neglected country estate. The wages were small, but work was light—just to be there. Fire-wood, fruit, and some vegetables were available.

Continued on page 19

Women and Children Behind the Fighting Line

By CAPTAIN A. P. CORCORAN

A MAD WOMAN wandering through a shattered street, moaning and wringing her hands; a baby girl lying by the roadside, her mouth green from eating grass; an old man roaming round the ruins of his home, trying to realize that it no longer affords shelter—these sights are of the essence of war.

Perhaps you think you know its horrors because you have sent a husband to the front, or because you are shivering with cold, or because you have lost your money and are forced to work. But let me tell you that no American as yet realizes, nor no Englishman or German, for the matter of that, unless he has seen it as the old woman of Suzanne saw it.

I will tell you her story, which I heard from her own lips. I happened to be billeted in her home for some time. It was just back of the line, a couple of miles from the trenches. She lived there with her husband,—they were both over seventy,—and their farm stock consisted of one cow and a pig.

One by one, her sons had left her to go to the front. She had had three. Now they were all dead. But she never complained. She was very quiet, sad, stricken; yet she did her day's work, and she looked after me well.

One morning, however, I went to another town some distance away. I was gone until evening. When I returned, it was to find her sitting in the ruins of her home, groaning and rocking herself to and fro. Some neighbors were with her: to them she paid no attention. But, seeing me, she sprang up, and before I could stop her she had thrown herself on the ground at my feet.

"For God's sake, go and kill them! Kill those cursed Boches!" Her voice rose to a kind of shriek, and she wound her arms round my ankles. "Look at what they've done to me! For God's sake, kill them!"

The woman was demented with grief.

We did what we could to calm her, and by and by she recovered her poise. Then she told me what had happened.

She had gone to town to do some marketing, leaving her husband in charge. When she came back, he was dead; her home was split in two; and her small but precious stock was blown to atoms. Two shells had struck them. And here she was, at seventy, with no kin, no cattle, and no money.

What did she do? Why, just what the rest do—hers is no unusual case. The Tommies in the town brought ground-sheets and pieces of tarpaulin, and made the old ruin as weather-proof as possible, and we continued to live in it, giving her as much work and pay as she needed.

It seems absurd, of course, to many that these people should continue to live in places where they face death daily. Yet what alternative have they? They might have joined, to be sure, those long trains of refugees, homeless, penniless human beings who are now depending on chance kindness for their subsistence. England is full of them; so is Southern France. But there were many who were unable or unwilling to join that throng. Can you blame them if they preferred to risk death in the homes of their fathers rather than live in those of strangers or foreigners?

All along the line you will see shepherds tending flocks that may at any moment be killed by a stray shell, or farmers plowing fields that will soon be craters—if indeed they are not captured by the enemy. And, even should they escape such losses, there is still the soldier to be reckoned with. He, of course, is master of the country.

Does he need the civilian's horse? He takes it without ceremony. Does he need the civilian's house? He enters and lives in it. The civilian's food? He eats. The civilian's stock? He kills it. To be sure, he pays his way; but what he buys is not always for sale. Yet, if they demurred?

Well, there's this story from the Balkans which is typical of what might happen to a defaulter.

A Serbian boy was driving his cart along a road, when there came by an officer who needed it. He demanded it. The boy refused: he needed it for his

living. So, to prevent any argument or delay, the officer drew his revolver. The boy dropped, and the soldier took his cart.

We don't do things so crudely on the western front; but they have been done, though not by French or British. We saw the traces as we passed. Which leads me to the story of the most uncomfortable five minutes I have ever passed in my life.

We had just taken a small village which had been long occupied by the Boche. The fight over, we went looking for billets, and I accompanied the officer on his rounds.

At one house, about the best left standing in the place, we could get no answer to our repeated knocking. Finally we pushed the door open. As we did so, this sight met our eyes:

Crouching in a corner of the kitchen—always the first room in the French farm-house—were an old woman and two girls, one holding a baby. In all my life I have never seen such abject terror as was written in the faces of those women.

Our stock of French being low, it took some time to make matters clear. When finally we succeeded, the look of terror gave way, and all three fell into fits of hysterical weeping.

They had not known the results of the fight—people often don't who are in the midst of it. They thought, perhaps, that the Boche had returned, and the sight of us had entirely failed to relieve their fears, for they had never seen the British uniform before.

They told me afterward that the bed they gave me had been occupied by a German colonel. The baby, I discovered later, was his son.

But shell fire and soldiers are not the only burdens that the civilians are called on to bear. They have negative as well as positive troubles. Try to imagine yourself in a town that has been robbed of every workman—no carpenters, cobblers, plumbers, professional men. Lawyers, no doubt, you could dispense with, and why bother with plumbers when you're living without a roof? But doctors!

A woman I met in Albert told me how her mother had lain four days in a damp cellar in Rheims, suffering from acute pneumonia. She had gone there to hide from shell fire. Her family were all away. The neighbors at first forgot her. When they finally found her, she was more dead than alive. They sent for a doctor; but the only one left, aged eighty, was much too sick to come. Still, she recovered—such is the perversity of things. It was the medical man who died.

Yet, tragic and continually threatening as is the life in front-line towns, it still has its light, even humorous, side. For one thing, it would be difficult to emulate the equanimity of the French housewife who finds herself suddenly under fire. I've seen her often in her kitchen, calmly making her omelettes, ten minutes after a shell had removed a window. And there never yet was such a barrage as could make her forget to collect her cash! A thrifty soul is this woman of France. Her economy sometimes takes humorous forms.

Clothes, as you know, are precious these days in France. Consequently it is no uncommon sight to see Jean, Madame's eldest, decked out in the following manner:

On his head is a Tommy's cap, rescued from a rubbish pile. Round his body is a Tommy's ground-sheet, in which three holes have been made to allow passage for head and arms. On his feet are some gumboots several sizes too large for him, kept in place by some dirty spiral puttees. And round his neck is a loaf of bread, one of those horseshoe affairs that they make in France.

Jean is coming home from market—he does all the shopping these days. Maman is busy with her billeted soldiers. Is he sad, as one stricken? Not he! He is whistling "Tipperary" as he swings along after the fashion of his friend the Tommy.

Will France be beaten? Look at him or his seaman there at home, busy over her cook-stove in her kitchen. Will she give in? Not "she! Do you think her husband less courageous? You can't beat a nation with such spirit.

German Efficiency

NOT a single detail was omitted in Germany's preparations for the great war.

Even the atrocities were not left to chance: they were foreseen, and the alibis prepared in advance.

Eight years before the outbreak of the war, the German government provided its officers with a "Military Instructor for Use in the Enemy's Country." In it, written in French, were proclamations all prepared for the use of an invading army, with nothing lacking but the names and dates. Some of them follow. Remember, it was eight years before the cruel war was forced on Germany by her jealous enemies that these proclamations were prepared for use in conquered France:

A fine of 600,000 marks, in consequence of an attempt made by ——— to assassinate a German soldier, is imposed on the town of 0———. By order of ———.

Efforts have been made, without result, to obtain the withdrawal of the fine.

The term fixed for payment expires to-morrow, Saturday, December 17, at noon.

Bank-notes, cash, or silver plate will be accepted.

I have to acknowledge receipt of your letter dated the 7th of this month, in which you bring to my notice the great difficulty which you expect to meet in levying the contributions. I can but regret the explanations which you have thought proper to give me on this subject; the order in question, which emanates from my government, is so clear and precise, and the instructions which I have received, in the matter are so categorical, that if the sum due by the town of R——— is not paid the town will be burned down without pity.

On account of the destruction of the bridge of F———, I order: The district shall pay a special contribution of 10,000,000 francs by way of amends. This is brought to the notice of the public, who are informed that the method of assessment will be announced later and that the payment of the said sum will be enforced with the utmost severity. The village of F——— will be destroyed immediately by fire, with the exception of certain buildings occupied for the use of the troops.

A RECENT photograph of King Albert of Belgium, taken in a barn close to the firing line in Flanders. The King and Queen of the Belgians are living in the only corner of their kingdom that has not been overrun by the Germans. In his Journal from Our Legation in Belgium (Doubleday, Page & Company) Hugh Gibson says:

"In modern warfare a king's place is supposed to be well back of the firing line; but Albert does not play the game that way. Every day since the war began he has gone straight out into the thick of it, even within the range of hostile rifle fire. It is a dangerous thing for him to do, but it puts heart into the troops."

Germany's Ingenious Substitutes

IT takes a lot of cheer-up literature to keep the German troops enthusiastic for Kultur these days: and one of the cheer-up pamphlets was recently picked up in a deserted German trench by Robert A. Drake, an American ambulance driver, who quotes from it in the Outlook. The pamphlet details the wonderful inventions of the Germans since the war started, and is written by Dr. Strecker, a professor in Leipsic University.

Leather is no longer a necessity to Germany, the Doctor boasts; a very good substitute can be made from the tanned membranes of fungous growth. Gun-cotton can be made perfectly well without any cotton at all, and he predicts that the new invention "German cotton," which is made of nettles, will have an extensive exportation after the war. Paper is used for knapsacks and yarn; and an artificial rubber tire has been produced.

Some of the other substitutes sound more ingenious than appetizing. The "waffle fungus," for example, fails somehow to make the mouth water; nor can one grow enthusiastic about the Doctor's suggestion that flies, having a large percentage of fats, should be raised in captivity. Nor should the caterpillar be neglected, the Professor warns. "A fat worm or caterpillar is a chemical creation of fat," he points out in his bland German fashion. "Why not use it?"

A MESSAGE THAT WILL LIVE

TWENTY-FIVE years from now we shall still be discussing the miracle of the Marne: still debating how it could have happened that a nation that had spent forty years in preparation was checked by an army that was hardly more than a mob.

This is the fifteen-word message that is said to have been sent by General Foch to General Joffre on that occasion: it helps to explain the seemingly inexplicable:

"My left is shaken, my center is retreating, my right is routed; I shall attack."

Soldiers Must Think

"THE day has passed," says Sergeant Alexander McClintock in Best o' Luck (George H. Doran Company), "when the man in the ranks is supposed merely to obey. He must know what to do and how to do it. He must think for himself, and "carry on with the general plan, if his officers all become casualties." Sergeant McClintock believes that this change should be impressed on the officers of our new army. The old tradition of "theirs not to reason why" has been smashed beyond repair by the experience of this war. He says:

"It is interesting to note how every attack, nowadays, is worked out in advance in the smallest detail, and how everything is done on a time schedule. Aerial photographs of the position they are expected to capture are furnished to each battalion, and the men are given the fullest opportunity to study them. All bombing machines, dug-outs, trench mortar and machine-gun emplacements are marked on these photographs. Every man is given certain work to do. But, besides that, he is made to understand the scope and plan of the whole operation, so he will know what to do with no officer to command. This is one of the great changes brought about by this war, and it signalizes the disappearance, probably forever, of a long established tradition. Sir Douglas Haig said: For soldiers in this war, give me business men with business sense, who are used to taking initiative.'"

The Tank Cuts Capers

SOME may consider the tank a lovable old lady, but I know a French family who don't. In the days of her infancy she was just feeling her feet, so to speak, in the neighborhood of the M—s' house. With the rest of us, they had come out to view the prodigy.

We were all lost in admiration, when quite suddenly she decided, evidently, to be skittish. Breaking her steering gear, she drove straight ahead, regardless of the efforts of her driver to direct her. Perhaps she took a liking for the M—s'. Anyway, she headed for their home.

In she went, and out on the other side. Needless to say, they found it convenient to lodge that night with their neighbors. I don't know whether they ever managed to inhabit that house again.

CAPTAIN A. P. CORCORAN.

Training for Death

When Guynemer Went Out

THAT greatest of French airmen, Guynemer, could pass none of the tests that a candidate must pass to-day before being admitted to the aviation service, says B. A. Jenkins in Facing the Hindenburg Line (Fleming H. Revell Company).

"He was physically unfit, according to all the rules. He was a consumptive, weighed less than a hundred pounds, and knew he could only live a year or two at best. He accounted for more than fifty Hun planes just because he was selling the fag-end of his life as dearly as may be.

"What a shudder went up over France—yes, over Allied Europe—the other day when he went down. I heard the news several days before it was printed, from our own airmen in Paris; but we could not believe it. His father and mother do not believe it yet, but are waiting for him in the little home in Compiegne, to which he always used to fly when he came back from the front, like a bird to his mountain."

Have You Thought of It in This Way?

"I TELL you, we have come to a time when we have got to weigh the expenditure of dollars in a new scale. It is no longer a question of whether we can afford to buy a thing that we want," says Frank A. Vanderlip. "The question now is: Can the nation afford to have us buy it? When we spend a dollar we put it into either one pan or the other of a balance. If it goes in on the side of unnecessary expenditure—if by spending it we employ labor unnecessarily, consume material, needlessly take up room in a workshop—that pan will go down and the pointer will turn away from victory. If we put it in the other pan of the scales—if we lend it to the government—we do two things: We give the government credit and we give the government room in the workshops to get its job done. We release labor that we have been commanding; we release material.

"Suppose you wanted a chauffeur, and you saw a man driving an ambulance. Would you stop him and say: 'I can give you a better job. I will pay you more than the government is paying you. You may be on an errand of mercy, but get off; I want a chauffeur'? You wouldn't do that.

"Suppose you saw a man turning out a shell at a lathe, and you knew that shell was going to he an effective instrument in a battle. Would you say: 'Shut off your lathe. Take that out. The cylinder of my automobile needs fixing. I want you to make a bicycle for my boy. I have a job; I will pay you more than the government is paying you'? Suppose your wife saw a woman making a gas mask. 'Would she say: 'I want a garment made: I want a new hat. Stop on that work'? Knowing that the gas mask might save an American life, she wouldn't say that.

"Yet we are all doing just that thing—all needlessly spending employees, money and labor and materials that ought to be going into the equipment of the army and the battle for victory."

Three Cheers for the Irish

PASSING through a military hospital, a distinguished visitor noticed a private in one of the Irish regiments who had been terribly injured.

To the orderly the visitor said: "That's a bad case. What are you going to do with him?"

"He's going back, sir!" replied the orderly.

"Going back!" said the visitor in surprised tones.

"Yes," said the orderly. "He thinks he knows who done it." Tit-Bits.

The Fighting Man's Chance

WE read of the thousands of casualties, but the fact is—a man's chance of being killed on the battle-field is about four times as great as his chance of being killed if he remained at home in London, says Answers.

Month by month, as men have grown accustomed to war, and as the power of the Allied artillery has increased, the casualties resulting in death have decreased. Only five men in a hundred, on the average, are killed: of the wounded who reach the hospitals, 98 per cent recover. And the ratio of deaths by disease is only about one to twenty deaths from wounds or in battle, whereas in former wars the ratio was about seven deaths from disease to one in battle or from wounds.

Why Should I Pay Myself a Salary?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

ONE of the best selling stories used by a cash-register salesman is that of a retail merchant whom he frequently urged to instal a cash register, doing away with loose change in his accessible money drawer.

This merchant was obstinate, and went along without a cash register until he failed. When his business was sold it went to his chief clerk, who had pilfered enough money from the unguarded cash drawer to buy it. The merchant had to do something for a living. So he went to work for his old employee as clerk, and things ran on as before, without a cash register. Several years later there was a second failure, and this time the merchant bought in the business.

The experience taught him three things:

First: He did not hire that clerk again; second, he put in a cash register; and third—but this was some time afterward, when the cash register began really to keep books for him and show him how the money came and also where it went—he began to pay himself a salary.

To-day, if the sheriff came in and sold out his business as a going concern, but left him what he has been able to set aside out of his profits for investment, he could retire very comfortably.

Some of the hardest workers in this world never draw any salary, and the strangest thing about their working without stated compensation is—they are all working for themselves! These workers are retail merchants, and farmers, and sometimes professional men, who put in long hours behind the counter, or in the cow-barn, or driving about visiting patients. In their absorption with the money that comes in for merchandise or cream or fees, and that which goes out for

goods or labor or drugs, they entirely forget their own services, and never have a pay-day.

At the end of each year, if they strike a balance at all, and there happens to be two or three hundred dollars upon which they can lay hands, they buy some new clothes for the wife and children, or indulge in some other safe and sane spree, and then go back to drudgery without compensation, in the belief that they have made money.

Of course, if they were going to work for some one else, the question of salary would be the first essential discussed. And now, with the more scientific grasp of business that we are gaining, these unpaid workers are beginning to demand as much from themselves as they would from an employer. Moreover, if they don't, the first thing they know, a government representative is likely to step in and ask them how much they pay themselves a week. And if they are not down on the books for a stated salary, and even if that salary is not large enough, the government may denounce them as pauper labor—plain "scabs."

It is doing something of that kind today in the baking business.

For years and years the little baker with a neighborhood trade has been working day and night without putting himself on the pay-roll. He had to pay his journeymen helpers, and his flour dealer, and the landlord, and everybody else. He paid them all so scrupulously that usually, when the receipted bills were filed, he had nothing left. But now the pressure of war has come upon the baker, little and big, with especial severity. He is asked to bake bread at the smallest reasonable margin of profit for the public good, and it is found that there is only one way in which he can do this—by strict systematizing of all his costs and accounting. The United States has lately stepped in through the Federal Trade Commission and investigated him for his own benefit.

One of the government investigators tells a story of a small neighborhood baker who was asked to put down on a black- board every item of his costs in producing a loaf of bread, from the flour and fuel to the wrapping-paper and twine. When he finished the investigator took the chalk and wrote at the bottom of the list: "$18 a week."

"What's that for?" asked the little baker.

"That's your salary," was the reply.

"Ho," laughed the little baker, I do my own work!"

"Suppose you leave that item in, and pay yourself that much in cash every week, and see if you can make the business run just as smoothly," was the suggestion.

The little baker did this for three months, and at the end of that time had enough money to invest in a Liberty Bond.

But there had been changes in his other expenditures. To pay his own salary he had been compelled to locate and stop a dozen sorts of wastes, big and little, in materials, the time of his employees, and the like.

Usually that is where the salary of this kind of worker is going. The doctor who puts himself on the pay-roll has to systematize his practice and make careless patients pay their bills. The farmer who makes his own weekly wages tangible in money discovers that he must get rid of a "boarder cow" that has been consuming more in feed than she gave in milk. The merchant finds that if he can not make his own business hand out his pay-roll every Saturday night, it might be better for him to go to work for some one who can. The laborer is always worthy of his hire, no matter whom he works for.

If you work for yourself, and do not receive your pay envelop regularly, strike until the boss puts you on the pay-roll!

Does It Pay You to Buy in Packages?

IF you figure on a dollar-and-cents basis, more than seventy-five per cent of the groceries of this country are sold in package form. Sugar makes up the bulk of the stuff not yet packed in modern containers, and even that is now being put into sanitary cartons and bags. Many things can no longer be purchased in bulk—matches, for instance.

Food conservation has brought up the old question, "Which is most economical—bulk or package goods?" And Newman Hamlink, connected with a big corn products company, recently undertook to give the answer in facts and figures—and it is, "Package goods are most economical, every time.

A grocer must weigh out bulk goods, and he can not do it as accurately or cheaply, or with such cleanliness, as it is done in big factories by machinery, where no hand need touch the stuff.

Suppose three quarters of all the stock in the 365,000 grocery stores of this country had to be weighed out instead of being handed over the counter in sanitary packages.

The average grocer is a married man, and his wife is his chief assistant in rush hours. They can serve their neighborhood without a clerk where package goods are sold. But weighing would require at least one additional clerk to each store. And, at only $15 a week for the extra clerk, this would run up toward $5,000,000 extra a year for the United States, to say nothing of the losses through overweight, the injustice to the consumer of underweight, and the waste of good food through exposure and spoiling.

How's Your Floor?

MANY a factory owner will spend money to fix up everything except the factory floor, says a writer in the Textile World Journal.

He says that he recently watched some workmen wheeling woolen goods, and making a detour of forty feet on each trip in order to avoid a bad place in the floor.

One wheelbarrow slid off into a hole while he watched, requiring the time of two men to lift it on to the planks again.

He was told that the condition had existed for more than a year: yet a single glance on the part of the owner ought to have convinced him that the labor saved, in avoiding that long detour, would go a long way toward paying for a new floor— to say nothing of saving a possible accident involving costly injuries.

Capitalizing Your Men

"WE have in our retail business a profit-sharing plan that has worked out very successfully," says M. J. Forbes in System. "By means of it we are creating a teamwork spirit that no competitive commission or bonus plan can give, we feel.

"We assume that an employee is leaving as much in the business as he is taking out. We therefore pay him dividends at the same rate as we pay on our capital stock. If our stock earns 10 per cent, the $1,500-a-year employee receives a cash dividend of $150. There is no agreement or contract between us. The firm merely gives this, as it sees fit, to any employee who has been with us a fiscal year.

"We do not feel that this is an act of philanthropy on our part. It will not only stop many small leaks, but will also add materially to our service to customers."

She Found Her Chance in a Hole-in-the-Wall

I HAD landed in Seattle knowing no one, I and with no capital except a good deal of courage and optimism. Both were rather depleted by the time I had made the rounds in search of employment. Returning to my room one day, my eye lighted upon a machine for sharpening razor-blades that my brother had given me with the remark: "I took this in payment for a debt. It's no good to me, but maybe you can squeeze a few dollars out of it, sis."

Next morning I started out with renewed courage, looking for a place where I could set up the sharpener and start in business. After a long and wearisome search I finally found a narrow space between the walls of two stores located in the heart of the city's business section. The rent was twenty dollars a month for a twenty-inch frontage—a dollar an inch.

I rented it, and next morning installed a table topped with the sharpening machine and slid a stool underneath. At first people glanced at my stand, smiled, and passed on—thinking, no doubt, that the woman in a twenty-inch space between two big stores was a freak. I learned later that I was occupying the smallest business location in Seattle.

Yet, if the space was small, my receipts were large: for business came with a rush. Men in a hurry tossed in their razor-blades as they passed, picked them up on the return trip, and paid cash. I had no expense except the rent. Soon a laundry agency was adding its mite to my income.

Now I have as much trade as I can handle—a trade built up in a strange city in the space of a few months and in the space of a twenty-inch "shop" front. In addition to making a good living, I have a snug little bank account, and I have received several offers to sell out my business.

I simply made up my mind to make success smile on me, and it accepted the invitation.

How Much are You Interrupted?

A PROMINENT business man recently discovered that, as result of distraction, only forty per cent of the average worker's time is expended in actual concentrated work at the desk.

Another manufacturer's experience is quoted by A. Vance in System. A department of his concern, employing eleven girls, was situated directly opposite the elevators. As about five hundred stops a day were made by the elevators, the attention of the girls was constantly diverted. The manufacturer moved the entire department to another part of the office, and discovered after a day or two that ten girls could do what eleven had been doing, and do it much more quickly and effectively. He went further and erected a partition around the girls, which enabled him to save still another girl.

How is your desk situated? Could it be moved so that your attention would be less frequently distracted?

The Real Eyetalian Vendetta

By RUTH MURRAY UNDERHILL

Illustrations by William Berger

THIS is a story of the deadly vendetta between the two wops called Jim and Sullivan.

At first the men in the Hole refused to believe that a vendetta was a real thing. They said no two fellers could be such mutts as to get a grouch on and go to kill each other for months on end. They said them things only happened in the movies. Then Jim and Sullivan had worked side by side in the Hole for six months. After the first month, the only question was, What was the cause of it? What in blazes could two guys have done to each other to make them hate like that!

There were bets up among the men best acquainted with movie horrors. Some held that Sullivan, who was the bigger, had murdered Jim's whole family with a crowbar. Another faction worked out the theory that Jim, who was slight and fiery and had a slick way of getting around, had run off with Sullivan's wife and was keeping her concealed somewhere in New York.

The men never knew the cause, because Jim and Sullivan spoke no English, and probably did not even know that they had been named Jim and Sullivan. But this is the story of the vendetta:

IT began in a place called Torre di Calabria. This Torre is a little town at about the instep of Italy, whose principal industries are digging in some very stony fields, gossiping in some very stony streets, and going to America to make your fortune. Its patron saint is Saint Rafael. Once a year, on Saint Rafael's feast, there is some official excitement in Torre, consisting of a horse race in the public square in honor of the saint. Make no mental pictures of swift thoroughbreds and heavy betting! There are only a few horses in the whole country-side, and these are mild-eyed and heavy-footed and work almost as hard as the people to get some kind of living out of the radiant, rocky

country. But, such as there are, they are decked with ribbons and ridden hell-for-leather three times round the piazza amid cheers. And, before the race, they are led, one by one, up the steps of the Church of Saint Rafael and down the aisle and before the altar, to receive a blessing on their efforts. A little unusual? They started that custom in Torre about the time America was discovered.

Naturally, Rafael di Luca thought he ought to win the race, considering his name. (Little did Rafael, or his patron saint, ever guess that an unsympathetic foreign country could change such a name to Jim!) Rafael was the gayest young blade in the village. They said he had the impertinence that would tweak the devil's tail.

He had nothing but impertinence to help him to-day, though; for the old white nag that he led up the church steps was so wheezy and raw-boned that even his cousin Caterina tittered. Rafael shot her a furious glance from under his long eyelashes, and stood as far away from her as possible to watch the other men take their turn.

The next entry was the handsome, sullen Salvatore, on a black horse worth two of Rafael's. Rafael knew this, for Salvatore had bought the horse from Rafael's bankrupt uncle. And he also knew another thing, which was unknown to the imperious Salvatore. He knew what the horse was afraid of. Caterina cast a smile of admiration at Salvatore. Rafael squeezed himself behind a pillar on the church porch, and, when the black horse and his owner were just at the door, out of the admiring silence he grunted like a pig.

The black horse threw up his head and bolted down the steps, with Salvatore sawing his mouth and cursing. The girls screamed, and the old people said that pretty certainly Salvatore had the evil eye, and neither for cursing nor coaxing would the black horse go back to get his blessing.

Neither Salvatore nor the horse was in any condition to ride in a race. At the second round the horse bolted clean out of the course, and made for the fountain in the middle of the square. Salvatore landed on his back in the tub-shaped village fountain, with the water splashing about and his legs and arms waving. Caterina laughed the loudest of all the village people.

They ran the race without Salvatore, and sheer excitement and determination brought Rafael in at the head of it. Rafael was well satisfied with the day. All the girls wanted to dance with him, and under the stone arch he kissed Caterina before he went home by moonlight.

IT was in the blackest of the gullies outside the walls of Torre that Salvatore sprang out on him. Rafael whipped out his knife, and there was as weird and thrilling a duel as you would wish to see against the black rocks of Torre. Then Salvatore lurched back, dripping a great arc of blood from his arm. He called Rafael some of the unspeakable bad names of their melodious language, while the latter was wiping his stiletto quite clean and putting it in his pocket. Then he finished with what people always say on the stage, in imagination, and in real life:

"But this is not the end! I'll get you yet!"

And he added, in the picturesque terms of Torre:

"Winter and summer, from near and far, for as long as I live, and after—vendetta!"

Salvatore never came back to the village, but his trail dripped blood all the way to the near-by seaport.

"He has gone to America to get rich, and then he will come back and kill me," said Rafael to Caterina, as he toyed with her hand, under the grape-vine. And Rafael meant exactly what he said.

"But, my angel, you would kill him first," murmured Caterina. And she meant exactly what she said, too.

TIME went on uneventfully in Torre, and Rafael became more and more tired of being poor. Caterina's father felt the same way, and he mentioned it to his young relative, one evening, when he found him and Caterina holding hands, as usual, under the grape-vine. He wondered if Caterina might not like to hold some wealthier hand for a while.

So Rafael, who had a temper of his own, flounced out of the house and did not darken its doors again. Caterina had to go and look for him, the night she had news to tell.

"We are going to America, my Rafael," she said, when she met him under the dark archway where he had first kissed her: "And you—of course you will come with us."

So they came to America. That was a year of unemployment. Men tramped the streets for months, looking for jobs, and were carried off to the hospitals at last to die of pneumonia. Men sold their coats to bribe foremen who dismissed them the next day. After the first three weeks, Caterina's father took cold tramping the streets, so Rafael looked for work alone. He and Caterina had stopped holding hands by mutual consent.

One morning Caterina said, with fire burning at the back of her eyes, that Rafael might stay home that day and take care of her father and the house, for she was going out to earn a living for the family.

"Be silent with your shameless talk!" snapped Rafael.

"I am sorry," said Caterina, with her lip trembling, "that it is shameless not to want to starve."

"It is true," said Caterina's father; in his gasping, whispering voice, "that something must be done."

"Well, then," shouted Rafael, "I—I. will do it!"

He looked from one to the other of their incredulous faces.

"I will get a job to-day," thundered Rafael, "I swear by Saint Anthony—or I won't come back!'

That day Rafael found the Hole. By the greatest luck, a man had been killed there an hour before and there was a place vacant.

"All right, guinney, get down in the ditch," said the boss.

So Rafael got down. He walked around a couple of cement barrels, and climbed over a crowbar, and there, in the gray slime, he came face to face with Salvatore. Salvatore was wearing American clothes, and stood resting, with a big hammer in his hand. He looked Rafael full in the face and did not move an eyelash.

"Hey, Sullivan," the boss called to him, "here's a partner for you. Let this new wop hold the drill while you hammer."

RAFAEL did not understand English yet, but he saw what they meant him to do—crouch down there on the rock and hold an iron spike in his two hands while Salvatore swung a hammer three feet above his head. Of course, as they say in the text-books, freedom to dispose of his labor was his. He looked around the Hole, and saw the backs of several hundred men who did not care whether he lived or died. He looked up toward the sidewalk, and saw the feet of several more, probably all ready to leap at his job if he left it. He got down and took the drill.

Salvatore heaved the hammer up. Rafael sat perfectly motionless, gripping the drill until hands a little softer than his would have been cut through. He tried to breathe some sort of prayer.

---

The hammer came down, directly on the drill.

"Aw, speed up, you wops!"

It was the boss's voice. The boss's mud-caked boots were standing directly in Rafael's field of vision. Of course, Salvatore would not strike while they were there: he was waiting for the boss to move. Six—ten strokes, and the boots were there still. It happened that the boss was disputing with the time-keeper. Fifty times Salvatore—who was now Sullivan—raised the hammer directly above Rafael's lowered head and his hands, which were all he had for making his fortune in the new country, and fifty times it came down directly on the drill. Then Salvatore paused and wiped his forehead, and the boss remarked:

"Now let Jim, there, take the hammer."

He moved away.

Rafael took it. The hammer almost flew out of his hands as he swung it up.

"I will give him a few strokes grace," thought Rafael, with his heart pounding.

The hammer smashed down, and almost missed the spike. He saw Salvatore wince. He knew what the other man was thinking—it was what he himself had been thinking a few moments ago; it was: "This time he will strike."

A negro, passing with a wheelbarrow, spoke, just behind Rafael's shoulder. Rafael could not understand the words, but he was sure they were:

"That man will be arrested for murder. He is just going to kill some one."

He brought the hammer down again on the drill-head.

After thirty strokes, he stopped and leaned on the hammer. He was as tired as after a whole day's work in the vineyards at home. Without a word, Salvatore took it from him.

They spelled each other so all day long until the whistle blew. Rafael knew nothing about whistles. He sat still in the murky twilight, watching Salvatore's feet, for Salvatore had the hammer. Suddenly he awoke to the fact that the noise of the drills had ceased. There were no longer men hurrying around them; the boss was out of sight. They were alone in the Hole.

JUST as he realized it, Salvatore was upon him. Rafael rolled in the mud to dodge the hammer, and then was up like lightning, with his old stiletto in his hand. The two men could scarcely see each other: they slipped and dodged in the gray slime.

Suddenly a brawny arm shot between them, and a huge fist grasped a shoulder of each. It was the arm of law and order.

"That'll be about all," said Boss Tierney.

He looked from one to the other, and caught the gleam of steel in their hands.

"Put 'em there," he said.

Salvatore, with a vicious jerk, freed his shoulder, and went to lay a worn stiletto on the top of the cement barrel. Rafael, with clenched teeth, laid his beside it.

"Now look here, ye dirty cutthroats," said the boss. "Do ye want to stay on this job?"

There was a sullen silence—only the baleful gleam of dark eyes as the two looked at each other.

"Speak up," yelled Aloysius Tierney. "Am I the boss here?"

A grunt came from Salvatore. "Sure."

"Well, then, listen here," said Boss Tierney. "I'll have no murtherous dago business in this Hole. If I catch you two fellers fighting again, I'm through with ye. The streets is full of decent men looking for jobs. And mind," he concluded, "no dirty tricks to get each other fired, neither. One peep of trouble from either of ye, and out ye both go. Understand?"

They understood. Even Rafael, from the baffled anger on Salvatore's face, knew that they had the choice of behaving themselves in the Hole, or going out to starve on the New York streets. The two bowed their heads in sullen silence.

"All right," said the boss genially. "Go on up ahead of me. I won't trust ye more than I have to."

They went up, squeezing between the steam-shovel and the bank of frozen earth. Just here, while the boss could be heard moving about below them, Salvatore grabbed Rafael by the shoulder.

"So you are afraid to starve, eh, Rafael, the racer of Torre!" he ground out in their native dialect. "And so am I. But do not think that means that vengeance is any further from my hand."

And, to make his threat more sinister, Salvatore hissed, in the language of the foreign country:

"Vendetta, by gosh!"

Rafael looked his enemy in the eye. "What you can do, Salvatore, I can do!" he ripped out. "Vendetta!"

"Hey, move!" yelled the boss, and herded them through the wooden gate on the sidewalk.

A girl waiting there under the arc light

ran up toward them, and peered into the faces of Rafael and Salvatore before she grabbed the boss's arm.

"Ma sent me for your pay, pop," said the girl.

NEITHER Rafael nor Salvatore had ever seen anything like Rosie Tierney. She wore no bright kerchief, no gold earrings, no embroidered bodice. She had never carried a bundle of wood on her head in all her life. On her red-gold hair perched a rakish white tam that fell over one eyebrow; a white fur neck-piece tickled her tilted little nose; high white boots with glass buttons incased her feet. She would flirt with anything, from an Italian in mud-caked khaki to a theater manager in a limousine.

She had a carnation in her coat, just a little draggled and ancient, but glowing. She held it up and smiled, adventurously, at the two young men.

"Want it?" she taunted.

Rafael and Salvatore stood on each side of the boss, under the arc light. They knew very well that the most serious part of the day's business was still to come, and that was for each one to get away and home without the other knowing where he lived and finding some convenient way to murder him. But the glowing dark eyes of Salvatore and Rafael became fixed, with one accord, on the carnation. The glances of girls had always fallen most kindly on Rafael. Rosie smiled at him and raised her hand.

But just then the heedless boss, with his eye on the corner saloon, stepped between. Rafael's instinctive processes notified him that this was the moment for his getaway. There was a tool-shack a few feet beyond him, and then a stretch of dark street. If he wished to take home his skin and his pay that night— Tears of rage and humiliation came to his eyes. He ducked behind the tool-shack and ran. But, as he turned the first dark corner into safety, he sobbed, as he shook his fist toward the Hole: "Vendetta, by gosh!"

THE boss did not put them at the drills next day. Rafael found himself, with Salvatore, wheeling barrows of stone to the concrete-mixer. Rafael had dumped his barrow and was turning to come back, when he came face to face with Salvatore. The other man had a pink carnation stuck behind his ear.

Rafael saw red. In a moment he had leaped at Salvatore and thrown the flower into the creaking bin of concrete. Every one looked up at Salvatore's yell, but instantly he bit his lips and walked on as if nothing had happened.

But a moment later Rafael felt a violent shove behind him. He was lifted off his feet, he turned a somersault in the air; and the next thing he knew, he was clawing and choking clown the concrete chute in a stream of concrete. Rafael thought he was going to drown or strangle; but he was pulled out, at the bottom, by the scruff of his neck, and set, tousled and plastered with concrete, in the center of a circle of roaring men.

Rafael's eyes flashed murder. Salvatore passed nonchalantly with his barrow, just as the boss hove in sight to learn the trouble. The two enemies turned away from each other without a look. But Rafael, picking lumps of concrete from his hair, put his knuckles against his teeth and bit them. And Salvatore, disappearing up the gangway to the mixer, drew a finger across his throat. In the silent and deadly language of Torre, they had said:

"I'll eat your heart out."

"I'll slice your head off."

So the great vendetta by machinery was on. The Hole soon perceived it, and then it occurred to every one, as a colossal joke, to stuff the two men with tales of what you could do with the different engines.

They told Rafael that the electric wires were magic, and that there was power enough in one of them to pull any object right across the Hole, if you tied one end of a wire to it and held the other end in your hand. So Rafael attached one end of an old wire to the steam-shovel scoop, and tried to pull it to where it would brain Salvatore as he passed with his barrow. But the scoop swung, as usual, horizontally in the other direction; and Rafael was dragged, face downward in the mud, to his enemy's feet.

Salvatore got hold of the cylindrical brass fire-extinguisher, which looked just like a bomb. But when he swung it above his head and turned the cock, the only thing that happened was that Boss Tierney stepped in front of him and was drenched with gasolene.

Then they tried dynamite. Rafael discovered a battery and attached a fuse, and then waited all day to see it explode under Salvatore's feet. It was a used-up battery.

All this time they never exchanged a word. Sometimes, notably after the fire-extinguisher episode, the boss descended on them in fury, and wanted to know who done that fool trick, because the feller was going to get fired. Each man would have given his soul to be rid of his enemy by such an easy method, but they remembered Aloysius Tierney's grim words:

"And no dirty tricks to get each other fired. One peep of trouble from either of ye, and out ye both go."

So, with rage eating their hearts out, they would turn on the Irishman two pairs of impenetrable dark eyes, and answer blandly, in unison:

"Don't know, Misser Boss."

There were no more skirmishes for a getaway at closing time, for Rafael had bitterly accepted the fact that Salvatore was occupied with the boss's daughter and he might slip home to Caterina unobserved. Only, he did not want to slip home to Caterina.

I here was no affection or merriment between them any more, since Rafael had eaten and slept with the thought of how to kill another man. He was getting as gaunt and wolfish as if he had never played a joke in his life. At home, he only sat, with his elbows on the table, glaring at his untasted macaroni.

"Perhaps the girls aren't nice to you in New York," taunted Caterina, with tears glimmering in her eyes.

Rafael had learned some English in the Hole.

"Shut up!" he shouted, as he dashed out and banged the door.

Then came the day when Salvatore was made night watchman. It is not customary to intrust this job to an Italian; but Boss Tierney explained unblushingly:

"Ye see, the feller only left to-day, and I'm savin' the place for a friend of me own. But he can't come till to-morrer, and I can't get any one else just for one night. But you guinneys is crazy for money. Do yez want to go right on to-night, and then ye can sleep to-morrer, it bein' Sunday ?"

"Sure," grunted Salvatore.

RAFAEL understood that there was a long, black night ahead when his enemy would be alone in the Hole—unless he was there. It was Saturday, and the men streamed out pell-mell for the pay-shack. The boss paused a minute to give Salvatore directions:

"Look around in the little tunnel to see if them wood props is firm. The men'll be working in there on Monday."

Salvatore flashed a sudden fierce smile and made for the little tunnel. Rafael slipped along behind him: he was smiling a fierce smile, too.

The little tunnel had only been blasted out that day, and Rafael had dug there all the afternoon. It was a cubby-hole twenty feet long by eight high, the dirt walls propped up by wooden bulkheads and a wire strung around for incandescent lights. Rafael saw Salvatore go in there with a hammer and spade and lantern, and heard him tinkering with the wooden props. Salvatore had not even looked to see if everybody was out of the Hole. He trusted to pay night to attend to that for him.

This was after many months of the daily duel. Rafael had long ago ceased to ask questions, but he had watched the men at their work with eyes that almost

Concluded on page 15

THIS IS THE LIFE

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LINCOLNS

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Concluded from page 10

burned the tools. He had known, for weeks now, how to kill Salvatore when the chance came.

By the light of the red lanterns he unearthed the materials he had been concealing. The jokers had been napping when they allowed Rafael to sneak away a stick of dynamite. Besides the dynamite, he took a long fuse and four batteries, bound together and ready for use. The little tunnel was exactly the place for him to catch Salvatore.

His plan was to attach the wire fuses to the batteries outside, where he could work at ease. Then he would carry the dynamite to the tunnel and slip it in when Salvatore's back was turned, come back and turn the key and run. The fuse was quite long enough to give him a good start, and the explosion would take place inside the tunnel, and he and the big machines outside would not be hurt.

He could not keep his hands from shaking as he handled the fuses for the first time and attached them to the batteries as he had seen the men do. But it was very easy. He took the dynamite in his hand and began to creep up behind Salvatore's back, feeling his way over the rough ground, and shaking with excitement.

At the second step he stumbled, and righted himself. He had a horrible idea that the dynamite would explode if he touched it to the ground. His other foot caught. He tried to get his balance without touching the dynamite; but the very newness and deadliness of the things he was using made his unaccustomed hands more awkward still. In a moment he had fallen backward, and was tumbling over some rolling, heavy thing. Rafael's heart stood still with terror. He grasped the heavy object to stay his fall, and it rolled with him. He struggled frantically, clawing and scrambling, and in the midst of it his hand touched a metal handle which moved with a click.

"Heaven have mercy!" gasped Rafael.

For now he knew what he had done. He had fallen over the batteries and turned the key. The fuse was sputtering, blue, ten yards away from him. Rafael leaped up with a yell, and ran, with his lungs bursting and the sweat pouring down his forehead. He reached the mouth of the little tunnel, and the thought just flashed upon him that in there was the place, and the only place, where he might be safe from the destruction outside. But at the entrance he collided with Salvatore.

"Let me in thou son of a devil!" shrieked Rafael, and he charged the other man like a bull.

"Let me out!" bellowed Salvatore, shoving like a battering-ram.

The tunnel entrance was narrow. They could just have squeezed past each other. But neither of them had any idea of that: they fought like maniacs, each one putting out his last ounce of strength to hurl the other the way he himself wished to go. Rafael was the smaller, but the thought of that blue fuse sputtering outside made him as strong as a demon. He braced his foot against the doorway, and butted the huge Salvatore, staggering backward into the tunnel. There was a wild struggle in the dirt, and then Rafael found himself bent backward against the sloping wall, with Salvatore's hands choking the life out of him.

"Heart of a toad!" panted Salvatore.

THERE was a sound of muffled thunder from the Hole. Then a low, grumbling roar began all about them. The lantern was blotted out; there was a rain of dirt in their ears and noses; pebbles battered steadily over their heads and shoulders. Rafael felt the hands that were choking him drop away. He straightened himself, and had hard work to catch his breath in the damp darkness. He still heard the pebbles sliding and spattering, but the sounds of the street above were cut off as if he were in a grave. He moved, and his feet distrubed a coil of fallen electrical wire which arced and sent a rush of sparks hissing up around him.

They were quite near the tunnel entrance. Rafael stretched out his arm and began cautiously to feel for it. There was a movement at the other side of the tunnel, and another rush of sparks. Salvatore was feeling, too. Without a word, they went on feeling; but the silence was so great that every sound could be heard. When Rafael stopped, Salvatore stopped, and each crouched, waiting for the other to spring. So they both drew near to the mouth of the tunnel. But there was no mouth, only slopes of soft, loose earth. The movements of both stopped.

RAFAEL leaned against the wall, exhausted from his struggle with the stronger man. He was still breathing heavily, but presently he noticed that he choked as he breathed and a heavy smell filled his nostrils.

"What is that smell?" he had cried out, before he realized it.

The voice of Salvatore answered him immediately, shaken and almost pleading, without a hint of threat in it:

"I think it is gas from a broken pipe, Rafael."

Rafael shook himself erect.

"But then we must work; we must dig our way out of here!" he cried. "There is death in here!"

"I think there is," answered Salvatore.

It was what each of them had been seeking for six months, but not for himself. For a minute more they stood tense in the darkness, each afraid to make the first move. Then Rafael called:

"Salvatore! We can never get out if we don't work together. What do you say, Salvatore?"

And Salvatore only answered:

"I think my shovel must be here on the ground."

Their hands touched the shovel handle at the same time, and suddenly clasped. They were both cold.

Salvatore took it.

"I am the stronger," he said. "Where was the tunnel mouth, brother?"

Rafael felt up and down the soft, even slopes.

"I don't know," he said.

Salvatore began shoveling at the place where the earth seemed loosest to the touch. But they heard the soft, sliding walls sinking down to fill the hole as fast as he emptied it. When he was panting for breath, Rafael took the shovel, and they went silently on as if they were on the job, by daylight. The gaseous smell grew slowly stronger. They could discover no fragments of pipe where they were: it must be seeping in through the loose earth, slowly but just as surely.

Finally Rafael put his hand on Salvatore's arm.

"Listen, brother," he said; "I think we shall die here. I—I—oh, Salvatore mio, I'm sorry I did it!"

Salvatore dropped the shovel and grasped his hand.

"You did it, Rafael?" he cried. "No, no! I—I am a criminal. I loosened the props in here. Except for that, they would never have fallen like this. I meant them to fall on you on Monday. Oh, forgive me, my brother!"

Rafael grasped his enemy's arm; his head was swimming.

"We each tried to bring death on the other," he murmured, "and now we have succeeded both at once, and each brought it on himself as well. Salvatore, this America is too big for us. We need all our strength to deal with it. We haven't enough to spare for quarreling together. Oh, let us be friends, Salvatore!"

"Fratello, amico mio!" cried Salvatore, falling on his neck.

They were both very drowsy. They sank to the ground together, while the blackness grew hotter and denser around them. Finally Salvatore gasped out:

"I want my soul to go in peace, Rafael. I forgive you for making Caterina laugh at me, that day in Torre."

It was out the cause of the vendetta. Rafael clasped his friend to his heart.

"I was a brute; I was an assassin!" he panted. "If we were to come out of here alive, for a penance I would take you to the house of Caterina in New York, and I would go away while you made love to her. Heaven knows," said Rafael, with a last heart-stabbing pang, "I guess she would let me go."

For six months Rafael had tried to keep from Salvatore the news that Caterina was in New York, and now it hardly caused him to raise his head.

"I do not deserve it, brother," he murmured weakly. "For I have taken from you the maiden of the boss by telling her that you are a damn-guinney and you don't talk English. But I swear, by the saints, to give her up to you if I come out alive. Farewell, my brother."

"Farewell, Salvatore."

They clasped hands on the final pledge.

IT was eight o'clock on Sunday morning before Boss Tierney and a gang of extra men dug through the cave-in and let a blast of cold air into the little tunnel. Since none of the big bosses were there on Sunday, Rosie had insisted on following her father to see the excitement. She fluttered directly behind the boss, who wielded a shovel himself.

"For Pete's sake," shrieked Rosie, "look at the two wops!"

Salvatore and Rafael were seated side by side on the ground, with their arms around each other. They did not stir. The boss took a whiff of the tunnel air.

"We might bring 'em to," he said, "if the gas ain't been too strong. I'm glad we didn't lose no white man that way."

"Are they hurt?" screamed Rosie.

And just for that minute, and the wild ones that followed, the muddy and tousled Salvatore occupied the place of a hero for her.

A YOUNG doctor with a black instrument set to work trying to make Salvatore and Rafael breathe.

"Keep that rubber-neck crowd away from the gate!" yelled the boss.

But he was too late. Caterina, in a flying blue skirt and embroidered bodice, and the flowered kerchief that she had worn to mass, burst past him like a whirlwind from the Mediterranean. Rafael was just opening his eyes, and she had kissed him several times before his mind was clear enough for him to push her weakly back.

"Caterina," he murmured faintly, "I made a promise last night under fear of death, and I—I guess I'll have to keep it. Yonder is Salvatore. He loves you. I told him he could have you."

Caterina threw her arms around Rafael's neck.

"Those things," sobbed Caterina, "are not for you to say, my little artichoke!"

She did glance at Salvatore, however; and noticed a white tam quite close to his ear.

"And as for girls such as he goes with," added Caterina, "if I see you even smiling at an American vixen like that, I shall violently slap your face, my darling Rafael!"

Some moments later, Salvatore came toward them, with Rosie clinging to his arm and questioning him with glowing eyes.

"Rafael, my brother," Salvatore apologized, "the Signorina Tierney says she could not very well keep company with you, because you are so bad at the English. You see, don't you?"

"Don't mention it, my dear Salvatore," answered Rafael blissfully.

Boss Tierney loomed upon the scene.

"Begorra," he roared, "somebody is to blame for this damn mess, and I want to know who, because he's going to get fired!"

SALVATORE and Rafael exchanged glances. Their looks, which used to convey a secret threat of murder, now flashed just as secret a message of loyalty and understanding. Then two pairs of impenetrable dark eyes were turned on the boss and two voices answered blandly in unison:

"Don't know, Misser Boss."

Boss Tierney looked around at the wrecked tunnel and at the buried machinery. Then he looked at the two pallid, grimy, ecstatic faces before him.

"Say, boys," he grinned, "is it over? You know, that—that—"

"It was a real Eyetalian vendetta, pa," glowed Rosie.

"Ven-det-ta!" repeated the boss. "Well, believe me, it was sure some vendetta, by gosh!"

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

WHEN THEY'RE LOW IS THE TIME TO BUY

HAVE you grown discouraged by the decline of your investments, and sold out at a loss? If so, you are playing right into the hands of the well-to-do gentlemen who make all their money by buying in the dark days and selling when the sun shines, Lord Rothschild laid the basis for his fortune by buying English Consols when they were at their lowest, at the time of the Battle of Waterloo: and always the family followed the same course. Says Bond Talk:

"In 1871, when the Commune in Paris was at its height, a young man called on the great banking firm of Rothschild to ask advice in regard to investing a large fortune to which he had become heir. The advice given him by the head of this great house was to buy "Rentes," French. Government Securities. "Buy securities when the streets of Paris are running red with blood!" exclaimed the young Man. And Baron Rothschild is reported to have said: "My young friend, that is the very reason that to-day you can buy Rentes for 50 per cent of their face value." It is said that the young man invested the entire fortune on the advice of Rothschild, and saw it increase within three years to almost double its original amount."

BUYING NEW JERSEY

HAVE you ever had the wish that you might come back here for a few days a couple of hundred years hence? How big a country will the United States be then?

The year 1674 is only two hundred and fifty years back: yet in that year a colony of Quakers, sent out from England by William Penn, bought from the Indians a large slice of what is now New Jersey. And the price as recorded in the new Life of Penn, by John W. Graham (Frederick A. Stokes Company), was as follows:

"30 match coats: 20 guns: 30 kettles: 1 great kettle: 30 pair of hose: 20 fathoms of duffels: 30 petticoats: 30 narrow hose: 30 bars of lead: 15 small barrels of powder: 70 knives: 30 Indian axes: 70 combs: 60 pair of tobacco tongs: 60 pair of scissors: 60 tinshaw looking glasses: 120 awl-blades: 120 fish hooks: 2 grasps of red paint: 120 needles: 60 tobacco boxes: 120 pipes: 200 bells: 1oo jews-harps and 6 ankers of rum."

Reading reports like these, and then comparing them with the present value of the same land, we sympathize with Bill Nye. "Chicago was once sold for an old pair of shoes," he said. "Whenever I read that statement, I go into the room where the portraits of my ancestors hang, and I shake my fist under the nose of my great-grandfather : 'Where were you when Chicago was sold for an old pair of shoes?'"

A WOMAN IN MANCHURIA

PEACE and violence are never very far apart in the East. In Pioneering Where the World is Old (Henry Holt & Company) Alice Tisdale tells of a vagabonding trip with her husband through remote parts of Manchuria. They traveled with an armed escort of two soldiers through a country filled with bandits. It did no good to ask the carters how near they were to their destination. 'Why should You wish to know?' they asked. 'It will not get you there any sooner. Just plod on and on, and by and by, if fate wills it, you will be there. That is all there is to it. Why discuss it?'

"Suddenly, from the quiet road ahead, a cloud of dust arose. As we strained our eyes to see, there came riding out of it three or four men. Each man riding was pulling after him by leading-straps a number of animals—that much we could see.

"Now we were near enough to understand their shouts: 'The Red-beards are coming! The Red-beards are coming! They are chasing us, to get our horses. Hung-hu-tzu-lai! Hung-hu-tzu-lai!'

"The carters jumped to their places, simultaneously letting their long whips sing and crack in the air. Down they came on the mules' backs. The carts sprang forward with a terrific bounce. It was a wild ride. Across the fields! Through the kaoliang! Over the beans! All around us, the terrified men yelled savagely. Behind, steadily getting nearer, a cloud of brown dust.

"Suddenly, there in front of us, hidden until now by the tall grain, stood a walled-in farm-house. We sprang to the ground. We hammered frenziedly on the door. Would they, oh, would they let us in? The precious moments were passing. Bullets were going 'phut!' in the dirt around us. Hope was all but gone—when through a loophole some one within spied us—the foreigners. Then they knew and opened their gates. Horses, mules, men—we all whirled into the court, swept on by the overwhelming instinct to live. The great doors swung to behind us, the heavy wooden bars clattered into place. We were safe."

AFTER 783 YEARS

WHEN the Holy City surrendered to the British after 783 years of Mohammedan rule, it caused rejoicing all over the world. The Jews were happy, and the Christians were happy, and even the Arabian Mohammedans were happy. Only the Turks and Germans had cause to mourn.

After half a year of practical inaction, with discouraging reports of a large Turkish force concentrated at Aleppo, the British suddenly at the end of October began their spectacular advance which resulted in the capture of Jerusalem.

This advance was a regular Biblical sight-seeing trip for General Allenby's men. They first labored through the barren country around Beersheba, capturing the city after a stiff fight. Beersheba is an oasis in itself, and of great strategic importance as the terminal of a railroad that runs north to Joppa and connects with a line to Jerusalem.

They capture the junction of the Beersheba-Damiscus Railroad with the Joppa Jerusalem Railroad, only twelve miles from the Holy City. And then, on November 17, Joppa surrendered.

The London Graphic says: "General Allenby, by his masterful strategy, has obtained the Golden City by the most pacific method possible in actual warfare, namely, a wide encircling movement that secured the city intact without firing a single shot into it or over it. All the sacred places to Mohammedan, as well as to Christian and Jew, have fortunately escaped damage."

HOW MANY PEOPLE ARE UNMARRIED?

A STATEMENT has recently been going the round of the papers that there are 17,000,000 unmarried men and women in the United States. The figure is misleading, says the Journal of Heredity, but the actual facts are startling enough. Unmarried persons over thirty-five years of age are relatively unlikely to marry, and of these there are nearly 2,000,000 men and about 1,250,000 women. There are about 500,000 unmarried women between the ages of twenty-five and thirty-four, and of these a considerable proportion will never marry.

Is it altogether a bad thing that there should be these millions of the unmarried? From the standpoint of eugenics, the Journal of Heredity thinks not. "While the number includes many potential fathers and mothers of a desirable character," it says, "it is probable that, on the whole, these lifelong celibates are eugenically inferior to the married population."

TWENTY YEARS AGO

LADIES wore bustles.

Operations were rare.

Nobody swatted the fly.

Nobody had appendicitis.

Nobody wore white shoes.

Cream was five cents a pint:

Cantaloupes were muskmelons.

Most young men had "livery bills."

You never heard of a "tin Lizzie."

Doctors wanted to see your tongue.

Milk shake was a favorite drink.

Advertisers did not tell the truth:

The hired girl drew $1.50 a week.

Nobody cared for the price of gasolene.

Farmers came to town for their mail.

The butcher "threw in" a chunk of liver.

There were no sane Fourths.

You stuck tubes in your ears to hear a phonograph, and it cost a dime.

From Town crier.

WHAT TOLSTOY WROTE IN HIS JOURNAL

COUNT LEO TOLSTOY in his youth laid down a large number of rules for his own guidance. The first one was this: "Fulfil everything which you have set yourself." And the second was: "Regard feminine society as an inevitable evil of social life, and, in so far as you can, avoid it."

The rest of his rules were quite as strict, and his failure to heed his own warnings filled the pages of his Diary (E. P. Dutton & Company) with a gloomy record of shortcomings:

"March 8th. Yesterday it was late before I opened my eyes, but eventually I got the better of myself. Then I wrote (hurriedly and without reflection) a letter to Nikolinka, and also one, in the stupid form which I have now adopted, to the office (self-delusion). My gymnastics I did carelessly, and with too little balancing of myself against my strength. This failing I shall term in general presumption. At gymnastics I showed off (boastfulness). Also I tried to impart to Kobylin my candid opinion of myself (petty vanity); at luncheon I over-ate myself (gluttony); I went to Volkonsky's without first finishing what I had to do (lack of continuity); I gorged myself upon sweets; sat up too late; and I told several falsehoods.

"March 9th. Yesterday it was long before I arose, for I lacked energy. Went for a drive in dirty gloves and minus a fur coat (want of thought, haste). Told Panin of my building scheme (desire to show off). Visited Oliver's and the Beers' (at both showed indecision and shyness). Called upon Kireyevksy without any reason (want of solidity, shyness).

"March 10th. Again did not rise till late. Spoke amiss to Ozerov, and pressed upon him a horse (meanness). Lied to Begichev. Left my fur coat behind (haste and want of solidity). At the Council showed diffidence; at gymnastics, vanity; at the Lvov's presumption and affectation."

Entries for the three days following begin with the mournful confession, "Rose reluctantly (sloth)." Thus within a week the great writer was able to convict himself of some twenty distinct sins.

---

THAT WONDERFUL THING CAMOULAGE

BEFORE we forget what camouflage means because of its adoption as a stock-in-trade of American slang, it is interesting to see how the art has developed in Europe from a clumsy screening of trenches with sod and leaves to elaborate scenic effects spread over miles of country. Whole camps are made invisible, roads are concealed, fake roads laid out, people are dressed in invisible cloaks of the old fairy-tales.

The French, says Lieutenant J. Andre Smith in the Architectural Record, were the first to develop the art of modern camouflage. Then the Germans copied them to good effect. The English adopted it as a military necessity, but practised it at first with a heavy hand and lack of imagination.

Good camouflage requires a sense of humor, inventiveness, temperament. H. G. Wells reported that "the effect of going from behind the French front to behind the English is like going from a brooding wood of green and blue into an open blaze of white canvas and khaki."

A "close-up" of clever camouflage is startling to people with the old-fashioned idea that invisibility demands inconspicuous shades and designs. A gun carefully camouflaged looks like a futurist portrait.

However, the eye to be deceived is not that of the artist or his friends, but the long eye of the enemy aeroplane. The French discovered that dull colors stand out sharply in certain lights and against certain backgrounds. They began to adapt to their uses the protective coloring of birds and animals. They used colors and markings that blended with the surroundings, darkened high-lights, and brightened dark surfaces.

"And then, with this as a foundation," say's Mr. Smith, "they began 'breaking' the outlines with irregular streakings and blotches, all very weird to behold at close range; but at a distance, if they did not accomplish invisibility, they gained what they were unable to do before, and that is the confusion to the eye: A gun painted in this way became a 'What-is-it?' It raised a doubt in the mind of the observer; it disarmed his suspicions, and accordingly blinded him to its importance. In other words, this new method of painting accomplished invisibility by giving to objects a sort of harmless insignificance. Painted in this way, aero-sheds, tents, and the various gigantic instruments of war are modest, shrinking deceptions. They seem to say, 'Tut, tut, don't look at me; I am nothing!'"

The camouflage artist of the war must paint with a large brush. "His protective markings must be in scale with tree-trunks and boulders or the scarred upheaval of the shell-torn earth. He must constantly struggle against obliterating mechanical surfaces, sharp angles, cogs and wheels, and, worst of all, he must fight against the suppression of the infinite shadows cast by projections, to break the sharp mechanical edges and wipe out, if possible, the shadow cast by the entire object. Paint alone can not always accomplish this obliteration of form, especially in the larger guns; but it is nevertheless constantly employed as a basis for protection, and further augumented by the use of reed or leaf nettings supported on posts above the guns and often in front and on both sides.'

"TO BE DIVIDED AMONG HIS PEOPLE"

THE Russian peasant, says Zinovi Pechkoff in the National Geographic Magazine, went into the war with a complete understanding of its purpose and a readiness to sacrifice. Many peasant communities, which had been granted a remission of taxes because of their poverty, came to the government offices in the nearest town offering to pay up back taxes.

When the official, surprised at such zeal, would say, 'But no; your community is granted three or five years' remission of taxes,' the peasants would shake their heads and answer:

"Oh, no; that was before the war. Now the country is in war; now the Country needs' money, and who would pay if the peasant does not pay?'

"In in many of the peasant communities they organized reading clubs for the purpose of gathering in the evenings and reading newspapers and discussing the situation.

"Sometimes they would have to send a man on horseback or in a wagon for ten or fifteen miles to the town to bring a newspaper.

"Then some young man or school-boy, surrounded by all the old men and women and children of the village, would read aloud the paper, and hot discussions would take place. They knew all; they knew about Serbia; they knew about Belgium."

"In one community the peasants decided to do something for the Belgians. They started to collect money, and they collected a very large sum—29 roubles (about $14).

"Then the community gathered at a meeting and debated as to whom this money should be sent, and they decided to send it to the King of the Belgians.

"So they wrote him a letter, and this is what they said:

"It is naïve, it is primitive, yet it shows the spirit of the people."

BE GOOD TO YOUR HEART

HERE is no eight-hour day for your heart. It must pump ahead, day and night, twenty-four hours a day.

It weighs only half a pound, and it must pump seventy gallons of blood through the human system every hour, or, as Joseph Jackson in the Philadelphia Public Ledger estimates, 1,205,000 gallons each year.

It has the power to propel the blood through the arterial system at the rate of 621 feet a minute, and this means that the blood requires about twenty-seven seconds in an adult to make a complete circuit of the blood vessels. Being pumped over and over again, the blood travels a distance of 61,000 miles in a year, or more than twice the circumference of the globe.

A wonderfully faithful worker, the little heart; and yet, the modern hurried man abuses it so constantly that the increase in deaths from heart diseases are enormous.

The remedy is: more exercise; less hurry; and more careful eating. The following rules, especially, deserve to be pasted in your hat:

Don't eat when tired.

Don't eat when hurried.

Don't eat when worried.

Don't eat unless you can give your mind to it.

Don't eat irregularly.

Don't eat quickly.

Don't eat the things you know will cause indigestion.

THE CHILDHOOD OF ANIMALS

SMALL families, long intervals of breeding, and careful feeding, guarding, and training of the young are characteristics not only of the human species but of the whole group of animal life to which human beings belong—that is, the mammals, says P. Chalmers Mitchell, F. R. S., in The Childhood of Animals (Frederick A. Stokes Company). Nature no longer maintains the species by the production of enormous families; instead, fewer young are produced, and they are better equipped by their parents to fight the battle of life.

Perhaps the most interesting example of this is seen in the carnivores, or flesh-eating animals. The cubs behave very much like human babies when they are born. They are helpless and usually blind, and almost their first sign of independent life is their power to wail and scream. They do not cry from hunger, but because they want companionship; and their shrieks guide the mother to them if she happens to be out hunting.

Before they are weaned, young carnivores begin to scrape off fragments of flesh from the prey the mother has brought home, and so acquire a taste for their future food. Before they leave the home lair they are taught the elements of stalking by the mother, who lets them play with her tail, flicking about its tip and training them to seize hold of it and worry it. As soon as young lions are strong enough, they are taken out on short foraging expeditions.

Very different is the early life and training of ruminants—that is, deer, giraffes, buffalo, etc. They have no permanent home, but are wanderers from the moment of their birth. The young are trained, not to attack, but to escape.

Monkeys seem to give their babies less care and training than some of the other mammals. Apart from nursing their young, they make no attempt to give them food or share it with them; and, instead of carrying the baby about, as a lion or tiger does, it is the baby who clings tightly to the mother as she springs and leaps from branch to branch of trees.

How Three of Us Lived on $26 a Week

BEFORE I married David I had never saved a cent in my life. I was thoroughly familiar with the workings of a checking account, but the money deposited itself at regular intervals as my father's administrator had arranged it should, and all I had to concern myself with was that it shouldn't vanish too quickly.

When I think now what a hardship it seemed to stretch what I now know to be a generous sum to cover my girlish needs, I smile a bit. For before I had finished my teens an unfortunate investment swept away all of my securities, leaving me at the end of my first year at college not only penniless but in debt to my tailor.

From that time until a year ago, when I married David, a bank was no concern of mine.

I was almost like those artists in O. Henry's story "who lived between a hank and a laundry, but had nothing to do with either."

But when I married David things were different. I had even less money than in the hall-bedroom and studio days—and in an amazingly short time there was to be a baby.

When I realized that I must give up my own work, I faced the delightful little problem of living and running a household on a smaller income than I had ever had in my life—barring a few desperate weeks when I had had none at all.

Those weeks had taught me two things, however: that nothing is impossible, and that everything might be worse. With these axioms I began to work things out.

Sometimes I worked with pen and paper, sometimes at greasy markets, sometimes poring over cook books and a few blessed hints I just stumbled upon. The tale of the mistakes I made and the tears I wasted might be interesting reading, but they would more than fill a book.

A few of the many useful things I learned are these;

Never to live in a cheap neighborhood. Never to buy cheap clothing. Never to charge anything. Always to do my own marketing, and whenever it was at all possible to do my own delivering. Never to buy more food than we absolutely needled.

But the best thing I learned—the one that solved my problem—was simply to make out appropriations for all of our expenses at the beginning of each week.

By doing just that one thing, I was enabled, out of an income of twenty-six dollars a week, to save ten and sometimes twelve dollars. And that was not ten years ago, nor in a country town, but this current year and in the second largest city in the country!

Roughly, our budget was: six dollars a week for rent, ten dollars for the bank, and five dollars each for running expenses.

Out of his five David paid for lunches, carfare, our amusements, and any small articles of clothing that he needed.

With my five I ran the house, paid for the laundry, gas, electricity, and my carfare. Those figures mean shaving five-dollar bill into mighty small slivers. But it can be done.

Each pay-day morning I distributed my elastic five dollars among envelops bearing such labels as "Laundry," "Milk," "Monday," "Tuesday:" "Wednesday," "Thursday," "Friday," "Saturday," and "Sunday," and, if it were close to the first of the month, "Gas" and "Electricity."

Into the milk envelop I put seventy cents; for laundry I allowed a dollar; gas and electricity were each apportioned twenty-five cents; and the remaining two dollars and eighty cents went for each day's food, forty in each envelop marked for the days.

Of course none of these amounts are by any means static when it comes to actual expenditure. Sometimes the laundry was only eighty-seven cents. In that case the surplus pennies were put into the gas or electricity envelop, or perhaps they went into a little tin bank.

Sometimes we had dinner out; that meant that I could put that day's forty cents in to some small luxury, or use it to help out sometime when there was a guest for dinner and I wanted an extra decent steak.

Forty cents a day for food may seem impossible, but any doubting Thomas is welcome to my account-book. The food was plain, of course; but a man who has eaten most of his meals at a college training table isn't very likely to be critical of anything much except quantity, and these menus were primarily designed to please such a palate.

Plain as our menus are, it took considerable thought and research to stretch the pennies that produced them. At first, on Monday nights we usually feasted on mush and milk, or ox-tails en casserole. But by questioning the butchers and grocery clerks I learned what was cheap and how to bargain.

The stores in our neighborhood all follow the practice of offering some special thing for sale each day.

If one advertised lamb chops particularly cheap, I bought lamb chops; if another offered strawberries or canteloupe more reasonably than the rest I bought my dessert there. Possibly I went all the way down the block for bargain in cabbage, asparagus, or some other vegetable.

Therein lies the big advantage of doing one's own marketing. For frequently pork chops would do just as well as veal or lamb chops, but if I were ordering by telephone I couldn't tell whether the pork chops on sale at twelve cents less than the veal or lamb were as good as I wanted to serve.

The Sunday papers with the big department-store advertisements were my text books. I made it a habit to study them keenly, comparing prices and brands that were advertised, until now I can spot bargain half a column away.

Each time an article that I needed was advertised at a substantial reduction, I bought it from the fund in the little tin bank.

When we finally moved from the play house kitchenette, bedroom, and bath apartment to a place with a regular kitchen, the little tin bank had practically furnished my apple-green pantry shelves.

It is only ten months since I hit upon the "appropriation scheme," as David calls it; but in that comparatively short space of time we have doubled and nearly trebled our income: for Dave, free from financial worries, has had two substantial raises in salary.

Besides our current expenditures we have paid a hospital bill and a howling doctor's bill, and have rented and furnished a larger apartment, making necessary a maid. But, in spite of these additional expenses, we have money in the bank, owe no man, and each of us sports a Liberty Bond button.

E. T. N.

This is His Week

FEW men ever yielded less to the mob; few have distrusted democracy (as such) more; yet he did more for the people than any philanthropist, in that he gave them cheap bread.

In 1830 the reaction from a succession of wars lasting forty years struck England. Her people faced famine. There was no money in either private or state treasury. The land was stripped of corn, and by reason of the Corn Laws bread had advanced to a prohibitive price.

Sir Robert Peel, as Premier, like Hoover today, found himself face to face with the problem of a hungry people and clear bread.

"We must learn, not how to eat less, but how to eat more wisely," said Peel. "But first of all we must make food cheap." It was then that he began his fight for free trade. "You will ruin England if you persist in this," his brother statesmen cried.

"I will make her!" declared Peel.

The fight for the repeal of the Corn Laws continued for a number of years. It was bitterly opposed on all sides.

Peel, however, insisted that the rapidly increasing population and the geographical situation of England made trade without import tariff an absolute necessity for national existence.

"We are a bit of land surrounded by water; we can not support ourselves by our own produced," stated Peel; "wherefore we must admit without levy such commodities as are necessary for our bodily livelihood."

When free trade finally carried, he instituted the income tax to equalize the loss of money to the public treasury through the cessation of food tariffs.

The police system as we have it to-day also must be attibuted to Peel.

Civil order in the towns and cities of England in those days was kept by civilian soldiers or a "watch" hired privately. It was dangerous for reputable citizens to fare abroad after nightfall without a strong armed guard as protection against thugs and footpads. This state of affairs Peel remedied when he organized the London police known as "Peelers."

This is why a policeman is a "Bobby" to-day in England.

Hating the word "democracy" and clinging fiercely to all that was ultra-conservative in theory, it is curious that almost every act of this statesman should have resulted directly in a betterment of conditions for workman and producer.

Want to Know How Many? Ask Him

WHENEVER any one in Congress wants to know how many spinsters there are in New England, oysters in Maryland, cotton bales in New Orleans, or native sons in California, they page Joseph S. McCoy. Answers a big, robust man with the square jaw of one who deals in facts.

Mr. McCoy became the government actuary more than twenty years ago. Congress "borrowed" him in 1898 to figure for it how the Dingley tariff bill would affect other nations. He conducted negotiations until agreements were reached which took shape in more than a dozen important treaties, and various committees of Congress have been "borrowing" Mr. McCoy ever since.

He was the expert who steered the Joint High Commission in its effectual efforts to settle all disputes between this country and Canada, and when Senator Aldrich opposed the French Reciprocity Treaty, Senator Cullom, chairman of the Foreign Relations Committee, sent a hurry call for Mr. McCoy to bring up the heavy artillery of facts and figures with which the then "boss" of the Senate was beaten. It was McCoy who was sent to China to report on the Boxer indemnity; next, Congress asked him for the facts about the high cost of living; and then he figured out the income-tax measure which became a law.

Mr. McCoy has been called as an expert in the construction of every revenue bill in recent years; and when, in the long debates over our new war revenue bill, Senator Simmons or Senator Smoot would announce with finality, "The expert says—," it was Mr. McCoy who was meant.

Sometimes Mr. McCoy's figures are called in question by men who believe the saying about liars and statisticians; but he only makes a strategic retreat to his room, digs out some more figures, and sends them along to the senator who is speaking- His figures have never yet been discredited.

In his odd moments Mr. McCoy makes a monthly estimate of the population of the United States and a yearly one of the various States.

"IF"

—Continued from page 5

Pal loved the change, and three months after our arrival gave me seven little Airedales (thoroughbreds) to care for. Their sale amounted to one hundred and forty dollars, their expense about thirty.

Now Pal and her daughters bring me an income of over $600 yearly.

They have also given me a rebirth of spirit that can not be estimated.

E. B. E.

A Doctor's Story

THERE is the most striking example of the power of the little word "if" I have ever known, as told to me by a physician of my acquaintance:

"At two o'clock one morning twenty years ago, I, pockets bulging with swag, dropped out of a 'jimmied' window in answer to a warning whistle from my pal outside. A policeman rounded the corner, and we ran, pursued by shouts and bullets. We plunged into a dark alley, only to find that it terminated against a high board fence. We climbed it side by side, and dropped on the other side. I turned to speak to my pal, and realized that we had dropped into separate yards. The sound of approaching police in the alley gave no choice but to dash on.

As I started around the pretty white cottage that stood on the lot, I stumbled and fell on a slanting cellar door. That in stant's delay made a dash for the street impracticable, so I lifted the door and dropped within. Crouched breathlessly on the steps, ready to shoot if cornered, I heard my pursuers run past the door.

"Then, in the blackness below me, I heard a groan, and a woman's voice: 'Here I am. Thank God you heard my cries.' I flashed my dark-lantern in that direction and descended. At the foot of the steps lay a white-haired woman.

She had fallen down cellar hours before, and she thought I had heard her, from the street. I carried her to a bed in the house, and, at her direction, telephoned her son, a doctor. I knew something about first aid to the injured (I had patched up fellows who didn't want their whereabouts known), and I did what I could for the woman. Her son came, and I assisted him; but he told me, with considerable emotion, that I had saved her life. 'You ought to be a physician,' he said.

He helped me through medical school, and took me into his office. Secretly I returned the spoils of my last burglary, and, fascinated by my new work, I almost forgot my past. Last week a man was brought into my hospital in the last stages of tuberculosis and dying from a police-inflicted wound. In this wreck I recognized my pal."

And he added, with a shudder: It made me realize what I would probably be to-day if I had landed on the same side of that fence as my poor pal."

R. M. B.

He Might Have Ended in the River

EARLY one winter morning, after an all-night ride, I tumbled off the water-tank of a Northwestern Flyer engine in Council Bluffs. About two hours later, with twenty cents in my pocket, I roamed into Omaha, so utterly ragged and dirty that the first cop that met me gave me ten minutes to leave town.

Instead of keeping a promise to that effect; I limped uptown, being crippled from an old hip injury which had returned because of exposure and underfeeding, and invested five cents in food. Despite having 'boed it from Minneapolis, I had never begged a meal, and was determined that I was not going to "panhandle."

I found a newspaper office, spent ten cents for twenty newspapers, planted myself on a corner, and shortly after noon had disposed of them. Now, possessed of twenty-five cents, hunger proved the master of discretion, and fifteen cents went for another feed. By this time the injured hip was causing me untold agony; I was cold, weary, and despondent; I had only ten cents in my pocket, and my hunger was far from satisfied. The muddy old Missouri began to look like the one best bet.

A short eighteen months before I had had a secure pay envelop in government employ. I had heeded the call of ambition, and the preceding winter had fought my way through eight hours a day at school, holding down four jobs on the side. In the summer I had drifted out for work. I had sold brushes, washed dishes, wielded a pick and ax, got started in the photography business, and was burned out, all in a few short months. And now the school season was again opening, and I could not return, for I was penniless.

Jobless, sick, and broke, with my grit all gone, the situation looked almost hopeless; and night was coming on.

After much searching I located the

Salvation Army headquarters and asked for a night's lodging. They told me I would have to find the local adjutant of the army and obtain a pass of him, as they charged fifteen cents for all beds, and I had only a dime.

His home was about a half mile away, and the short trip was that night a journey of positive agony: but at last I arrived. At first glance the house seemed deserted. Then I noticed a light moving about inside, and I crawled to the door and knocked.

A man with a book under his left arm, his right hand swinging a lantern, answered the door, and after listening to my tale gave me the necessary pass.

And now comes the "if."

He explained that he had moved from town that day, and by accident had left a valued book behind him. After worrying about it all day, he had taken a lantern from his new home, crossed the river, and had been in the house only a few minutes. He had found the book and was preparing to leave when I had knocked.

The army gave me a place to sleep, and next morning found me work. I desire to state particularly that the service was rendered me with no question as to my religious creed.

I am somewhat over thirty-two now. I have scrapped my way from "down there" up the hill again, through law school and to and through admission to the bar. I am preparing to practise, with no asset but willingness to work.

What is out ahead, who knows?

But if that book had not been forgotten—then what? The street beggar? Another thief created through force of circumstances? A wearied, frozen failure on the door-step of the army adjutant's deserted house? The river?

Who knows?

L. M.

His "If " a Siberian Prison

I AM eight years now in the United States. I have gone through college, learned a profession, saved a little money for a rainy day, and, what is more precious, have been a free citizen all these eight years! A seeing man does not exult over not being born blind; but to me, born under the yoke of Czardom, freedom means very, very much.

It would take too much space to describe everything in detail. I would have to write my own biography—a typical Russian biography. I will only summarize it with this:

Before I had time to look around, without doing anything wrong, I faced a ten years' sentence to Siberia. I dreamed of freedom and justice, and it turned out that even that carried a punishment. But I

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succeeded in making my getaway, heading for the border. The danger was great; for if I were caught, another escape would have been impossible, and the treatment I would get then would be the severest imaginable.

It was about 9 P. M. on the 18th of December, 1909 (old style), when I reached a clearing in a pine grove bordering the swamps, and waded for about four hours. I was happy to behold a lake lying deep amid her high and curving banks. At the farther end I saw tall signposts, and a big house sending forth long rays of light through the windows. From the description I obtained from a villager I recognized it to be the German border, with a German inn near by. "In ten minutes I will be out of the zone of danger," I thought. But, as I turned one of the curves of the bank, I almost fell into the arms of a sentry. My hopes were shattered, and death (or worse) stared me in the face. In my despair, when I could speak, I began begging my captor to let me go. But sentries as a rule can not be soft of heart; the punishment for being lenient is severe. Yes, all would have been lost if—well, if, miracle of miracles, the sentry did not happen to be one of my old schoolmates. He proved to be loyal to friendship, at least in my case. Half an hour later I was quietly sipping my tea, with the care-free feeling of the convalescent.

J. B. S.

She Might Still be an Old-Maid School-Marm

I HAD to laugh when I read your request for letters based on the little word "if." For if it had not been for a loose shoe-heel I would now be a forlorn old-maid school-marm instead of the mother of five Young Americans!

I was cut out and ordained by Nature

to be an old maid, and was most religiously carrying out her intentions for me. Tall, angular, straight-haired, fully spectacled, and precise, I was just past twenty-six, and teaching my sixth year of high school mathematics. Never having had boy cousins or a brother, and my father having died before I could remember, and always loving books better than people, I really had never looked at a man with any interest.

My harum-scarum room-mate, with her trail of admirers, roused no envy in me. To her I owe my faithless heel. My examination papers were to be graded, and so on Saturday she promised to take my shoes to be repaired.

Never having forgotten anything myself, I supposed the work had been done, and donned my foot-gear without examination on Monday. It held until the critical moment, when I was at the head of the stairs, and a one-time high school student, visiting old haunts, was at the foot. Then it gave way, and down I went, head over heels, into his arms.

He was a great big Western rancher.

Somehow or other, he realized that under my disguise I was a warm-hearted human, and in three months from our sudden meeting I was his wife. When I look out across our ranch, and to the fir-clad mountains beyond, when I realize how truly I have lived these last fifteen years, and how far the old artificial life lies from this, I certainly thank the Lord for my room-mate's forgetfulness. For if my shoe had been mended I would still be a chalk-covered school-marm, and not fit to be that. For nowhere is real life and a loving understanding heart so needed as in a high school. I forget things now, and my desk looks like a whirlwind; but the rancher thinks I am perfect; the children share his opinion; and I actually have written two books besides learning all I had to know in order to handle my job.

Even if I never intended to fall in love, I'm mighty glad I did.

MRS. J. G. G.

Saved from the Alms-House

ONE instance standing clearly out in our dull and commonplace lives, and saving us from the alms-house, depended solely upon the important little "if."

We are two maiden sisters. Our little house was left to us at the death of our parents.

There were not many things for us—middle-aged and not trained in up-to-date things—to do in a little town where everybody did for themselves.

Sick expenses and other things gradually took away from our little bank account, until one gray November morning found us with a notice of seventy dollars road tax and twenty dollars cash.

Already there was a mortgage on the place. What should we do?

Our. proudest possession was a prizewinning Holstein cow. Shortly before she had presented to us a fine, healthy, lively calf. Mr. Olsen, our chief adviser, said it was perfect, and "wuth somethin'." And on this cold, misty morning, over our frugal breakfast, we were discussing the advisability of selling the cow, the calf, or both.

Hannah—she's the younger—went out to the barn lot to milk. She started to tie Marie Louise (that's the calf). Just when she got the rope around the calf's neck, it started to run—Hannah holding on to the other end of the rope. There was a group of lovely old walnut trees in the corner of the lot, and the calf made a bee-line for them. Round and round the first one she went, winding the rope around the tree, with Hannah all out of breath trying to keep up.

Down the road came driving a man and woman. Seeing Hannah's predicament, they came faster, stopped, and the man got out and held Marie Louise until we could unwind the rope. Soon she was safely in the lot.

The man, who was the owner of a Wisconsin lumber company, at once noticed our walnut trees.

Later, over hot coffee and Hannah's corn cakes and fruit syrup, he told us of their value, and we decided to sell the older trees.

Mrs. W , the wife, so admired our fruit syrups that she bought some and gave us orders for her city friends.

Thanks be, we had means and to spare.

We were saved from penury. If that calf had not been so contrary. If Mr. W— had not driven by at that moment. Haven't we lots to be thankful for? Thanks to that if?

S. B.

The Bag of Pecans

ONE cold February afternoon I sat toasting my toes before a warm fire, when the telephone rang. I answered, and was asked to sit up that night with a sick woman who was being cared for by the members of our church.

I hesitated. It was the coldest, bitterest day I had ever known in all the nineteen years of my life. I was a school-teacher, and the past week had been the time for quarterly examinations. But there were no trained nurses in our little town at that time, and so I promised to go.

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That night is still spoken of by our older citizens as the coldest ever known in Texas, and it stands out in my memory apart from all others.

I found two patients awaiting me—a middle-aged woman and her mother. Both had pneumonia. They were upstairs in an old rickety wooden shack back of the few business buildings in the town. The lower part of the building was empty, and after ten o'clock all that part of the town seemed deserted. I was alone with those two sick women. The norther was whistling through the cracks in the floor and walls, and it kept me busy during the night trying to keep them warm.

But the night was over at last, and my patients seemed better. I had become interested in them, and visited them often until both recovered.

The younger woman soon found work as a cook on a ranch in an adjoining county, and departed thence, taking her mother with her. I heard nothing more from her for some time.

The two years that followed were hard ones for drought-stricken Texas, and my father was among the many to suffer. He had bought a large tract of land, and had it almost paid for when these bad years came. He had made nothing on his farms; his cattle and horses had died; and the last payment on his land was due, and he had nothing with which to pay. His friends and neighbors, even the banks, were in as bad a plight as himself. He would lose his land unless he could sell part of it; and who would purchase in times like these?

When it looked the darkest, a stranger knocked at our door, bearing a small bag of pecans sent me by the woman I had once nursed.

This stranger, a Georgian, had been visiting at the ranch where the woman was cooking. While there he had been laid up with a sprained ankle, and the woman had been kind to him. He had come West to buy land, but, not finding anything to suit, was now on his way home.

The woman, learning that he had to I wait over between trains in our little town, had asked him to leave the pecans at my father's house. My father made the stranger welcome and showed him the sights of our city. So well was he pleased with our locality that he bought some of my father's land, and we were saved from bankruptcy. He also liked my father's daughter, and—yes, we are married and living happily in the old home town.

If I had answered "no" that cold winter's night I would in all probability never have met the man who is now my husband.

J. W. T.

A Good Gambler and a Good Cook

"IF you are a good gambler and a good cook, write to Hardiman Davis, Rattlesnake Ranch, ———, Montana. I need a wife."

If I had not picked up the newspaper which some passenger had left on the seat of the Pullman, I should never have seen that advertisement. Perhaps it was the word "cook" that caught my eye. I was a domestic science teacher, and Eastern and thirty and tired. I shut my eyes wearily, but the lurch of the train beat the words into my brain.

If you are a good gambler and a good cook. I need a wife—need a wife—need a wife."

No one had ever needed me, or called me a good gambler; but every one said I was a good cook. I thought how tired I was, and of the vacation trip ahead through Yellowstone Park with half a dozen other teachers. Suddenly I hated that trip.

With rebellion hot within me and burning my cheeks, I sent a telegram:

Then I was frightened at what I had done,

frightened at myself. But my Puritan conscience would brook no turning back, and I resolved to discipline myself with the punishment that my rashness had brought upon me.

I went to Montana, and alighted from the train at a two-by-four red station shoved against the cindered track by the mountains that crowded down upon it. I gasped, and turned to get back on the train; but already it was puffing away from me. I turned back again grimly and faced—Hardiman Davis.

He wasn't a cow-boy, and he didn't have a six-shooter. He stood there smiling, a little confused, infinitely anxious.

"Miss Mason?" he queried. "Well, I'm Hardiman Davis. You—you are a good gambler. My mother is at Rattlesnake Ranch. Will you come out and—and visit her till we—till we—well, get acquainted and know what we want to do?"

I laughed,—I couldn't help it,—and went: went over mountain roads as hard as pavement and as crooked as a corkscrew; went in a big Cadillac to a farmhouse that sprawled its hospitality over a huge space, and smiled out over a narrow, winding, fertile valley; went into a life big and broad and cheery and sweet, with a man who is now the maker and the master of it.

To-day he brought in the mail to me, and we saw the announcement "IF." He looked at me and laughed.

"If I had not advertised on a dare, I should never have found you."

And I answered him: "If I had not been a good gambler as well as a good cook, I might still be lonesome and tired and teaching school."

M. F.

Her Big Sister

IF I did not have a "big sister," I'd be trudging in a hot, stuffy factory. But I have one, and now I'm in fourth year High, and have enjoyed all the pleasure this life affords.

Thirteen years ago my father died, leaving a family of five dependent on my mother. Helen, the eldest, left school at once and went to work. In a year's time she entered a commercial college. Although out of school eight weeks with sickness, she returned, and finished at the head of her class. She then secured a position in the town we lived in, at six dollars a week. Seeing no future for herself or us, she left and got a job in a near-by city. She was placed in a hotel as a bookkeeper.

Nov, the very name of hotel spells temptations. But did she fall or even falter? No; she went through it with her head held high, and she finished it holding the esteem of all. She is now head auditor of a big corporation.

If I didn't have her, where would I be to-day? Most likely, in either a cotton or a canning factory. If she had not kept her head level, we would have starved long ago. She, with my mother's help, sent us to school.

No; Helen has not given millions to the poor; nor has she erected libraries. But she has done more: she has plodded at the same thing, day in and day out, rain, hail, or shine. She has done this through grit and love. If there were not many others like her in America, where would America be to-day? America will erect no monument to "my big sister." She does not need it—she has erected her own monument, one which ages can not wear away, one that, like Tennyson's "Brook," will go on forever."

J. B.

THE EDITOR ANSWERS

I HAVE been reading the Life of Edward Everett Hale, by his son, and was reminded again of that delightful story of Dr. Hale's, 'My Double and How He Undid Me." It is the story, you remember, of a very busy man who discovered an Irish gardener, named Dennis, his exact duplicate in appearance. He trained Dennis to take over all the monotonous part of his social obligations—listening to tiresome callers, attending committee meetings, etc.

Dennis's instructions were very rigid. He was always to vote with the minority—thus establishing his reputation as an independent thinker—and he was to speak nothing except these four all suflicient phrases:

1. "Very well, thank you. And you?" This for an answer to casual salutations.

2. "I am very glad you liked it."

3. "There has been so much said, and, on the whole, so well said, that I will not occupy the time."

4. "I agree, in general, with my friend on the other side of the room."

What an interesting thing it would be if each of us could have a second self to take over all of our unpleasant obligations. What part of your daily work do you like the least? What part would you turn over to a double, if you had one?

From a Telegraph Operator

RECENTLY I did some work for the Y. M. C. A. in the securing of its war fund of $35,000,000. In the course of that work I sent an important telegram to Harold Bell Wright. A few days later in this letter popped:

The telegram was delivered after only a little delay, and the answer came back very promptly. And EVERY WEEK is going to be just as prompt as a telegram from now on, W. B. P. By the way, how is it selling on the coast at a nickel? All the reports we have had so far are very favorable.

Step Up and Receive Your Medal

Dear Editor:

After we get through with our EVERY WEEK we send it to a farm just outside of Gulfport, Mississippi. It was impossible to buy a copy in that town until we had been there last winter. I asked the news-dealer for it so many times that just before our leaving he complied. We were so glad, but he said: "Now, just as I get it for you, you are going away." I told him to keep it on his counter and he would soon see there were hundreds of others just as anxious for it as I. We boosted it all through the South; and we must have made an impression; for on our return trip, which we have just made a year later, we find almost all the places carrying it and selling a great many copies.

M. T., Chicago.

From the bottom of our heart, we thank you. News-dealers are going to be easier to enthuse now because they make a little larger profit on EVERY WEEK. And next to saying a few kind words to a friend about us there, is nothing that helps so much as a word dropped in the ear of the news-dealer.

Yes, It Can Still be Bought

Dear Editor:

I asked for your book, "More Power to You," at our local book-store, but the proprietor said he had never heard of it. Can it still be had?

E. P. C., Ohio.

Shame on that proprietor for such ignorance of the classics. Yes; a second edition of it has been printed, and a dollar bill sent to this office will bring a copy. The address is 385 Fourth Avenue, New York.

Such is Fame

I SOMETIMES wonder whether the power of the press is not exaggerated. The other day I saw William H. Taft walking down the street. His picture must have been spread before the American public a million times in the past ten years, at least. Yet I watched him cover four or five blocks, and apparently nobody at all recognized him.

It reminded me of the prominent woman who was dining in Washington, and was approached by a nice old countrywoman.

"I think I have seen your picture in the papers," the old lady ventured hesitatingly.

"No doubt," the prominent woman assented, secretly pleased. "No doubt you have, my good woman."

The little woman leaned over close, and, putting up her hand, whispered:

"Does the medicine really cure, the way they say it does?"

Two Important Matters

Lastly, brethern, as the preachers say, we are glad to tell you that the five-cent price, from all reports to date, seems to be a great success. Thank you for making it so.

And, secondly, our address is 381 Fourth Avenue, New York: and we still like to get mail.

This is the Place Where—