Living in a Limousine and Living in a Tub

THERE was quite a little group of people on the curbstone, waiting for a break in the stream of passing automobiles: among them two shop-girls and I.

The girls recognized a woman in one of the limousines as the wife of a very rich New Yorker; and their comments were distinctly envious.

I smiled to myself as I listened.

For only a few days before I had been at a party where the lady in the limousine was present: and I wished that the girls might have been there too, and heard the remarks that she made.

She came dressed in a thousand dollars' worth of clothes, with five or ten thousand dollars' worth of jewels sprinkled over her. And, from the minute of her arrival until she left, her conversation consisted of nothing but cynicism and complaint.

She had just moved into a new apartment: it was noisy, she said, and she hated it already.

The limousine her husband had given her as a birthday surprise—and he ought to have known that she loathed upholstery of that color.

She had seen all the new shows, and they bored her to death.

Of all the bitter, soul-sick people whom I have ever met she takes first prize: and the little shop-girls envied her.

What feelings would have been in their hearts if they had lived in Athens about 400 B. C., and had seen a poorly dressed man living in a wooden tub?

Pity, probably: perhaps contempt.

Yet, when Alexander the Great visited that man and offered him any favor in the world, the man replied that he wanted only one thing—that Alexander should step out of his sunlight.

A curious old world, isn't it, where a lady in her limousine, possessed of everything, is still dissatisfied: and Diogenes in his tub, owning nothing, can be so content?

We are on the threshold of a period when the struggle to get things is going to take on a new, perhaps more bitter, phase.

The men who have carried the hard, unpleasant burdens of the world have learned, in this war, their power over the world.

They have learned from Russia that the most strongly intrenched government can not stand against them.

They have learned from England that Labor can dictate to Cabinets; in this country, as Samuel Gompers says, they have made in three years a generation of progress.

I do not see how any real lover of the race can fail to find satisfaction in this great forward movement of the common man.

The movement will have its excesses: but has capitalism had no excesses? It will frequently prove expensive: but so has every previous régime.

My fear for the common man is not that he will cost the world too much, but that, when he gets what he wants, he will find that he has still somehow failed of happiness.

I would have him study a little the strange case of Diogenes, and of the limousine lady.

Before he sets forth on his journey to the top, I would have him cut out these lines of Milton and paste them in his hat:

He that has light within his own clear breast
May sit in the center, and enjoy bright day;
But he that hides a dark soul and foul thoughts
Be-nighted walks under the mid-day Sun;
Himself is his own dungeon.

From the dungeons of poverty and hunger and want the common man is going to be delivered: I would put him on his guard, lest, in escaping from these, he be plunged into the worse dungeon of spiritual death.

His mind is filled now with the thought of a day when every one will have his own limousine.

I ask him to remember that a world in which we all lived in tubs would be a first-class world, if we all had the spirit of Diogenes:

And that where there is no vision the people perish just as surely as where there is no food.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

YOUR HONORESS

THE MYSTERY OF SHELL SHOCK

By H. ADDINGTON BRUCE

HE was an English soldier, a volunteer of twenty-five, eager to do his best for home and country. Given intensive training, he had at last been sent to the front, to the battle-scarred fields of Flanders. For days he had listened to the infernal din of conflict, as artillery duels raged. In the trenches he had been under fire, had seen others fall, but himself had escaped injury. Some day, he knew, an advance would be ordered; and he was manfully resolved to acquit himself well.

The opportunity to share in an expected victory never came to him.

Walking one day in an open space, a high explosive shell burst near him. The fury of the concussion lifted him from his feet and hurled him violently down, unconscious. When he recovered his senses, he found that he had fallen on his right shoulder, which pained him fearfully. To relieve the pain, he tried to move his arm, but could not.

"I am paralyzed," the thought flashed into his mind.

He felt himself gently lifted, and knew that he was being carried to a field hospital. Before he arrived there, consciousness had fully returned and the pain in his arm had greatly subsided; but the paralysis remained. He heard a doctor say:

"You are all right. You haven't so much as a scratch. You have merely been blown down. You are not hurt in any way."

"But I am paralyzed in my right arm," he insisted. "I can not move it."

"There is no reason why you should not be able to move your arm. Come, now; you can move it."

"I can not. It is paralyzed."

In fact, eventually it was necessary to send this soldier hack to England with his arm still paralyzed, although repeated examinations had shown that he was free from organic injury. "Shell shock" was the diagnosis made of his case.

Take also the case of a young Englishman, a member of one of the first expeditionary forces sent to stem the German invasion of France. In October, 1914, an explosion buried this young man in a trench for fifteen hours. He was then rescued and revived. Though weak, he seemed to be physically unhurt, and the expectation was that he would soon be fit for duty. But while he rested in the hospital a singular discovery was made.

It was found that he had lost his memory, and had lost it so completely that he knew nothing of his identity. He remembered not one fact in his previous history, recognized none of his mates, and had even forgotten how to talk, to write, and to read. "Shell shock," said the doctors sympathetically. Forthwith he was sent to his home in Manchester for observation and treatment. The sight of his parents, of old-time friends, failed to awaken in him one reminiscent memory-image. He remained forgetful of every event of his life up to the moment of regaining consciousness after the terrible experience in the trench.

Everything was precisely as if he had lost his original personality and had developed an entirely new one. The new personality, indeed, proved to be as well equipped mentally as the old one. He quickly relearned to talk, to read, and to write. He became competent to take care of himself in every way. But the past still was blotted out; and, as far as I am aware, he has not yet recovered memory of it.

Shell Shock Constitutes 10 per Cent of Canadian Casualties

WHAT is this mysterious malady of shell shock, by which unwounded soldiers lose their memory, become blind, become paralyzed—ay, and in many cases are rendered virtually insane, suffer from strange deformities, or become totally deaf and dumb? How may shell shock be successfully treated? How may it be prevented?

These are questions with which some of the foremost medical specialists of all the warring countries have been wrestling since the first months of the great war.

According to Major Pearce Bailey, head of the psychiatric section of the Surgeon-General's Office, shell shock cases constitute 10 per cent of the total casualties in the Canadian forces overseas. Major Thomas W. Salmon, returning from investigations abroad in the interests of our army, reports that shell shock is responsible for not less than one seventh of all discharges for disability from the British army, or one third, if discharges for wounds are excluded. Reports to similar effect have come from France, Italy, Russia, and Germany.

Concerning its nature and causes there has been, and there still is, much controversy. Various theories have been advanced to account for it; but most of these have been discarded, until to-day only two principal theories remain, differing sharply from each other. One of these, which may properly be referred to as the mechanical theory, attributes shell shock to the direct action of air concussion on the nervous system. Although no signs of injury are externally present, the advocates of this theory argue, the force of a bursting high explosive is such that, in the nervous systems of those near whom a shell bursts, there may readily result a physical or chemical change, "and a break in the links of the chain of neurones which subserve a particular function."

In support of this view is cited the unquestionable fact that autopsies show distinct changes in the brain tissue of men who have died without regaining consciousness after being rendered insensible by a shell bursting near them. Thus the innumerable symptoms of shell-shock patients—from blindness, deafness, loss of speech, and paralysis to memory troubles and mental confusion—could plausibly be explained on a wholly physical basis. But it must at once be added that there are certain facts that cast grave suspicion on the soundness of this mechanical theory of shell shock.

One of these is the interesting circumstance that actual shell wounds severely involving the brain or spinal cord seldom, if ever, are accompanied by symptoms similar to those of shell shock in which less severe injuries are supposed to have occurred. Another is the equally interesting circumstance that shell-shock symptoms have time and again developed in soldiers before they have come under shell fire. "Many hundreds of soldiers," as stated by Major Salmon, "who have not been exposed to battle conditions at all develop symptoms almost identical with those in the men whose nervous disorders are attributed to shell fire." Also, and most significant, is the fact that treatment of shell-shock cases in accordance with the mechanical theory is productive of no curative results: whereas brilliant cures have repeatedly been obtained when treatment is given on the theory that shell shock is at bottom not a physical malady but a mental one.

Hysteria an Aid to Suggestion

ON this second theory—the psychological theory of shell shock—the effect of the bursting high explosive, which stuns but does not wound, is to create a hysterical condition in men already on the verge of hysteria from conscious or subconscious fear, from homesickness, from fatigue, from nerve strain and excitement of all kinds.

Becoming hysterical, they become ultra-suggestible. They have already heard much about the dire effects of shell concussion. They know that other men have been paralyzed by it, or have been rendered deaf and dumb, perhaps blind,

Concluded on page 22

Another Interesting Theory of Shell Shock

"MYSTERY" is still the proper word to use in connection with shell shock. The doctors are continuing their experiments along the lines suggested by Mr. Bruce; and at the same time Dr. William T. Porter, of the Harvard Medical Faculty, has reported in the Atlantic Monthly a wholly new series of experiments.

Dr. Porter noted that many cases of shell shock follow a fracture of the thigh-bone by shell or bullet wound. "Now, the bone marrow," he points out, "is very rich in fat, and it has long been known that after fracture of the femur (thigh-bone) large numbers of fat globules appear in the blood and circulate until they enter the capillaries in the brain and other organs."

Dr. Porter conceived the theory that these globules of fat, plugging the capillaries, cause the arteries and heart to be partially emptied of blood. "In fact," he says, "the patient may be said to bleed to death in his own veins, since the quantity of blood left in the arteries does not suffice for the nutrition of the cells of the brain."

If this theory were correct, then a little fat injected into the veins of an animal should produce all the usual symptoms of shell shock. An unlucky cat was selected for the crucial experiment. An instrument for recording blood-pressure was attached to kitty, and "when the normal pressure was in record, a little less than a tablespoonful of olive oil was injected into the jugular vein. Thereupon"—true to the theory—"the blood-pressure began to fall, and the animal soon showed all the phenomena of shock observed in the wounded soldier."

Later, with a machine which he devised to draw the blood back into the chest and heart, and so bring the blood pressure back to normal, Dr. Porter treated and cured a number of cases of shell shock; and experiments with his machine are still being carried on behind the lines.

RED FLANNEL

By ANNA McCLURE SHOLL

Illustrations by E. F. Ward

BARNES MASON, theatrical manager, hung up the receiver with the pleased air of a child who has been invited to a party. That it was his own entertainment, paid for liberally out of his own purse, did not detract from the importance of the occasion; and he lingered, prolonging expectation, though the departing decorators had assured him that the sacred precincts were empty even of a stray carpenter, and he, their originator, would find the lights switched on and all in order for his inspection.

Mason had built theaters before, but never one like this, into whose very curtain were woven sentiments for which he had no other power of expression. His wife's name might have been embroidered in the curtain fabric and monogramed upon the chairs, so much was it his intention that his new plaything should bear throughout the stamp of her personality.

She had shown too clearly the disrespect in which she held his former efforts in theater building; and not long after their first memorable meeting had pointed out to him that gilded little boys in swimming costumes, supporting yards of dusty red velvet above stuffy ornate boxes, were as obsolete as a play with a villain. She offered to improve Mason's taste in theaters while she was starring in the least objectionable of them.

The memories of that education were the most treasured of Mason's career, all the more because women had never taken much interest in him. People in general described him as a plain man, and he seemed to fit the term morally and physically. His rugged features suggested life on a farm and much exposure to the elements; his hands, strong and capable, seemed made to guide a plow rather than to sign contracts.

He sometimes wondered over the rôle in which he found himself: for he had been strictly brought up in New England, by parents who listed theaters among the devices of the devil. With their warnings ringing in his ears, and half expecting to be struck by lightning for his disobedience, he saw a "show," survived, and next day was haunted, not by memories of beautiful ladies, but by the receipts of the box-office. His new-born ambition to be a theatrical manager, presented modestly to his family, had the effect of stopping their moral circulation for a week; but in the end, through his mother's influence, he was allowed to apply for the position of ticket-seller in a small-town theater. Barnes Mason thus put his feet on the road that was to lead him to Elise Farrell.

He arrived before her with the marks of travel upon him, with heavy lines in his forehead from hard thinking, and in his eyes the grim pertinacity that had carried him to the front ranks. He was solidly intrenched in his success; but Elise had shaken his self-confidence, his pride in his achievements.

The very hour of her arrival in his office remained with cameo-like distinctness in his mind—a dividing line between two lives. Familiar objects had been transformed by the entrance of this faintly smiling lady, who wore no rouge, and whose eyes from the shadow of her hat regarded him humorously.

He did not quite know what to say to her, and yet he had the sensation of its being extremely important that she should know what he thought about a great many topics. Usually women talked, and he listened with a feeling of gratitude that he didn't have to hear their voices through a lifetime. But Elise seemed to be waiting for him to speak; and before he knew it he was waxing eloquent—not on the subject of plays, but on that of his old home, and of his mother, and of the violets that grew by the spring-house.

THEIR marriage a year later excited much comment in theatrical circles. Why a successful actress, who was noted for her orchid-like beauty and her esthetic proclivities, should marry Barnes Mason was a mystery for which no one seemed to have a solution, least of all the bridegroom, obviously dazed by his luck. Mason took her home after the wedding trip to his apartment in Riverside Drive, over whose details she made merry; and her husband learned for the first time that colored Moors'-heads hung on a bright-red wall-paper are not the last word in ornamentation, and that a bronze dog with a card plate in his mouth would not lure the sensitive to come again.

She swept out his treasures, made the place, to his mind, as bare as a palace he had once seen in Italy, and then endangered his eyesight with veiled lamps that gave out an artistic but futile glow. He was too grateful to her for marrying him to protest; and there was fascination in seeing her emerge from a shadowy corner to greet him, as if a delicate fresco had come to life.

At his earnest request, she left the stage for a year; but she was continually discussing it with young men who dropped in at all hours of the day and night, and who talked so much about genius that Mason became perfectly convinced that they hadn't any.

"How can you stand them, Elise?" he said impatiently. "Why don't they go to work?"

"You have the real American notion of activity, Barnes," she replied; and then she added, with a slight flush: "Guy Prendergast is getting ready to write a great play, and I'm helping him."

"I've read millions of 'em, but I never saw one played," Mason replied, and wondered why she had selected Prendergast as a peg on which to hang an explanation.

HE disliked Guy even more than the others, because he was always underfoot, while the stuff he talked was enough to make a strong man ill. Mason, seated on a little chair, drinking pale tea because his wife had made it, was obliged to listen to theories that made him wonder why the utterers of them were not behind bars.

He had been brought up on the old-fashioned drama, with plenty of action and as many thrills as you could crowd into an act; not a great deal of talk, only just enough to make things clear; and pretty much what people said in real life—"I see you're busy; shall I call again?" or "Where did you find this glove?" But Elise's collection of maniacs discussed plays that had no plot, and in which the bulk of the action took place off stage, while the stage itself served as a lecture platform, or a place where people came to comment on what they had done.

Mason stood it as long as he could. Then, one day, he interrupted one of Prendergast's rhapsodies.

"Young man," he said sternly, "what connection has your forthcoming play with the box-office?"

Malicious gossip reported that Prendergast had fainted upon hearing these cruel words from a brute of a successful manager, but the real facts were never revealed. Barnes Mason's friends knew that he had come home one night to an empty house which presented only its violet decorations and esthetic sparseness of furniture to his distracted search. In her dressing-room he found a note on her pin-cushion addressed to himself. It ran:

My Dear: I am sorry to hurt you, but our marriage was a mistake. I love beauty, and you care only for success. I shall go back to the stage. I have a great work to do there. Take care of yourself, and be sure to watch those colds you get occasionally. ELISE.

That was all, but for a few moments he had the sensation of being alone on a dead planet. He looked vaguely about him, read the note again, then began a restless walk through the deserted rooms, pausing at last before the west windows. The Hudson, like a gigantic mirror, was reflecting the daffodil light of sunset and the undermists of the grayish violet hue that she loved. The beauty of nature hurt him as if her soul had passed into it, and with a groan he turned to face the empty rooms.

Next day he closed his apartment and went to his old New England home, with the instinct of a wounded creature seeking "green things" for restoration. At the end of a month he was back in New York, and the first thing he did was to call up Blaine and Harcourt, the well-known firm of architects, and tell them that he wanted them to build for him "the most beautiful theater in New York. Make it for this newfangled drama. You know what I mean! High-brow! no gilding."

At the first conference, Harcourt, inspired by dark hints from Mason, continued the description:

"You want a setting for a princess who is always searching for lost rings in malarial forests!"

Mason said, "Yet get me," and the plans were drawn up.

GOSSIP reached him that his wife had taken a small apartment in Washington Square, and that he was expected to divorce her so that she could marry Prendergast. But he waited for the word from her. He would not pull the string for his own guillotining.

---

All these memories crowded his consciousness as he approached the stage entrance of the Mirage Theater, and paused a moment to admire its Italian Renaissance facade, upon which the June sunlight slept. At the door a caretaker was waiting with the keys. Mason took them and locked himself in.

The curtain had been lowered, and on this thing of beauty his admiring gaze rested longest. Its general tone was violet—and from its misty background of the shadows of the underworld emerged Orpheus and Eurydice. He traced a likeness to Elise in the slim, sweet woman who followed the music of the lyre. They might say what they liked of her. He believed that she would play a square game. Wasn't it square to leave him rather than to pretend she loved him?

HE gave the keys to the caretaker and stepped into the sunshine again, and the first person he met was his old friend Harry Wilcox, who was also a manager—and a successful one. Harry linked an arm in his and led him toward a café.

"No, thanks!" Mason said. "But if you're thirsty go ahead."

"I don't care where we exchange language, Barnes. I have a swell proposition to put up to you. Listen! What are you going to open the Mirage with?"

Mason looked jealously secretive.

"Something choice, Harry—something out of the usual run. You kind of set the tone of your theater by the first play you put in it. Don't come to me with any of your farces—'Guess Again," or 'Hold the Wire,' or anything of that order."

"Oh, the Mirage is a high-brow, is it?" Wilcox said in a grieved voice. "I never thought you'd come to that, Barnes—I never thought you'd put on plays without a gizzard. What do you mean? The kind where they talk in their sleep?"

"I want a play to match the theater," Mason said calmly.

"Will you let a fellow see your cherished darling?"

Mason didn't want to particularly; but Harry was a friend, so back they went.

"Where's the orchestra-pit?" Wilcox demanded.

"No music."

"O Lord, worse and worse!" said Harry. "People'll go to sleep. This looks like you were imitating the Back-Basement Players—all gloom and woe and thin women, doing a desperate mystery from the Russian, in sulphur and mustard."

"Nobody has to lease the Mirage if he doesn't want to. To tell the truth, I ain't particular whether it stands empty or not. I have the kind of theater I want, and I know the kind of play I want for it," Mason announced.

Wilcox wondered at the change in his friend, who had never seemed the same since the departure of his gifted wife. He felt worried.

"You need a change, old fellow," he said sympathetically. "Listen! I know a swell club on an elegant little lake in Pike County, Pennsylvania. You can go out before breakfast any morning and catch a five-pound bass; and near the shore the water-lilies are so thick you can't sink. Come along with me next week. They have a colored cook whose waffles are some waffles. What do you say?"

But Mason shook his head.

WILCOX proved to be the first of a number of people who approached him with a view to leasing his theater for the autumn season. But he put them all off; none of their offerings seemed worthy of the setting of the Mirage. So astonishing did the theatrical world find these proceedings that it was rumored Mason was slightly "touched" through grief for his enchanting wife. All the same, his reluctance kindled competition, and the glamour surrounding the Mirage grew more seductive as it became known that Mason was holding out for a gem of a play—something as far out of the usual run as was the theater itself.

But he didn't find his play, and September was well under way when one morning Wilcox swung into his private office waving a brown object which proved to be the script of a symbolic drama called "False Dawn."

"Handle it carefully," said Wilcox. "It's it—what you've been looking for: the gem, the unparalleled product. You can understand it, and yet—it's full of Russian moonshine. It's misty, but you can see 'em act in the mist. It will go with the curtain and the purple chairs and all the high-brow junk."

"Who wrote it?"

"That's a secret—yet; but the author and the leading lady say there's only one theater in New York worthy of it, and that's the Mirage."

Mason had frequently heard this statement from other authors about their plays, so he settled himself in his chair and began to read with a skeptical shrug of his shoulders. The list of characters was short enough to please him, and the opening lines caught his attention at once. Strangely enough, they made him think of Elise, and as he read on he found himself thinking of her more and more. There was witchery in the play like the flash of summer lightning on distant horizons. Her witchery, her queer, tender charm. Why, he could almost hear her speaking the lines!

AFTER a while he began to read more slowly, to harvest the treasure and extract the full honey from every situation. "False Dawn" justified all that Wilcox had said of it, being that unusual product, a thoroughly dramatic play which is yet steeped in beauty and poetical feeling.

Wilcox, on his return two hours later, found him with the play still before him.

"Well, what do you think of it?" he asked.

"Might hit the high-brows," Mason said cautiously.

"Suit the Mirage all right?"

"Yes, I guess it does. Who wrote it?"

Wilcox coughed, blushed, and brought out at last: "Guy Prendergast."

Mason stared at him a moment; then, with a quiet, deliberate gesture, he picked up the script by one corner and whirled it across the room.

"The puppy! Does he think I'd give a play of his house room?"

"He doesn't. Elise does. He wrote it for her, you know, and she's crazy to put it in your theater. She says if you'd planned the Mirage for her you couldn't have done anything more according to her taste."

Mason turned his face from his friend. Pride because he had attained to the height of her requirements struggled with bitter resentment of what she was asking him to do. Did she think that his efforts served no better purpose than to create a casket for the work of Guy Prendergast?

"How did she get into the Mirage?" he questioned sullenly.

"You remember the day I borrowed the keys?"

Mason nodded.

"Well, she was like a child. She babbled on about its beauties till I was tired of listening."

"I'm glad she likes it; but she can't lease it for Prendergast."

"Now, look here, Barnes; be reasonable," said Wilcox coaxingly. "People'll stop talking if you let Elise open your theater, and you've got a gem of a play. Prendergast is a coming man. That he's in love with your wife doesn't cut any ice. He's given her a big thing to come back to the stage in. He's given her the play. If you'll give her the theater, the honors will be even."

Mason looked grimly before him.

"Of course, you're managing her."

"Well, suppose I am, Barnes! She's in good hands. Now, I want the Mirage from the middle of October for a long run—for 'False Dawn' is going to have a long run."

Mason felt his cup of bitterness overflowing. He had built a theater which was his shrine of memories, his tribute to what a beautiful woman had meant to him. That she had laughed at him, left him stranded in a home of unfamiliar loveliness, made no difference. Mason felt no resentment of Elise—she was welcome to his theater: but to put a play of Prendergast's there was another matter. Prendergast had talked her out of a good home with his poetical nonsense.

Wilcox, who knew his man, decided to let Mason's anger ebb. To-morrow, he judged, the owner of the Mirage would be thinking more of Elise than of the dramatist.

And so it transpired. Mason spent a sleepless night, but the morning found him in the mood of those who know that attempts at retaliation are as futile as an effort to fill up a quicksand. Elise should have the Mirage, and he would try to forget whose play was on the boards.

He kept away from the neighborhood of the theater in the weeks that followed, and he had the sensation of having placed a cherished child with strangers. One grain of comfort remained: his sanctuary was in the hands of a lady who would keep it safe from sacrilege.

Her face, whimsical and lovely, looked at him from bill-boards that announced "False Dawn" as the medium chosen by the distinguished actress, Elise Farrell, for her reappearance on the stage. Mason was in the horrid predicament of not being able to pray for her success without including in his petitions the obnoxious Guy Prendergast. The manager spent many sleepless hours tossing on his pillow in a vain attempt to get away from visions of Prendergast's triumph on the opening night. Any one who had money enough to pay for it could build a theater, he reflected bitterly; but to write a play was a far higher achievement. Elise, reciting the sharply beautiful lines of Prendergast's drama, could read devotion in their every turn; but—what could a building tell her? Mason felt in full measure the tragedy of the inarticulate.

THE afternoon before the performance a messenger boy arrived in his office with an envelop whose handwriting set his pulses jumping. Opening it, he found a little note from her, begging him to use the box she had reserved for him, and thanking him for letting her have the Mirage, on whose beauties she made no comment.

He did not know why this hurt him; but it did; yet he told himself that never had he been more than that to her—a mere "useful man," a stepping-stone for her ambition.

In the midst of his reflections, Wilcox entered with a genial challenge to attend "the biggest opening night New York has seen for years."

"Nothing doing," Mason answered grimly. "I've got a bad cold and I am going home to nurse it."

Wilcox regarded him with friendly solicitude.

Continued on page 18

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 WOMAN COULDN'T BE LADYLIKE

FLORENCE NIGHTINGALE was a great reformer and pioneer. Her famous work of caring for the wounded in the Crimean war was not more valuable than her achievement in opening the field of professional nursing to women. But her success did not come easily. Public nursing was considered almost immoral by the polite folk of her day, and it took keenness and patience and courage to overcome all the obstacles that family and friends put in her way.

Luckily, Miss Nightingale had a bold mind, and a frank, incisive way of speaking that downed opposition, says Sir Edward Cook in his story of her life (Macmillan Company). As a young woman she talked with a freedom that was not considered quite proper for her sex. After a conversation with her, Sir Henry de la Bèche, the noted geologist, said: "A capital young lady that, if she hadn't floored me with her Latin and Greek." A polite indoor sport for young ladies of that period was reading aloud. But Florence Nightingale would have none of it. "To be read aloud to," she said, "is the most miserable exercise of the human intellect. Or rather, is it any exercise at all? It is like lying on one's back with one's hands tied and having liquid poured down one's throat. Worse than that, because suffocation would immediately ensue, and put a stop to this operation. But no suffocation would put a stop to the other."

Early in her twenties she set her heart on nursing, but for a long time was dissuaded by her parents. She was eager to please and obey them, and constantly hoped for some sympathy with her plans. Her family, however, could not understand a woman's aspiring to anything beyond her home and society. They refused to listen to any of her plans, and she gradually grew hopeless and despondent. "In my thirty-first year," she said, "I see nothing desirable but death."

Finally, in 1850, she managed to study nursing in Germany at a hospital in Kaiserwerth. None of the other nurses were gentlewomen, and many of them were peasants. The attitude of polite society toward her work is illustrated by a remark she made about an operation

which had been performed. "The operation ... I did not mention to —, knowing that she would see no more in my interest in it than the pleasures dirty boys have in playing in the puddles about a butcher's shop."

There was no nursing course in England, but her work at Kaiserwerth strengthened her determination to nurse in spite of her family. She had found herself at last, and wrote to her mother:

"This is Life. Now I know what it is to live and to love life, and really I should be sorry now to leave life."

It was only four years later that Florence Nightingale was called to Scutari to help improve the horrible conditions among wounded soldiers in the Crimean war. Her ready sympathy and wide knowledge and remarkable organizing ability soon put her at the head of all the hospitals on the Bosphorus, and she had ten thousand men under her charge. She arrived at Scutari in November, 1854. In February the death rate in the hospitals was 42 per cent; a few months later it had sunk to 2 per cent.

"NO, SAH; YO' SUSPICIONS SUTTENLY AM UNFOUNDED"

WHAT ARE YOU PLANNING TO DO AT EIGHTY?

SOME men are old at thirty, and some die young at eighty. There is no dead-line for mental activity in human beings, and no reason for the common feeling that age means retirement to the shelf. Henry Dwight Chapin, M. D., in Health First (Century Company), quotes the scientist Dorland to the effect that "many of the finest achievements in business, statesmanship, literature, and all other activities have been wrought by men long past sixty."

"This author," says Dr. Chapin, "compiled and analyzed the records of four hundred men famous in all lines of intellectual activity in order to find when these persons accomplished the greatest work of their lives. While in the earlier years of life the emotional element is at its highest, and constructive work comes largely from this side of man's nature, as in artists and musicians, the higher mental qualities mature later, and are exhibited by scientists, philosophers, and statesmen.

"He makes a most remarkable showing of many cases—ninety in all—where persons accomplished their greatest work at an advanced age.

Galileo wrote "Dialoghi delle nuove Scienze" at 72.

Bancroft, "History of the United States," at 85.

Buffon, "Natural History," at 81.

Lamarck, "Natural History of Invertebrate Animals," at 78.

Herbert Spencer, "Synthetic Philosophy," at 76.

Goethe, "Faust" (second part), at 80.

Tintoretto, "Paradise," at 70.

Verdi, "Falstaff," at 80.

HOW TO MAKE YOUR SANDWICH BED

GARDENS don't "just grow." Besides rich earth and water and sunshine, they need air, even at the roots. In Home Gardening (Grosset & Dunlap) Benjamin F. Albaugh says: "If air can not penetrate to the roots the plant languishes and dies from suffocation."

Mr. Albaugh has invented a type of garden called the "sandwich bed." It is adapted especially to small back-yard gardens, and will be equally fruitful, the author guarantees, on a roof or a paved street.

Here are the directions for making your sandwich bed this spring:

First—Place a layer of straw or stable litter or leaves, about five inches deep. Tramp or pack pretty firm and smooth.

Second—Spread over this a layer about one inch deep of rich, fine stable manure.

Third—On this place another layer of stable litter about two inches thick. Tramp or pack this down firm. Then turn on the hose and give the mass a thorough soaking, but stop before leaching begins.

Fourth—Spread evenly over the bed at least four inches of street scrapings, but avoid streets that have oil or asphalt in their make-up. If street sweepings can not be readily obtained, use instead a compost of equal parts of fine river sand, rich garden soil, and old, fine stable manure. Mix by shoveling over in a heap.

After all is in place, tramp till firm, and it is ready to plant. The sandwich bed may be prepared in the autumn, so it will dry off and warm early in the spring. However, a spring-made bed is just as successful if the directions are carefully followed.

THE BILLY SUNDAY OF RUSSIA

ILIODOR, the Mad Monk, has been called the "Billy Sunday of Russia." He was born a peasant, and started his work, humbly enough, as an itinerant priest. But his fame spread, and he became a preacher of immense power over the masses. For some reason, Rasputin, the evil genius of the Russian court, took an interest in him and for a while made an intimate friend of him. But gradually an enmity sprang up. Then Iliodor attacked the nobles and the corruption of court life. He knew too much about Rasputin and his influence at court to please that holy man, and so shortly after the outbreak of the war he fled to Christiania.

Iliodor preached violently against the Jews, the revolutionists, the selfish rich, and the corrupt nobles. But somebody must have liked him, for he tells of the thousands who followed him from one end of Russia to the other.

In preaching, he talked the language of the people instead of the old clerical Russian. "I used all kinds of allegories," he says in The Mad Monk of Russia, Iliodor (Century Company), "to impress the people with the dangers emanating from the revolutionists. On one occasion I constructed a dragon, which symbolized the revolution. In the interior of this dragon I placed little children dressed as demons. Seeing how the people were impressed when these little demons jumped out of the dragon, I said: 'Let us burn this monster that devours the heart of Russia.' The people burned the dragon, signifying the breaking up of the revolution."

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THE FIRST MAN AND HOW HE LOOKED

WHAT did the first man look like? Not, unfortunately, like the traditional pictures of Adam walking erect in the Garden of Eden. The first man, as reconstructed by modern men of science, was closely akin in habits and appearance to his immediate ancestors among the apes.

F. W. H. Migeod, quoted in the Journal of Heredity, says:

"He appears as a hairy creature with skin of an uncertain brown color. In bodily size he approaches the average modern man as regards height, but with a longer body and shorter legs. The legs were bandied, and as a result the creature will have a wobbling walk. The arms will be long. The head will have small frontal development, but be large behind. The nose will be flattened and broad at the base; the jaws of great power but the chin very receding. His eye will be black and small but piercing, and over-hung with heavy bony ridges.

"He will be unclothed, and for a dwelling will seek a cave if in a mountainous country.

"The absence of clothing will prevent his migration of his own free will into the more unfavorable regions to the northward, and it will not be until he has learned to make use of the skins of animals as a protection against weather that he will wander far out of subtropical latitudes."

It took centuries before man could achieve even a skin for clothing. He had no weapons with which to kill the larger fur-bearing animals, no knife to skin them with. He had no fire, and consequently no ashes to cure the skins. As a matter of fact, our first man was able to bear the cold almost as well as the beasts. Mr. Migeod believes that when clothing was first assumed it was for ornament rather than for protection.

Baboons of the present day can throw stones, and gorillas use sticks, so it is safe to assume that our earlier ancestor could do the same. But such implements as he used he certainly never kept after the moment for their use had passed. He had no sense of property and no capacity to look ahead. For long ages he could not talk except to make noises indicating pain and pleasure, and cry to his mate.

ARE THERE TWO AND SEVEN TENTHS CHILDREN IN YOUR FAMILY?

THE population of America continues to increase, in contrast with the population of France (for example), where before the war the death rate was actually in excess of the birth rate. Superficially, our birth rate looks healthy enough, said Louis I. Dublin in a recent speech before the American Association for the Advancement of Science. But when the figures are analyzed a little they show that our increases in population are really due to immigration, and to the high birth rate among the foreign born. The birth rate among the native born, who comprise the better educated and more intelligent section of our people, has been falling for the past half century, and continues to fall. In a group of women under forty-five years of age who had been married from ten to twenty years the average number of children was found to be 4.1. The children of native parentage, however, showed an average of only 2.7 children.

Among the graduates of Yale and Harvard the number of children born per married graduate has fallen from about 3.25 in the decade 1850-60 to a little over 2 in the decade 1891 to 1900; while the number of children per married graduate of Smith College is only 1.3; Vassar, i.6; Bryn Mawr, 1.7; and Holyoke, 1.8.

"How many children ought the American family to have," asks Mr. Dublin, "in order that the population may not diminish, but may remain only stationary?" And he answers—four.

If each couple is to replace itself in the world, it is obvious that two children must reach maturity and marry. But this means more than two children born per family, for a number of reasons. The death rate is exceptionally high in the period of childhood, amounting in the first year of life to more than 10 per cent of the babies born. If we begin with 100,000 at birth, and trace them through from year to year, we find that about 75,000 are alive at the average age of marriage.

Further, it must be considered that all persons do not marry. In our country the unmarried constitute from 12 to 15 per cent; and of those who do marry 7 per cent have no children.

Two children for each married couple is not, therefore, enough, concludes Mr. Dublin. Four are needed, if the native population of America is to maintain its proportionate place in the world.

WILL SOCIALISM FOLLOW THE WAR?

WITH the government running our railroads and fixing the price of our morning toast and coffee, in what sort of a state shall we be after the war? Is the dream of the socialists to be realized?

No one can answer this question fully: but England's experience is interesting. The Nation gives the results of certain reports recently made over there. One of them was by a sub-committee of the House of Commons, representing all parties; another was by the Liverpool Chamber of Commerce; and the Steamships Owners' Association produced the third.

All three of the reports agreed that the government had been forced to take over the businesses which it is now operating—that in the emergency there was no other solution. But how has the government handled the businesses of the nation? With terrible waste.

From all sides there comes a demand in England that as soon as the war is over the government shall turn the railroads and steamships and other enterprises back to private ownership. And the most interesting thing about it all is that the laboring men are equally as insistent as the employers.

ON CLEAR THINKING

THE trouble with most people who fret and worry about trifles, wear themselves out dreading things that never happen, and dwell perpetually on the irritating and distressful side of life, is that they have never really learned how to think, says Dr. Robert S. Carroll in his book, The Mastery of Nervousness (Macmillan Company). The "nervous" person does not know how to control and select his thoughts. Trivial, irrevelant, or harmful ideas come into his head, and are allowed to take up the space that ought to be given over to real thinking, until his mind is cluttered up "like a room piled ceiling-high and uninhabitable because of the accumulated mass of useless trash." Instead of thinking each thing out to its finish, he leaves one idea unfinished and confused and goes on to the next. In this way he gradually becomes the helpless victim of his mental impressions.

Any person of average ability can train himself to ignore useless or destructive ideas, says the writer. He can learn to fix his attention firmly on what is interesting and real, and think his thoughts out clearly to their conclusion. There is some satisfaction in this kind of mental life.

One of the best ways of learning to think clearly is learning to speak clearly. Nothing makes for accurate thinking so much as accurate speaking. Don't mispronounce words or use them incorrectly because it is too much trouble to look them up in the dictionary. Don't skip words and references in your reading that you do not understand. A hazy knowledge of language means hazy, inaccurate thinking.

Above all, don't exaggerate in your speech. The man who declares that he has a "splitting headache," that he "did not get a wink of sleep," by the very act of saying so hypnotizes himself into thinking so. There is a kind of dishonesty in speech that is made up of superlatives. "Extravagance of speech stands for distortion of thought," observes the writer. "One who habitually defaces reality by extremes of expression, if not already nervous, is traveling nervous-ward.

MUST WE GIVE UP THE CIRCUS?

WHEN you see a dog skip lightly through a hoop or ride a bicycle across the stage, it often seems as if he must be having a good time. But in nine cases out of ten he has been put through a course of training necessarily cruel. Ernest Bell in the Contemporary Review says:

"For a dog to walk on his hind legs may not look at all painful, but the training, in which he is held in the position by cords and hit under the chin by a piece of wood if he attempts to come down on his fore legs, is distinctly cruel."

Even more brutal is the training required to turn wild animals into stage performers.

"To accomplish this there is simply no means but fear, and fear has to be instilled by pain. The lion, tiger, or leopard must have his spirit thoroughly broken before he will consent to perform on the stage with the glare of the footlights in front of him, the noise of the music, and the sight of a crowd of people. No wonder that the performers in these cases have to be safeguarded with iron spikes, red-hot bars, metal whips, fireworks, and pistols. The wonder is that any one can feel pleasure in seeing animals forced to make fools of themselves.

"Good work is being done in England to lessen the horrors connected with performing animals. Recently a man was prosecuted and fined for an act in which he threw a little dog into the air, made it climb a shaking ladder and finally balance on his head at the top."

MY MOTHER

By Francis Ledwidge (killed in Flanders)

GOD made my mother on an April day
From sorrow and the mist along the sea,
Lost birds' and wanderers' songs and ocean spray,
And the moon loved her wandering jealously. . . .
Kind heart she has for all on hill or wave
Whose hopes grew wings like ants to fly away.
I bless the God Who such a mother gave
This poor bird-hearted singer of a day.
(From the English Bookman.)

WHEN MELBA CAME TO AMERICA

WHEN an opera singer looks like Melba she doesn't mind telling her age. Melba is fifty-two, and still one of the world's great singers. Probably no other operatic star has had the experience of being literally showered with bank-notes. Several years ago Oscar Hammerstein urged Melba to come to the United States. She firmly refused. Every day the manager called, raising his offer each time, until at last he reached $3000 a night.

Melba went right on refusing. "He came back the next day," says Melba, "very insistent. 'You must come, Madame!' he shouted. 'I will give you $3000 a performance.' 'I will not go to America,' I repeated, with growing emphasis.

"'Yes, you will,' he declared, and then began scattering bank-notes from one end of the room to another. Then he rushed out, saying: 'I am sailing to-morrow. I will see you in ten days.'

"When I gathered up the money, I found 100,000 francs. I decided that Mr. Hammerstein was in earnest. He was a man of remarkable personality."

An Upright Judge

By GEORGE A. BIRMINGHAM

Illustration by J. C. Coll

NO one knows how the quarrel between Peter Joyce and Patrick Joseph Flanagan began. It had been smoldering for years, a steady-going feud, before it reached its crisis last June.

The Joyces and the Flanagans were neighbors, occupying farms of very poor land on the side of Letterbrack, a damp and lonely hill some miles from the nearest market town. This fact explains the persistence of the feud. It is not easy to keep up a quarrel with a man whom you see only once a month or so. Nor is it possible to concentrate the mind on one particular enemy if you live in a crowded place.

Joyce and Flanagan saw each other every day. They could not help seeing each other, for their farms were small. They scarcely ever saw any one else, because there were no other farms on the side of the hill. And the feud was a family affair. Mrs. Joyce and Mrs. Flanagan disliked each other heartily, and never met without using language calculated to embitter the feeling between them. The young Joyces and the young Flanagans fought fiercely on their way to and from school.

The war, which has turned Europe upside down and dragged most things from their familiar moorings, had its effect on the lives of the two farmers on the side of Letterbrack. They became better off than they had ever been before. It must not be supposed that they grew rich. According to the standard of English workingmen, they had always been wretchedly poor. All that the war did for them was to put a little—a very little—more money into their pockets.

They themselves did not connect their new prosperity with the war. They did not, indeed, think about the war at all, being fully occupied with their work and their private quarrel. They noticed, without inquiring into causes, that the prices of the things they sold went up steadily. A lean bullock fetched an amazing sum at a fair. Young pigs proved unexpectedly profitable. The eggs that the women carried into town on market days could be exchanged for unusual quantities of tea. And the rise in prices was almost pure gain to these farmers. They lived, for the most part, on the produce of their own land and bought very little in shops.

There came a time when Peter Joyce had a comfortable sum, about £20 in all, laid by after making provision for his rent and taxes. He felt entitled to some little indulgence.

An Englishman, when he finds himself in possession of spare cash, spends it on material luxuries for himself and, if he is a good man, for his family. He buys better food, better clothes, and furniture of a kind not absolutely necessary, such as a piano.

An Irishman, in a similar agreeable position, prefers pleasures of a more spiritual kind. Peter Joyce was perfectly content to wear a bawneen of home-made flannel and a pair of ragged trousers. He did not want anything better for dinner than boiled potatoes and fried slices of bacon. He had not the smallest desire to possess a piano, or even an armchair. But he intended, in his own way, to get solid enjoyment out of his £20.

IT was after the children had gone to bed, one evening, that he discussed the matter with his wife.

"I'm not sure," he said, "but it might be as well to settle things up, one way or another, with that old reprobate Patrick Joseph Flanagan. It's what I'll have to do sooner or later."

"Them Flanagans," said Mrs. Joyce, "is the devil. There isn't a day passes but one or other of them has me tormented. If it isn't her it's one of the children; and if, by the grace of God, it isn't the children, it's herself."

"What I'm thinking of," said Joyce, "is taking the law of him."

"It'll cost you something to do that," said Mrs. Joyce cautiously.

"And, if it does, what matter? Haven't I the money to pay for it?"

"You have," said Mrs. Joyce. "You have surely. And Flanagan deserves it, so he does. It's not once nor twice, but it's every day I do be saying there's something should be done to them Flanagans."

"There's more will be done to him than he cares for," said Joyce grimly. "Wait till the county court judge gets at him. Believe you me, he'll be sorry for himself then."

Peter Joyce started early next morning. He had an eight-mile walk before him, and he wished to reach the town in good time, being anxious to put his case into the hands of Mr. Madden, the solicitor, before Mr. Madden became absorbed in the business of the day. Mr. Madden had the reputation of being the smartest lawyer in Connaught, and his time was very fully occupied.

It took Joyce nearly three hours to reach town, and he had ample time to prepare his case against Flanagan as he went.

There was no lack of material for the lawsuit. A feud of years' standing provides many grievances that can fairly be brought into court. Joyce's difficulty was to make a choice.

He pondered deeply as he walked along the bare road across the bog. When he reached the door of Mr. Madden's office he had a tale of injuries suffered at the hands of the Flanagans that would, he felt sure, move the judge to vindictive fury.

MR. MADDEN was already busy when Joyce was shown into his room. "Well," he said, "who are you and what do you want?"

"My name's Peter Joyce of Letterbrack, your honor," said Joyce. "A decent man with a long weak family, and my father was a decent man before me, and it's no fault of mine that I'm here to-day and going into court, though there isn't another gentleman in all Ireland I'd sooner come to than yourself, Mr. Madden, if so be I had to come to any one. And it's what I'm druv to, for if I wasn't—"

"What is it?" said Mr. Madden. "Police? Drunk and disorderly?"

"It is not," said Joyce. "Sure I never was took by the police only twice, and them times they wouldn't have meddled with me only for the spite the sergeant had against me. But he's gone from the place now, thanks be to God, and the one that came after him wouldn't touch me."

Peter Joyce sank his voice to a whisper. "It's how I want to take the law of Patrick Joseph Flanagan," he said.

"Trespass or assault?" said Mr. Madden.

He was a man of immense experience. He succeeded in carrying on a large practice because he wasted no time in listening to preliminary explanations of his clients. Most legal actions in the west of Ireland are reducible to trespass or assault.

"It's both the two of them," said Joyce,

Mr. Madden made a note on a sheet of paper before him. Joyce waited until he had finished writing. Then he said slowly:

"Trespass and assault, and more besides."

Mr. Madden asked no question. He added to the note he had written the words, "And abusive language." Abusive language generally follows trespass and immediately precedes assault.

"Now," said Mr. Madden, "get on with your story, and make it as short as you can."

Peter Joyce did his best to make the story short. He succeeded in making it immensely complicated. There was a boundary wall in the story, and it had been broken down. There was a heifer calf, and a number of young pigs. There was a field of oats trampled and destroyed by the heifer, and a potato patch ruined beyond hope by the pigs. There was a sheep torn by a dog, stones thrown at Mrs. Joyce, language that had defiled the ears of Molly Joyce, an innocent child of twelve years, and there was the shooting of a gun at Peter himself.

Joyce was prepared to swear to every item of the indictment. He did actually swear from time to time, laying his hand solemnly on a large ledger that stood on Mr. Madden's desk.

Mr. Madden listened until he had heard enough. "You haven't a ghost of a case against Flanagan," he said. "The judge won't listen to a story like that. If you take my advice, you'll go straight home and make it up with Flanagan. You'll simply waste your money if you go into court."

Mr. Madden, it will be seen, was a man of principle. He made his living out of other people's quarrels, but he gave honest advice to his clients. He was also a man of wide knowledge of west of Ireland farmers. He knew perfectly well that his advice would not be taken.

"I've the money to pay for it," said Joyce, "and I'll have the law of Patrick Joseph Flanagan if it costs me the last penny I own. If your honor doesn't like the case, sure I can go to some one else."

Mr. Madden, though a man of principle, was not quixotic.

"Very well," he said. "I'll manage your case for you. But I warn you fairly, the judge will give it against you."

"He might not," said Joyce. "In the latter end he might not."

"He will," said Mr. Madden, "unless—"

He was watching Joyce carefully as he spoke. The man's face had an expression of cunning and self-satisfaction.

"Unless," Mr. Madden went on, "you've something up your sleeve that you haven't told me yet."

Joyce winked solemnly.

"It's what it would be hardly worth mentioning to you honor," he said.

"You'd better mention it, all the same," said Mr. Madden.

"What I was thinking," said Joyce, "is that if I was to send a pair of ducks to the judge a couple of days before the case was to come on—fine ducks we have, as fine as ever was seen."

"Listen to me," said Mr. Madden. "You've got the very smallest possible chance of winning your case. But you have a chance. It's a hundred to one against you. Still, odd things do happen in courts. But let me tell you this: I know that judge—I've known him for years; and if you tried to bribe him with a pair of ducks, he'd give it against you, even if you had the best case in the world instead of the worst. That's the kind of a man he is."

Joyce sighed heavily. The ways of the law were proving unexpectedly difficult and expensive.

"Maybe," he said, "I could send him two pair of ducks, or two pair and a half: but that's the most I can do, and there won't be a young duck left about the place if I send him that many."

"Either you act by my advice," said Mr. Madden, "or I'll drop your case. This isn't a matter for the local bench of magistrates. If it was them you were dealing with, ducks might be some use to you. But a county court judge is a different kind of man altogether. He's a gentleman, and he's honest. If you attempt to get at him with ducks or any other kind of bribe, you'll ruin any chance you have, which isn't much."

"That's a queer thing, now, so it is," said Joyce.

"It's true, all the same," said Mr. Madden.

"Do you mean to tell me," said Joyce, "that his honor the judge would go against a man that had done him a good turn in the way of a pair of ducks or the like?"

"That's exactly what I do mean," said Mr. Madden.

Joyce left Mr. Madden's office a few minutes later, and tramped home. In spite of the lawyer's discouraging view of the case, he seemed fairly well satisfied.

That evening he spoke to his wife.

Concluded on page 15

IT GROWS ON TREES

SPRING SUGGESTIONS FOR SLUGGISH SUITORS

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WHERE YOUR FIFTY MILLION IS GOING

Concluded from page 10

"How many of them large white ducks have you?" he asked. "How many that's fit to eat?"

"There's no more than six left out of the first clutch," said Mrs. Joyce.

"I'd be glad," said Joyce, "if you'd fatten them six, and you needn't spare the yellow meal. It'll be worth your while to have them as good as you can."

A MONTH later the case of Joyce v. Flanagan came on in the county court.

Mr. Madden had hammered the original story of the wall, the heifer, the pigs, and the potatoes into shape. It sounded almost plausible as Mr. Madden told it in his opening remarks. But he had very little hopes that it would survive the handling of Mr. Ellis, a young and intelligent lawyer who was acting for Flanagan.

Joyce cheerfully confirmed every detail of the story on oath. He was unshaken by Mr. Ellis's cross-examination, chiefly because the judge constantly interfered with Mr. Ellis and would not allow him to ask the questions he wanted to ask.

Flanagan and his witnesses did their best, but the judge continued to make things as difficult as he could for their lawyer. The matter, when all the evidence was heard, appeared tangled and confused, a result far beyond Mr. Madden's best expectations. He had feared that the truth might emerge with disconcerting plainness.

Then an amazing thing happened: The judge took Joyce's view of the circumstances, and decided in his favor. Mr. Ellis gasped. Flanagan swore audibly, and was silenced by a policeman. Joyce left the court with a satisfied smile.

"Well," said Mr. Madden, a little later, "you've won. But I'm sure I don't know how it happened. I never went into court with a shakier case."

"I shouldn't wonder," said Joyce; "but it might have been the ducks that did it. I sent him six, your honor, six—and as fat as any ducks ever you seen."

"Good heavens!" said Mr. Madden. "After all I said to you—and— But, heavens, man! He can't have got them. If he had—"

"He got them right enough," said Joyce, "for I left them at the door of the hotel myself, with a bit of a note saying as how I hoped he'd take a favorable view of the case that would be before him to-day, and I told him what the case was, so as there'd be no mistake—Joyce v. Flanagan, was what I wrote, in a matter of trespass and assault—and abusive language."

"Well," said Mr. Madden, "all I can say is that if I hadn't seen with my own eyes what happened in that court to-day I wouldn't have believed it. To think that that judge, of all men—"

"It was Flanagan's name and not my own," said Joyce, "that I signed at the bottom of the note. 'With the respectful compliments of Patrick Joseph Flanagan, the defendant,' was what I wrote, like as if it was from him that the ducks came."

"I'd never have thought of it," said Mr. Madden. "Joyce, it's you and not me that ought to be a lawyer. Lawyer! That's nothing. You ought to be a Member of Parliament. Your talents are wasted, Joyce. Go into Parliament. You'll be a Cabinet Minister before you die."

Her Service Flag

By LOUIE H. OSBORN

Illustration by Ruth Hambidge

IT is many years since, with my baby boy in my arms and leaning on my husband's shoulder, I left the big steamer that brought us to America. All my heart is here, in this land where none need to be afraid—where we came for freedom, and found it. Long ago I went to night school to learn English. I have had sorrow and poverty; but that is not the fault of the land. It happens so in some lives, that is all.

For nine years, now, I am janitress in this house; because, after Ernst was blind and could no more be engineer in a big house, we came where I could do the work; and since he is gone, they are kind to me, these people. The poorer people are always good neighbors.

Mrs. Marshall lived here before I came, on the first floor, right over me; and a better neighbor you would not wish. Just herself and her boy Eddie. Her husband—so she once said to me—died in the war with Spain; and her boy was to go into his father's regiment when he arrived at twenty-one years.

She said the regiment had buried Mr. Marshall in Cuba; and the Colonel came himself to bring her her husband's little things to keep. And a medal he had she showed me also. It was for shooting, like in a "Schützenfest." That time, too, she said they had nobody,—she and Eddie,—because Mr. Marshall's people were all dead and her people were all in Australien: I do not know in what part.

I remember it all most plain; because I thought by myself how it was not like in a German regiment, for a fine officer to come to a poor house for such a kindness and sympathy for the wife of a plain soldier.

We came away from Zabern, my Ernst and I, when our boy was a baby. If he had been a girl maybe we would have stayed; but the Militär ideas in Germany sent us away, for our boy; and then, after all, he died. But a regiment here was different.

So the Marshalls and their dog lived always right there; and Eddie went into his father's regiment. Always he came home at the same time to supper; and always, as with a clock, I could know the hour, for I could hear his mother hurry to the door; and Bob, the dog, called to him with a bark.

TWO nights in each week Eddie went to the drill. Then Bob would sit by the window; and when Eddie would come down the street the dog would scratch on the window glass. Always, every night, Eddie and Bob went to walk a little, before bedtime; and that dog was not let to bark, so he would not disturb the people.

When the war came to us over here, Eddie's boss said he would give to Mrs. Marshall the half of Eddie's pay while he would be gone with his regiment. It was not much, naturlich, but they had a little savings; and so Eddie went away.

About it Mrs. Marshall was so quiet, you would have said she did not care so much; but that is how some people are. She hung a little flag in her window—red outside and white inside, with one blue star in the middle—to show she had sent her man to the army.

Bob sat often, quite still, to look up at the little flag, as if he too did know it stood for Eddie. Day in and day out Mrs. Marshall would sit in that window and knit, out of the gray wool, things for soldiers. Mostly she knitted socks; and so fast her fingers went that almost you could not see the needles; and every minute she could, she knitted and knitted. Once or twice Eddie could come home in his soldier uniform. It was not like the "field gray" of Prussia, and I was glad.

AND then Eddie went away in a ship. Mrs. Marshall told me. She had been all right while Eddie was yet in this land; but when he was gone away, she was not the same. She did not sleep.

She was more gray in her hair, and had no pink in her cheeks; and her eyes were shiny like in a fever. Not sleeping makes one to look so. I could tell, always in the morning when I did empty her garbage pail, that she did not eat the way she was used to do. But always there was paper, showing to me that Bob had not been forgotten, for on it was the blood from liver or something like that.

Always, every night, Mrs. Marshall would go with Bob to walk; and some nights, Mr. Reilly, our policeman, came back with them to the door. She was so small, Mrs. Marshall, he just wanted she should not go alone. He too knew she did not sleep; and he was sorry.

Everybody of the neighbors began to see how it was with Mrs. Marshall not sleeping. Mr. Meyer, the butcher, he used to send her sometimes a present of something extra nice—a little bird, or a piece of good steak, or so; and his boy each time would ask her how does she sleep. The milkman said to me she did no longer have milk every day; and he too was in anxiety, because he knew sleep one must have.

Always, when I baked, I would make the excuse to share my fresh bread before it should dry. But she would smile, so slow, and say she would have just a little; because she was not hungry, only so tired from not sleeping.

She walked up and down, most of the nights, from the front room to the kitchen, and from the kitchen to the front room, for hour after hour. She made no great noise, only I sleep light, and so I could hear her. Sometimes I could hear Bob walk too. One day I spoke about it to her.

"Oh, Mrs. Knopf," she said, "I do not wish to trouble you to keep you awake; but I can not sleep. I see my boy, if I fall asleep. Sometimes he is hungry and cold; sometimes he is hurt and all alone; sometimes he is all in bandages, and I can not reach him to care for him. But most I shake when I see him prisoner to the Germans. Rather I would he were dead than so. And so, if I sleep, it is only a little, and to such dreams! Then I am awake again, and I must move. I can not stay still in my bed, for no more can I sleep."

It was not much I could say. Had I not lived in Zabern, and did I not know how the German Militär was? But I said what I could; and Bob laid his face on her knee, and she stroked his head. Always that dog acted more like a person than a dog.

There is a little boy on our street who has a uniform. He is not yet a soldier, for he is but at the age of twelve. Always he came by our house after school. Always he stopped with a salute to the little flag in Mrs. Marshall's window, and smiled to Mrs. Marshall if she sat there. Often he stopped and would ask if she was well; and always "was she sleeping better now?" Then he would go on his way, and always Bob barked to him like a friend, and she kissed her hand. That is how every one felt about Mrs. Marshall.

One day, not so long ago, a fine gentleman, no longer young, in a uniform for officers, came down our street. I was bringing in the ash-cans, so I could see. He stops before the window. He sees the little gray head; and he salutes as one does to a hero. In that moment she looks up from her sock, because Bob barks; and she smiles to the gentleman—such a sweet, lonesome-mother smile! He lifts his hat to her and goes on; but he blows his nose hard. Men do that sometimes, so that none should know how it is with them.

And so it was till Saturday. I had need to go downtown to see my husband's cousin, who is sick. So most of the evening I was not here. On my way home at this corner I met Mr. Reilly, the policeman. He said to me that the neighbors had told him Mrs. Marshall had a telegram from Eddie just before it was his time to begin his duty; and he did not see her and Bob all the evening, not even by the window. He hoped it was good news, and she could sleep.

Ever since Eddie is gone away, I have the key to Mrs. Marshall's back door; Eddie wanted I should. So I said to Mr. Reilly I would go in, in the morning, and find out what Eddie in his message had said. I was glad he sent it.

I heard not Mrs. Marshall walking when I went in; and I said to myself that maybe she was sleeping. I listened long, but it was all still upstairs. I was very tired, and I slept. But a janitor must get up early; and so yesterday by seven o'clock I rang the bell for her garbage. I had no answer. So, as soon as I send back the other pails, I go up there. I knock; and I hear not even Bob.

Then I unlock the kitchen door, and I go in most quietly, on my toes. No breakfast has one had in that room. I go on; and there in her bed is Mrs. Marshall.

In her hand is a piece of yellow paper. She holds it tight. Fast asleep she is. And curled up on the bed is Bob. He is asleep too. I take the paper, but she does not move. Bob opens his eyes, but comes not to me; just puts his head down again. I read the paper. It says: "Killed in gallant action in France, Private Edward Marshall. Details later"; and it comes from Washington.

No more need she walk, the little mother; no more need she dream he was having pain or trouble or shame. She knew—and she could sleep. I think Bob knew too. I was glad that she could sleep.

I STAYED up there all the time that I could,—that was yesterday,—and I thought she should have food; so down to my own kitchen I came for soup, and carried it up there, and also a bone for Bob. He will not come to me when I ask him, and he will not eat. He just stays on the bed; and that I did not like. So I myself went to the side of the bed to wake Mrs. Marshall, for I had made the soup hot. I could not wake her. She was to have a long, long sleep, for her boy was now in no danger any more.

And now we, the neighbors, will let her to sleep. There is no black thing at our house door. I would not let them. But a nice gray ribbon, like her hair; and on it I have pinned the flag out of her window, so that they who go by our house may know; and I shall make them put it in her hands to-morrow, before I lay her beside Ernst and my little Fritz.

It was her flag, and she shall keep it always, while she sleeps.

WHY THEY ARE CALLED TANKS

TANK is a curious name for the great steel-coated monsters that have spread such terror through the German lines. How did the name come to fasten itself upon them?

Sir William Tritton has answered the question, and is quoted in the Asiatic Review:

"When we commenced to build them at Messrs. William Foster & Co.'s works, our men were naturally very curious. So we told them they were water-carriers for Mesopotamia.

"That was too much of a mouthful for them, so they shortened the description into 'tanks;' and 'tanks' they have remained and are likely to remain until the world's last battle.

"In time we had to tell our workmen the truth, and I do not believe sufficient credit has ever been paid to them for the wonderful way in which they kept the secret."

February 22d 1918

"DYING, MOSTLY"

An Interview with Miss Kathleen Burke

SOMETIMES cold, undecorated facts shout louder than the most fervid emotional appeal. When I asked Miss Kathleen Burke about Serbia, she handed me a report of the Scottish Women's Hospitals, of which she is Honorary Organizing Secretary and special delegate to America. For her services since the war started she has recently been made Commander of the British Empire.

When I opened the report, I read casually:

The first Serbian Unit of the Scottish Women's Hospitals arrived at Kraguejvatz on the 6th of January, 1915. The Unit at once took over a Serbian hospital of 500 beds, and also cared for a number of wounded in six small inns in the town. Seven members of the staff died in one week at the time of the typhus epidemic.

Fourth Serbian Unit established under canvas at Valejvo. The mortality in the surrounding Serbian hospitals was as high as 87 per cent. The mortality in this camp hospital was reduced to 12 per cent.

Unfortunately, a great many members of the staff lost their lives in Serbia; but we never had any difficulty in replacing them. When the news reached Britain that seven of our women had died in one week in one hospital, we had five hundred applications in fifteen days for permission to replace them.

"It is impossible," said Miss Burke, "to tell you of the heroism of our doctors and nurses—all of them women. Conditions in Serbia were beyond words. The first unit had an old school-house for a hospital. The wounded lay two and three on the same mattress. Finally they got six small buildings, and moved part of the patients in after our women had scrubbed and whitewashed and cleaned out the vermin.

"Vermin formed a terrible problem for all of the units. All the members of the staff cut their hair short and dressed in white cotton pajamas soaked in petroleum.

"Often the nurses had to fetch their water from a distance of two or three miles from the camp, as it isn't safe to take the water from anywhere near a typhus camp.

"We tried to induce the Serbian women to bring their children to us for treatment. But they are taught to have so small an idea of their own importance, and they are so shy, that it was hard to get them."

"How about the Serbian women during the war? What are they doing?"

"Dying, mostly," answered Miss Burke grimly. "Of course they shouldered the whole burden of agriculture when the men

went away, and raised big crops, only to see them seized by the Germans. I believe one of the most useful things our units did was to convince Serbian men that women are worth something. And the women learned the same lesson."

PUTTING THE KICK IN ETHICS

WE don't hear as much now as we did at the beginning of the war about German "Kultur," but it's a many-sided thing and ought not to be lost sight of. Hugh Gibson told recently of one side as he saw it when, as First Secretary of the American Legation in Brussels, he was trying to help Herbert Hoover keep the Belgians from starving.

The relief workers were continually harassed by German officials, although the Hoover helpers carried special passes signed by the high command. Mr. Gibson went to the German Governor-General to protest. The Governor pooh-poohed the complaint and didn't attempt to put any delicacy into his suggestion that Mr. Gibson was exaggerating.

It was an uncomfortable situation for a neutral diplomat, but up spoke a junior member of the Legation with a suggestion at which no one could take offense. He said:

"Why not send out a German officer in citizen's clothes, with a pass such as Hoover workers have, and see what happens?"

Young Beutner, son of an Imperial Cabinet Minister, took him up. He started out with his pass, an even more iron-clad one than that supplied to the relief workers, one "so good as to be hardly fair," as Mr. Gibson said. He approached the border, was held up by the German guard, and produced his pass. "Probably forged," grunted the officer in charge. Beutner protested—and got just what some of the Hoover workers had.

One who showed particular efficiency in the beating up that followed was a big man with a huge black beard. They tossed what was left of Beutner into the automobile and told him to return whence he had come. He did. Next day, when a member of the Legation visited him in the hospital, Beutner told his story.

"But what hurt most," he concluded pathetically, "was that the big fellow with the black beard who kicked me from behind was my old professor of ethics in the University at Munich."

TALK IS NOT ALWAYS TALK

BEFORE the war, General Foch was a lecturer at the French École de Guerre. In one of his lectures he laid before his students the following maxim:

"A lost battle is a battle one believes oneself to have lost. A battle, then, can only be morally lost. But, if so, it is also morally that a battle is won. One might add, a battle won is a battle in which you refuse to acknowledge defeat."

Fine talk! you may say; but how would it work out in practice?

At the supreme moment of the Battle of the Marne, when victory or defeat seemed to hang in the balance by a feather weight, a corps commander hurried to General Foch with anxiety and despair written all over his face.

"My men are tired out and at the last gasp," he reported. "They can fight no more."

General Foch wheeled upon his corps commander almost fiercely.

"So are the Germans," he snapped back. "You are to attack at once!"

Those ten words foretold the greatest victory of the war. That attack smashed the famous Prussian Guard of the German Center, and compelled the German Right to beat an overnight retreat.

CAPTAIN MICHAEL WHITE.

THEY WILL MAKE THE PLAYTHINGS OF THE FUTURE

AT Pau, near the Spanish border, three crippled French soldiers who had drifted together began carving toys, with only their jack-knives, out of old boxes and any bits of wood they could find. One of the men, Laulon; was a permanent invalid. Another, Arribet, had lost an arm and a leg. The third, Cousseau, was also a cripple.

The chief of the American Red Cross

Bureau for the re-education of crippled soldiers sent them proper machines and materials for toy-making. A short time later she received a box containing the miniature cart shown in the left-hand picture. With it came this letter:

"Mademoiselle:

"This toy cart is a knick-knack of our own creation, without any model, which we ourselves imagined as typical of this region. It is we three who have made this little present for you, and it is a very small thing beside all that you have done for us.

"And since you are particularly interested in Comrade Arribet, I can, in my turn, only praise. With his left arm and his right leg amputated, he is a remarkable character, and he gives to our other comrades, such as I, who are less wounded, a great courage.

"One of a humble family of eight children, he made his living as a servant, and when the war deprived him of means of resuming his former trade, he turned to the

toy factory at Clermont-Ferrand, where he became the best pupil in the school. Encouraged by the instructors there, and wishing to make his labors still more useful, he came to Pau, and it is here that I came to know him. Since then we have been working together, in the hope that some day we might be able to find a position which would permit us to earn our living. Despite the fact that I have two arms, and a certain artistic gift, he succeeds in outrivaling me. My friends join me in wishing you a Happy New Year and in thanking you once more for your noble gifts.

(Signed) LAULON,
"School for Mutilés, Pau."

FIVE MINUTES OF SCIENCE

By PROFESSOR JOHN PAUL GIVLER

What is a Japanese Air-Plant?

IF you have been keeping a Japanese air-plant at your house under the impression that it is a plant, hold tight to your arm-chair, for here is a shock:

The Japanese air-plant is not a plant at all; it is an animal. It eats, sleeps, breathes, and has its optimistic and pessimistic moods, just like any other creature.

Take the little fellow down off his hook some day and put him under the microscope. You will then see that he has mouth, throat, stomach, and all that sort of thing. The Japanese air-plant is one of many animals that live standing still and looking like real plants. They are called hydroid polyps.

Air-plants are captured in salt water, dyed green, and soaked in glycerine. If it weren't for the dye they would be brown; and if it weren't for the glycerine they couldn't live on air and away from salt water. The reason they droop and mope in dry weather, and spruce up bright and green when it rains, is because they live on the moisture in the atmosphere.

Now you know. And if you have been letting the poor creature worry along with nothing but the general title of "air-plant," you might give it a name.

Five-in-One Meat

PROF. A. M. REESE, the scientist, has just decided that alligator meat is good to eat. He says it is tender and has the combined flavor of fish, beef, chicken, and pork, and then one of its own.

Where Camouflage Got Its Start

CAMOUFLAGE is not new. It is as old as the first blade of grass that ever grew, as the first bird that ever took wing, as the first reptile that ever crawled. It was invented by divine providence when the world began, and we only think it new because some shrewd people have applied it to modern war.

When the world was raw and crude, and the life of every creature was battle to the death from day to day, nature colored and tinted her children to blend with the landscape in natural concealment. And this natural camouflage, as explained by the American naturalist, Abbott H. Thayer, is far more wonderful than anything devised on the western front.

Did you ever notice that most creatures of forest, field, and stream are shaded dark above and light beneath? That reverses the rule of ordinary light and shadow, and gives its possessor a flat, disklike appearance. It fools the eye because its shadows are unlike those of ordinary objects.

Then, take the dappled, streaked, checkered, and blotched creatures, such as the dappled gray horse, the zebra, the diamond-backed rattlesnake, and black-and-white cattle. Notice how much the dapple looks like light falling through leaves, the zebra's stripes like the shadows of branches, the rattler's skin like mottled undergrowth. Notice how blotches on cattle break the animal's natural outline and blend with the landscape. That's camouflage par excellence—protection from pursuers.

Everything the army camoufleur does to-day is imitation of this marvelous system. And he can't do it so well as nature does, because he must work with inanimate objects to fool the thinking eye in the air above.

What the Ants Do with Their Kings

THE king business has had some pretty hard knocks since this war began. Nicholas Romanoff has lost his job entirely, and the Allies are planning to give the Kaiser the blue envelop. There have even been a few grumblings against King George of England, and nobility and aristocracy generally has developed a pretty black eye.

This makes it interesting to note how our hard-working little brethern, the ants, handle their haughty monarchs. They do it pretty thoroughly. And they have had the problem whipped for centuries, whereas the human race is just getting busy along that line.

The ants' plan, as outlined by the scientist Lubbock, is quite in accordance with the edict to Adam and Eve that their descendants should earn their bread by the sweat of the brow.

When a misguided gentleman ant decides to be king, and gathers a train of slaves about him, builds a particularly high ant-hill, gives it a fancy name, and quits work, the other ants kill him. That is the ants' solution of the aristocracy problem. And that goes for any ant whose ambition is either merely to quit work or to quit work and wear a title.

The ants have a good deal of trouble with these blue-stocking gentry, too. There are so many would-be rulers among the tribes that if a king will do an honest day's work on the side they let him go on and be king—or queen.

Oh, yes, they have queens. Ambitious ladies of the Red Sanguinary Ant Tribe go on the war-path, murder the grown ants of some little black tribe, bring home the babies and rear them as slaves. But these queens work hard themselves, for and with their slaves and subjects; and so they are tolerated.

The Refuscent Ant is a born nobleman. He is tolerated because he works hard and is a brave fighter. But he has to have slaves because he can not build a house, cook a meal, or feed himself.

The Strongylognathus used to get by as kings and queens; but they are being wiped out by their slaves because they won't fight any more. Worst off, though, are the Anergates, former rulers of ant-dom, now deserted by their tribes, and hunted and persecuted by all ants. Only once in a while does a scion of this proud line find a great-great-grandson of some former subject to give it a square meal and take care of it overnight for old time's sake.

The Truth About Moths

FOLKS generally have many mistaken ideas about moths and what will kill them.

Ralph C. Benedict has just finished a four-year study of this clothes-hungry little pest, and he has discovered that: Camphor and naphthalene in closed places kill them surely. It is almost impossible to poison them to death. Cedar chests and tobacco do not repel them. Any tight-closed box, if none are already in, will keep them out. They may be in your clothes, even though you can't see them, because they take on the color of the garments they eat.

He turned one red, white, and blue on the proper diet.

Gunning for Tigers and Converts

FIVE rifles on a rack on a wall of the study of the Reverend H. R. Caldwell, of Yen Ping, province of Fukien, China, give an insight into the reason why Mr. Caldwell is one of the best known missionaries in China.

"I never use a Bible to preach to the Chinese," Mr. Caldwell explained, as he exhibited his soul-saving arsenal. "I know better. If I reached into my bag and took out a Bible, the group would all melt away. But I get my gun, and preach religion with a repeating rifle. Here is the story of how I make my converts:

"One day a conference had been called in a near-by village, and I had started with my Chinese cook, Da Da.

"When we had reached the place for the meeting, we found the village in mourning. A boy of seventeen had been eaten by a tiger the day before. Nothing but his head was found (the beast generally leaves the head of his victim untouched), and all the natives were scared to death.

"They were so upset, we thought it best to postpone the conference. All the village insisted that I must go and kill the tiger.

"Of course I said I would go. We took along a goat for a decoy and started up into the ravine near by.

"We waited four hours, until nearly six o'clock, Da Da watching up one end of the gorge and I the other. We had about decided to give it up and go home, when something moved near us. Suddenly there slipped out of the bush, within a few yards of us, the biggest brute of a royal tiger I'd ever seen. He came on us as noiselessly and softly as a picture on a lantern-slide—just 'faded' into view, if you can call it that. Well, I grabbed that little .22 high-powered rifle, which was all I had along. It shoots an explosive bullet through a steel plate.

"When I put that gun to my shoulder, I prayed as I never prayed before, 'Dear Jesus, direct this shot.' I tell you, that was a time for prayer, and the Lord was right there. I pulled the trigger, and the great tiger just crumpled up and fell over, as easy and soft as a flower. I didn't need another shot.

"I sent back to the village for help, and we got the beast on poles and took him down for the people to see. We put him in front of the headman's house, and every one came from miles around to look, and made even more noise and fuss than when they were begging me to go on the hunt.

"Now, here's the best of the story—how I bagged my real game.

"One of the boys came up to me and said: 'Teacher, how is it that you are not afraid to go up alone against a great beast like that? When we go for tiger, we take one hundred men with poles and sticks and drums, and make much noise; but you go quietly with your servant, and shoot the tiger all alone.'

"'No,' I said; `I wasn't alone. I had some one besides a servant. I had my Lord Jesus with me, and He showed me what to do.'

"Then I told him how I prayed when I made the shot; and I took out my gun, broke it for him, and explained how the cartridges went in and slipped out. And pretty soon all the people left the tiger and came around, and I sat on the edge of a bed, breaking that gun and shoving in the cartridges and slipping them out, and all the time telling them about the God of the Christians who gave them guns like this.

"Then I shot John 3:16 into them, and pretty soon that whole crowd was converted and wanted to be taken into the fold.

"I tell you, that little .22 high-powered rifle is the best weapon for Christianity any one could have."

"Red Flannel," by Anna McClure Sholl

—Continued from page 7

"You do look a bit done up; but be a sport, Barnes, and come. It will squash the scandal-mongers. Show yourself in a box and all will be well. We won't drag you before the curtain."

"Well, I'm not making any promises."

He sat late at his desk, drearily unable to decide whether to go home or to the theater. What he dreaded was the reaction to his first sight of her after many months. In his stranded, helpless state, he would feel like a castaway who for a brief time sees upon the horizon the sails of a ship that goes onward to a goal he himself will never reach.

But Wilcox's words, "It will squash the scandal-mongers," rang in his ears and urged him on to the last sacrifice he could make for her.

EIGHT o'clock found him seated nervously in the shadow of a box-curtain. So unimportant did he consider himself that he had not even changed from his office clothes, and, peering out at an audience of unusual elements, he felt like a stranger who has wandered into town from some distant country place. Among the faces he recognized many of her friends; and once Prendergast came excitedly down the aisle, whispered to some one, and was off again.

At last the curtain lifted and the play began. To Mason the stage was empty until she came upon it. Then everything grew throbbingly alive, and she seemed unreal and wonderful to him as she moved with infinite grace through the involutions of the first act, weaving dramatic webs through voice and look and gesture, casting a spell on the audience, whose outward tokens were silence and a tense atmosphere like the pause before a tempest.

He hated himself for a paroxysm of coughing during the progress of a difficult scene, and he wondered whether her quick look directly at him was a rebuke. He muffled his mouth as well as he could with his handkerchief, and made ready to quit the place should another fit seize him. But he soon forgot his fears—even forgot at last the crucial fact that he was witnessing the performance of a work by Prendergast. Playwright, producer, manager—all were left behind as she advanced from height to height of her achievement.

During the last act an usher brought him a note. Opening it, he read these words:

Put red flannel around your throat to-night.

ELISE.

"Wait," he said to the man; and, tearing off a part of the paper, he inscribed the words:

I haven't any.

BARNES.

He wanted to cry after the messenger had gone—like a neglected child who is told to accomplish something beyond its powers. Red flannel! Where would he get such a thing? Was she making fun of him? She had no right to do that. Oh, she had no right to do that!

The remainder of the play was lost upon him, or came to him through the misty avenues of his tear-filled heart, blurred in effect. Only the strong, steady applause, which was like the roar of a rising tide, conveyed to him the success of "False Dawn." From that volume of sound he retreated as from victories in which he had no part.

WHEN the star had taken call after call, the curtain finally fell on an exhausted but self-satisfied group of people, the members of a company sure of the success of their performance and in buoyant reaction from the nervous strain of weeks. Elise was popular with them, and they crowded about her to offer congratulations.

"I wonder if every one is as hungry as I am," she said, as she beamed upon them.

"Hurry up and change," urged Harry Wilcox, who had been weeping for joy in the arms of the producer. "The food proposition sounds good to me. Where do you want these flowers sent, dearie?"

"Send 'em to the nearest hospital. It went like a breeze, Harry, didn't it?"

"Like a cyclone! You're goin' to have a bite with me and Guy?"

"I suppose so."

She lingered a moment, for she knew Prendergast would be waiting for her, and she dreaded his romantic importunity.

He was at her dressing-room door, sure enough, a rapt look on his poetical features—the reflection from unplumbed depths of self-satisfaction.

"Well, the deed's done!" he sighed.

"Yes; your play's a success."

"Our play, Elise."

"I didn't write it."

"You inspired it! Elise, am I never to have my reward? Won't you promise me to-night that you'll get that divorce and marry me? Think how long I've waited."

"Think how well you've employed your time, Guy."

"I'm tired of waiting, just the same," he said with emphasis.

"And I'm tired of not being sure," she retorted.

"Sure—what do you mean?"

"Of you—of myself."

"You don't question my devotion," he said impatiently, following her into her dressing-room.

She did not answer him at once; then she replied musingly:

"There's something you can do for me now—this very minute."

"What is it?" he asked eagerly.

"You heard Barnes cough, didn't you?"

His face grew hard.

"I certainly did! He had no business to bring that to a first night."

"Rather white of him to come at all, I think," she replied.

He looked at her jealously. "Did you give him that box?"

"Yes. Now, this is what you can do for me, Guy. You can go out and hunt up some red flannel and lard and mustard and things for Barnes's throat. There must be some little shops open on Eighth Avenue, or maybe there's a drug-store. Cold cream would do instead of lard."

He stood very still, staring at her with angry, incredulous eyes. At last he ejaculated: "Get those things for him? Never!"

She looked amused. "You are not a good sport, Guy!"

"Anything but that!" he answered sullenly.

"Look here, Guy; he gave you the most beautiful theater in New York to put your play in; you—the man I'm supposed to be in love with. Aren't you capable of the extent of reciprocity represented by half a yard of red flannel—after all those beautiful sentiments in your play?"

"My play has nothing to do with Barnes Mason."

"Well, where would we have been if he had turned sulky? There wasn't a theater but his in town free for a long run. He turned his treasure over to us—and at a low rent, too, and you won't so much as buy a bit of red flannel for his throat."

"You are humiliating me," Prendergast said angrily.

"That depends on the point of view."

He regarded her jealously. "You're very solicitous about Mason—all of a sudden."

"I'd be solicitous about any one with a cough like that," she retorted.

"He had no business to disturb other people," Prendergast muttered sullenly.

"Will you get the red flannel for me—and the other things?" she inquired, calmly insistent.

"No, I will not, Elise," he said emphatically. "You shouldn't ask me to do an errand like that."

"Then I'll do it myself," she replied.

He waited a moment, his hand on the door-knob.

"You are coming to supper with us, of course?" he remarked uneasily.

"I suppose so. You'd better run along and secure a table. You know where I like to sit."

He started to go, turned back, opened his mouth, closed it again, shrugged his shoulders, and went out.

AS Mason switched on the light in his apartment and closed the door behind him, he did not experience his usual sensation of reaching a refuge. A deeper loneliness oppressed him than he had yet felt, as if her triumph had removed her further and further from the only things he had to offer her—a home and his need of her.

Her note to him was like the incident of a dream. How difficult it was to imagine Elise even knowing of such a commodity as red flannel. The very words brought up in his mind the picture of his mother smearing a dreadful mixture of lard, molasses, and mustard on a flaming strip of that serviceable material by the light of a kerosene lamp, while he, flushed and feverish, looked on expectantly.

His throat felt hot and dry, and he went into the bath-room for the bottle of gargle he kept there. How often Elise had laughed over the meager furnishings of his own particular glass shelf, the rather wild and ragged tooth-brush—a "Sis Hopkins" tooth-brush, she called it—and the

---

misshapen tube of paste, some of which was always in a cloudy smear on the glass.

When he had gargled his throat, he went back to the living room, and sank into an arm-chair, too weary even to light his pipe or to put his feet into slippers.

The sharp ringing of the bell roused him from a feverish doze, and he went impatiently to the door, resolved if the visitor were Wilcox to be rude for once. He would not talk over "False Dawn" with him or any one.

BUT when he opened the door, there stood Elise, bareheaded, with an evening cloak over her shoulders, and her arms full of bundles.

"You!" he exclaimed.

"Yes, me! I thought you needed some one to take care of you. That cough of yours, Barnes, nearly upset the climax of the first act."

"Yes, I know," he said humbly. "I oughtn't to have gone to a first night with a cough."

"Nonsense. Only I fell to thinking what you ought to do for it, and nearly forgot my lines."

She advanced into the room, deposited her parcels on a table, and looked about her. Everything was as she had left it. Even her vases held fresh flowers, and these harmonized in color.

"Barnes," she said softly, "why didn't you put back the Moors'-heads and the bronze dog?"

"In your rooms!" he exclaimed.

She turned from him and began nervously to untie the packages.

"I've brought everything," she said. "You must go right to bed and have your throat tied up."

He smiled.

"With red flannel? I can't connect you with red flannel."

"Oh, violet isn't the only color!" she gave back.

He regarded her wistfully.

"I'd rather you'd go away now, Elise. The longer you stay, the harder it will be afterward."

She took no notice of this.

"Get ready for bed," she commanded. "You'll take more cold standing there. This place is like a barn. Why don't you turn the heat on?"

But he lingered.

"Prendergast's play was great," he said wistfully. "I didn't think he had it in him."

"Maybe he'll never grow up to his play," she said, with a laugh.

She went over to the fireplace, took from the mantel a bowl, emptied it of its dried rose leaves, and poured mustard in it. "Rose dust won't hurt you," she remarked cheerfully.

Barnes watched her with fascinated eyes. His sore throat was vanishing like snow in April; but, rather than let her know it, he would actually swallow the fiery mixture she was preparing.

"How many times must I speak to you, Barnes?" she said, when she looked up and saw him still gazing at her with that rapt, incredulous expression. "It's all ready. Just call out when you are."

Then he obeyed her, wondering if they were both on some unreal stage which would vanish if the wrong word were spoken. When he called to her, she came in with the red flannel bandage and a hot drink. He submitted to the one and drank the other gratefully; then sank back on his pillow, regarding her with wistful eyes.

"Are you going now, Elise?" he said.

"Not this minute. I'll look around the apartment a bit. Don't you have your mind on me. You go to sleep."

THE fact that she was to be near him for a little while longer filled him with deep content. A pleasant drowsiness crept over him, and in very luxury of comfort he closed his eyes.

How long he had slept he did not know; but when he opened them again, there was Elise seated in front of a fire just lighted on the hearth in the bedroom, and slowly and reflectively taking the hair-pins out of her hair. For a moment he didn't dare speak, lest she should vanish as they do in fairy tales. Then he risked it, one hand against his red flannel stock, his sole link with reality:

"Elise, aren't you going home?"

"I am home," she answered. "What time shall we have breakfast?"

Food Monopolist Crusoe Discovers Meatless Tuesday's Footprint

How Do You Deal With Trouble-Makers?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

Illustration by Jessie Gillespie

SOME years ago a big Eastern public service corporation was under constant fire from the press throughout its large territory. The city newspapers did not make much trouble, but never a week went by without its heated editorial attacks from the suburban and country press. Criticism would burst out now in one section, and again in another; and, while little direct harm was done, it took only half an eye to see that something was wrong somewhere.

This state of affairs hampered sales work. So the sales manager went on a little tour of investigation, and this is what he found:

John Jones, editor of the Bingville Weekly Bugle, found himself short of money to meet the pay-roll Saturday afternoon. Three columns of advertising had just been canceled by a local merchant, and the baby was teething at home. An editorial was needed to close the forms. He looked around for something to criticize, remembered that this public service company took sixty days to pay its advertising bills, and vented his spleen in a burning editorial demanding lower rates or better service.

The company carried advertising with all those little editors. Most of its supplies were purchased from big concerns whose bills required careful checking, and who could wait for their money, so that ordinarily a bill might not be paid for thirty or sixty days after presentation. The Bingville Bugle's little bill for advertising space went in with the rest.

On the sales manager's suggestion, the company established a special short-circuit accounting service for simple bills from little people, so that these could be checked up and paid within two or three days. In effect, they were put on a wage basis. Six weeks after that short circuit was established, all criticism died out, and it has never been renewed. Now, when the pay-roll is short and the baby is teething, the Bingville Bugle criticizes some other corporation or the State legislature.

How do you deal with trouble-makers—fellows who get in the way, and raise objections, and block things?

They are just as likely to be inside the organization as out.

The advertising manager of a manufacturing company went before his board of directors with a $300,000 program laid out for the coming year. He took specimen layouts and diagrams showing returns for the preceding year, and presented his plans so vividly, in a four-minute talk, that approval seemed to be merely a routine matter.

Then, suddenly—the trouble-maker!

One director reached for a drawing that was to go into a big women's magazine and remarked to another:

"This page ad alone will cost us $5000."

"What! For one issue?" asked the other director, in alarm, and thereupon held up the whole appropriation, regardless of the fact that his company had been buying such advertisements for years. And that program did not go through until the advertising man's wife cleverly got the conscientious director into a meeting of the local women's club, where half a dozen of her friends, carefully prompted beforehand, impressed upon him the part that advertising played in simplifying their work of purchasing for the home. Because he had a mind that jumped to conclusions, they brought him around by main strength of argument; and at the next directors' meeting he insisted that the advertising program be reconsidered and approved.

The trouble-maker can often be diverted by giving him something else to think about or something different to do.

At a big university, one of the time-honored student institutions was the yearly bonfire on the campus. This always proved costly because the students stole their fuel. On the morning after an annual bonfire the university was minus all the loose boards on fences and outbuildings, and everything burnable that could be picked up and carried off.

There was some talk of prohibiting the bonfire altogether. "Prexy," indignant about student lawlessness, was in favor of this.

But just then the faculty enlisted a new instructor in engineering, who, returning from ten years of practice in the business field, brought a fine ability for handling men through unobtrusive utilization of their motives. As an alumnus, this engineering professor entered into the spirit of the annual bonfire, and suggested that the students make it even more festive by taking up a collection for refreshments.

The idea was seized upon, and he became custodian of the fund, and at the next bonfire sure enough there were sandwiches and a huge pail of coffee. Nobody ever thought to ask the engineering professor for an accounting of that fund, however, and this was just as well. For with the students' quarters and half-dollars he had provided sandwiches and coffee and an ample supply of boxes, barrels, and miscellaneous lumber which had been scattered around the campus beforehand with apparent carelessness.

There were enough barrels and boxes for a dozen bonfires; and the students, having paid for these themselves, stealthily stole them to feed the flames, and left the college fences alone.

Cut Your Red Tape Carefully

AT the elbow of a certain business executive rests a pad of paper headed, "Time-Saver Sheet." At the top of the sheet is printed the firm name and address, a date line, and a salutation. Under this is the following:

"This form is to save the delay incidental in dictating to stenographers. If information is asked, you can save time by replying on this sheet and returning same to us. If information has been asked of us, we give it to you briefly, as our idea of service is action with brevity."

Below this statement the busy executive writes in pencil two or three simple sentences, signs his name, and throws the paper into the outgoing mail basket.

There was a time not so long ago when to sign a letter in pencil was bad business form, but the war is teaching business to cut red tape and produce results by direct methods. How much better is this simple, direct statement from the man at the head of affairs than the usual long-winded business discussion, often dictated by a subordinate, with waste paragraphs and "palaver."

Not long ago there arose the fad, supposedly valuable in saving the time of the executive, of stamping a letter "Dictated but not read." This was a false method of cutting red tape.

A certain government official asked for bids on shipbuilding supplies. The lowest bidder accompanied his form with an explanatory letter stamped, "Dictated but not read."

In the letter several words were badly mangled, and a decimal point on an important item of costs was misplaced. The officer returned the letter to the bidder with the notation, "Would advise you to destroy your rubber stamp and read your letters. This bid is rejected for lack of proper consideration."

Of these two attempts to cut red tape, the first, the pencil memorandum from the chief executive, was simple and direct and justified. The second method is clearly wrong.

Sell It to Her

AN insurance man who found himself running out of live prospects among young insurable office men after the war began, started to canvass the office women who had taken their places.

While his associates complained of poor business, he card-indexed the women holding well paid jobs, who could afford insurance. He found them more approachable than men, more inclined to listen to arguments, and more easily convinced.

If you are an insurance agent it may be worth your while to apply this idea. And hurry up. Because, says Rough Notes, with many of their active salesmen going to war, many insurance companies are taking kindly to enlisting saleswomen to look after the large increases that they expect in life, health, and accident business.

A Letter from Casey

DEAR BILL:

Received your letter wherein you unbosom some bitterness because you have not been rewarded for your efficiency as a train dispatcher, while others, no smarter, have been promoted.

No, Bill, there's been nothing the matter with you. You certainly are A TRAIN DISPATCHER with a record that has 'em all backed off the board.

Bill, they offered you the chief's chair once, didn't they? Seems like you turned it down on account of the long hours, hard work, and the pay wasn't enough more to make it worth while. Sure—it was a tough job with lots of "rawhiding" and abuse attached to it. Yes, I remember now, they unloaded the job on young George. He used to handle all the dirty dishes around there. Remember that time they wanted a train dispatcher to take a tough assignment out on the line where he would have to stay up nights in the rain with a bad situation? Nobody else felt like going to it—wasn't anything in it but exposure, hard work, and eventual criticism; you know how it is: good thing to avoid; George did it.

I just happened to notice your P. S. saying that they have made a train-master of George. Well, well, what do you know about that?

Why, just think of all the fool things that kid used to do—the time he used to throw away—riding around on freight trains, rummaging around the roundhouse, messing around with the track department, helping build time-tables, and the Lord knows what all—and, mind you, not getting a cent overtime for it. SAY, BILL, any time they got us to put in any extra time they PAID us for it—didn't they?

In regard to the advice you ask, Bill, I hardly know what to say. But you certainly are A TRAIN DISPATCHER, and we could fix you up over here at the same price you are getting there and would guarantee not to ask you for any service we didn't pay you for.

As ever, your friend,

CASEY.

Where to Fight

NEVER try to settle a dispute with a customer across the counter, is the advice of an experienced hotel man. And the Hotel World tells why. Your position behind the counter gives your customer a subconscious feeling of superiority over you. When he comes up boiling with a complaint, get a good position from which to discuss the matter with him. Come around on his side. Put the dispute on a dignified basis at the beginning by saying, "Just a minute, sir, and I will be right out to talk this over."

That shows you are willing to give the matter time, and not complicate it with whatever work you happen to be doing behind the counter. Moreover, when you come out on the floor you eliminate that feeling of superiority in the customer's mind.

He Capitalized His 'Phone Number

TOM WILLIAMS went to St. Louis from Springfield one day to buy lumber. He never had been there before, and he started to look up the dealers in the bulky directory. He looked and looked, and finally threw the book down in despair.

"When I get back home," he said to the clerk, "I'm going to see to it that the people of Springfield never have to wade through a thousand pages of names to find my 'phone number."

That was six years ago. To-day his telephone number—"300 Green, Springfield, Missouri"—is better known than he is. A letter, telegram, or package so addressed will reach him without delay.

To emphasize the idea, Williams painted his business green—wagons, buildings, stationery, everything. Even his billboard sologan: "300 Green for Sudden Service" rivaled the grass on the hillsides. Then he counted himself in—green ties, green shirts, green suits. Not gaudy green, but green.

Business boomed, and he added coal to lumber. The words "300 Green for 2000-Pound Tons," and the fact that he took no orders he couldn't deliver the same day, brought Williams one fifth of the city's coal trade in two years, despite the fact that he charged fifty cents a ton more than anybody else.

And the business? Well, he's had to buy five new sawmills since.

Perhaps Williams came it a bit thick. Others might not want to do it quite so thoroughly. He lived with and for his business, which is not a bad idea for success. But the big point—the point any business man might well apply to his own affairs—is that Williams, with a single carefully worked out idea, put his concern above the common run and branded it distinctive.

THE EDITOR ANSWERS

We Congratulate You

Dear Sir:

Many times I have wanted to congratulate you on your magazine, and am going to put it off no longer. I am a conductor on the New York Central—and a song writer. The song writing is a side line with me, but I get a good deal of enjoyment out of it. It is difficult for me to tell you which gives me the greater amusement—sitting up to the "wee sma' hours" trying to shake a proper melody out of the muse, or reading the rejection slips of New York music publishers. I should worry. I always inclose the proper postage; and as long as I am able to pull the freight for Uncle Sam I can laugh at rejection slips.

E. F. S., Kankakee, Ill.

It was Rousseau, as we remember, who remarked that no man ought to be dependent upon literature for a livelihood. It should be a glorious side line to his regular job of farming, stevedoring, or plumbing. We congratulate you, E. F. S. It would give us less pain, in sending out our own rejection slips, if we knew that every one who received them had a good job and was writing just for the fun of it.

From a Wealthy Subscriber

Dear Sir:

If I should keep my hundred-dollar Liberty Bond until December 15, 1942, without cashing any of the coupons, would the Government pay the coupons all together, together with the hundred dollars; or must I cash the coupons as they come due?

A. O., Bridgeport, Conn.

The Government will pay you the whole. The coupons are an obligation of the Government until cashed: you can save them all up if you want to. Personally, we need the money on our coupons several months before they are due. We are glad to have a subscriber so wealthy that he can even ask such a question.

One on Us

Dear Editor:

Caught you napping. Short story in a recent number entitled "Adopting Bobby." Evidently the author was never in Muskogee. People buy drinks there in drug stores, dry-goods stores, and even in banks, but not in saloons. Oklahoma was "dry" as a territory and has been dry ever since: so there are not and can not be any saloons there.

F. W. S., Chicago.

We have received half a dozen letters on this subject; and we have served notice on our short-story writers that hereafter all stories submitted to us in which saloons are mentioned must be accompanied by an affidavit from the bartender that the reference is O.K. We must have accuracy.

And Once Again

Dear Sir:

On page 14 of your current issue you credit the Indianapolis News with the statement that the following sentence contains all the letters in the English alphabet: "Pack my box with five dozen jugs." Now, frankly, did the Indianapolis News say this or did they express it this way: "Pack my box with five dozen liquor jugs?"

I appreciate the delicacy of the situation. Possibly you shun the word "liquor" in your spotless columns: but don't try to camouflage that old sentence by omitting the letters "l-q-r" which we have been taught belong to the English alphabet.

E. A. S., Philadelphia.

Obviously we have no business attempting to deal with these liquor and saloon subjects. We invariably get in bad. The trouble is with our early training. As the young lady said to O. Henry, "Your mother must have raised you too careful."

Is New York as Bad as She is Powdered?

Dear Sir:

I have read your correspondent's letter about New York, and I agree with everything he says. I have delved in this money-ridden, ragtime-dippy city for eight years. New Yorkers are cold and selfish—horribly so. As some one remarked, they have ambitions but not aspirations. They think they know everything, and that New York is the United States. Me for the Middle West, or better yet the Coast—it's farther away from New York.

R. L., New York.
Dear Editor:

I have lived in New York for ten months, and believe there are as many thoughtful, decent people here, to the square mile, as anywhere. I am sixty-five, and look it. Young men and men of forty frequently offer me their seats in the subway cars. If your correspondent would originate a smile suitable for his countenance, and would wear it week days and Sundays, he might discover admirable qualities in the people of this great city.

H. S., New York.

I have had some unpleasant experiences in New York: but, on my one visit to Los Angeles, I felt lonesome; and a hotel clerk spoke very harshly in Terre Haute, when I visited there. Yet I know that if I had stayed long enough in either place I would have found delightful people and become enthusiastic. I've traveled around quite a bit, and I give you my word, I don't see much difference in the folks. They're all pretty good, when you get to know them.

Our Next Number

WE realize that we are a little peculiar—a bit touched, maybe. We break so many established rules. For instance, we never announce that "our next number will be the greatest number we have ever issued."

Our next number will be about as good as this one. Nothing very special in the way of famous names, but rather a large number of short articles packed in a few pages, and quite a good handful of information, some useful, some not so useful.

We don't pretend to be anything so great in the world. We're just an old friend of yours that drops in of an evening. Sometimes we are fairly bright; and sometimes we just sit by the fire and get off some pretty old ones.

But you know our heart's in the right place, anyway. And if you've got another nickel we'll see you next week.

How I Fell in Love with My Wife

WITH so many million strong men and good-looking women in the world, how does any particular man happen to fall in love with any particular woman?

Or, to be more impertinent, how did you, sir, happen to fall in love with your wife? Or you, madam, with your husband? Did he save you from drowning? Or did you see each other across the audience in a theater? Or how did it happen, anyway?

And does she—or he—correspond pretty closely to the ideal that you had worked out for yourself in advance? Or did you, when the fatal moment came, toss all preconceived notions to the winds?

We will pay $5 for every letter on this subject that is good enough to print: and we will pay $25 for the best letter. All of them must be in our hands by May 15. No manuscripts can be acknowledged or returned. No names will be divulged, of course: and the letters that win will be those that are most specific and tell the most interesting story.

Address the Contest Editor, Every Week,
381 Fourth Avenue, New York.

The Mystery of Shell Shock

—Concluded from page 5

perhaps mentally disordered. Now they themselves have been stunned by a bursting shell. As they return to semi-consciousness, they are in a mood to suggest to themselves any symptoms whatever.

"As consciousness returns," to quote one army physician, Major Arthur F. Hurst, "the patient's mind becomes fixed on some part of his body which is painful, the pain being the first impression powerful enough to attract his awakening attention. Or the temporary inability to see or hear or speak, which generally remains unnoticed when consciousness first returns, because of the absence of any desire to see or hear or speak, is suddenly realized, owing to a special call being made on one of these functions.

"The patient's dawning intelligence becomes fixed upon this single missing function, and he suggests to himself that the disability will be permanent. The fact that other functions are missing remains unnoticed, and after a time they spontaneously return. The persistent localized loss of function is thus caused by auto-suggestion, leading to the perpetuation of what would otherwise be a very temporary incapacity.

"Less frequently, the impressions received by the patient between the explosion and the loss of consciousness gives the key to the symptom. The first thought, on regaining consciousness, of a man deafened by the noise, speechless with terror, or struck in the back by a sand-bag when the explosion took place, may result in the suggestion of deafness, dumbness, or pain in the back and paralysis."

In other words, the psychological theory regards shell-shock patients as being afflicted precisely like those numerous persons in civil life who develop "railway spine" as a result of being in railway accidents which have greatly shocked them mentally, but have caused no organic injuries adequate to account for their disease symptoms. Treatment by drugs or other physical methods fails to cure "railway spine." Treatment by some mode of suggestion may bring seemingly miraculous recoveries. In like manner, a steadily increasing number of experts are agreed, shell-shock victims should be given treatment by suggestion and by "physical re-education."

The difficulty is, however, that more than one method of treatment by suggestion may have to be tried before a cure is effected, for the reason that not all patients are equally influenced by the same method. This means that the physician called upon to treat shell-shock cases has to be exceptionally persevering and exceptionally ingenious.

The Hypnotic Treatment

THE simplest method of all, and the most marvelously efficacious when it can be successfully applied, is treatment by hypnotism. The shell-shock patient is told, while in the hypnotic state, that henceforth he will not be troubled by the blindness, deafness, paralysis, or other disability from which he has been suffering. This assurance of relief is given him in a most emphatic manner. If the suggestion "takes," the patient comes out of the hypnotic sleep to find himself actually a well man again.

It was thus, for example, with a soldier blinded by the shock of a bursting shell that tore his sand-bag parapet to pieces. Other methods of treatment failing, it was decided to make trial of hynotism. He had then been without vision for two months. It proved an easy matter to hypnotize him, and, while he sat unconscious in a reclining chair, an army physician insistently assured him that when he woke he would no longer be blind. He then was de-hypnotized, with the final command:

"Wake, and look around. You can see. You can see."

"I can indeed see!" cried the astonished patient. "My sight has been given back to me!"

Hypnotic suggestion, again, cured the young English soldier whose right arm had been paralyzed as a result of shell shock. In fact, it has cured not a few cases of shell shock presenting symptoms of crippling and paralysis far more distressing than this soldier's.

The Ether Method

SHELL-SHOCK victims rendered deaf and dumb have likewise been enabled by hypnotic suggestion to hear and talk anew. Sometimes, it is worth noting, the restoration has been effected, not by hypnotizing the patient, but by etherizing him. One of Major Hurst's shell-shock cases was a young Australian totally deaf and dumb. Hypnotism had been of no help whatever to him; so he was treated by the ether method, after having been informed in writing that it would have the effect of restoring his speech and hearing. What followed the administration of the ether may well be told in Major Hurst's own words:

"He began to struggle after the first few whiffs, and long before he was anesthetized he began to repeat the word 'Mother,' first in a whisper, then louder and louder, until he shouted it in a stentorian voice that would have filled the Albert Hall. The etherization was then discontinued, his limbs never having become relaxed. As he came round, I told him to say various words, which he repeated after me, and then I carried on a continuous conversation with him. When the effects of the anesthetic finally passed, he was talking with a normal voice and he had completely recovered his hearing."

Here, as explained by Major Hurst, the secret of the cure lay partly in the fact that the subconscious blocking of speech and hearing was temporarily overcome as a result of the action of the ether on the brain centers, and thus it became possible to demonstrate to the soldier that he really could talk and hear. But still more important was the fact that he had subconsciously accepted the written suggestion that ether could and would cure him. Which accounts also for the numerous cures of other shell-shock patients—notably sufferers from some form of paralysis—by the administration of electric shocks. They are assured, and they believe, that electricity will cure them. Their belief invests the electricity with truly curative power.

Educate Soldiers Against Shock

WHEN a patient can not be hypnotized or fails to respond to suggestions given during hypnosis, when he can not be persuaded that ether or electricity or any other material device will help him, his case still is far from being hopeless. For it often is possible quickly or gradually to "re-educate" him to the use of lost functions. This is particularly true of patients afflicted with dumbness, arm paralysis, and shell-shock crippling. So, too, the mentally confused shell-shock victim may be re-educated to normal mentality. But, it must regretfully be added, the process of re-education frequently is slow, and may entirely fail unless carried on by men and women really expert in handling nervous cases.

This being the case, the question of preventing shell shock becomes of double importance.

That it can be entirely prevented is more than doubtful. That, however, its occurrence can be greatly reduced is certain. The elimination from active army service of men having any history of nervous maladies is one helpful step; for persons of neurotic tendencies are notoriously liable to develop shell-shock symptoms. But it is not enough to try to weed out potential shell-shock victims. In every army there should also be carried on an educational campaign to make all soldiers aware that bursting shells which cause no actual wounds have no inherent power to paralyze or blind or otherwise disable. To banish the soldier's fear of shell shock is the essential thing.

Why It is Well to Pay as You Go

A LOT of us common folk who have to struggle along on a salary that is none too large, in these days of war prices, might take a hint from the wonderful system the British Empire has worked out for paying its living expenses. Governments, you know, have a cost of living problem just as individuals have.

The British Government's plan is to pay as it goes, leaving as few debts to drag along as possible. It considers that debts are bad things to have around. Maybe you have found that true in your affairs. We have in ours. And this pay-as-you-go plan, even if it is a bit difficult, seems very much worth while.

So carefully and cleverly has England planned its household budget, according to a London despatch to the New York Evening Post, that it is not only paying current peace time expenses as they appear, but has now reached the point where it is also running its part of the war on a cash basis.

"This means," says the correspondent, "that England is paying for the war out of current earnings. Through bonds and taxes it is raising about a billion dollars a month, cash. This, with a little judicious borrowing from the United States, about equals the current cost of the war and the government."

"We have," says the editor, commenting on the despatch, "still much to learn of the economy through which we can absorb and pay the costs of the war."

He was referring to the American government; but it strikes us that this thing applies to every person in the land.

How Money Grows

WHEN Mary E. Sissons, of Harrington township, New Jersey, was adjudged insane in 1896, she had $56,000 in the bank. When her guardian filed his reports a few days ago, it showed that the original $56,000 had grown, in the last twenty-two years, to $396,221.01. Savings certainly do prosper if they're planted in the right place and left alone.

Whistling for Money

THE folks up at Kenosha, Wisconsin, have the right idea. They are systematizing their war contributions.

The Kenoshans realize—and so ought we—that the Y. M. C. A. and the Y. W. C. A. and the Red Cross and other legitimate war aids are going to need more money right along, even if we have given them a lot. And so they have adopted a plan—a very simple plan. They all stop once a week and whistle for money. The whistling lasts for thirty minutes. When it ends, they've got a lot more war money. This is because every Kenoshan donates his income for the weekly whistling time to common fund. The actual whistling, of course, is done by the city's whistles.

About $11 an inhabitant has been whistled up this way, or more than $350,000 all told. None of it goes for Liberty Bonds. Those are an investment, and this money is a patriotic contribution.

We think this is a fine idea. There ought to be room for it in a lot of our live little American cities. It's better than tag day, saves the cost of a big personal visit campaign, and it makes folks feel that they're giving something without being asked for it.

Good work, Kenosha. We're glad to pass this idea of yours along.

Buying Men's Names

WHEN the Maxim Munitions Company was organized a while ago, hundreds of Americans bought stock in it because they thought they were buying shares in the enormous mental and financial resources of the inventor Hudson Maxim. But they were not.

"This corporation," says the Financial World, "has a capital of $10,000,000 with but little in the form of plants or other visible assets to show for it. The plant at Watertown, New York, about whose acquisition so much ado was made, is no longer in control of the company. The name of the company led a great many people into the stock, believing it would be a profitable speculation. All these people have been grievously disappointed. As a war-bride Maxim Munitions has been a distinct failure."

Even if you have a chance to get cheap stock in the John D. Rockefeller Oil Company, and the promoter showed you a letter from John D himself saying it was all right, you would do well to investigate further before investing. John would.

Why Banking Hours Are So Short

BRIEFLY, it is because so much work must be done before a bank can open, and so much more after it has closed. The bank's hours are short, but the employees' hours are long.

"There can be no holding over of checks or money from one day to another," says Frank Merrill in the Bankers' Monthly. "The results might be disastrous. Tellers must 'strike' a balance as soon as possible. The total of all money, checks, drafts, and notes received must agree exactly with the total sum placed to the credit of the depositors. Remittance letters much reach the proper trains.

Checks must be charged to the accounts of their makers, so that over-drafts may be avoided. Signatures must be examined for forgeries."

A bank is one place where time really is money.

A Common Question

"I HAVE a pretty good sized loss on my Wabash preferred 'A' stock," wrote K. M., of Hamilton, Ontario, to Investment Weekly; "and, in view of the general railroad situation and the outlook, I am wondering whether I should continue carrying this loss in hope of making it up eventually, or whether I should sell my stock at the market and have that much less to worry about. There have been rumors recently that the stock would soon go on a 5 per cent dividend basis. Do you think it likely?"

To which the editor replied:

"If you are in a position to carry the loss you now have, we would suggest that you continue holding the stock. It has acted as well marketwise as many of the better second-grade preferred railroad stocks. The dividend of 4 per cent which the stock is paying is being earned by a substantial margin of safety; and, furthermore, this rate is in effect guaranteed by the government. Sooner or later the stock will undoubtedly be placed on a 5 per cent paying basis."

A good many stocks are having as tough a time just now as "K. M's." Wabash; but if the actual property and the right organization is behind your investment, war fluctuations should not scare you into parting with it. If your stock has stood staunchly by you in better days, it's up to you to stand by it now.

Financial Booklets that Will Help You

COMPLETE information concerning Liberty Loan procedure is contained in a new booklet just issued by John Muir & Company. It is entitled "Your Liberty Bond." Ask for booklet H-33, which will be sent upon application to their main office, 61 Broadway, New York.

AN article entitled "Old-Fashioned Business Paper" by William C. Cornwell, editor of the Bache Review, discusses the subject of merchants paying for purchases by giving their notes. It is considered by the American Trade-Acceptance Council to be most convincing. It is printed in the Bache Review, and copies may be obtained upon application to J. S. Bache & Co., members of 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, O., 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.

E. M. FULLER & COMPANY, members Consolidated Stock Exchange of New York, have issued a new ten-cent page booklet describing in full the "ten-payment plan" of buying active securities, and the advantages of this plan to the investor. A copy may be obtained without charge upon request for booklet O-4 to E. M. Fuller & Company, 50 Broad Street, New York.

ALL owners of railroad securities will be interested in a report of the activities of the Railway Investors' League. This report has just been issued under the title of "Recognition for Railroad Investors—What Has Been Accomplished Since 1916." Copies will be sent on application to P. M. Whelan, secretary, 61 Broadway, New York.

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

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