If You Are Not Too Careful Who Gets the Credit

YESTERDAY a man traveled two miles out of his way, and wasted two hours of his time, in order to call on me and make a complaint.

We had published a photograph taken by him, and had failed to put his name as the photographer in little type underneath.

It was our mistake, and I told him I was sorry about it: but as he left I thought to myself, "My dear sir, I have your measure to a quarter of an inch."

And I felt like warning him to be careful, in walking over the subway gratings, lest he should drop through one of the cracks.

For it is only little men, as I have observed, who are so tremendously concerned about the precise allotment of credit in this world.

I can not imagine Lincoln walking two miles out of his way to protest because his name had not been printed in little type.

He formed a Cabinet of men better known nationally than he himself: four of them were sure that they were far greater than he.

Seward wrote to his wife: "Only one man can save the Union, and I am the man."

Stanton said to a friend who asked him what he was going to do in the Cabinet: "I am going to make Abe Lincoln President of the United States."

Chase from the Treasury Department conducted an open campaign for Lincoln's defeat and his own nomination to the Presidency.

Yet Lincoln—aware of it all—pursued his quiet way untroubled. He meant to save the Union; and if he could do it by submitting to Stanton's abuse, he would submit gladly.

If he could do it by suffering some personal humiliation at the hands of McClellan and Fremont, it was a price he was glad to pay.

If Seward or Stanton or Chase were to have the credit when the thing was done, he did not care. The important thing was to get it done, let the credit fall where it might.

Have you read the story of Harriman's fight to save the Imperial Valley, as told by George Kennan?

In 1907 the Colorado River overflowed its banks, and threatened to destroy the valley. Though Harriman's railroads did not own any of the land in the valley, Harriman jumped in and spent $1,500,000 to stem the flood.

When it became evident that another million or more would be required, he telegraphed President Roosevelt, and the President told him to go ahead, and practically assured him that Congress would reimburse him.

Harriman saved the valley, Roosevelt recommended his reimbursement; but Congress never acted on the recommendation, and Harriman's roads have never to this day been reimbursed.

Shortly before his death, Harriman revisited the valley, and was met by a reporter.

"Mr. Harriman, the government hasn't paid you that money," said the reporter, "and your work does not seem to be duly appreciated; do you not, under the circumstances, regret having made this large expenditure?"

"No," replied Mr. Harriman. "The valley was worth saving, wasn't it?"

"Yes," said the reporter.

"Then we have the satisfaction of knowing that we saved it, haven't we?"

Not much reward, you say, for the expenditure of two or three million dollars. But it's the only kind of reward that big men really value.

There is a wise old saying to this effect: "A great deal of good can be done in the world, if one is not too careful who gets the credit."

If your object in life is to get credit, you'll probably get it, if you work hard enough.

But don't be too much surprised and disappointed when some chap who just went ahead and did the thing, without thinking of the credit, winds up with more medals on his chest than you, with all your striving, have collected on yours.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

THE MOST INTERESTING MAN I KNOW

He Always Finds a Way

By JAMES H. COLLINS

WHAT makes B. L. Hamner one of the most interesting men to me is his faculty for being interested himself in whatever he happens to be doing, and his power for interesting others in that particular thing, and his habit of being just as much interested in something that he intends to do when he gets done with the present project.

For years he was a trial lawyer in the West, learning how to get along with people, and also how to give people the best that was in himself. Then he lost health and money, and turned up in Florida to recover both. Health was easy—he got it back by wandering all over that most diversified State. And money came just naturally as he got interested in bank deposits that people in Florida let lie unregarded.

For instance, he found money for Floridians by helping them see the importance of coöperation in marketing their vegetables, and bringing in settlers, and building communities.

There was a weekly farm journal which they read, and Hamner saw interest in that, and went to work for the editor (against the latter's advice) at a salary of fifteen dollars a week. This was all the editor thought he could afford the first week; but in a month he had increased it to fifty dollars and begun giving him stock in the paper to boot—for Hamner was bringing in money by developing the dormant advertising possibilities.

Then the city of Tampa needed a man who could get people interested in its possibilities, and Hamner was grabbed for that job. Then a big Southern railway system took him to develop neglected communities along its line; and that is where Hamner was the last time I talked with him, and his ideas of development were original. Instead of scattering settlers indiscriminately along the line through several States, he puts them into organized communities, on ready-made farms.

Sites for these communities were selected on a basis of interest. First, Hamner chose territory where land was cheap because people had taken little interest in their own locality. Then he gave them a lively interest by getting them to invest money in the development of their own community.

Hamner's big interest to-morrow will be bankers, he says. He believes they can improve their investments along lines that will render great human service through development of backward sections and industries. Therefore, he goes any distance to-day to learn anything new about how bankers think and feel, what they do with money, and why, and so on. His interest in them is so original and genuine that to-morrow they are pretty certain to be interested in him—humanly and financially.

Fame Left Him Unmoved

By F. O. BARTLETT

ONE meets men and finds them interesting from all sorts of different angles. I can't think of any individual to whom I could apply the superlative of "most."

Captain Bob Bartlett, however, is consistently interesting. Shortly after he returned with Peary from his voyage to the North Pole, I had the honor of discovering for him a place colder than his farthest North. It was the Harvard Stadium in November; and as he sat on the cement seats during a football match I saw his nose grow purple and his teeth begin to chatter, and heard him sigh for the gentle clime of Etah.

Bob blew into New York and Boston and Philadelphia and finally every important city to the Western coast fresh from the deck of his ship. He found himself surrounded, at first quite to his amazement, by all the leading men and women of the nation, anxious to grasp his hand and shower favors upon him. Scientists, literary men, millionaires, politicians, society folk, actors (and actresses), and sportsmen pressed close. The doors of the most exclusive clubs and houses were thrown open to him.

A plain sea dog who asked for nothing more than three square meals a day and a chance to pull at his old black pipe, he suddenly discovered himself with a sort of Aladdin's lamp. And the interesting thing about him was that he was able to meet all these different kinds of folk quite unabashed and unawed—just as he might meet them on board his ship or in camp. He neither feared them nor envied them. For him there were no strata. He moved in a world of pure democracy—though perhaps he felt under some restraint in his language at times. And when the somewhat hysterical popular interest in him calmed down he was able to go back to his ship as much the sea dog as before.

He has just come back with MacMillan. I haven't seen him since, but I'll bet he's smoking the same old tobacco in the same old pipe, and trying to scheme some way of getting back up North. In the meanwhile, he's probably knocking around with Harry Payne Whitney or R. T. Hale or Sandy Reardon—according to who happens to be nearest.

SPIES!

—By John Walker Harrington

THERE are at least a quarter of a million German spies in this country to-day. This on the authority of William J. Flynn, until recently Chief of the United States Secret Service. Long before we got into the war this country was enmeshed in a gigantic web of intrigue; and by the time we had been at war nine months it was estimated that these spies had caused the destruction of $50,000,000 worth of property.

According to Richard M. Hurd, chairman of the board of trustees of the American Defense Society, very few of the hidden enemy have been run down. We were as little prepared to meet Germany in the field of intrigue as we were on the field of battle. But, just as the United States hastened to put a thousand soldiers at drill where one drilled before, so it set to work to meet the deadly menace of the spy. All of the government agencies of detection have been speeded up; the Secret Service and the Department of Justice have been recruiting; and the hunt for the shadow Hun is well under way.

Of the hunters and their work, many of the best stories can not be told until after the war, if then; but there are some tales that it can harm no one to tell, and which illustrate phases of the work.

One of the most important captures took place long before we declared war on the Kaiser. It happened this way:

Chief Flynn was strolling through the lobby of a New York hotel, when his eye lighted upon a grave and somewhat imposing privy councilor of the German Empire. He was Dr. Heinrich Albert, a reputed economist having offices in the building occupied by the Hamburg-American Line. The Chief had seen him several times. He noticed that Dr. Albert was carrying a russet leather portfolio, and it came to him that the doctor was never seen without it.

Now, mind you, Chief Flynn didn't have a thing "on" the man. He was as respectable, to all seeming, as only a German bent on mischief can be. But it was the Chief's business to be curious about things, and he was curious about that russet leather portfolio.

AFTER that, night and day, wherever Dr. Albert went, a Secret Service operative followed him as persistently, though not so ostentatiously, as the lamb did Mary.

This shadowing went on for months; and all that the shadows had to report was that Dr. Albert, as was quite natural, lived at the German Club on the edge of Central Park; that he usually traveled to and from his office on the Sixth Avenue elevated road, which runs to Fiftieth Street and sends a spur up to Fifty-ninth Street, where the Doctor got on and off; and that the russet leather portfolio always traveled with him.

Then, one night, Dr. Albert dozed off as he rode. "Change for Fifty-ninth Street!" yelled the guard. And, waking with a start, Dr. Albert jumped to his feet and gained the platform just as the guard clanged the gate. In his hurry he left the portfolio on the seat. He realized his loss at once, tried to clamber back on board the moving train, demanded telephone connection with the next station, and stormed about the platform like one demented.

While the Doctor was still shouting, an insignificant appearing little man got out at the next station. He was carrying a russet leather portfolio. Within an hour translators were busy with the Doctor's papers, and shortly there was exposed the whole fabric of plot and intrigue by which Germany was in effect making war upon us while ostensibly remaining a friendly nation. The papers told of plots to blow up our munitions plants, to sink ships, to cripple our factories by sabotage.

After that the German spies were more careful; but the Secret Service knew what to expect, and matched cunning with cunning. It was learned that important German agents were followed by shadows of their own to spot Secret Service men who might be on the trail, and that look-outs with powerful glasses were stationed in office windows where they could command a good view and cover the arrival and departure of the German agents.

Thus guarded, one German set about buying passports by the wholesale. He made a fine deal in a South Street saloon one afternoon, and, as he passed over the money, a wisp of a man in a gray sweater and dirty cap jostled awkwardly at his elbow, looked up at him casually, mumbled, "'Scuse me, boss," and went on his way. The next time they met, the little man had had a shave and was wearing the badge of the Secret Service.

It is an axiom of the Service that a little man makes the best shadow and a big man the best blind; often they work in pairs. When the story leaks out of a plot for blowing up shipping along a water-front and reënacting the Halifax disaster, it probably means that some man of the Service has been spending his days and nights down along the piers, garbed in jumper and overalls and with a bale-hook carelessly draped about his neck. Wherever they work, they are so blended with their background that they pass unnoticed.

But the best disguise that the Secret Service knows is intentness upon one's business. The janitor who got hold of valuable notes from the waste-basket of a certain steamship company was of that type, and so was the sad-eyed stenographer who got himself employed at the German Embassy. He seemed so limited and literal in application to his work that he kept the job because he didn't seem able to grasp anything beyond making neat copy on his typewriter. One night, quite late, a letter came to the Embassy informing Count von Bernstorff that a person of importance would arrive at a New York hotel. The stenographer opened the letter, read it, resealed it, and took the first train out of Washington. He presented himself to the important person as the confidential messenger of the Ambassador, got a fund of information, and disappeared into the Service.

THE government sleuths are quick to seize new ways of solving old problems. It has long been established that no cipher can be contrived that can not be worked out; but when it came to finding out what was in the cipher messages that Captain von Papen, one of the chief agents of German intrigue, was sending to Berlin via the Sayville, Long Island, wireless station, the trouble was to get anything to work on. Chief Flynn and an expert named Apgar solved the problem by making phonograph records of the vibrations of the wireless as they were caught by a special apparatus. Then the record was played over hundreds of times until the cipher yielded up its secret.

Naturally, one of the chief assets of the spy-hunter is his knowledge of how the German mind works. When a German officer who blew up a bridge in Canada was caught on the American side, it was necessary to prove—this was before we entered the war—that he had carried the dynamite from this country into Canada. He swore that the explosives had been given to him in a suit-case that was handed to him on Canadian soil by a man named Tommy, whom he had never seen before.

After reading the officer's sworn statement, the operative in charge of the case, remembering that the "Me" came before the "Gott," wrote on the bottom of the paper: "I declare that the above affidavit is true, on my honor as an officer in the German army," and pushed it back for another signature. The officer read it, and laid down his pen. "I won't sign that," he said, and subsequently confessed that Tommy was an imaginary person. The Secret Service man had guessed rightly that his man held the honor of his rank higher than his honor before God.

Of the organizations of the government called into service as spy-hunters when we got into the war, that which we usually designate with capitals as the Secret Service is only one. The actual

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A Woman Spy Once Saved the United States

THERE are spies and spies. German intrigue is a serious menace to our country; but once a spy—a woman—saved us from destruction. If Lydia Darrah, a demure little Philadelphia Quakeress, hadn't overheard General Howe and his staff plotting a surprise attack on Washington, the American army might have been decisively defeated and the history of the world changed.

Howe's Adjutant-General was quartered in Lydia's living-room, and it was there that the attack on Washington's army was planned. Lydia was listening at the keyhole. Next morning General Howe laughingly gave her a pass through his lines "to get flour at the mill." She walked fourteen miles to Washington's headquarters, told what she had heard, walked back with her sack of flour, and went quietly on with her housework.

Howe's army marched out to make the surprise attack; but Washington's troops met it on the way, and gave it a thrashing. Howe turned his horse and hurried back, with the remark:

"They didn't seem to be a bit surprised."

Said Lieutenant-Colonel Craig—to whom Lydia Darrah had reported at Washington's headquarters:

"You have saved the army—and you shall not be forgotten so long as liberty endures."

AN AMERICAN SEES THE TANKS AT WORK

THE tanks do more than destroy German guns and troops of German soldiers: they destroy utterly the morale of the German army. They are irresistible. In A Yankee in the Trenches (Little, Brown & Company) Corporal R. Derby Holmes tells of his first sight of the British monsters:

"We listened, and away from the rear came a tremendous whirring, burring, rumbling buzz, like a swarm of giant bees. I thought of everything from a Zeppelin to a donkey engine, but couldn't make it out.

"It was getting a little light, though heavily misty. We waited, and then out of the gray blanket of fog waddled the great steel monsters that we were to know afterwards as the 'tanks.' I shall never forget it.

"In the half darkness they looked twice as big as they really were. They lurched forward, slow, clumsy, but irresistible, nosing down into shell-holes and out, crushing the unburied dead, sliding over mere trenches as though they did not exist."

Later in the morning the order came to get ready to go over the top for the bloody battle of High Wood on the Somme. The position was important, and regiment after regiment had attempted to take the woods, and failed with awful losses.

"The faces of the men were hard-set and pale. Some of them looked positively green. They smoked fag after fag, lighting the new ones on the butts.

"Then the whistle shrilled; I blew mine, and over we went.

"The tanks were just ahead of us, and lumbered along in an imposing row. And how slow they did seem to move! Lord, I thought we should never cover that five or six hundred yards.

"Slow! Slow! I found myself planning what I would do when I got to the front trenches—if we ever did. There would be a grand rumpus, and I would click a dozen or more.

"And then we arrived.

"I don't suppose that trip across No Man's Land behind the tanks took over five minutes, but it seemed like an hour.

"When we reached the Boche front trenches, a strange thing happened. There was no fight worth mentioning. The tanks stopped over the trenches and blazed away right and left with their all-round traverse.

"A few Boches ran out and threw silly little bombs at the monsters. The tanks, noses in the air, moved slowly on. And then the Graybacks swarmed tip out of shelters and dug-outs; literally in hundreds, and held up their hands, whining: 'Mercy, Kamerad!'

"We took prisoners by platoons. Blofeld grabbed me and turned over a gang of thirty to me.

"We searched them rapidly, cut their suspenders and belts, and I started to the rear with them. They seemed glad to go. So was I."

Don't Feed or Annoy the Germans

"ON the day when our boys took charge of the first little sector of the trenches, they were on tiptoe with expectation," said an American officer recently returned from France.

"They could hardly wait to get their guns into position, and five minutes after their arrival they were banging away at a German observation post across the lines.

"A French officer ran up to them in great consternation:

"'Stop it! Stop it!' he cried. 'You don't know what you're doing.'

'But it's an observation post,' the Americans protested.

"'Of course it is; but it's been there two years. Quit firing on it: you don't suppose we want them firing on us, do you?'

"Whereupon the Frenchman explained that, whatever might be happening in other sections of the front, this particular section was quiet, and the soldiers on both sides meant to keep it so. And the Americans, sobered and wiser, confessed that they had still much to learn about the foolish and contradictory business that we call war."

A TALK WITH LIEUTENANT PAT O'BRIEN

—By Freda Kirchwey

DURING his off time one hot day last summer Lieutenant Pat O'Brien, of the Royal Flying Corps, decided to take a trip over the German lines, instead of resting. The moral of this story is: Never work when you might rest.

Lieutenant O'Brien went up some nine thousand feet, and was attacked by three German planes. Two he accounted for; but the third sent a bullet that crashed through his upper lip and jaw and lodged in his throat. His comrades saw his machine do a spinning dive to earth inside the German lines, and said good-by to a brave man. But O'Brien wasn't dead. Right now he is in America telling his friends how it happened.

He is a diffident young man; but his tale speaks for his valor, no matter how you tell it:

"I was sort of smashed up when I landed. I spent three weeks in a German prison camp in Belgium. No, I can't say they treated me so badly. Only, everywhere you went, there were always interpreters along, pumping you—trying to find out things. They always acted pretty decent to make you talk. The food wasn't much. For breakfast we had black coffee—no sugar or milk. That was all, unless you saved some bread from the day before. For lunch we had soup and boiled cabbage or boiled beets. Once in a while we got some sort of pickled meat—as white as paper. At night we had tea—they called it that—and bread, and sometimes canned meat hash or beet jam. Somehow, I never could get to like beet jam.

"Three weeks after I landed, they thought I was well enough to go to a reprisal camp. I decided not to go; reprisal camps aren't healthy places. We sat in a compartment in the train—six Englishmen, a Frenchman, and I. There was a guard with us, so close my knees almost touched his.

"Occasionally I stood up and tested the rack over my head and the strap beside it. I had complained of closeness and opened the window. Then, suddenly, I stood up, grabbed the strap and the rack, and swung myself out into the blackness, feet first.

"Of course the guard could have stopped me, if he'd jumped quick. But I suppose he didn't believe it, even when he saw me shoot out. We were going about thirty-five miles an hour."

Lieutenant O'Brien looked thoughtful. It was a breathless wait, but he was preparing no climax.

"Poor chap," he went on. "He was just starting home on leave—that guard. Of course he was sent straight back to the trenches. It's an awful thing to let a prisoner escape. I was darn sorry for him.

"When I came to," continued the Lieutenant quietly, "I saw a light about half a mile down the track. The train had stopped. I tried to crawl off the tracks; but I fainted again for a while. Then I roused myself and ran—I ran till I dropped. When daylight came I hid in a thicket.

"For seventy-two days I tramped and dodged Germans at night and hid all day in the bushes and undergrowth. It's lucky for me that I grew up in the country, and know the woods and how to live out of doors. The days lying hidden from dawn till dark were almost worse than the nights of travel. It was over a month before I found a clothes-line with any things to cover my uniform. I almost lived on raw cabbages and carrots and beets."

His journey led through part of Germany and across Luxembourg and Belgium, two hundred and fifty miles of enemy country.

"How did you steer your course?" I asked.

"By the North Star," he said, and then smiled. "I've dedicated my book to the North Star."

At last he reached the border of Holland, and then it seemed that he must fail, with success in sight; for the wooden ladder he made to get over the wire barrier charged with high-tension electric current proved so good a conductor that he was knocked out the moment he set foot on it. When he recovered, he began frantically to dig a tunnel under the wires with his hands. He wriggled through with only an inch or so to spare; and as he got to his feet a little way on the Holland side, he saw the dim figure of the sentry pass.

Probably you've guessed that O'Brien was an American.

UNDER THE SURGEON'S KNIFE

IF only surgeons could write, there would come out of this war some of the greatest books of all the ages. Now and then there is one who has the gift: Doctor Georges Duhamel, a French surgeon with the rank of Major, is such a one. His book written of his experiences at Verdun contains some wonderful gems of vivid description, some of which are quoted by Professor Albert Schinz in Medicine and Surgery. Take this bit, for example:

"The cause of the trouble is not so much the crushed leg as that slight wound in the arm. His lips are livid, hardly distinguishable from the rest of his face; the pupils of his eyes are dark, immense, and from his face there shines forth a soul undaunted, that will not yield till the last moment. He takes in, almost disapprovingly, the ruin of his own body, and, watching the surgeons scrubbing their hands, he speaks in a meditative voice:

"'You will tell my wife that my last thought was for her and my children?'

"Oh, it was no roundabout question, for without hesitation the man yielded his face to the ether masque.

"The echo of his solemn words still resounded in the room: 'You will tell my wife—'

"The surgeon shows moist eyes behind his glasses and with deep feeling answers:

"'We will not fail to, my friend.'"

The Mud-Baths of the Somme

Detour—Roads Rough

By SINCLAIR LEWIS

Illustrations by R. K. Ryland

THERE have been, to date, 9,743,216 stories about the wickedness of Broadway and the superior virtues of the small town. But there must have been at least one case in which the city fellow was the hero and the handsome young drayman back home the villain.

Mr. Stacy MacGovern Blackwell was city-born and city-sharpened. He was probably the first real-estate man in Philadelphia to use investment bonds to increase purchases, and business men still talk at luncheon clubs about Blackwell's success in making the sleepiest Quaker town on the Main Line into the favorite suburb of the country club set. He was just past forty, but he was known to the better realty operators from Bridgeport to Birmingham, and he was regularly quoted in the real-estate sections of the newspapers. His was the shadow fame of having Blackwell & Company in large red letters on a thousand bill-boards, and his work in connection with the Liberty Bond issue had familiarized most Philadelphians with the picture of that thin, clever, baldish skull, that lean face, professorial forehead, and rather wistful smile. He had an amusing wife, an income of twenty thousand, and a roadster with a custom-made body on a Betterton-Lecoque chassis. But he was not free from troubles.

Everything that he did or dreamed was subject to pawing over by the dry, skinny fingers of his silent partner, who had available capital but kept his imagination on time deposit. For eighteen hours a day Blackwell spurted ideas about village greens, salad greens, aëroplanes, little theaters, the Y. M. C. A., fishing, cafeterias, farmers' alliances, and hygienic barber shops. Street-car conductors, masseurs, bankers, and even magazine editors had been known to appreciate his suggestions.

Blackwell was ready, now, to go on alone with his own capital, or to seek a new associate who would get the same fun as himself out of the game of business. But such a change would not affect his second worry.

Sensitive, introspective, sincere as a dynamo, he hated his own tendency to go about thinking what a unique little hero he was. In moments of inanity, when he was walking to his commuting train or lunching alone, he caught himself at his familiar trick, at that conversation between his two selves, when the one would say, "Well, I'm certainly hitting 'em hard!" and the other would mock, "At it again, praising yourself!" and unabashed the first self would retort, "I'm so modest that I even rebuke myself for conceit." Over and over his office-wearied mind would repeat the dialogue till he hated himself.

Not egotistical but boyishly jubilant was he when he received the Big Invitation. The Volt Club of Chicago asked him to come and talk to them about making the suburb of the future. It was a distinguished compliment. The Volt Club was composed of the financiers, manufacturers, lawyers, transportation men who managed Chicago.

Blackwell knew he would not have been invited if the Volt Club had not been watching him. He hoped that among its members might be the practical visionary whom he was seeking as partner. This was his examination for promotion.

WHEN he tried to prepare his address, he was successful, up to a certain point. He was the perfect speech-writer up to the point of making any little black marks on paper. When it came to that, his thoughts seemed to have turned into an especially uninteresting ash-pile. He wanted to flee, to do anything in the world, even tighten the rim-lugs on his car, rather than write. The only remarks of which he could think were windy pleasantries about Chicago, the National Army, and initiative.

He was tired, anyway. He needed a vacation. He decided to motor to Chicago, and to let the unending road stir him into thought. It was early autumn; the maples were mingling orange with delicate green. He invited his wife to go with him in the roadster, but she was bored by touring, and she told him to run along and play by himself. She knew him; to her he was not Mr. Blackwell, but eager, blundering, generous young Stacy. She begged him to be careful, and packed his bags for him, and sent him off at six of a bright Monday morning. He planned to make the trip in four days' driving, with Friday and Saturday for a loaf in Chicago, where he was to speak Saturday evening.

IN New York and Baltimore he had been not unaccustomed to having hotel managers welcome him, reporters know who he was, and leading citizens ask him if he could possibly wedge in a luncheon between his engagements. In Philadelphia he was too used to personal attention from office-boys, policemen, waiters, and even theater ticket sellers to think anything about it. But in the small-city hotels in which he stayed on the first two nights the clerks neither fainted nor blanched when he put his name on the register. Garage men were apparently not impressed by the Betterton-Lecoque. Their only attention to him, when he was driving his car in for night-storage, was to stand looking supercilious, and to groan, "Now, cramp her 'way round—no, not that way, other way!—whered'ya think you're trying to put her?—in the office? Now, back—back, I said! Aw, let her come, will you?"

He noticed a real estate sign in an iron town, and trotted up to see the firm. It was pure impulse; he was the friendliest tail-wagging pup in the world. He was tired of driving in silence. He wanted to chat with some one "in the business." He hadn't a thing to say, but as he hastened up to the office he was sure that there were a lot of things about workmen's cottages that he was feverish to learn.

"I'm Stacy Blackwell," he said casually to the head of the firm, and held out his hand, expecting to be thanked for being Mr. Blackwell, and probably invited to revise their prospect-file. The real estate man didn't hold out his own hand—no, nor his heart; he growled: "Blackwell, you said your name was? Well? What can I do for you?" His manner indicated that what he wanted to do for Mr. Blackwell was to get rid of him with speed. The friendly pup felt like a very lonely pup.

BY dinner-time on Wednesday, his third day of driving, he was more than half through Ohio. He was inflexible and cranky from unaccustomed long driving, but after dinner he drove on by dark, to make distance. He was reduced from a bubbling personality to a machine that merely sat and drove, that saw nothing but the road, knew nothing but the wheel and the trail-signs. He was too drained of energy even to take the trouble to switch on the wind-shield spot-light and adjust it so that it would illuminate the right side of the road, though he was on a too narrow cement way.

He was droning along in a mist of drowsiness. He saw by a red haze which outlined a rise ahead of him that another car was coming, beyond the rise. He slowly put out his hand to dim his lights, sleepily wondering if he wasn't too near the center of the road. Then the other car had shot over the rise, was on him. Its lights confused him. His hand twitched on the wheel and—blam! crash!

In the daze of the accident he did not think of being afraid; he did not yet realize that he might have been hurt, or that in the other car, still concealed from him by its lights, some one else might he hurt. The other people did not exist for him.

But they began to exist, with noise and fury. As he stiffly climbed out, four men were yelping confusedly, "That was your fault—" "We were 'way over on our side—" "We was running slow—" "By golly, you'll settle for my machine or—" "You bet he'll settle—" "Oh, I'm hurt! My finger is all tore up."

The man of the last cry came running to the headlight.

"Let me see your finger," begged Blackwell, in feeble anxiety.

The injury was only a skin-graze, and he snapped, "You aren't hurt at all!"

He found that his undesired acquaintances were four young men in overalls; their car a paint-peeled flivver; and he was angry as he realized what it was that had smashed his beloved Betterton roadster, which stood lurched over, obviously with a fender gone, the axle twisted, a wheel in splinters.

"Any of you chaps hurt?" he demanded.

"Nah, we ain't any of you chaps hurt; but my machine is hurt bad, and you're going to pay for it!" growled the tallest of the group, a lean, dry-skinned, sunken-eyed man of thirty, with a bullying voice, who loomed up in the lights of Blackwell's car.

Wire-drawn and curt, used to obedience, used to respect, Blackwell faced this mass of undisciplined flesh and said quietly: "Certainly; I expect to settle." But his decisive voice could not be heard in the brawl the four men were making as they bumbled from one machine to the other, all talking at once.

The owner of the flivver—Harry seemed to be his name—wasn't affected by the very best Blackwell manner; and he kept shouting:

"Yes, you bet your life you'll settle—you was 'way over in the middle of the road—"

ANOTHER machine was stopping. From it exploded a crowd of girls and boys of sixteen to eighteen. With the ghoulishness of any crowd at any accident, they screeched, "Was anybody hurt?" Delightedly the boys poked their fingers at the twisted axle of the Betterton-Lecoque, and cried, "Gee, some smash! How'd it happen?" The girls made a circle about Blackwell, giggling hysterically, commenting, "Oh, see Willie! Where'd he get the cute little golf-suit?" and gloating again and again, "Anybody hurt?"

Blackwell's hair-trigger temper went off, and he turned on them with a flattening rebuke:

"My dear young ladies, if you believe this to be a little vaudeville for your entertainment, you are mistaken. Don't you suppose we are going to have enough trouble without having to answer every fool question you sweet young things ask? No; nobody was hurt. We're very sorry, but you won't be able to smirk over any blood."

He expected them to sneak off, but they stood stolidly enjoying his wrath. One of them murmured:

"Oh, mama, he's a preacher, and him in that dinky little coat! Say, Bessie, you quit smirking over the blood!"

The four men were still yowling about "settling."

From another car, which had just stopped, a leisurely man in a big felt hat pushed his way through to Blackwell and whispered:

"Hard luck, sonny! Don't let those roughnecks put anything over on you. You've got dimmers on your lights, and they haven't, and the Ohio law says that a man that hasn't any dimmers on can't

---

collect a cent in case of a night collision. You take my word for it, sonny; I run a jitney from Wade's Creek to Tarpenton."

The jitney man patted Blackwell patronizingly. He did not seem to be any more impressed by the Blackwellishness of Stacy MacGovern Blackwell than were the others; but Blackwell was feebly grateful to him. He seized the man's arm, and to him, as to a trusted elder brother, he appealed:

"I'm ready to settle. It may have been my fault. I was in the middle of the road. Besides, I haven't got time to stick around and have a law-suit. I've got to get to Chicago."

The owner of the damaged flivver was whining, "He ought to be lynched."

The jitney man poked him in the ribs and chuckled:

"Aw, shut up, Harry, you poor fool. If you'd put dimmers on your lights, like I've told you, it wouldn't have happened. This gentleman tells me he's ready to have your rotten 'bus towed into Tarpenton and repaired, and he'll pay for it. He's just going down to 'phone for the wrecking car now. So you dry up."

"Yes, that's right—just going to telephone," bubbled, not Mr. Blackwell of Philadelphia, but the little brother who was thankful to do anything big brother suggested. "I'll skip down to the next farm."

"You'll skip down nothing! This ain't any skipping-rope. You'd never come back," complained Harry.

"Say, Harry, my lip's cracked! You suppose this fellow is going to abandon a Betterton-Lecoque to save a little bill on your lizzie?" the jitney man rumbled.

"I don't know anything about any Better 'n Cokes, but I know he's going to settle."

BLACKWELL felt that if he ever heard the word "settle" again he would go mad and run about biting fence-posts. But his hero and protector, the jitney man, ignored Harry, and genially commanded: "Run along, bub, and telephone, and I'll watch your things."

Gratefully Blackwell hurried off. It was healing to be away from the confusion, from the sight of his pathetically wrecked car, the whining of Harry. The corn fields were about him; the sky was great and peaceful. He had recovered some of his trust in Mr. Blackwell by the time he had reached the nearest farm-house, and, despite the fact that the farmer wanted to know his name, favorite brand of coffee, and opinion of tractors, before making him surlily welcome to the telephone, Blackwell was fairly authoritative in talking to Hickson, the garage man at Tarpenton. He promised Hickson an extra fee if he would come out with the wrecking car at once. He asserted that he had perfect confidence in Mr. Hickson—but would he please be sure to remember to bring that flivver axle and radius rod?

He hastened back and patiently listened while the flivverous Harry indulged in his favorite word "settle" nine more times, and made several bright hints about payment, compensation, and getting the flivver fixed. It really did not seem worth while to have motored so hard just to make Harry's acquaintance. Then Hickson came shooting up in a big, competent-looking service car. Hickson was big and competent-looking himself—a bluff, bustling, solid citizen in a leather coat, as patronizing as the jitney man, and more brisk.

"Who do you work for?" Hickson asked him.

"I have a real estate business in Philadelphia."

"Able pay for both cars?"

"Yes!" Blackwell was delighted. Here was a man who would get things done quickly.

"All right."

"This fellow's got to settle—" began Harry.

"All right, Harry, all right!" Hickson growled. "Your car will be ready for you to-morrow noon, at my garage. Now get'ell out of here, and don't bother me. You can ride to town with Sanders here."

Harry meekly departed. Blackwell glowed. He felt that all this confusion, this purposelessness and waste of energy, was ended now; and he faithlessly adopted Hickson as his patron and big brother in place of the departing jitney man.

"You said you were in the real estate business? I got a cousin that's bookkeeper for Talbot and Twinney. Know um?" condescended Hickson.

Blackwell did know of Talbot and Twinney—as the cheapest hall-room-renting agency in Philadelphia. But there was meek politeness in his answer:

"No; I don't happen to know anybody at Talbot's personally."

"Huh! Ought to hit 'em for a job. Live firm," said Hickson, while he stripped off

his leather coat and began to adjust a monkey-wrench.

He completely ignored Blackwell as, with his mechanic, an industrious and disdainful young man with smuts on his nose, he began to take down the front axle assembly of the flivver. Blackwell was thankful when he was permitted to help, when these experts were good enough to recognize him as one who was competent to unscrew bolts. He held wrenches and ran for a jack when he was commanded.

They were able to get the flivver into shape for towing to Tarpenton, but Blackwell's car had to be left. Hickson would take the axle into town for straightening, and order a new wheel and fender from Cleveland by telegraph. He promised to be out next evening with the repaired axle and the new parts. Meantime Blackwell was to stay with his car and protect it.

"It will seem a long while, my boy, but don't forget I'll be right on the job, watching out for you and hustling to get things done. So don't worry, m' boy. S' long."

"S' long—thank you very, very much," said the chronic little brother.

THEN he was alone—and suddenly more emptily weary than he had ever been in his life. Though five minutes before he had been lifting like a stevedore, now it was an enormous task to get across the road to the grass patch to which his car had been pushed, get out a lap-robe, climb into the seat, and adjust himself with his feet inelegantly cocked up between the steering wheel and the left door. The knob of the right door was sticking into his back; but to shift his position took as much resolution as to get out of bed on a cold morning.

For a second he considered his car, its front wheels replaced by jacks, and the left front fender crumpled like a kicked tin can. It was as human and touching as a crippled athlete. He identified it with his wife—she who had loved it, had driven it, and polished odd corners of it. He felt as if she had in some way been injured. He was lonely for her.

Then, immediately, he was soggily asleep. And immediately after that pestering lights were shining in his face. He opened his peppery eyelids to find a car stopped, facing him, and a truck-driver looking over the wreck with lighted matches. The truckman came to the side of the car, and deliberately regarded Blackwell as if he were an ibis in a museum, or the Grand Cañon, or any other impersonal wonder of nature. In a manner of profound revelation he stated:

"There's been an accident."

"Now, how did you ever guess that?"

The man considered him as if he had never met a lunatic before, and was glad of the chance to broaden his education. He inquired: "Where'd you come from?"

Blackwell emphatically flopped over, groaned, and hid his eyes from the glare.

"Huh! You don't look like you were much of a driver," said the man contentedly.

The sound of the truck's starting was blessed to Blackwell. Quiet and darkness shrouded him again. He felt no strangeness, now, in the unknown place by the road, the crouched position. This was his normal life.

He awoke to full morning, and to another motor-load inspecting the wreck and his sleepy self. This committee did not condescend to him. They merely ignored him. But the next visitation, a farmer and his wife from over the hill, spelled out the name Betterton-Lecoque on a hub-cap, and informed him pityingly:

"Never heard of this kind of an automobile. Guess 'tain't much good if a flivver could smash it all up like that. You ought to get a Xerxes car. My son-in-law's got one, and I guess if 'twas to hit a flivver it would go clean through it."

Now, the Xerxes car for twelve hundred dollars provides an extra tire, winter top, bumper, insurance, baling-wire wheels and every-thing except a real engine. It has a nice long wheel-base, and the distance from the garage that a Sunday motorist may safely take a Xerxes is approximately equal to the length of that wheel-base.

"Yes, no doubt. But it's difficult to imagine a Xerxes going fast enough to hit anything," said Blackwell.

HIS sarcasm had been considered rather neat in meetings of the rules committee of the Maine Line Country Club, but the farmer's only response to it was:

"Yes, my son-in-law's a good careful driver. Lot of these fellows haven't got any sense about driving. Well, mama, guess we better go get breakfast."

Breakfast! Blackwell would have panhandled breakfast as shamelessly as any vagrant, if he had known how. While he abashedly tapped the side of the car and tried to conceive the best technique of panhandling, the sight-seers turned away from him without saying good-by, and paddled off.

Blackwell did not feel angry at their inhospitality. He felt that they were quite right in not wanting him. Decidedly, he was not Mr. Stacy MacGovern Blackwell now, but a night watchman. His tweeds were smeared with grease, his knees matted with the dust of the road. He was unwashed, unshaven; his hands were filthy and his nails like black horn.

The lack of morning coffee made him feeble. He wabbled down to the house from which he had telephoned, and bought breakfast. Fiery with the pride of bitter hot coffee, he stalked back, and for half an hour pretended that he really was a man of affairs again, and going to get something done. He energetically washed the back of the car, but when he looked at the smashed fender again, his tinkering seemed petty, and he sat down on the running-board and gazed forlornly at the landscape.

He had already done justice to that landscape—a fair corn-field, a forest of seven maples, and a cement culvert. But he was destined to make a much completer study of it. He accumulated an authoritative but highly useless knowledge of a gravel bank, a large rock with a vein of quartz glistening in the sun, and the angle of inclination of a fence-post.

About Chicago—how to get there, or how to impress the Volt Club when he got there—he could not think. The only person he desired to impress was Mr. Hickson of Tarpenton, who could do magic, and even get Betterton parts from Cleveland.

Blackwell assured himself that he could still make much of the distance by car. The parts ought to arrive that evening—Thursday. Hickson had said so, and Hickson was the wisest and most dependable man in the world. He could get off by midnight. He would drive all night! Perhaps he could make Chicago late Friday afternoon. At the possibility of really going on, of seeing the car live and quick and whole, he was thrilled for ten minutes.

But, as the warmth of the September day enveloped him, he became sun-drunk and listless, and alternately slept and answered the questions of people who stopped and were ready to give him unlimited advice about driving more carefully. They went through an almost invariable formula:

"Been an accident?"

"Anybody hurt?"

"How'd it happen?"

"What kind of car do you call this?"

"Pennsylvania license, eh? You're pretty far from home, ain't you?"

At first he resented being expected to tell the whole story over and over; but the weight of the general opinion that he was a freak, put there for their curiosity, made him adopt their view.

THE day didn't drag. It lay in the dust and let itself be dragged. Blackwell invented little tasks to keep himself alive. When dusk came, he could think of nothing in the world except that Hickson was long overdue with the rescue car. When one of the cars that kept coming at him over the hill stopped, and it was actually Hickson, Blackwell was in such an esctasy of pity for himself that he was almost sorry that his period of waiting was over—now he was no longer an interesting martyr!

"Wheel and fender come all right?" he asked trustingly of his friend and patron Hickson.

"No, they didn't get here; but they ought to be here first thing in the morning," chirruped Hickson. "Well, I had the axle straightened all right, and I borrowed a wheel from an old Betterton down the line, and we'll get you hauled into Tarpenton to-night, and you can be right comfortable there. Fine town—"

"First thing to-morrow morning? Well, say, if the parts surely come then, I'll still be able to make Chicago by Saturday afternoon, don't you think?"

Blackwell was begging for comfort, and his big brother soothed him:

"Oh, yes; sure, sure. Mike, gimme a lift on this axle."

Still tagging after the big boys, Black-well appealed: "They will get here to-morrow morning, won't they?"

"Oh, yes; sure; I guess so. Eeeyup she goes, Mike; one more heave."

Hickson had, in the twenty-four hours of waiting, grown from a garage man to a master of destinies, and Blackwell was timid about getting in his way. Even to Mike the mechanic he was deferential. He clung to them as the powers who would get him to the infinitely distant harbor of Chicago.

When the Betterton was jury-rigged for hauling, Blackwell skipped into the wrecking car, delighted to be leaving the gravel-bank, large stone, and uninterestingly leaning fence-post. He tried to be dignified and informative, and said what seemed to him some rather sound things about motor-car stocks.

Hickson interrupted him:

"Yuh, I guess so. Let's see; you said you were working for a real estate firm in Philadelphia? Why don't you come out here to God's country, where you can make a little money? I know a real estate

---

fellow that's rolling out his little four thousand plunks regular."

All day Blackwell had looked forward to the paradise of Tarpenton. He would leave his car in the garage and walk forth a free man, to have a bath, a splendid meal eaten at leisure, charming people!

When the car was housed, Hickson said briskly:

"Well, think I'll have my supper. Put it off till I could fetch you in. Have you had your supper, son?"

Blackwell innocently took it for an invitation, and "No; much obliged, old man!" he said gratefully. He pictured a motherly Mrs. Hickson and an enormous steak.

"Best place is the restaurant right across the street," Hickson said, and blandly hustled away.

"Ugh!" said the clever Stacy MacGovern Blackwell.

He crept across the street. The restaurant was a lunch-counter in front of a pool-room. He endeavored to persuade the proprietor, manager, chef, captain, waiter, and 'bus, who were a stocky young man with a rope-colored pompadour and a sports shirt, to let him have something to eat. The potentate was busy playing pool, and resentful at being disturbed. He came out with a cue in one hand, and to Blackwell's most agreeable "What have you to eat to-night?" he mumbled, "Veg'table soup, hamburg steak, fried eggs, apple pie, 'amsandtch."

"I'll have it." Blackwell smiled in the manner of a gentleman of South Carolina accepting a julep from a gentleman of Georgia.

"Yuh'll have what?"

"All of it."

"Whynchyuh say so?"

"I did!"

Suddenly the perishing pride of Mr. Blackwell raised its head from the drifts and made one more plunge forth into the night and storm.

"See here! I spoke courteously to you—"

The waiter did not even look at him:

"Aw, you drummers make me tired—expecting to get supper at seven or a quarter past or Lord only knows when, and then trying to pull the flip Columbus stuff. You can't bluff me—I used to work in Dayton!"

HE piled the food before Blackwell, all at once, and went loftily back to disport himself at pool, while the crushed Blackwell tried to get down a dry hamburger steak sandwich on thick bread, soup that was wet but otherwise of little virtue, and pallid apple pie. He studied the lunchroom—the dirty floor, the gambling machines, the shelves with cans of tomatoes, the disordered cases of cigarettes, gum, candy, and ear-muffs. He thought of a hundred ways to improve the place and attract motorists—all of them beginning with a scrubbing-brush. He didn't dare suggest any of them to the haughty young man, but the return of inspiration nerved him to go sailing out of the door to see what could be done about Tarpenton.

Almost anything could be done about Tarpenton. The village that he had all day pictured as a cross between London and Bryn Mawr was apparently composed of seven hundred persons, all dead, but uninformed of the casualties. The walks were intermittent attacks of crumbly cement, the paving was of fine pure honest natural mud, and the stores were junk-heaps. But he did find a drug-store that was clean, tile-floored, ambitious. He impulsively went in.

He bought amber motor-goggles from the quite complete case on the counter, and complimented the druggist upon the neatness of the store. The man blushed sallowly. Why, Blackwell queried with a sudden enthusiasm, didn't he start like establishments in neighboring towns? He named three in which he had been unable to buy such goggles the, afternoon of the day before.

"We-ul, I couldn't look after them and give this place personal attention," objected the druggist.

"Cinch! Take young chaps in here, train 'em, put 'em in charge of the other stores, give 'em percentage of profits, keep 'em interested and responsible!"

"Yes; and then they'd work up a trade and go in business there for themselves."

"Cinch! Make 'em sign agreement not to. Usual legal contract," Blackwell urged.

He had never before considered the drug business, but it had become his chief concern in life to see a chain of small-town drug-stores started immediately and properly. While the druggist stared with a "Well, what you got to sell?" expression, Blackwell fervently outlined a whole scheme of organization—a plan that would have been worth approximately ten thousand dollars to a man able to use it.

The druggist was much too prim to be called a swine, but certainly he did not care for the pearls beseechingly cast before him.

"Well,"—sniff,—"maybe there's something to what you say,"—sniff,—"but I guess I can manage to keep pretty busy right here,"—sniff,—"so, uh—" was his hysterical verdict.

It may be stated confidently that this particular druggist rarely had efficiency geniuses come and beg him to accept ideas; but as Blackwell dejectedly fluttered our the druggist chuckled: "Wonder what that fellow intended to try and sell me? Well, guess I didn't encourage him much. Guess he pulls that line of taffy every place. Didn't catch me with it, though!"

THE hotel at Tarpenton wasn't a hotel. It was a body of wooden chairs and cuspidors surrounded by denatured hall-rooms. It hadn't even a restaurant, or that pretty girl with mulberry-colored silk stockings who in all lobbies of all good hotels always sits irritably waiting for the young man who never comes. As Blackwell listened to the talk of the 'bus-driver, the town policeman, and a small-territory traveling man, he was afraid to intrude. "You aren't wanted," he miserably admonished himself. But he could not endure his exile when he heard the policeman, a peculiarly innocent and trusting old gentleman, tell of his good fortune in winning a free Texas lot as a prize at the motion pictures. He had, it seemed, only to pay for making abstract of title.

Suddenly the recently deceased Mr. Blackwell came to life and took charge of everything in sight.

"Pardon me, but I happened to hear what you were saying. I am a real estate man, and I've known—of course, in your particular instance it may be all right, but I've known the prize-lot, free-for-abstract game to be highly fraudulent. They divide up swamp or desert land in some distant State, land worth about two dollars an acre, into a number of tiny lots, and, by getting seven or eight dollars per abstract, really sell that land for about three hundred, clear, an acre. Now, I'd advise—"

The town policeman was gazing upon him with a mixture of benevolence and pity. He arose and drawled: "Ye-up, maybe; but you can bet your bottom dollar I ain't going to give up a free prize—"

"Do you know how many other prizes were given that same evening?"

"No, sir, I don't. I never ask about things that don't concern me!" piped the policeman, to a chorus of snickers, and he sauntered out.

Blackwell's depression increased as he heard the ever-changing group in the hotel speak much wisdom about matters of which he knew nothing—county option, chain drives, scratch feed, humus. Hickson the garage man came in to buy a cigar.

Blackwell brightened. Here was his friend! Hickson merely nodded to him; but with a man next to Blackwell he discussed the price of coal at considerable length. He did not introduce the man, nor in any way indicate that he would like the counsel of Mr. Stacy MacGovern Blackwell—who owned rather a nice block of stock in a coal mine.

The village newspaperman came in. To him Hickson shouted:

"Here's a fellow had an accident last night, Homer. He ran into Harry Benner's liz, mile this side of Wade's Creek. The Swenson boys and a fellow from Vandalsburg were with Harry. Better put a piece in the paper, Homer. I'm fixing up both machines."

So at last Blackwell was interviewed. At the end of it he stated: "Incidentally, I am Stacy M. Blackwell, and I am head of rather a large realty firm in Philadelphia."

"That so? Well, well! So long. Got to hustle. We get the paper out to-night," breathed the awed literary light.

Blackwell didn't even look about after these journalistic honors. He stalked up to a bed whose mattress was an accurate relief map of the Sierra Nevada mountains and the Sacramento valley.

He read the Tarpenton Intelligencer at breakfast. On the back page, between "Glad News for This Section—Local Man Cured of Rheumatism by Simple Prescription" and "Don't Forget the Baptist Lawn Festival," he discovered:

Harry Benner and Will and Charley Swenson, with a friend from Wade's Creek, had an unfortunate accident Wednesday evening near Vandalsburg when their natty buzz buggy was hit by a Pennsylvania car. The axle was badly bent, and we opine you will need a new mud guard, Harry, if you take a certain young lady from Arcola out riding any more. Both cars are being repaired by Hickson, our genial and competent garage king. The other car was driven by a man named Stacy.

Blackwell managed to laugh, but he felt enormously unimportant as he hastened to Number Three, the first train on which the parts for his car could arrive. He reached the station five minutes before the train—a long five minutes to wait. The people at the station ignored him, but stared at the son of the local banker, who was going up to the city in a new suit with a belt and buckle. "Gee, some suit Roy's got!" he heard the station agent say to the 'bus driver. He did not hear any one comment on his own beautiful tweeds.

He was raging because he could actually be jealous of the raiment of a chinless young man of Tarpenton; because he was going about like a prep. school freshman, wanting attention from a town of a population considerably less than that of the building in which he had the largest office. But, no matter how he raged, he knew that his first ambition was to be admitted as an equal in Hickson's exclusive set in Tarpenton; and his second, to have the car parts arrive on this train, and be able to escape from this haughty village that ignored his friendliness.

The train was coming in. He gaped at it as it rounded the curve, panted over its two dingy day coaches and the express car. He ran along the platform beside the express car, peering in for the package of parts. He visualized it—there would be a rounded hump for the new fender. He almost made himself believe that he saw such a package.

AS the train stopped, the expressman came to the door of the car with a bunch of manila envelops, handed them—and nothing else—to the local agent, and waved his hand to the train crew. Blackwell stood emptily watching the train pull out. He gravely stated to himself, "I guess they didn't come on this train." He walked feverishly up Main Street till it occurred to him that he had no place to which to walk and no reason whatever for walking.

---

The rest of that gray Friday Blackwell alternated between a wooden chair in front of Hickson's garage, and the railroad station. He lived from train to train.

He tried to pin Hickson down to facts about the probable arrival of the parts, and to discover whether, if Cleveland could not send them, they could not be secured from Toledo or Columbus. But Hickson was too busy a man to have time for stating facts. He had a meat market as well as his garage, and he rushed from one office to the other. It seemed to be his rule always to look as busy as the secretary of a deaf and dumb convention, even if there were nothing but gossip to be busy about.

Like all hustlers, he never liked to give a direct answer. When Blackwell sought positive information, Hickson would shout bluffly: "Yes, sir; I'll tell you anything you want to know. Oh, just a minute! Hey, Jim! Wait a second! Want to see you!" And Blackwell could not get near him again for an hour.

He was annoyed, but he had come to depend on Hickson as the only visible refuge, and all day he made an effort to get Hickson to do something definite. Meanwhile, to kill time, or at least to damage it a little, he tried to talk with a retired farmer about "early conditions here." If there ever had been any early conditions here, the jolly old gentleman had apparently not noticed them.

BLACKWELL read the spotty back numbers of magazines in Hickson's office. He walked along the few streets in town and endeavored to make conclusions about the Tarpenton school of architecture. He didn't venture to present any one with ideas or inspiration.

To each of the four trains he rushed a quarter of an hour early. With each he had the sickening relapse when the expressman failed to hand out the package of parts.

The last possible train was clue at six-fifteen. He must have asked Hickson at least four times, "Those parts ought to come on that last train, don't you think?" and four times tried to get comfort out of Hickson's careless, "Oh, yes; sure; I guess so." He also sought the valued opinions of the garage mechanic, the laundry-man, the station agent, and the lunch-counter proprietor about the amount of express carried on that six-fifteen train, which had become easily the most important train in history. He knew that he was becoming a pest and a not very high-class moron, but he could not manage himself; could not recognize himself as Stacy Blackwell.

HE got through from four-thirty to a quarter of six by respectfully listening to the opinions of a very important and communicative man, the sewing-machine agent whose roadster was being treated at the garage. But when the agent departed time was paralyzed again, and all eternity contained in the half hour he still had to wait. He tried to make supper last till ten minutes past six; but the only way to get through what seemed to be precisely the same hamburger and soup he had destroyed the evening be-fore was to bolt them, and at six he was left occupationless.

He took a long walk, in fact a walk clear to the end of town. He was sure it must be ten minutes past, now. He expectantly looked at his watch. Only six-five!

And when he got to the station the train was late.

And the parts weren't on that train, either.

And number three, next morning, was the last train he could take if he were to get to Chicago in time for the Volt Club speech.

And he couldn't imagine himself daring to speak even to the coat-room boy at the Volt Club.

And he fled to bed, clean licked by Tarpenton, convinced that he had been a maniac ever to imagine he could be of any importance.

He was too paralyzed to telegraph to Chicago that he could not come. He would do that in the morning.

Number three, connecting for Chicago, left at eight-twenty-seven. It was his last chance; yet at eight Blackwell was discontentedly dabbling in his bowl of petrified breakfast food. He wanted to run and hide from the world. He was planning his telegram to the Volt Club.

Eight-seventeen. If he hurried, he could pack his bag at the hotel, get the other bag from the garage, and make the train.

Just time!

The Stacy MacGovern Blackwell who did things on time suddenly called him from his game of make-believe.

He quietly dropped from the high stool. He spun a quarter at the waiter with a curt, "Here!" He walked across the street to the garage, and spoke to Hickson with none of his recent obsequiousness:

"I'm going to take the train. You told me you'd get those parts on time, when you knew mighty well you couldn't. Now you'll wire for them at once—Toledo, if Cleveland is out. I've wasted enough of my time. I'll call you on long distance from Chicago to-morrow, and if you haven't got the car all ready to go out, I'll send down a Betterton agent to see about it."

Hickson's fleshy mouth opened and his heavy mustache wabbled, but he said nothing for a moment; then, belligerently, "I've been doing my best."

"No, you haven't!" Blackwell's voice was cold as arctic night. He yanked his extra bag from the car, and yanked himself from the garage, without one backward look.

He made the train with a minute to spare.

The Chicago train was late. The Volt dinner was at seven-thirty. At seven Blackwell came out of the station in Chicago, and rather crankily ordered the taxi-driver to hurry.

At nine-thirty he arose in his tweed suit, among the pink-faced, silver-haired men in evening clothes, and snapped:

"I've just been among people who are too stupid to move out and move on. I'm going to tell you about Mr. Blackwell of Philadelphia, and what a great man he really is. For four days I've been looking for some one who would understand that fact."

The Volt Club looked disapproving. Careless of them, his voice sure as a circular saw, Blackwell tore ahead.

ONE hour later he wound up the story of his adventure with:

"Ninety per cent of people are only ten per cent efficient. I intended to come here and tell you about easy grades in suburban streets, or some piffling thing like that. But I come saying that we must change everything! We, the representatives of capital, aren't so very different in our ideals from the wildest soap-box fanatic. We must commandeer all Tarpentons—mind you, not only those among the corn-fields, but those Tarpentons that make up a large part of Chicago and Philadelphia and New York. We must refuse to let them be satisfied with dirty food and stale merchandise and suspicious fear of new ideas. We must drive them to efficiency."

He sat down. The club smiled at him all the friendliness he had longed for in Tarpenton. The big man across the table begged:

"You're right, Blackwell. Say, I own about nine tenths of a town exactly like Tarpenton. Will you come and boss it for me? Here's your chance to get even with the Hicksons."

"Me? Not on you life! It's the next fellow's turn. I couldn't handle important people like Hickson. I'm never again going to take my chances in any town smaller than a million!"

How We Ran Away from Our Relatives

I SHALL never forget that night when we made our decision. We were in the dickens of a fix. The firm I had been bookkeeper for had failed, and I was suddenly out of a job. The month's bills had just come in, and no amount of scheming and stretching could make ends meet. Also that day a letter had come telling us that two young ladies—thirteenth cousins, I think—would arrive in a few days to make us a six weeks' visit!

When Polly and I married and settled clown in the little town where we had always lived, we confidently expected to save at least twenty-five dollars each month for ten years; then we meant to retire to the fruit farm of our dreams and be happy ever afterward. But we had reckoned without our guests!

Both of us were orphans with no very near relatives and very few close friends. But it's a safe bet that no young couple as poor as we ever had more mere acquaintances and distant kin who were always coming to visit. And they were all (and always) hungry!

Polly is a fine cook, and at first we, naturally, were pleased to find ourselves so popular. But popularity pays no bills, and our food bills were getting larger each month.

It began to roil me. What were we getting out of such a life, anyway? We were rarely alone any more. Polly was nervous, worried, and increasingly irritable.

Here we were, at the end of five years, with two adorable youngsters, our household goods, a reputation for hospitality, and nothing else. The time had come for a change, and I pronounced an ultimatum: We simply would not feed another parasite a single meal until we had a hundred dollars in the bank.

Polly wanted to know how I'd go about shooing Great-Aunt Jane, Cousin Nell, and all those others away. We couldn't hurt their feelings!

What, I asked her, were their feelings compared to our self-respect?

Then Polly collapsed in my arms and settled the business by saying:

"Peter, I'm tired of it all! Let's go away somewhere—a thousand miles from all the kin—where we can live simply and be happy and enjoy the babies. I'd like

to live in a tent and forget all about keeping up appearances. Oh, Peter, let's! And we can save for the farm!"

For Polly, that speech was a masterpiece. We hadn't a dollar; but we were young, unafraid, and enthusiastic, and before we went to sleep we had decided to go to California.

Next morning we sent a telegram (collect) canceling our would-be guests' plans for a visit. Then we selected our future home. A map of California was consulted. Finally, near Sacramento, Polly found a little town she liked because of its attractive name!

Within two weeks our belongings were sold for about half what they had cost us, the balance on our grocery account was paid, two home-seekers' tickets were bought, and we started, with only money enough to keep us about two weeks.

We really enjoyed the four-day trip, and on the train we formulated the platform on which our success has been built:

That there's a job for every man and every woman. That it is not harder to earn money than to spend it well. Therefore, since time also is money, in our home shall be no waste of either. We abhor stinginess, but "nothing is cheap that is superfluous."

Late on a Monday afternoon in June we reached our journey's end, to find our little town lying right in the center of northern California's deciduous fruit district.

Next morning I set out, repeating to myself: "There's a job for every man." But my knees were wabbly. I walked to the depot from which three fruit companies ship thousands of tons of fruit yearly. Wagons, piled high with boxes and crates of peaches and plums, were lined up alongside of the platform, and from every direction still they came. Perhaps two dozen men, employees of these three companies, were busily receiving the fruit from the drivers, checking it, piling it on the platform, and loading it into cars.

I began to worry. I didn't believe those men could handle all that fruit—perhaps they needed help. They did. Five minutes later I had forgotten I ever was a bookkeeper.

It was a warm day. Mrs. Barstow, at whose home we had secured accommodations, was complaining at lunch about the heat, and bewailing the fact that a vacation at the seashore was impossible. She could not find a cook to look after her boarders, of whom there were three besides ourselves. That was Polly's chance. She grabbed it. Next day Mrs. Barstow left for Santa Cruz.

For six weeks I worked at the shipping depot. Then I went to work on a big fruit ranch. My pay was fifty dollars a month, our wood, all the fruit we wanted, and a furnished house, rent free. We stayed there two years, occupying the two-roomed house; and in that time we learned to speak and understand Spanish. I learned to graft, to prune, to spray, to handle a four-horse team, and to run a gasolene engine. Polly learned to pack fruit, adding in the two years more than a hundred dollars to our ranch fund.

Then came a job as foreman on a ranch employing many Spainards. Here I had lighter work, double the pay I had received, and we occupied a much better house.

We've been in California seven years. Those years have brought us friends, health, and contentment. Three months ago we took possession of the home we expect to end our days in. It's not all paid for yet, but the way is clear.

And yesterday a telegram came. Great-Aunt Jane, Cousin Nell, and baby Rose, so pleased because of our apparent prosperity, are coming to spend the summer with us.

L. L. B.

THEY HAD THEIR NERVE

STYLES IN HEROINES

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AT LAST—ALL THE PROBLEMS SOLVED

IN JAPAN

By Jennie Glass

I HAD been living in Japan for over a year, and I still did not know how far to trust the sincerity of the Japanese. They did not seem frivolous, but they certainly were not a serious people. They were always smiling. Japanese faces were certainly happy faces, but I much doubted their sincerity.

I began musing on some of their strange customs. I thought of my servant Amaso and her white funeral garments. Hers was surely a case in point. Amaso had never shown outward affection toward her husband, nor he to her; but I had never doubted that they were devoted.

I recalled the many times I had watched them working together in the garden, with never a sign of affection, but always that silent dependence of the one on the strength and goodness of the other. Amaso would work all day by her husband's side, weeding, freshening, culling the green shrubs.

I remembered how she always carried an unusually choice flower to him for appreciation. Then, when her husband was taken ill, she had tended him so patiently. I don't believe Amaso ever slept those four or five awful nights, and she insisted on doing her usual work for me as well. Not a night passed that I did not see the night-light shimmering through their screens. And always crouched beside the husband's mat was Amaso, gently tending the sufferer.

When he died, Amaso came to me apologetically, requesting a day's leave of absence. She was very sorry to disturb my honorable household by her poor sister's presence, but if the thought were not objectionable to me, this same worthless sister should perform her household duties in her absence. I was curious. She did not mention her bereavement.

"But, Amaso, why do you go?"

She answered in the ordinary conversational tone:

"My husband has departed to his ancestors, and he wishes my presence at the temple."

"You poor dear, you may have as many days as you want."

She bowed in the sweet Oriental fashion and noiselessly retired. I felt that I had blundered in my question, for she seemed anxious to avoid mentioning her husband's death. It was probably too sacred a subject for speech.

But when I saw her, clothed in white garments, walking slowly from the house, I could not help accosting her again.

"I go to his burial," she said simply. And did I see a flash of a smile in those great eyes?

My peace was disturbed. Why on every side those uncalled-for, useless smiles? The courteous shallowness of these people sickened me.

I decided to sound the depths of a Japanese soul: for Amaso had returned, in her beautiful white robe, and was walking with miniature steps to her own quarters.

I called to her. I would test the value of the woman then and there. She came unassumingly before me, dropped on her knees, and as usual bowed, touching the floor with her smooth forehead. She was surely a beautiful creature. I saw a little jar which she had placed behind her, and wondered what were its contents.

I expressed my heartfelt sympathy for her sorrow. She was very sad, she said, to bring her grief before my august person—and was that a shade of a smile in her eye? I was horror-stricken. She wasn't heart-broken; she was glad!

Amaso rose gracefully, without effort,

preparatory to taking her leave. She picked up the little jar and bowed low to me.

"That is a very beautiful jar," I ventured.

"It is a very poor thing, unworthy of such an honor."

I smiled at her quaintness.

"Let me see it."

She handed it to me, and I looked into it. My flesh began to creep. It was full of ashes: I could see a tooth and a bone that remained unburned. Amaso must have seen the paleness of my face, for she seized the jar before it dropped from my trembling hands. She saw my weakness evidently with surprise, and, peering into the jar, began to smile. Then, after looking anxiously at my horror-stricken face, she laughed aloud—a merry, tinkling laugh.

It aroused me. I shook off the stupor that had seized upon me, and faced her. "Amaso!" She bowed her head under my eye. "You will leave the premises immediately. I wish never to see again a person so hardened as to laugh over the remains of a loved one newly dead."

Submissively and without sound of a footfall, she shuffled from the room.

I reached for water and dampened my forehead. For an hour I paced up and down, nerve-racked. It had been too horrible—too inconceivable.

Amaso had not gone. Perhaps she would refuse to go, and I would have to see her again to force her departure. I would not see her again. Yet I could not bear to think of her as still on the place. So I made my way to her quarters, deter-mined this time to use physical persuasion.

I hurried through their little garden—how hideous the thought of it was in the light of my knowledge. I even sobbed a little over the woman's fickleness. I rushed up the tiny steps and pushed back the screen.

Before me was a pitiable sight. Amaso had committed hari-kari. There she sat cross-legged, face downward in a pool of blood.

A cruel short knife was in her body, with both hands still clutching it.

It was an hour before I found her note and had quieted myself enough to read it. It was brief:

Honorable Lady:

I am sorry to bring my poor life into disturbance of your peace. I commit hara-kiri, for an honorable person thought my reverend husband was not beloved and held sacred by me.

Respectfully your servant,
AMASO.

When I recovered enough to travel, I left for America.

THE LIFE-LINE

—By Edmond McKenna

WE hadn't been long in the flat, and, as it was our first venture in housekeeping, Barbara and I were greatly interested in our neighbors. Not in their private affairs, of course, but in themselves. We really didn't want to know their affairs at all, but we dearly loved to speculate about them.

We had bought second-hand furniture. It was a little more expensive than the brand-new kind; but then, it gave our four rooms a certain air of coziness. Barbara said that new things always gave her a feeling of insecurity. When a newly married couple came to inspect the flat under ours, Barbara said the man looked to her like one who would buy new furniture. It was her way of saying that she didn't like him very well. I saw him myself a few days later, and in truth he was raw enough looking. He was a big blond fellow of about twenty-three, with a seriousness newly acquired and badly fitting. The woman was a dark, shy little person, the kind that—I suppose because they are not very attractive—are complimented by being described as intense.

They were a cautious couple, the prospective tenants, and had been advised, no doubt, of the romantic quality that inheres in landlords and janitors, for they stopped at our door to check up some of the statements the janitor had made about heating and light and service. In a week they moved in, and it was with them as Barbara had predicted: every bit of furniture they had was new, even to the clothes-line.

Barbara had a way of tying the personalities of all our neighbors up in their clothes-lines. The areaway was criss-crossed with lines, and Barbara got a good deal of information from them. After the first wash she knew that the woman who lived just across from us had two babies. She ventured that some of our neighbors were of a certain nationality because they hung out variegated garments on their lines.

After a few weeks' observation she could tell, with a fair degree of accuracy, who of our neighbors were poor and who were not so poor. She could tell when the Delaney girls were going to a party, and when Mrs. Nolan's lumbago sent her back to bed.

BUT it was the bride's new clothes-line that interested Barbara the most. To her mind, it seemed to promise revelations of great importance. The first day the bride put clothes out on the new line, Barbara said to me, as we were sitting down to dinner:

"She wasn't raised in New York."

Without knowing of whom Barbara was speaking, I replied with the casualness I affect at such times in an effort to gloss over my lack of divination:

"What makes you think so, dear?"

"The bride—I mean."

Barbara said this decisively, to let me know she detected my subterfuge.

"You deduced that from the clothes-line?" I asked. A little raillery often gets us over a strained moment.

"Indeed I did! She wiped the line with a wet cloth before she hung out the wash."

There is something beyond logic in some of Barbara's deductions. It turned out to be true that the girl came from a small town in the Middle West where housekeeping is still practised.

If, as I suspect, all women know things like that, what a revelation a New York areaway must be to them—especially in our district, where the week's history and biography is published freshly before their eyes every Monday.

I realized this keenly when, one day, I saw Mrs. Nolan reading my patched underwear with plain satisfaction. Mrs. Nolan had lived in that flat, or in similar places, some fifty-odd years, and must have been erudite compared with Barbara: and underwear has no reticence at all.

It may be that Barbara is more sensitive than our neighbors, or has the gift of learning more from clothes-lines. Anyway, their stories made her buoyant at times and dejected at others. Indeed, I came to associate her periodic fits of the blues with the periodic appearance on the clothes-line of some gorgeous things belonging to one of the Delaney girls.

As "things" they were wonderful. But to Barbara they had moral and ethical implications that were terrifying. I had often looked at the same sort of gorgeous apparel in a window I pass on my way to work, and often wished I could buy them for Barbara. Their connotations, in my case, were impossible quantities of dollars.

I told this to Barbara, trying to be reasonable.

"That's just it," she sighed. "They are even more impossible for that girl than they are for me."

Of course, I didn't know anything about that; but the next day, when I passed the shop, I discovered the amazing difference between things in a window and things on a clothes-line. It was personality that made the difference. The garments in the window were beautiful; but they had no personality, beneficent or malign. Even if they had been very old and ugly and striped, like poor Mrs. Garbarino's clothes, they could never be pitiful.

I could see that it was Barbara's fault, in a way. She read personal meanings into the areaway news; but I could not edit out the morbid stories for her.

OUR affairs went along smoothly for several months, and, although we kept pretty much to ourselves, we felt very wise about our neighbors. Then, one Monday night when the weather was getting warm, Barbara thought we should open all the windows and pin back the curtains, so the rooms would get a good airing.

It was just before bedtime, and before pinning back the curtains Barbara put out the lights. She was standing by a window that overlooked the bride's apartment.

"Jim, come over here," she called to me; and in her voice there was pity and fright.

I thought she had detected a murderer's shirt on one of the lines, or at least the evidence of some of the younger Miss Delaney's escapades.

"Look," she gasped.

I looked, and in the bride's apartment I saw the husband preparing to hang out the wash.

The windows were dark, but a light in an inner room revealed him silhouetted in the window-frame, with his sleeves rolled up, bent over a trayful of things on the window-sill. He seeed to be taking instructions from some one

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inside; for he went back several times, and then rehung a few pieces. He did it very well, I thought, on the whole.

"She must be terribly ill," Barbara said. "I wonder if she's happy?"

BARBARA had forgotten about the husband. She seemed never to remember him any more, although I have never quite been able to forget him. Even to-day, when I see an areaway full of clothes-lines, the picture of that uncouth husband at his incongruous task blots out their multitudinous associations.

There were tears in Barbara's eyes the next morning when she looked at the meager line of woman's things swinging bravely in the sunlight.

"Oh, dear," she sighed. "I hope—"

"There, there, girl," I said, "don't take it so much to heart. She'll soon be all right."

"But it isn't that," Barbara said, refusing to be comforted. "If that Delaney girl hangs out anything now, it will swing against hers all day."

Which shows that there is no use trying to comfort Barbara when she won't be comforted.

She seemed to take the bride's line under her protection, and several times in the next three weeks, when the lights were out, just before bedtime, I saw her try to read it for five minutes together, although nothing at all had been hung out in all that time.

But clothes-lines can't remain incommunicative forever—at least, not with Barbara around.

WHEN I came home one night and found Barbara beaming, I knew the hempen oracle had made a revelation.

"It's a little girl!" she said.

"Oh, you have been over to see her?" I asked.

"No, goose; can't you see the little clothes on the line are different?"

NO MAN COULD FILL LINCOLN'S SHOES

IN the office of a shoe store in West Forty-fourth Street, New York, lies a treasured card once white but now browned by age.

On it is this writing:

This is the story of the card:

Sixty years ago Peter Kahler was a shoe-maker in Scranton, Pennsylvania. In a small shop beneath a hardware store on Lackawanna Avenue, he acquired local fame both for the comforting fit of the boots he made and for his well flavored philosophy.

With his skill in conforming leather to the peskiest foot, he pegged his way into the affections of his neighbors. With his quaint analysis of the gossip that drifted through his door he helped himself toward more than local recognition as a "character."

But Kahler was ambitious: he looked ever for other feet to conquer. One day opportunity confronted him in the form of a rumor from Washington that President Lincoln was in trouble.

Lincoln stood six feet three and one half inches in his stockings. His feet shared the traditional angularity of the rest of his frame.

In those days boots were always made to order, but the best of craftsmen had failed to provide the President with the perfect casing.

Said Peter Kahler: "I believe I can do it. I'm going to Washington, and if I can only get in to see Mr. Lincoln I'll make him some boots that will fit."

With a sheet of cardboard in his valise, he went to the capital. At the White House door he offered his card: "Peter Kahler, Shoemaker, Scranton, Pa." A few minutes later he stood before the President.

Kahler recited his conquest of Scranton's feet, and explained his system of building a shoe from a diagram and measurements peculiar to himself. Without parley the President removed his boots and bade Kahler go ahead. Spreading his cardboard on the floor beneath the Presidential feet and stockings, the pilgrim from Scranton got down on his knees, carefully penciled the outlines, and jotted the requisite measurements.

It must have been to facilitate entrance to the White House for a final visit and checking up on the following day that Lincoln wrote on the back of Kahler's card:

"Let this man come right in."

The next day the shoemaker verified his figures, and left Washington with the President's signature and the date, December 13, 1864, written between the outlines of the two feet on the precious chart.

Back in his shop, Kahler devoted himself to the President's boots for several weeks. He sent them to Washington with a letter, and in due time received this note:

Dear Sir: The pair of French calfskin boots which you so kindly sent to the President, and the slippers intended for Mrs. Lincoln, have been received, and he desires me to express his thanks for the same.

Your ob't servt,
JOHN G. NICOLAY,
Priv Secy.

Undoubtedly, Mrs. Lincoln enjoyed her slippers; certainly her husband was pleased with his boots, for Peter Kahler did not rest until he was sure they fitted. He had expected pay for his work, and was thinking of writing the President again. But, fortunately, he sought advice from a Scranton friend, Frederick L. Fuller, who explained that the President naturally regarded the boots as a present and in not

mentioning money had paid the artist a delicate compliment. That pleased Kahler more than anything else. Events proved him by no means a loser. Newspapers outside of Scranton copied the story of the obscure shoemaker and the boots that fitted a President, and Kahler was soon famous.

The incident taught him the value of advertising. Moving to New York, he set up a shop on lower Broadway, and exhibited in a window the cardboard diagram he had drawn in the White House, the "let this man come right in" card, and Secretary Nicolay's note. His prices were high, but people of importance flocked to pay them.

Kahler's growing business soon burst its buttons. He opened a larger store farther up Broadway, at Eleventh Street. To-day the Kahler store, just off Fifth Avenue, is one of the largest in New York and its trade country-wide.

Old Peter Kahler died long ago, and his grandsons, Peter and Charles Kahler, run the business now. Charles Kahler's middle name is—you've guessed it—Lincoln, and that's not merely because he was born on February 12, either.

He Helps the Birds and Himself

I MAKE many a dollar in spare time building and selling bird-houses. The demand is increasing as more and more people learn how much we owe to the birds as guardians of our food supply. I build the houses of 3-4-inch dressed lumber, and also of rustic slabs. Any one who is at all handy with tools can turn out attractive bird-houses. They should be stained brown or green: the birds like these colors best. I use heavy sanded roofing paper for the roofs.

I get from $1.25 to $3.50 for a house. A few of the larger and more elaborate bring $5.

Hardware dealers and department stores are often in the market for such houses, but I get better prices, by calling at the homes of likely purchasers or telephoning to ask if I may show my wares. Early spring is the time to start the selling campaign.

Who is She?

ONE might almost ask, "Where is she?"

Seventeen years ago one could not pick up a paper without seeing her features on the front page. They were pleasant features—not beautiful, but nice, sensible, and dashing. Good-humored, too. Her comings and her goings, her wooings and her doings, her dinings and her dressings and her thinkings, were all paramount front-page stuff. She was the joy of the young reporter on his promotion. She was the saving of many a weary city editor. Colors, fruits, and candies were named after her. She christened warships.

When she came to town, the town was hers. When she rode out, people fell off 'buses looking at her. When she was shopping, people crushed one another's ribs in to get a peek at her. She came as near being a bona-fide "personality" as the exigencies of our democracy will permit.

Some went so far as to call her the "American Princess."

Probably more people were interested in her at one time than they have been in any one person before or since.

She had a remarkable man for a father—in many ways the most remarkable man the United States has produced in sixty years. She was the one thing in all his life he had been unable to manage, people said, and she became twice as interesting as she was before.

She found herself the heroine of a thousand stories, some of them true, some of them partly true, most of them untrue. People talked of her adventuresomeness, of her hatred of convention, of her daring.

She had campaigned in the Philippines and had ridden out on punitive expeditions against the Moros in the days of the reconstruction in the Philippines. She had smoked in public, and gotten away with it.

Twenty times she was reported engaged, and twenty times she had denied it. Then, one day, she really became engaged. He was the last man in the world any one had planned for her to marry: a congressman from a Middle Western State, already middle-aged and slightly bald.

She was married. Her train was seven yards long. The crush around the church was so great that three women were suffocated.

And that was all. For ten years her features haven't graced a front page. She is quite as interesting now as she ever was—but that is all. Where is she? Who is she?

Here's a Good Idea

PERHAPS a large percentage of the trade at your store comes from young men: if so, you are probably worried, for the army is taking more young men every day.

A dealer in men's wear in a Western city had a good idea. When war was declared, he began gathering the measurements of all the young men in his vicinity—their shirt and collar and sock sizes, their preferences in neckwear, etc. With this information he collected also the names of their nearest relatives and friends.

These facts, on cards, are all ready for a Christmas when the war will be over, and the boys in camps and "over there" will be wanting civilian clothes in which to come marching home.

Have You the Conference Habit?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

Illustration by Jessie Gillespie

AT 10.00 A. M. they told him Smith had not arrived, so he said he would look in again later. At 11.15 they said Smith had come in and gone out again. At noon they told him that Smith could not be seen—he was in conference.

The visitor said that he thought Smith would be glad to know that he was in the office. Would they telephone his name in? But subordinates were firm. The idea of interrupting a conference! So the visitor said he must try to see Mr. Smith some other time, and left his card and departed.

When Smith came out of the conference and saw that card, he went through the ceiling. For the visitor was purchasing agent for a large Western company, and had dropped in to see Smith on his way home from a buying trip, because he liked the kind of fellow Smith was and the cordial letters he wrote—which were very different from the stereotyped "Mr. Smith can not be interrupted—he is in a conference."

Do you suffer from the great American conference habit?

This habit has been growing amazingly the past ten years. Originally it started with the very good idea that, because business organizations were spreading out and personal contact difficult to maintain, team-work could be promoted by bringing the men together every so often from departments and branches.

But nowadays, wherever two or three are gathered together, even in every-day routine talk, that is sanctified by the term "conference." And a man in conference is supposed to wear a cloak of inaccessibility. Nothing else on earth counts.

In most cases, this is pure camouflage!

Nine conferences out of ten are debating societies and rest cures. They are debating societies because, when more than two or three men undertake to discuss business matters without the strong control that ought to mark a real conference, they simply talk around the bush, and destroy concentration. And, because not one conference in ten is held to a strict program by an executive who knows where to start and when to leave off, the net result usually is a letting down of mental efficiency that makes the conference restful, but nothing more.

The most efficient business nation in the world, undoubtedly, is England.

The American lands in London, anticipating a series of world-beating conferences, and is told that at 2.10 P. M. Wednesday afternoon Sir Charles Smith will see him for fifteen minutes. The appointment is sacred. Sir Charles is waiting, and promptly turns out the previous visitor, and finishes with the American on schedule. All the facts must be summarized so that Sir Charles may give his decision. It may be a matter of millions involving concentrated affairs on the other side of the world. It is decided with a clearness and definiteness that makes the American head go round—and thus Sir Charles is able to spend Friday noon to Tuesday morning at his country home.

Not long ago a new manager took charge of a business so hypnotized with the conference idea that it was falling to pieces. Able men were quickly lost because they could get nothing done. No matter what project was proposed, the conference crowd held an autopsy on it. The bigger it happened to be, the greater the necessity for careful consideration, they said.

A preliminary conference debated the matter, and clearly brought out all the objections against it, and reduced initiative and energy to doubts and delays. Then all the misgivings were handed over to sub-committees, who held other conferences upon them, until finally the project was set aside altogether, to wait until times got better, or the war was over, or the weather changed.

That business had degenerated into an organization of debating clubs—a Russian Duma.

What the new manager did was very simple. Going back to first principles for debating societies, he applied ordinary parliamentary rules to hold discussion on the track and run it on schedule, and wielded the gavel on anybody who tried to wreck the train or lead it off on a ramble through the woods. He cut down on the number of conferences, and made those that were necessary thoroughly unrestful by humorous and caustic comment for the fellows who doubted and dissembled.

When a subordinate attended one of this manager's conferences, he got enough things to do to keep him busy for a week, with full authority to carry them out, and the obligation to come into the next conference bringing the results.

Best of all, he utterly destroyed the myth about the sanctity of a conference. No Western buyer ever showed up in that office to see their Mr. Smith and found Smith inaccessible. Five minutes before a conference started, the manager's secretary took her station in the general reception-room. She was there to represent the manager—and nobody who ever had business with that concern slipped out of her memory. She knew faces and names, and would recognize a voice over the telephone a year after she had last heard it. She was even more solicitous about a stranger than in taking care of some visitor she knew.

Had that Westerner turned up to see Smith, she would have called Smith out. Better than that, she often sent the visitor into the conference room, and there he saw his man and met other men of importance in the company, and perhaps brought live information and a fresh outside point of view upon the matter they were conferring about.

You Can Advertise Even a Hospital

THE largest hospital in Oklahoma was a comparatively small institution a few years ago, handicapped by its location on the upper floors of an office building, says a writer in Printer's Ink. Some people found it inconvenient to go up in the elevators, and others were afraid to. The superintendent began advertising. He sent out letters, and published newspaper announcements, showing that a hospital up in the air was above dust, noise, and flies, with plenty of fresh air. That overcame the disadvantage of location.

Most people think of a hospital as a last resort in sickness. This superintendent told people that a good hospital was a better place in which to be sick than home, if you wanted to get well. He showed that it was a pleasant place to be, rather than a doleful one; that you might even spend a vacation there for an operation, choosing the most convenient time in many cases.

This institution had very little money when the advertising was started, but was rich in good ideas. It had the goods. It advertised. And advertising paid.

Put Thrift into Your Tips

IMPOSSIBLE? Not at all. Henry Alexander, a New Yorker who is tip-broken, explained how recently at a meeting of the Institute of Electrical Engineers. Here is his plan:

Every week he gets from his bank several thrift cards, and puts a 25-cents thrift stamp on each. Then he buys a lot of loose thrift stamps. He gives no tip until the amount the waiter could reasonably expect reaches thirty cents. Then he gives the waiter a thrift card with a 25-cent stamp attached.

If the waiter already has a card, Mr. Alexander sticks on it one of his loose stamps. He has found a way to standardize his tipping, help the waiter to save for another automobile, and do the government a good turn, all at the same time.

And it was a man of the name of Alexander who sighed for new worlds to conquer!

Here's a Business for You, Madam—Pack Trunks

ABOUT three years ago my widowed mother lost her small fortune through the dishonesty of a relative. We had always lived in one of the small cities near New York, and after the crash came, which meant the giving up of our attractive home, we decided to move to New York. I hoped to find some way in the city by which I could support myself and my mother.

For nearly a month I looked for a position—and looked in vain, because of my lack of experience. One day I returned to our boarding-house, and sat down by the window, thinking gloomily of my general worthlessness.

Several trunks were being taken from the hotel opposite, and I was idly watching the porters when there flashed through my mind the joking remark of a friend whose trunks I once packed. "Marie dear," she had said, "if you ever have to earn your bread and butter, you can surely do it packing trunks."

Without stopping to consider difficulties, I put on my hat and hurried over to the hotel, asked for the manager, and offered my services as a trunk-packer. To my delight, he thought the idea practicable. He advised me to have some cards printed, stating my terms. These he agreed to have distributed among his guests.

Two days after the cards were placed in the hotel I received a telephone call saying that a family of four had suddenly been called home on account of illness, and wished to engage me to pack their trunks and forward them. There were six huge trunks, and I spent the entire afternoon packing. When I received $10 for my work you can imagine my joy.

Orders came quickly after that, and soon my mother and I took pleasant rooms in the hotel, where I could be more easily reached. I am businesslike, careful, and systematic in my work. In a note-book I write the contents of each trunk as nearly as possible, and where each article is to be found.

My prices vary according to the size of the trunks. For those under 34 inches my charge is $1, and for all over that length $2.

I recommend this source of livelihood to any woman thrown upon her own resources without any business training.

Look Out for This Man

ALMOST any day, now, a mysterious stranger may come into your office and request a private interview.

When you are alone with him, he will intimate that he represents the United States Secret Service in a very, very confidential matter, and that he has in his possession some rare and valuable information which he is going to place in the hands of a few carefully selected persons like yourself. As an evidence of good faith, he will ask you to sign a paper—an innocent-looking paper, pledging you to uphold the Constitution of the United States, or some little thing like that.

Not until several weeks later will you see through his game—when a confederate brings back that paper with your signature, altered into a promise to pay money, accompanied by a worthless souvenir book which represents "value received."

This mysterious stranger has been working up in Boston, and Current Affairs tells how one shrewd Yankee handled the transaction. Upon refusing to sign, the mysterious stranger said, "Then give me a release for your rights in this information," proffering his fountain pen. The Bostonian sat down, and wrote diagonally across the face of the paper, "Canceled!"

If I Were a Barber

IF I were a barber I would try to sell my services regularly each morning to a couple of physicians. I know a barber in a city of 50,000 who has two busy doctors on his list, one at 6:30 A. M., the other at 7.

Each morning his ringing of the door-bell sets the household in motion. The doctor gets up for his shave, and by the time he is dressed breakfast is on the table and he is ready for his trip to the hospital. For this personal attention each physician pays $300 a year. E. A. F.

What bright idea have you which you have introduced into your own business, or would introduce into some other man's if you were given the chance? Send it to the Editor of the Business Page.

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

THIS ENGLISHMAN WAS MADE IN AMERICA

"YE'VE no metaphysics, ye've no leeterature, ye've no art; but ye've a future." So said his school-master in sending Eric Geddes forth into the world. Eric came of a family long distinguished in England; and, having shaken the dust of the school from his feet, he promptly set out for America.

For a time, says Current Literature, he worked in a Southern lumber camp, donning overalls and digging in with the best of them. So successful was he in handling men that the B. & O. Railroad took him into its organization. He handled the men who mishandled the baggage; and made a record sufficiently bright so that he was called on to organize a road in India; and from there was brought to the Great Northeastern in England. He was barely thirty years of age when he entered its service.

We heard little of him in the first year of the war; but he was hard at work building the roads that supply men and munitions to the western front. And from there he bobbed up—young, virile, full of American pep—to be the ruler of the King's navee.

He is not much of a speaker, his appearances in Parliament reminding one more of the matter-of-fact American business man than of the English politician. In fact, in the whole world of politics he is a rank outsider; they respect him, but hardly know what to make of him. And he does not care a bit.

"Don't you think," he was asked once, "that you had better think it over?"

"Think it over!" he exclaimed. "If I think it over I might decide not to do it."

There is that element of recklessness in his character; but combined with it is his memory of what the Northern blockade did to the South, as he saw its effects in his own experience. And he continues to pin his faith to the British blockade.

WHY FRANCE MAKES THE BEST PERFUMES

THE best perfumes, like the best wines, come from France. And, like rare wines, rare perfumes are the result of a slow, careful process of perfecting.

The quick, cheap method of making perfumes is to throw the flowers directly into vats of alcohol, which absorbs much of the scent but kills the flowers at once. "The slower and more effective process," says the New France, "consists in placing them on a bed of tallow or other animal fat spread on glass plates. The scents are gradually absorbed by the fat, which is subsequently treated with alcohol to extract the perfume. By this process it is possible to obtain almost every bit of scent in the flower.

"French perfumers use only alcohols made from the very finest spirits of wine which has been allowed to age for years, and consequently have certain subtle qualities not possessed by commercial alcohols."

Perfume-making in France is an art and a tradition. Several families have been in the business for hundreds of years, handing down their rivalries and their professional secrets with jealous care from generation to generation.

The first plant for making perfumes was established at Grasse by Sieur Toubarelly, the perfumer of Catherine de' Medici. Ever since, this city has been a center of the industry. When the war broke out the exports of France totaled about a billion francs yearly.

WHAT CHANCE HAS THE POOR CHILD?

IT is usually assumed that a high death rate among babies must necessarily be due to poor food and care: but the editor of the Journal of Heredity questions this assumption.

If poor food and poverty are the causes, then the children of the rich should live long and healthy lives, and the children of European nobility ought to have an especially fine record. The best food in the world and the finest medical attention are at their service. Yet the figures show that the infant mortality among the royal families is not low, but, on the contrary, very high.

To discover the real cause for this condition, Professor A. Ploetz took 3,210 royal children, and compiled the figures for child mortality (the first five years of life). These he correlated with other figures, showing the age at which the fathers of the children had died. The chart below shows the result, and it is very striking. Where the fathers suffered from very poor health, dying before their twenty-fifth year, less than half of the babies lived to be five years old; where the fathers were vigorous, living into old age, the percentage of infant mortality dropped below 25; and of children of fathers who lived to be more than eighty-six all but 3 per cent lived.

Poverty and malnutrition are unquestionably contributing elements in the infant death rate, the editor concludes. But they are not the only factors, nor indeed the most important. Given a child of healthy, long lived parents, and his chances of pulling through are good, whether fate places him in the palace or the hovel: but the child of sickly parents succumbs easily in either environment.

Length of Life of Fathers and Child Mortality of Their Children in Royal and Princely Families, Ploetz's Data

     

	Year of life in which fathers died
	16-25	26-35	36-45	46-55	56-65	66-75	76-85	85 up	At all ages
Number of children	23	90	367	545	725	983	444	33	3210
Number who died in first 5 years	12	29	115	171	200	245	105	1	887
Per cent who died	52.2	32.2	31.3	31.4	27.6	25.8	23.6	3.0	27.6

THE LITTLE BRIDES OF AFRICA

WHEN a Bulu girl—she may be as young as nine years—is sold by her father to the man who is to be her husband and master, she has little voice in the transaction. If he is old, and known to be cruel to his wives, she will hate him: but she will marry him.

Her master may give in payment for her a woman or some ivory; and there will be feasts in her father's town and the songs of marriage. "In the evening," says Jean Kenyon Mackenzie in An African Trail (Central Committee on the United Study of Foreign Missions), "when the sun goes down the path to its setting, and she moves away in the caravan of her husband's people, you will not ask which of the children in that caravan is the little bride; you will know because she weeps.

"In her husband's town they will be dancing the marriage dances, they will be singing the songs of marriage. Her husband's kin will be singing songs of mocking:

'There is a little goat capering in the clearing—
A neglect of cooking,
A neglect of work!
There is a little kid capering in the clearing!'
'O little bride, hurry in the house and grind the meal—hurry!
Hurry and get your hoe, hurry!
O little bride, hurry!'
'You come to steal—He ye-e!
You come to grudge—He ye-e!
You come to deceive—He ye-e!'
'There is a weed in this town, there is a little weed—He!
There is a child with sharp eyes in this town—He!'

"So sing the husband's kin. And the bride's mother sings too—little conventional petitions that the child be adequately fed, that the child be spared, little phrases of maternal solicitude:

'Don't send my child to fish in the stream:
There are little snakes—O!
Don't send my child to fish in the stream!'
'They count the bananas they feed my child—They count them!
One, two bananas as they feed my child—They count them!'

"So sings the mother and the child's kinsfolk before they leave her in the care of strange women; and the little girl stands bewildered at the heart of the circling dancers."

DON'T KILL SNAKES

SCIENCE is beginning to question whether St. Patrick really performed a service to Ireland, after all: for snakes are not our enemies, says Gayne K. Norton in American Forestry. They never attack except in self-defense. Of our hundred and eleven species only seventeen are poisonous—"two species of Elaps, coral snakes, and fifteen species of crotaline snakes, the copperhead and moccasin, the dwarf and typical rattlesnakes. On the other hand, the help they render is valuable. The pests destroyed each year, especially the rodents that injure crops and carry communicable diseases, roll up a large balance of good service in their favor.

"Rodents are destroyers of farm products, cause loss by fire through gnawing matches and insulation from electric wires, and of human life through germ-carrying, particularly the bubonic plague. Before the war the Department of Agriculture placed the bill at $500,000,000.

THE MOST PRICELESS GIFT OF ALL

THERE is a famous Danish author, Henrik Pontoppidan, who has just received the Nobel prize. Recently he celebrated his sixtieth birthday, and all Denmark turned out to honor him. Hundreds of people came by day and night to his house outside Copenhagen, bringing him birthday gifts. With the others came his oldest friend, Henri Nathansen, with a great bouquet of American Beauty roses.

Pontoppidan was examining and admiring all his presents, when suddenly he gave a cry of surprise. Bending over Henri Nathansen's bouquet, he pulled the flowers apart. There, resting within, was a bottle of kerosene oil—"the most priceless gift of all," as Pontoppidan exclaimed.

For to-day petroleum is worth its weight in gold in Denmark. His old friend knew that Pontoppidan worked best at night; so, at great cost and trouble, he had procured enough oil to fill Pontoppidan's lamp for several evenings.

---

"EMPTY CRADLES—A SOLDIER'S DUTY"

OPENLY, through pamphlets and leaflets, the German people are being encouraged to adopt plural marriages. The government has not officially backed up this proposal; but, according to the Aargauer Volksblatt, a Swiss Catholic paper, such literature is being distributed by the million to German soldiers in the trenches and to all classes of women at home. No German paper or official has uttered a word of protest against the scheme.

One pamphlet, which is in its second edition, is entitled, "The Secondary Marriage as the Only Means for the Rapid Creation of a New and Powerful Army and the Purification of Morality." The author points out, says the New York Times Current History, that the idea of immorality is relative, and says confidently: "Good morals are only what the upper classes of society approve."

"The main proposals are stated as follows: 'Women in all classes of society who have reached a certain age are, in the interests of the Fatherland, not only authorized but called upon to enter into a secondary marriage which is supported by personal inclination. Only a married man may be the object of this inclination, and he must have the consent of his married wife. This condition is necessary in order to prevent the mischief which otherwise might surely be expected.

"'The offspring of these lawful secondary marriages bear the name of their mother, and are handed over to the care of the state, unless the mother assumes responsibility for them. They are to be regarded in every respect as fully equal members of society. The mothers wear a narrow wedding-ring as a sign of their patriotism. The secondary marriage can be dissolved as soon as its object has been attained.'

"The leaflets distributed to the troops are more simple and direct in their appeal. One entitled 'Empty Cradles—a Soldier's Duty,' is translated as follows:

"'Soldiers, a grave danger assails the Fatherland by reason of the dwindling birth rate. The cradles of Germany are empty to-day; it is your duty to see that they are filled.

"'You bachelors, when your leave comes, marry at once the girl of your choice. Make her your wife without delay.

"'The Fatherland needs healthy children.

"'You married men and your wives should put jealousy from your minds and consider whether you have not also a duty to the Fatherland.

"'You should consider whether you may not honorably contract an alliance with one of the million of bachelor women. See if your wife will not sanction the relation.

"'Remember, all of you, the empty cradles of Germany must be filled.'"

DO YOU EVER DREAD A DEPENDENT OLD AGE?

NO class of dependents has been so completely neglected as old people, writes I. L. Nascher in the Medical Review of Reviews. Old people require a special diet. They need only about half as much energy-producing food as young, active individuals; on the other hand, they require a great deal of heat-producing food. As most dependent old people have poor teeth or none, their food should be prepared so that it does not need much chewing. This vital problem of proper feeding is not even considered in most homes for the aged.

If old people are to be happy, they must have some useful and productive occupation. There is one beautifully equipped home for the aged in New York City where the inmates have all the comforts of a good family hotel. The old people are even given an allowance of spending money. But they have nothing to do except, as one inmate said, "wait for the time when the good Lord will take them."

In contrast to this is the New York City Farms Colony, where nearly every one of the thousand inmates is employed at some useful work.

"The cobblers are in the shoe shop mending shoes," writes Mr. Nascher, "and the tailors are in the repair shop repairing clothing; the printers work in the printing office and the painters do the painting about the institution. Those having no trades work on the farm or in shops where skilled labor is not required, and those least capable do light work, such as setting the table and removing the dishes. They are urged but not compelled to work; and so thoroughly systematized is the work that almost all the labor about the institution is done by inmates.

"The practical results are: (1) extremely low cost of maintenance; (2) the inmates are happy, since they feel that they are contributing toward their support and are not useless paupers; (3) they do not suffer from certain ailments due to inactivity and mental depression."

A LITTLE HOUSE IN MESOPOTAMIA

GETTING BIRDS TO LIVE WITH YOU

THERE are various ways of winning the friendship of wild birds. You can put up houses and shelters and build bath-tubs for them. But the unfailing way of attracting them is by setting a good table for them, not only in winter but in summer. People who like to have a variety of birds around the house, and yet want to protect the garden, should plant flowers and shrubs that furnish food and lure the birds away from the flowers to be saved. In 1,000 Hints on Flowers and Birds (G. P. Putnam's Cons), Mae Savell Croy says:

"Some of those which produce a good crop of seeds are prince's-feather, love-lies-bleeding, asters, thistles, forget-me-nots, and sunflowers. Berry bushes especially for the birds planted near the strawberry bed, raspberry patch, and in the orchard will pre-serve those fruits for family use. The bird bushes should be a little taller than the fruit for table use, so they will see it first."

A regular Christmas tree for birds can be fixed at any season of the year by tying to the branches bones and scraps from the table. "Wheat ears, clover tops, and sunflower heads will prove a great attraction, while broken crackers and bread crumbs sprinkled in the crotches will he eaten readily."

AND YET, THE CHINESE GO ON LIVING

TO the uneducated Chinese—and that means the average Chinese—health is a matter of magic and sorcery. Even the health departments in large cities in times of epidemics issue prescriptions for magic potions to cure the people. Chinese doctors of the new school and medical missionaries have an appalling task ahead of them, especially since the people, as soon as they learn the first rudiments of Western methods, make a rush for all kinds of patent medicines. These are to them just a new sort of magic. Says Tyler Dennett in Asia:

"Patent-medicine advertisements are spread over China almost as thickly as cigarette signs. Dr. Edward H. Hume of the Yale Mission at Changsha told me that he had even seen a patent medicine advertised to cure bound feet. Indeed, the patent-medicine business is being pushed so energetically as to endanger the real advance of public health."

Other problems face them even more acute:

It is the custom in China to delay burial until the astrologer is able to name an auspicious day and place. The result is that unburied coffins are to be found almost everywhere—in back yards, by the roadside, and in the fields. The doctor pointed out how dangerous to public health was the presence of these coffins in Yenping. The magistrate had a census taken of the coffins above ground in the city, and found that they actually numbered sixteen thousand. The city itself was estimated to have only about twenty thousand inhabitants.

"It was a difficult problem for the magistrate. He might easily move in such a way as to bring the whole city down about his head. But the Chinese are clever in such situations. He finally devised a way out. A proclamation was issued levying a tax of fifty cents on each unburied coffin. The Chinese may be superstitious, but they are even more thrifty. For a few weeks Yenping devoted itself to funerals, a thousand a week."

According to Mr. Dennett, Chinese doctors are themselves so often imbued with a respect for custom that they can not adequately meet the problems that arise. In one of the largest cities he found the only hospital half empty.

"Rice-planting was on, and most of the patients had gone home to help. Of course the doctor was not to blame for that: it is the Chinese custom. But when I opened the door to one ward, which was full of patients, one whiff was enough. Every window was tight shut. 'What can I do?' explained the doctor. 'They don't like to have the windows open.'"

THE IRISH FOREVER

A COLLECTOR of china was telling his friends about his troubles with a man-servant who was "all thumbs."

"Why not dismiss him?" said the practical Englishman. "But he is a good servant," said his host.

"Stop it out of his wages," said the Scotchman. "But," said the master, "he breaks more than his wages would pay for."

"Why not raise his wages?" said the Irishman.

From the Graphic.

SPIES!—

Concluded from page 5

Secret Service of the United States comprises detectives of the Post Office, the Internal Revenue and the Customs Departments, the Department of Justice, the intelligence bureaus of the Army and Navy, and the rather loosely organized American Protective League, with a membership of about 50,000 citizens who can be trusted to keep a watchful eye upon things. The general public is on the watch, too, as a recent happening in New York gave proof.

One morning there waved from the window of a skyscraper a strange flag—blue with a white square in the center. It was waved back and forth three times and then withdrawn. From a dozen or more sources the Secret Service heard of the incident within the next half hour. It happened, in this instance, that the signal was from the offices of a reputable tugboat company, and had been used for years to notify its craft to put in for orders; but the incident showed how alert the unofficial citizen watchers are.

In another case the willingness of the citizen to serve was of greater value. An operative had lost the man he was shadowing because a truck had blocked him off from entering a street-car. He leaped on the running-board of a passing automobile, explained hurriedly to the young man and woman in the machine what he wanted, and, although they were on their way to the theater, he was at once assured that the machine was his as long as he wanted to use it. Later the owner of the car called at the office and offered his services to the government.

With all these agencies at work, still the heaviest part of the spy-hunting falls upon the tried men of the Secret Service. They come from all walks of life. A. L. Drummond, who had a brilliant record as Chief, began life as a steamship purser; John E. Wilkie, also at the head of the Service at one time, was a Chicago newspaper man; James J. Brooks was a clerk; Flynn was once a plumber; and Moran, the present head of the Service, entered the Treasury Department years ago as an office-boy. The Service has been recruiting largely since the war began; and novices, after passing their Civil Service examinations and a searching investigation of their character, are put to work as partners of the seasoned veterans. At present there are no women, officially at least, in the Service. Unofficially, however, women have been of great assistance and they may have received official recognition by the time this is in print.

BUT it was a woman who didn't mean to who furnished a clue recently that led to an important arrest. She was a Brooklyn milliner. When she returned, after a short absence, to find that the girls in her shop had followed the example of neighboring establishments and decorated the place with American flags in honor of a local regiment marching by on its way to a cantonment, she made a big fuss.

"I won't have it!" she shouted. "The idea, and me with a nephew who was confidential man to Count von Bernstorff for months and months."

Very soon after that a certain dangerous enemy alien was taken to Ellis Island, and there was a hint in the discreet press that a German spy, left here by the Ambassador of the Kaiser, had been caught in the toils of the Secret Service.

This is His Week

BETWEEN the years 1850 and 1860 Otto von Bismarck was a young man rising to political power in Prussia. He was rude and rough, and his hectoring ways were forever leading him into fighting duels. He had a dozen to his credit in his University days, and as many scars, of which he was inordinately proud. He wore shabby clothes and lived in shabby lodgings; but he was clever, and before he was forty he had risen to great prestige.

Bismarck was a junker. For centuries his people had maintained great estates worked by peasants, and had fought for the Hohenzollerns. He believed absolutely in the divine right of sovereigns. He dreamed of a Germany united, held in union by a divinely authorized and "fatherly" monarch with the aid of a vast and disciplined system of soldiery.

There were those who opposed the dream of Bismarck, of course, and for the moment the future of Germany hung in the balance. Should the nation become militaristic? Then spake Bismarck:

"Not by speeches and the resolutions of majorities are the great questions of the time decided—but by blood and iron."

After that they called him the Man of Blood and Iron, and he reveled in the title, and did his best to live up to it. He had no faith in peaceful means. Having, with Austria, fought Denmark for the provinces of Schleswig-Holstein, Prussia and Austria fell to squabbling over them.

Bismarck forced the squabble. He wanted to test out his new army. He did, and found it good. As a result of this victory Austria was forced to accede to Prussia the right to assume leadership of the Germanies. Bismarck now decided that war with France would be a good thing. It would give further practice to his army and put the finishing touches to the union of Germany. During the siege of Paris he said: "The people of Paris have too much to eat and not enough to digest. Iron pills are what they want, and too few of them have been used."

In 1894 Bismarck began to discuss the probability of another great war which Germany would shortly have to wage if she hoped to keep herself in trim. His death, in 1898, deferred matters until 1914.

The Editor Answers

Signs of Spring

SPRING has come. Two weeks ago a man told me sadly that he was going to be compelled to move back to the city. "My wife says she will never go through another winter in the suburbs," he said; "so we've got to look for an apartment."

Yesterday I met him again and he said: "My wife has just found the cutest house in our suburb two blocks away from where we're living now, and she wants me to buy it."

When robins and wives settle down contentedly in their nests again—spring has come.

We Can't Publish all the Masterpieces

Dear Editor:

The manuscript of story and poem returned O. K. Sorry it did not come up to your requirements; but, glad to say, accepted by another paper and published, and many new subscribers added to their list.

F. A. B., South Carolina.

From a Good-Looker

Dear Sir:

In a recent issue of your paper appeared a letter "from a homely woman" who feels that the beautiful woman has all the advantages. Perhaps your correspondent overlooked the fact that beauty attracts much that it does not wish to attract—that, in fact, the beautiful woman is often put to more trouble to be rid of those whom she attracts than the homely woman experiences in seeking to be attractive.

Physical beauty attracts, it is true: but equally true is the fact that it can not hold anything of value for long. And the beautiful woman always has the fear that perhaps it is her beauty and not herself that is admired.

C. D. K., New York.

It must be annoying, of course, for a lovely woman to be admired. Yet, curiously enough, the sale of heavy veils continues to be small in comparison with the sale of mirrors.

Putting Us Down Where We Belong

Dear Sir:

Every one who writes to you seems to hand you roses: so here's a bouquet with a few thorns thrown in. Your magazine is good; yes, extra good. But, take it from me, your editorials are usually punk stuff. The last one is beyond the limit. So individual goodness and heart power are the things we can depend on to bring in the millennium! Then good-by millennium. All progress has come about through improved economic conditions, created through the operation of the law of self-interest. Man is an animal who has to fight for his bread and butter, and you can't make an angel out of him if you handicap him in his struggle for existence.

H. H. S., Iowa.

It's all very easy to be for this "survival of the fittest" stuff when one is in a nice, warm, safe country like the United States, H. H. S. But suppose you had been born in Armenia, a member of an "inferior" race that happened to be in the way of a "fitter" people like Germany. Wouldn't you, under those conditions, be a little stronger for the increase of friendliness and love and good will in the world?

Maybe.

We think we will have to write one of our punk editorials along this line sometime.

Smooth Propositions in Oil

ONE day not long ago a man named B. X. Dawson appeared on the curb market near Broad and Wall streets, New York, and began to talk about the Queen Oil Company.

No one there—or anywhere else—had ever heard of the Queen Oil Company; but he told about the wells and the developments and the estimated number of barrels per day it would produce. He enlarged on the company's financial backing, exhibited highly encouraging letters from substantial business men praising the property, and passed around pictures of the oil site itself.

Certain curb speculators investigated Dawson's story. They found that there really were wells and improvements, and that oil had actually been struck.

Dawson began to sell stock—cheap because they needed a little more money for immediate additional improvements. Later, of course, the stock would go up. Sales increased, and stories about the new stock began to appear in the papers. Glowing prospectuses were mailed to selected lists. Hundreds of little investors everywhere put money into the stock.

Then something happened. Queen Oil collapsed. Within forty-eight hours of the first decline, it went completely off the market. It has never been heard from since, and the little investors have only their stock certificates to show for their investments.

What was the matter with Queen Oil?

Why, Queen Oil was just one of hundreds of flash-in-the-pan oil companies that are stripping little pocket-books right and left throughout the country. They are the parasites fattening on the legitimate and enormous development of the oil industry in America.

There was nothing really the matter with Queen Oil. Its wells actually exist—and may be very good ones. It was the promotion scheme, with the wells as a basis, that was wrong.

"Speculation in new oil stocks and old promotions," says Louis Guenther in the Financial World, "is infecting the country like a burning fever. Although the oil boom is young, it has already stung many investors. When the inevitable day comes that that investor has to balance his books, Old Master Experience will teach him that indiscriminate investments without prior investigation result in more loss than gain.

"It takes more than a printing-press to make a successful oil company. Oil is not the only essential: honesty in the financing and capable management are far more important. After the oil is once secured, then the real hard work begins. A constant and profitable market and proper transportation facilities for the oil must be provided. These beget the profit.

"But we can not avoid parasites. The richest foliage develops the greatest variety of stickers, not feeders. These take all they can, but never give anything in return. It is from these parasites that the people must protect themselves. While the business they exploit is legitimate, their part in it is illegitimate. Against a small production of oil, reams of stock are sold, while the investors believe dividends cover the whole authorized capital. Sad will be their day of awakening."

This is not saying there aren't a great many legitimate, well managed oil companies in which it is all right to invest money. The story of Queen Oil merely goes to show that, whichever company you choose, it would be well to prove its pedigree before you invest.

How to Spot a Fake Investment

"ONE who is wise may soon determine how hollow are these pretenses to big dividends by asking for a detailed financial statement," says Louis Guenther in the Financial World. "It will not be forthcoming. Close inquiry will disclose that the dividends are frequently paid out of capital or on a small capital, and at times actually from the moneys received from those who subscribe to stock. I can not and do not believe that we have reached the millennium in finance, where inexperienced men can pick up twelve to twenty-four percent per annum dividend-paying enterprises as they would apples from under a tree."

What Being Crooked in Money Matters Got Him

DAVID LAMAR was a money-mad young man. He wanted something for nothing. He went to Wall Street and got it. And, in addition, he got what he didn't want—a term of years in a federal penitentiary. Lamar—the same Lamar whose satisfaction with his own craftiness led him to name himself "the Wolf of Wall Street"—is over being money-mad now, temporarily at least. His chief thought is "to write confessions that will inspire younger men to do right."

Describing his prison visit with "the Wolf," a writer in the Forum says that Lamar, clad in a blue crash uniform which, though frayed, was neat and clean, greeted him with a sweeping bow, and passed before him into a cheerless barren room where the windows were high up in the walls and the only furnishing consisted of a deal table and some chairs. After discussion of the business in hand, Lamar, who seemed troubled, said suddenly:

"'I am on the shady side of life. I have had my day in court, and was constitutionally protected. The courts were fair with me, and I was justly imprisoned. When I come out I will be square; I will have paid whatever debt I owed. I have learned that everything concerning a man's happiness comes from within, and that it is an inexhaustible source.

"'There is no one I want to fight. When I am out, I shall go back to my home in New York, live quietly, and trouble nobody. Perhaps I shall evolve from my own experience a book of confessions that will help and inspire younger men to do right.'

"As we stepped out from the gloomy reception chamber, where the guard had sat between us listening to what we said, into the marble corridor," concludes the Forum article, "Lamar shook hands cordially and walked briskly away toward the other gates that opened to the cells."

And that's what happened to a young man who misused his mental equipment. Shrewd, able, resourceful,—fitted to take his place with the best in business and finance,—Lamar went down because he didn't play the game square.

Financial Booklets that Will Help You

A NEW booklet entitled "Your Liberty Bond" has been issued by John Muir & Company. It contains complete information concerning Liberty Loan procedure. Ask for booklet H 33, which will be sent upon application to their main office, 61 Broadway, New York.

R. C. MEGARGEL & COMPANY, 27 Pine Street, New York, members of the New York and Chicago Stock Exchanges, will send you booklets entitled "The Part Payment Plan" and "Securities Suggestions." The latter is published semi-monthly, and the current issue contains an interesting article on "The Oil Industry, Past, Present, and Future." Write them for these booklets, which will be sent free of charge upon request for A.

THE Bache Review is a guide to business men in this period when great changes in the business structure are taking place, due to enormous expenditure in winning the war. In a recent issue the efforts of the new War Finance Corporation in supplying additional business credit is discussed. Copies may be had on application to J. S. Bache & Company, members of the New York Stock Exchange, 42 Broadway, New York.

PEOPLE in all parts of the world deposit their money by mail with the Citizens Savings & Trust Company, Cleveland, Ohio, which pays 4 per cent compound interest. This bank will send you its booklet "P," giving full details of its banking by mail plan, free on request.

THE investment bargain possibilities in sound public-utility securities are described in literature which will be sent upon request by H. M. Byllesby & Company, 218 South La Salle Street, Chicago, and 1219 Trinity Building, New York.

"RECOGNITION for Railroad Investors—What Has Been Accomplished Since 1916" is the title of the report of activities of the Railway Investors' League which has been recently issued. It contains material that will be of interest to all owners of railroad securities. Copies will be sent on application to P. M. Whelan, Secretary, 61 Broadway, New York City.

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

PERKINS & COMPANY, of Lawrence, Kansas, make their loans upon personal examination of security and guarantee titles perfect. They mail their interest drafts to their investors to reach them the first of the month, so that there are no delays in interest payments. Write for circular No. 721.