It's the Most Important Word in the Language To-day

WORDS come and go: they have their day. We have passed through the reign of "psychological" and "efficiency" and "merchandising."

And a new little word now holds the throne: the destinies of the world are wrapped up in its six letters.

It is spelled this way: M-O-R-A-L-E.

I listened the other night to Will Irwin's description of the great Italian disaster. There are no better fighters in the world than the Italians. Cadorna had established them in positions almost impregnable.

What, then, happened to hurl them to defeat?

First of all, the report spread insidiously all over Italy that the war would be over in December, that the peace conference even then was under way in Switzerland.

It spread first, not among the soldiers, but among the women at home. Soldiers going home on leave met wives who gave them the good news and warned them: "Don't take any chances now: the war is practically over. Just be careful a few days more."

The whole story is too long to tell. But, for our purpose, the significant fact is this—the morale of the people at home was first attacked; and they, in turn, poisoned the faith and determination of the troops at the front.

Morale is as old as warfare, and it can be made or broken overnight.

Cæsar was overwhelmed by Pompey at the battle of Dyrrhachium. Yet so powerfully did he impress his own faith upon his troops that they met the same army only a few days later, and, though outnumbered two to one, accomplished one of the greatest victories of history.

Gideon in one night destroyed the morale of the hosts of Midian, and defeated them with only three hundred men.

From month to month, and even from day to day, the curve of a nation's morale fluctuates as the war goes on. The morale of France was very low at the moment of our entry into the war: to-day it is very high.

And that nation whose morale curve is highest when the final conflict comes will win the war.

What, then, is this quality—morale? Of what elements does it consist?

Of cheerfulness, first of all.

When the forty-two thousand Jews returned from their captivity to rebuild the walls of Jerusalem, they brought not merely money and food and implements, but "there were among them two hundred singing men and singing women."

Their leaders knew the magic influence of music on discouraged men and women.

Modern generals have learned that lesson. The German armies are singing armies. And our armies are to be formed of singing as well as fighting men.

There will be no lack of spirit at the front: what of the spirit back home?

And what of the faith of the home folks? For faith is the second great factor in morale.

The strength of the fighter is the strength of his faith [says F. S. Oliver]. Each new Gideon who goes out against the Midianites fancies that the sword of the Lord is in his hand. He risks all that he holds dear in order that he may pull down the foul altar of Baal and build up an altar to Jehovah, in order that his race may not be shorn of its inheritance, in order that it may hold fast its own laws and institutions, and not pass under the yoke of the Gentiles.

Cheerfulness—bred of the knowledge that the home fires are burning brightly and are worth fighting for.

Courage—sustained by the courage of those who are behind.

Faith—that the cause is eternally just, and therefore can not fail.

These are thus elements of morale. If you yearn for the news of victory that will spell peace, see that you keep these qualities in your own heart strong and vibrant.

For almost always, when morale begins to weaken, it begins to weaken first of all at home.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

"THERE ARE NO COMMON MEN"

An Interview with Ralph Connor

By LOREN PALMER

"THERE are no 'common men.'" Type can not convey the meaning that Major Charles W. Gordon put into those words. Back from three years in the trenches, this chaplain of the Canadian forces at the front has, as he said, seen "the sudden flaming forth of the divine in men." For him unemotional bravery and unquestioning self-sacrifice had become a commonplace.

"Why, I remember one little insignificant beggar," he said. "No one knew where he came from, and no one cared. He had been nobody back home; he was the last sort of material, you'd have thought, from which heroes are made.

"Then, one day, he was on duty in a front bay, an outpost position. Men aren't supposed to get together in such places, but a half dozen had bunched themselves there—the human instinct for companionship, I suppose. A live bomb dropped in their midst. Five men rushed to one end of the bay and cowered down, awaiting the crash that would mean death to them all: but the sixth dropped on that bomb and smothered the explosion with his body. He was blown to bits, but the others were saved. It was the little beggar from nowhere in particular."

Major Gordon—you know him better as Ralph Connor, who wrote "Black Rock," "The Sky Pilot," and "The Major," his latest book—Major Gordon was lying in bed in a room in a New York hotel when I talked with him. He had come to New York to snatch a few hours' rest; and I got the impression that he found New York almost too restful, and that he was startled to find here so little evidence of a country at war. By now he is at his home in Winnipeg, Canada, busy with the book his government has asked him to write about the war, or—and this is more likely—back at the fighting front."

The tan of the trenches was still on his face when I talked with him. It is a face strongly lined, and his deep-set gray eyes have the steady look of those who have seen death and conquered fear. The mouth beneath the close-cut iron-gray mustache is firm. They say the chaplains in this war are fighting men.

He told that story of the "no-account little beggar" unemotionally, reflectively.

"Such acts have become almost commonplace," said he. "They are strewn through the story of this war like stones in a field, and all conditions of men have had part in them. They told us before the war that in the 'blue-blooded aristocracy' of England the blood was running thin and the bodies getting soft. But hosts of young men from what we call—for lack of a better term—'the best families' (I hate the phrase) have shown their ability to endure tremendous physical strain, carrying on through the dirt and the lice with unruffled temper and calm assurance. Call for the heroic, and these men are 'there' just as often as those bred to hardship and built for fighting."

"There was one little lieutenant. With his delicate, sensitive face and quiet spoken way, he appeared to be what you call a 'mother's boy.' But he was like steel. In one of our bad goes, his company commander was wounded. He lay in the bottom of a trench, where no living thing could get out or in. He was groaning and bleeding. They fixed him up as best they could, and the little lieutenant asked permission to try to get back and bring up stretcher-bearers. His commander refused. After an hour of this, with no slackening of the hail from the machine-guns, the lieutenant said:

"'Sir, I have always obeyed your orders; but, by God, I can't stand it any longer! I'm going for the bearers.'

"He jumped out of the trench, and without heroics a private, his batman, followed at his heels. The lieutenant got perhaps fifty yards before the bullets cut him down; the private also was killed.

"AND the devotion of the men to one another is just as splendid. Two chums were in a raid in No Man's Land. As they came back, one was wounded and fell near our trenches. The machine-gun fire was so fierce that no one was allowed to go to the wounded man's aid. His chum, however, quietly got together some water bottles, bandages, and biscuits, and begged so hard for permission to make the attempt that his commander said to go.

"He crawled out to the wounded man, tied up his hurts, gave him water, and made him eat some biscuits to hearten him. And then they lay there, waiting for night to come, when they could crawl to safety. As they waited, a bullet found the rescuer. We get to know when a man has a fatal hurt, and this man's chum sensed it.

"'Ye're hit, ain't ye, Jim?' he said. And the other answered: 'Guess I've got it,' and died."

"A few minutes later the sun set, and the man whose chum had died for him crawled back into the lines.

"Oh, yes; once in a while a man does 'break,' but there are few instances of the yellow streak. A man had better die in the field than face the contempt of his fellows. He can't live in a battalion after he has proved yellow. And the war has brought keen discrimination to these man. The symptoms of shell-shock are so like those of terror that at first we were easily deceived; but now the men spot unerringly the man who is going back because shell-shock has unhinged his mind and the man who runs because he is plain afraid.

"Men are naturally brave when it comes to actual fighting, and when we are at hands' grip with the enemy acts of gallantry are so common as often to pass unnoticed. Instances of men jumping into a trench and cleaning up a squad of Boches single-handed are numberless. The Victoria Crosses awarded do not represent one thousandth part of those deserved."

Major Gordon's reference to awards for courage reminded me of what John Gallishaw tells in Trenching at Gallipoli. Gallishaw was a member of the famous Newfoundland contingent. The Newfoundlanders were impatient of formalities, and one big private had been so often reprimanded by smart British officers for minor breaches of discipline that a request for his name meant to him that he'd blundered.

He was in a sap only a few yards from the Turkish position, when the supply of bombs gave out. The bombs used by the Turks explode five seconds after they are thrown, while the English bombs are timed for three seconds. This difference gave the Newfoundlander his chance. Instead of retreating, he began picking up the Turkish bombs and throwing them back."

A brigade officer saw the performance and stood gazing an awe-struck moment. At last he spoke:

"I say, my man, what's your name and number?"

The Newfoundlander heaved back another bomb as he answered plaintively:

"What in hell have I done now?"

Said an Irish sergeant:

"There's a man who would have been recommended for the Distinguished Conduct Medal if he had answered that officer right. The real Distinguished Conduct Medal men and the real V. C. heroes never get them. They're underground."

THOSE men out there know that there are lots of things worse than death," the Major continued after a pause. "Wounded men sent home will say, 'I've had enough.' But they can't stay at home. They want to go back. They hate the beastly thing that is war, but they can't feel content out of it while the others are there carrying on.

"If I were to pick from the hosts of brave men I've known, I think I'd fancy a class of men that perhaps you'd not think of as heroic. I mean the runners. Usually they are young chaps, too light to be of much use in a bayonet push. They go, day or night, on any kind of an errand. They carry on through the worst barrage. Messages must be taken back, and they've got to go. Nothing stops them except death.

"Two of these runners were sent back from an exposed position with a message for headquarters. They hadn't gone far when one fell with his arm shattered. He called to his comrade to go on, and set himself to bandaging his arm. A hundred yards farther on the second man fell—killed outright. The man with the shattered arm saw it. He heaved himself up and staggered on. A bullet got him in the back. His legs wouldn't carry him; but he could still crawl, and he crawled. He reached the parapet and was pulled inside. He gave the message; but when they started to examine his wounds, they found that he was dead.

"Devotion to duty? It has to be duty reinforced by some other human passion to make men do things like that."

EVERY MAN IS A POSSIBLE HERO

COURAGE is elemental and almost universal, says Professor George T. W. Patrick in Medicine and Surgery. No class has a monopoly of heroism. The London cockney, the university student or professor, the wastrel from the East End, most unpromising fighters, many of them, have turned out to be heroes.

Read these incidents taken at random from the despatches:

"A live bomb fell among a group of men. Private D. R. Lander covered it with his foot to protect his comrades. His foot was blown off."

"The Reservist Courtin, of the 126th Infantry, first killed all the men who were working a machine-gun, and then leaped alone into the trench, which was defended by twenty Germans, whom he killed by shooting some and bayoneting the rest."

"Corporal Leboucq, of the 4th Cuirassiers, although he was quite alone, took a captain and twenty-three Württemberg soldiers prisoners by his coolness and intrepidity."

"Arthur Fleury, of the 319th Territorial Infantry, killed four Germans single-handed, captured eight, and put three others to flight. He was twice wounded and sent to the rear, but returned to his company of his own accord, though not fully cured."

When the German Doctors Ran Away

THE camp at Wittenberg, Germany, which housed some fifteen thousand prisoners, Russians, British, and French, was approximately ten acres in extent.

The barracks, built to hold one hundred and twenty men, were crowded to the extent of two hundred. Supplies were so scarce that there was but one mattress to three men. In the hospital there was none.

The cold was intense; but most of the prisoners and all of the British were deprived of the overcoats issued by their own governments. Sanitary arrangements were almost non-existent, and food was reduced to a minimum.

In this camp, in the fall of 1914, typhus broke out in a virulent form, and lasted to the following summer.

"It is easy," says Dr. McCarthy, an inspector of camps on behalf of the Amercan Embassy, in his book The Prisoner of War in Germany (Moffat Yard & Company), "to imagine the helpless horror that overtook the men. It was from this plague-stricken camp that the entire German staff and guard to a man, responsible for their own honor and their safe-keeping, fled. Not a single German was left within the camp enclosure."

Presently, however, help was sent in the form of four British doctors who had been detained at Halle—probably, Dr. McCarthy says, for this very purpose. Of the four, one survives. He, one Captain L—, found the sick and the well all herding together. When he tried to take them to the hospital, he found no stretchers were available. Tables from which the men ate were used for the purpose, and there was no soap even to wash them afterwards. When he attempted to wipe away what he thought was dust from the folds of a man's clothes, he found it to be a moving mass of lice. When he took the clothing from the men to disinfect it, he had nothing to put on them instead. Drugs and bandages were practically unprocurable.

Gangrene and bed-sores resulted in loss of limbs that might have been saved by some camphorated oil and cotton wool.

The food consisted of a roll, half a cup of milk, and some soup transported in wooden tubs without covers. It was impossible to get even warm water with the milk.

And, according to orders from the German government, all patients, whether they were suffering from plague or other disease, had to be placed in the same hospital!

By dint of courage, perseverance, and devotion, conditions improved after a time. Beds and clothing were procured in small quantities; also drugs and food free from dirt.

Finally, by the middle of April the cases diminished rapidly, aided by the warm weather.

And then, when all danger was past, a German doctor visited the hospital in search of bacteriological specimens for research work!

"I believe," says Dr. McCarthy, "that if the military authorities had called for volunteers to manage the medical side of these plague camps, they would have found German doctors to face the danger and assume the risk and responsibility.

"Yet, in the absence of this, German science and German medicine will bear the responsibility and the odium attached to the act of men who, when human life was placed in their hands, failed to live up to their plain duty."

Mother and Child

One Mother's Letter

SEVERAL years ago a little mother, with her husband and two boys, "took up" a small ranch on a Colorado desert. They were ten miles from the nearest neighbor, and their wood and water had to be hauled five or six miles. There was no money, and a great deal of hard work. The mother was well educated and she greatly missed good books and magazines.

Then the father died. The two little sons and their mother had a hard time indeed making a living. After twenty years of this starved, monotonous life, the two boys found lucrative positions in the nearest city. Then they wrote her that they were going to send her money soon to buy some good clothes and a ticket to California, where she was to live at ease the rest of her days. The boys had made arrangements to be transferred by their employer to the same place, and henceforth all would live together.

The little mother shed tears of happiness.

A few days later the United States was plunged into war, and the letter from her boys that had made the little mother so happy was closely followed by another, in which they asked: "What shall we do, enlist or not?"

The mother never hesitated, but, sitting down in the shack by courtesy called her home, she cast away her hopes of being liberated from her prison of poverty. Here is the letter she sent her boys:

"You must decide for yourselves, my boys. But if I were in your place I know I should enlist and go to the defense of my country. And oh, my dears, if you should not live to come back, life is but a little span at best, and you would have a part in saving the finest civilization of which the world has ever dreamed. On some cathedral in Italy—I can not remember just now which one—there is an inscription which reads: 'That only is important which is eternal.'"

The boys have gone "over there." She has resumed the old life of poverty and toil in the desert. But it is said that nowhere else in the world can there be seen such wonderful sunsets as in the desert.

The Open Boat

By C. F. S. in Punch

"WHEN this here War is done," says Dan, "and all the fightin' 's through,
There's some'll pal with Fritz again as they was used to do;
But not me," says Dan the sailor-man, "not me," says he;
"Lord knows it's nippy in an open boat on winter nights at sea.
"When the last battle's lost an' won an' won or lost the game,
There's some'll think no 'arm to drink with squareheads just the same;
But not me," says Dan the sailor-man, "an' if you ask me why—
Lord knows it's thirsty in an open boat when the water-breaker's dry.
"When all the bloomin' mines is swep' an' ships are sunk no more,
There's some'll set them down to eat with Germans as before;
But not me," says Dan the sailor-man, "not me, for one—
Lord knows it's hungry in an open boat when the last biscuit's done.
"When peace is signed an' treaties made an' trade begins again,
There's some'll shake a German's 'and an' never see the stain;
But not me," says Dan the sailor-man, "not me, as God's on high—
Lord knows it's bitter in an open boat to see your shipmates die."

Down But Not Out

HIS leg had been entirely shot away, and he wore a rude attempt at dressing when they found him. After drinking all the water he could get, he insisted on telling his story. It is his rescuers who relate it in Under Three Flags (The Macmillan Company). They were two graduates of Johns Hopkins.

He had been in the fighting round Termonde. When he awoke to consciousness he heard a German groaning beside him. In broken French the enemy explained to him that his knapsack contained bread, water, and dressings, which he would share if the Frenchman would fetch them. He did. But the German died.

That same day another fight occurred close by. Once again he lost consciousness, and awoke to find his leg shot off. Again a wounded Boche was close by.

For the second time, he shared supplies with an enemy. Then there came a German ambulance, which took away his chance friend but refused to help him out of his agony. Utterly worn out, the poilu lapsed again into a faint. He was numb with misery when they found him three days later. They took him to the Termonde hospital. One day he was seen, raised on one elbow, explaining excitedly to a fellow sufferer that he knew a one-legged man who had become an aviator. The moment he left the hospital he was going to join the air force!

American Nurses Arriving in London

The Son of One-Horse Jack

By PHILIP CURTISS

Illustrations by Walter Biggs

ON the fair grounds, some one was working a jumping-horse. From the roadway Marc Adam watched him a moment, and then strolled over for a nearer view. It was an act innocent of ceremony, for the Wessex fair grounds were nothing but an open field with a weed-grown track, a sagging white fence, and a grand-stand capable, from all appearances, of holding about twenty people.

Near the gate, Italian laborers were working listlessly, and, as the visitor passed, one or two of them touched their caps respectfully. To one who knew him only as the former head of Adam & Company, importers of salad oils and extracts, the patriarchal touch would have been rather ridiculous; but at the present moment it seemed quite in the picture, for in his tweed knickerbockers and swinging his cane, the old merchant looked very much the country gentleman. With his pointed gray beard, he bore a striking resemblance to the late King Edward.

At the side of the track, Adam leaned on the rail and watched the performance, which was nothing remarkable for a horseman, but seemed very spirited to the good-natured onlooker.

The horse in the case was a large brown animal with an anxious eye, and, excited by jumping, it kept mincing up and down with little rears from the ground, to which its rider paid no attention. The barrier was only a three-foot gate topped with brush and flanked with the usual white-washed wings; but, to the man standing on the ground beside it, it seemed a formidable height. With a genuine hippodrome thrill he watched the rider put his horse toward it, saw the animal gather speed in quick drumming steps and then sail into the air. The top bar went down; yet, even at that, it seemed to Adam quite a majestic performance. He felt inclined to applaud. But his feeling was hardly shared by the rider, who, still in mid-air, looker over his shoulder and gave a muttered exclamation. He turned the horse spiritlessly and came back to the hurdle, while a friendly la-borer restored the fallen bar.

"Good jumper, is he?" ventured the merchant. (To him horses were always masculine.)

The man in the saddle wiped a perspiring face on the sleeve of his shirt.

"Ten years ago she was," he corrected unconsciously. "She's been spoiled. She's learned she can knock the bar off, and so she doesn't try."

He sat as if willing to continue the conversation, and Adam studied him critically; for, although the old Jewish merchant knew nothing of horses, he knew a good deal of men. He saw before him a man of thirty, with a handsome but not very mobile face, and one made older by those deep weathered lines at the side of the mouth so common to men who make a profession of sport. It was the face of a man who knew the world well enough if occasion required, but did not boast of it meantime. Realizing his own inadequacy where horses were concerned, Adam ventured nothing further, and the rider picked up his reins.

"Well, I mustn't let her get cold," he said. "Good day."

"Good day," replied Adam; but as the younger man walked his mare across the grass, Adam stood looking after him with the almost pathetic sympathy of an older man for those qualities in a younger which he himself has never possessed and now never can possess.

The Italian laborers had an Irish boss, and of him old Adam sought information.

"That?" replied the Irishman, turning to look at the now distant horseman. "Why, that's Mr. Sullivan." Then, being a proper Irishman with a weak spot for anything savoring of the turf, he added: "One-Horse Jack Sullivan they call him. That's what they called his father before him."

Marc Adam's eyebrows lifted suddenly.

"So? I knew One-Horse Jack well years ago. Is he alive now?"

The Irishman shook his head.

"Dead these five years." Then he added: "A fine man. A fine man."

"A fine man indeed," echoed Adam. "How goes the work?"

THE Irishman answered with all the minute detail of a man consulted on his own profession; but when Adam walked away from the fair grounds his mind reverted immediately to young Jack Sullivan. The old merchant had indeed been guilty of a mild sentimental falsehood when he had said that he had known the older Jack Sullivan well, but in this he was free from any intent to deceive, for the mention of One-Horse Jack had brought rushing back a chapter in Adam's own history which he had almost forgotten.

In the seventies—those mellow days of black-walnut furniture and famous horse races, those days which, even in this republic, we designate as "Victorian"—Marc Adam had come to this country, a boy of twenty. His father had been a hotel-keeper in Prague. He had had a good bringing up and a good education, but his only friend in America was the caterer of a racing club on Long Island, and for want of a better beginning young Adam had found himself installed at this club as a waiter. It was not the station in life for which he was fitted, but the mild young Bohemian took it good-naturedly, and in some ways that summer was the happiest of his whole life. It was certainly the most exciting.

Among the gallant racing men was Jack Sullivan the elder, even then known as "One-Horse Jack"—hard-bitten, hard-riding, loud-laughing, and with a knowledge of horse-flesh amounting almost to clairvoyance. He never had any great amount of money, but he was not an adventurer. He asked no favors and accepted no loans, and he owned just one good steeplechase horse, which he rode himself.

Possibly because the fearless riding and the dashing manners of the young Irishman so contrasted with his own mild nature, the young Bohemian waiter made of the horseman a mental hero. He always sought opportunity to wait on him. He never missed seeing his races, if only from the club-house piazza; but, as usually happens, the object of this hero-worship passed through it completely unconscious of it, and when autumn came young Adam abandoned the shirt-front and napkin for all time.

A fair master of English, he easily obtained a clerkship in an importing house, and the racing club chapter of his life history soon faded from contemplation. A man of refinement and education, his career was not that of the usual Jewish immigrant. It was not spectacular: it was rather a steady advance through positions of trust until he married the daughter of the head of his firm and reëstablished the house as Adam & Company.

There was nothing in Adam's later life to remind him of that single picturesque summer; nor, for that matter, did he care to have anything remind him of it. In his clerkship days he looked back upon it rather with shame, and when he married his wealthy, conservative wife, diplomacy kept him from mentioning it. Now, however, he looked at things more broadly, more humorously. Now that that far-off chapter of his early life had at last been recalled to his mind, he remembered it, not with humiliation, but with a sudden warm sense of colorful reminiscence.

IF the chance encounter, however, had made a deep impression on the older man, on the younger it had made none at all. Only when, on the following day, he found the gray-bearded man at the same place on the fair grounds did he have any recollection of the first meeting. This time it was he who spoke the first words.

"Fine morning," he said.

"Beautiful," replied Adam. "Is the horse going better to-day?"

At mention of the unfortunate mare a mock dejection came over the rider. He shook his head ruefully.

"No," he drawled; "she'll never go any better. She's lost it. She's gone."

The older man looked his sympathy, and after a pause he asked tentatively:

"Are you going to take part in the Hunt Club show?"

Sullivan smiled.

"It doesn't look so. I had hoped that I might work her up to it, but I can't."

The old merchant hesitated. He knew perfectly what he wanted to say, but he knew equally that his ultimate intention would require the utmost diplomacy.

"Isn't your name Sullivan?" he asked.

The younger man looked up sharply and nodded.

"I think," said the older, "that I once knew your father—at the Manhansett Club."

Like a miracle the rider's face changed. He looked at Adam expectantly.

"Yes," continued the latter; "at the Manhansett Club, forty-odd years ago. I worked there."

HE would have told exactly the capacity in which he had worked, except that he did not think the time was ripe. It would have made no difference, for at the single mention of his father the younger man had been won.

"Those were great days," he suggested enthusiastically. "My father always was telling about them."

"Yes," repeated Adam. "He was a young man then. He had a wonderful gray horse."

"Kentucky King!" exclaimed Sullivan impulsively. "I've got a picture of him."

"Kentucky King," affirmed Adam smiling at the other's enthusiasm. "I saw your father ride him in a steeplechase without a saddle, for a bet; and he won it too. I remember that race as if it were yesterday. Mr. Belware had a horse in it."

"Belle of Brooklyn," snapped Sullivan, with the horseman's astounding accuracy for past performers.

The older man nodded.

"Your father was a hero that day. 'One-Horse Jack,' they called him."

"They call me that, too," grinned Sullivan. "One horse has always been our speed."

---

"Well, if the horse is a good one, as your father's always were—" began Adam. And then he saw his mistake.

Sullivan saw it too. He looked down at the brown mare's head and grimaced.

"Guess I'm not keeping up the family reputation."

"Don't think you need to worry about that."

Adam made light of it; but as he turned to go Sullivan called to him:

"By the way, if you cared to see that picture of Kentucky King, any time you'd drop over to my house, Mr.—"

"Adam," supplied the other.

"I'd be glad to see you, Mr Adams."

"Adam, not Adams," corrected the merchant, smiling.

He did it with a very deliberate purpose; hut not until a full hour later did honest Jack Sullivan get the significance of it. He was soaping a bridle in his stable-yard when it came to him.

"Adam," he repeated to himself, and in his simple and slow-working mind he began piecing together vague references to that name. Then the truth burst on him; but he soon dismissed it with a grin.

"Aw, I should worry," he said to himself, and went on soaping the bridle.

JACK SULLIVAN the younger, in short, like Jack Sullivan the elder, belonged to a type of man of which at least one specimen exists in every horsey community. He was what is called in Ireland a "squireen." He was a gentleman by birth, but his purse was small and his tastes and ambitions were limited entirely to horses. By the very nature of the circumstances, he was essentially a man's man, and among the men of Wessex he was always taken for granted. By the women of Wessex he was greeted with cordial bows, but it was rarely that he ever spoke with one of them, even with those he had known from childhood.

Little, however, as social problems ever troubled Jack Sullivan, his experience was broad enough to make him thoroughly conscious of them, and the minute he had identified Marc Adam he realized that the kindly old gentleman was the leading figure in one of those cruel dramas that are played in every exclusive resort in America.

WHEN he had purchased the great Wendall estate in Wessex, Marc Adam had been absolutely guileless in intent. He had merely known that the almost baronial old mansion, with its exquisite setting of New England hills, met exactly the picture which he had formed, even before he came to America, as a background for that autumn of his life toward which he was always working. What he did not know was that, except for the impetuosity of an agent, he would never have been allowed to purchase a foot of the Wendall estate; that other residents of Wessex would have bought it five times over rather than let it go to one of his race.

The truth of the situation was impressed inevitably upon the unfortunate gentleman before he had been two days in Wessex. He had seen too much of the same situation in other places not to recognize it. For his part, he had come to an age when he could find it broadly amusing; but, in a way that really showed the fineness of the man, it saddened him to have arrived at a point where he had expected the world to be broad and beautiful, and to have found it as mean and petty as the world of his first clerkship.

To the credit of Marc Adam, he displayed no consciousness of the wall of hostility erected around him. Even in his own mind he refused to harbor a smallness to match that which was entertained against him. He lived his life in Wessex, enjoying such pleasures as no hostility could keep him from enjoying, but, until he spoke to Jack Sullivan, neither he nor his family had made or received one single social advance.

Not even was the invitation of the simple young Irishman accepted until it had been repeated: a delicacy quite unnecessary, for a visit to Jack Sullivan's bachelor house had the formality of a visit to a barn—which, in some ways, it rather resembled. It was a place that would have given a housekeeper cold chills; but the moment Marc Adam entered it, it awakened a reminiscence as potent as that of forgotten scents. The yellowed prints on the walls, the spurs and gloves lying carelessly on tables, the aroma of leather and old tobacco, made him suddenly feel, with a catch at his heart, that he was back in that old, old racing club of his youth. There was a sense of squat bottles and long pipes, and of a tall figure with thin bow legs standing before an open fireplace.

It was a crude hospitality that Jack Sullivan offered; but, until he sat back in a great leather chair and talked of old days, Marc Adam had never realized how lonely he had been in his isolated grandeur. He had meant to stay twenty minutes. He stayed three hours; and even then he did not mention the affair that had brought him until he was leaving.

"Mr. Sullivan," he said, "I've got a matter that I would like to talk with you about. Why couldn't you come up to dinner to-night?"

For a moment the Irishman's face clouded. He had not dined formally in a private house in ten years,—not since the single ill-fated attempt to send him through college,—and the idea appalled him. His rooted habits revolted against it, but equally his social training was not quick enough to invent an excuse. He stammered and blushed, and then accepted. The moment he was alone, he regretted it. He grew hot and cold, he was in a panic; but he went.

AND then happened a curious thing: The minute Jack Sullivan had stepped across the threshold of Adam's house, there swept over him a wave of reminiscence as vivid, as potent, as that which had swept over Adam. The old Wendall mansion had been little changed since he had gone there as a child. There were distant memories of boyhood; but the thing was deeper than that. It was more like slipping hack into a pleasant dream or waking up from a bad one. Jack Sullivan couldn't tell which, but it was all strangely, vividly familiar. These deep carpets, this slipping in and out of anxious-faced servants, this cathedral clock booming in a hall, this fire burning in an immense stone fireplace—all seemed strangely exhilarating. It all seemed a life that he had once left and now come back to again. Poor Jack Sullivan! He had gone badly to seed in ten years.

It was from a trance that Adam rescued him when he came down the oak staircase looking, in his evening clothes; more like King Edward than ever.

"May I present you to my wife, Mr. Sullivan," he said—"and my daughter?"

The young horseman turned to see a stately woman in a gown as magnificent as the room, and behind her a small dark-eyed girl of twenty-odd, with a foreign look and a wistful expression.

It was not until after dinner, over their coffee, that Adam mentioned the subject in mind.

"Mr. Sullivan," he said, "I know it is not your business, but I need an expert. I want to build up a stable. Myself, I know nothing of horses; but somehow, here in these hills, motors seem out of place. I want horses—all kinds of horses: coach horses, saddle horses, hunters. There are such horses to be bought, but I don't know where to get them. You do. Will you help me?"

At the very suggestion Sullivan's eyes grew wide with interest and his weather-beaten face grew brick-red over his unaccustomed white collar. Adam's ambition seemed to him so wholly normal that it never occurred to him that the old merchant had never dreamed of it three days before. He leaned across the table in his excitement.

"If you are looking for a good hunter," he exclaimed passionately, "I can tell you where, for six or eight hundred, you can get the finest three-quarter thoroughbred you ever saw—pure chestnut, not a white hair on him, sixteen hands, carry your weight, and just as good in heavy country as in the show ring—"

Adam laughed.

"I guess we can talk business," he said. "Shall we join the ladies?"

SO began a friendship as novel, as vivid for the young Irish sportsman as it was for the old Jewish merchant.

At nine the next morning Sullivan was at the Wendall place, and with old Adam surveyed the long-disused stable. The next day, in Adam's big car, they made their first trip after horses.

"I'll call around at your place and pick you up," said Adam in planning it. "And, the way, do you mind if my daughter comes?"

"Mind?" asked Sullivan. "Why, not at all. But, as I was saying, if you want to get the true type of French coach horse, you can't expect to pick them up offhand. Nevertheless, I can show you—"

Show him he certainly did. Business the real love of Adam's life, in those trips he learned the fascination of that most alluring of all forms of commerce, the buying and selling of live stock—the long motor trips over sun-bathed hills, the picturesque, almost feudal scenes at the big stock-farms, the high-bred animals running free in whitewashed paddocks, the quaint, pungent talk of the stablemen, and all the old-fashioned etiquette of buying and selling. In that line, at least, Adam saw very soon that the son of One-Horse Jack was no mean bargainer. Every horse-dealer, every stockman in the country knew him, and to every one Sullivan adapted himself precisely.

At the big Fairview Farms, where they went for the coach horses, he was as formal as in a law court. "If you please, Mr. Kinkaid," it was to the manager; and "The pleasure is mine, Mr. Sullivan."

On the other hand, at sharp little "Cooch" Dawson's, where they went on the long chance of picking up a weight-carrier, it was more: "How old is she, Cooch?" "Six this spring." "Six, eh? That mare was six the year of the Civil War."

THEN, one day in the early fall, when the air was sharp and the sun was golden and the hills were blue and the scent of burning leaves was in the wind, One-Horse Jack was called to his door by the honk of the motor-horn, but saw in the car only a single bundled figure. A pair of dark eyes looked at him rather timidly, and a voice said:

"I'm father's substitute to-day. He's gone to the city."

And it may have been the tartness of the air or the golden sun or the blue

Continued on page 18

Does the Other Fellow Overlook Points?

By JAMES H. COLLINS

Illustration by Jessie Gillespie

A CERTAIN editor maintains such an even average of originality, practicality, and human interest in his magazine that people often ask where he gets all his ideas.

"That's easy!" he says. "Our best things are taken out of rival magazines—we go after the articles they do not publish, the points they overlook. Every article ever written was intended to answer readers' questions. While the author is answering some questions he usually raises others that he does not answer. We follow up the suggestions, and get the answers. Points that other fellows overlook would fill three magazines like ours—if we see them."

Most of the originality in business, and the service and the efficiency, come down to this—doing things a little better, a little more quickly than others.

Out in the Middle West, where it is harder to build up a manufacturing business than it is in the East, because materials are not so handy or trained workers so plentiful, there is a factory that makes ventilating apparatus of galvanized iron. In cutting parts there was considerable waste of sheet metal. The manager looked around for some way of utilizing these trimmings, and found that they could be made up into good brick-ties—which are short strips of metal laid with the mortar in brick walls to help hold the structure together.

But how could that prairie factory sell brick-ties after they were made? It had no trade connections in the hardware business.

For several weeks the manager studied the subject of brick-ties among contractors and hardware dealers, and then founded a growing business on two points that the other fellows were overlooking. Ordinary brick-ties were just plain strips of sheet-iron. He devised a new brick-tie having triangular points punched up in the metal, which tied a wall more tightly by giving a better hold on the mortar. Then he found that ordinary brick-ties, being cheap things that everybody took as a matter of course, were sold loosely in kegs, the hardware dealer weighing them out, or sometimes counting them. Why not put up his brick-ties in packages of a hundred each, with a little talk on the box about the superior holding quality of the triangular points?

Old hardware men could not see any advantage in treating brick-ties like breakfast food. But the manager adopted his package idea, and that gave his product distribution with very little sales work among the hardware dealers. For they found ties in packages more convenient to handle.

A Little Lesson in Efficiency

SOME years ago the writer described a remarkably efficient system that was being used by a department-store in Canada. On the day that the article appeared a department-store manager in New York telephoned excitedly to ask where he could get further details. He said it was just the thing that he had been hunting for for years.

An amusing instance of overlooked points! For, two years before that, the New York store of which he was the manager had engaged a production expert to study its needs and devise new methods, and this very system was the outcome of the expert's investigation. It had been delivered complete, ready to operate, and paid for on a very liberal basis. But the New York manager had never installed it in his establishment. The Canadian department-store man, on an investigating trip to the States in search of just the practical little points that others were overlooking, had taken that system back home bodily, and had made it work for him.

If the little merchant around the corner centers his intelligence upon points in service that the big department-store on the main street is overlooking, he can hold his own despite disadvantages of capital and location; while the corporations and trusts and Goliaths of the business world generally are constantly being swatted with pebbles from the slings of little Davids who concentrate on the points they are missing—and you bet they know it!

One of the most successful concerns in the electrical appliance business is located on the Pacific Coast—about the last place on earth for a company in that line. When it started, some years ago, experts in the electrical industry were able to demonstrate that such an enterprise had none of the factors necessary for success—materials for those products were remote, skilled mechanics hard to find, and even if the product could be made in that region, there was not sufficient population west of the Rockies upon which to found outlets.

The young fellows who established this Western concern went ahead, however, chiefly because they had a liking for that particular business and wanted to set up a shop for themselves where they lived. And from the start they succeeded, largely on overlooked points. The big electrical appliance corporations of the East, absorbed in large-scale production and national distribution, were overlooking dozens of important little details pertaining to the human nature side of their output.

Make a Market for Your Product

THE Western company had to make a new market right around home by adapting its products to home people. Dropping the complex technicalities of electric engineering, which had always made electrical devices more or less mysterious to ordinary people, they centered on the every-day human aspects of such devices, and found new points of contact with the public.

Before long they were so well intrenched in their own Western territory that wider markets were needed, and they began to expand into the national field. Goliath thought that rather humorous, and kindly warned them that they stood no chance in competition with his far-reaching organization.

To-day, however, this Pacific Coast concern is firmly established in the national field, and its business has been built on the same factors that enabled it to begin small and on a local basis—the little human points that others overlooked.

How I Help My Husband

I WAS teaching a little country school when I met the man who was to be my husband, and the explosion of a bomb couldn't have upset the people with whom I boarded more than did the statement that I was going to marry a "traveling man." The announcement threw the Sewing Circle into consternation, and many times before the term was finished I heard the remark: "Guess by this time next year she will wish she was back teaching school." But I wasn't, and I never will be. And just because so many people still have wrong ideas about the traveling salesman, I want to tell about my experience.

First of all, the success of the man on the road depends largely upon his wife. When my husband is away I write to him every day, telling him how things are going at home and cheering him up. A salesman on the road needs cheer. There is nothing more tiresome than riding twelve hours at a stretch, and snatching meals at railroad lunch-rooms.

In the larger cities there are fine hotels, but there is no one except a tip-seeking bell-hop to greet you, while in the smaller towns it is often hard to get decent sleeping quarters or meals. There are cranky and time-wasting customers to handle, too. But under all conditions the traveling man must smile and seem cheerful—it's part of his business.

A traveling man has very little opportunity to read while on the road, so I read all the articles I can find on salesmanship and tell my husband about them. He says that this is a great help. Recently I baked some muffins in the pans manufactured by his company. He had pictures taken of them and used the pictures in his selling talk. The plan worked so well that the company has had prints made for the rest of the selling force. There are many ways in which a wife can help her husband on the road.

When "Made in Germany" Fools Us

A LOT of things we Americans have despaired of getting any more because they were "made in Germany" were sent to Germany from America, made up, and sent back to us at fancy prices.

Only our silly insistence on imported articles, in the opinion of President C. F. Kettering of the Society of Automotive Engineers, and our failure to probe for the truth about German goods, keep us from making these things for ourselves.

"A paint salesman came to me," said Mr. Kettering, "gravely concerned because he couldn't get 'those little camel's-hair paint-brushes that used to come from Germany.' I asked him who said they were camel's hair. He said that was what he bought them for. I told him to send a man to the Chicago stockyards and see what he could find out. The man went, and asked if they shipped any hair to Germany.

"'Yes,' said the packing man; 'before the war we shipped all the hair that came out of the inside of a cow's ear to Germany to make camel's-hair brushes out of.'"

Maybe there's a cow's ear in your trade. Look and see.

She Delivers the Goods Both Ways

STARTING years ago with one old gray horse and a second-hand wagon, Miss Cora May Pepper to-day does nearly all the auto-truck, wagon, and bicycle delivering for St. Joseph, Missouri.

The merchants found her system such a money saver, and the people found it so much more satisfactory to deal with a professional deliverer instead of with the old-style store system, that Miss Pepper's business just grew and grew.

But she worked hard, too. No business, she believes, can prosper unless it has its owner's personal attention, and unless the owner is careful about details, and is reliable and absolutely square in even the very smallest details.

Miss Pepper's wagons gather packages at 8:30 A. M. and 2:30 P. M. They are collected in and routed from her central office in wagons numbered by districts, each wagon making two deliveries a day for all the stores. Special deliveries are made by trolley or bicycle, when necessary.

And the Pepper business slogan is: "Not a thing so small it will not be delivered; not a thing so large it can not be delivered."

You might be able to do something like this in your town. That you may have little to start with is no reason why you shouldn't start. Remember Miss Pepper.

The Way to Handle Tony

A LADY bought an umbrella in an Italian shop, and absent-mindedly paid the price asked. Then it flashed on her that she had omitted the bargaining.

"Why, I did not bargain with you!" she said to the shopkeeper. He readily agreed that it was never too late to mend. So the dickering was duly carried out, and the umbrella changed hands at a lower figure.

That, according to a manufacturer of wide Italian experience, writing in the London Times, was truly characteristic of the Italian. He looks upon all dealings as a form of sport, and you will do well to remember it in dealing with him. Trade, to him, is not merely an exchange of goods, but a game in which one man's wits are pitted against another's; and playing your cards cleverly is as interesting as the actual profit or loss resulting.

The Italian, this writer finds, must be dealt with carefully. He has many races and many natures merged in him; and the Sicilian, the Tuscan, the Lombard, the Neapolitan, all Italians, are yet very different from one another.

We are warned that the Italian workman is easily angered, and not quite so easily soothed; but if managed good-naturedly, with sympathy and justice, he will render loyal service. He is quick to go on strike. Reprimand one Italian, and all his friends will quit as a protest. But go to the bottom of the trouble and correct matters, and they will all return to work with no hard feelings.

At learning new tricks and trades the Italian has no superior—especially if it calls for delicacy of touch and artistic treatment. He will learn it in a marvelously short time. He will do wonderful work with the crudest tools, producing not only jewelry, art objects, and the ornamental things of life, but steam engines, electric machinery, ships, and practical devices second to none.

Urn Burial

By CHRISTOPHER MORLEY

Illustration by John R. Neill

NEVER quarrel at breakfast is the first maxim for commuters and their wives. Partings in anger mean day-long misery for both, and generally involve telephone calls later in the day, and a box of chocolate-coated maraschino cherries carried home on the 5.18.

Marriage (say the philosophers) is a subdivision of the penal code, dedicated to the proposition that men and women are created equal. But the studious observer of matrimonial feints and skirmishes sees very little to verify that daring surmise.

Harry Bennett sipped his breakfast coffee grimly. Its savor had departed: for ninety seconds earlier Mrs. Bennett had fled upstairs in a flush of anger and tears. In five minutes he would have to run for the train; and what man can soothe an outraged wife in five minutes? He ate his toast without relish, gazing sourly on the blue-and-white imitation Copenhagen china, the pretty little porcelain marmalade pot, and the big silver coffee-urn.

The desperate inequality of married life pierced his heart. Why should he have to accept in silence tart remarks uttered by his wife, while the least savagery of his own was cause for tears?

He rushed upstairs to say a few consoling words. The bedroom door was locked. Compassion fled, and he growled furiously through the panels. Then he ran hotly for the train.

It seems unreasonable: but the lives of human beings are not guided by reason. Harry had come to the conclusion that the silver coffee-urn was at the bottom of all their squabbles.

Before Elaine Addison surrendered herself into his capable hands, there had been a competitor for the honor of surrounding her with sectional bookcases, linen closets, potted hydrangeas, and the other authentic trappings of a home.

Aubrey Andrews was the rival warrior. He was the kind of man who always has a lot of crisp greenbacks in a neat leather bill-fold. Harry's hard earned frogskins were always crumpled in a trousers pocket. This may seem trivial, but it distinguishes two totally different classes of men. Aubrey was tall, dark, well groomed; he played billiards and belonged to expensive clubs. It was supposed that his wife would be beyond the reach of financial worries. He kept a horse and easy office hours.

Harry—well, Harry was no aristocrat. He worked hard for what he got, and didn't get much. He was neither tall, nor dark, nor well groomed. But he was a fine, lovable, high-minded chap, and to every one's surprise, including his own, he got Elaine.

Tennyson had a good deal to do with it, I think. Harry still read Tennyson, although that excellent poet is no longer fashionable, and kept on repeating what Tennyson said about Elaine. And finally Elaine could not help saying "My Lancelot!" and melting into his arms.

AUBREY gave them a magnificent silver coffee-urn for a wedding present, and presently enlisted for service, first on the Mexican border and then in France, where he became a heroic and legendary figure, surrounded in Elaine's mind by the prismatic glamour of girlhood days.

That coffee-urn was a stunner! It was far the handsomest thing in the little suburban house, except, of course, Elaine herself. Beneath its shining caldron sat an alcohol lamp that rendered a blue flame and kept the coffee hot. Elaine's initials—her maiden initials—were engraved upon it, and those of the donor: E. A. from A. A. The hand of the insidious silversmith had twined the A's together very gracefully.

Every time he looked at it, Harry felt subconsciously irritated, although he hardly realized why.

It stood on the little mission sideboard, outshining everything else in the pretty dining-room. It was Elaine's particular

pride, and was used only on special occasions. Often it was brought out for the little celebrations that young married couples have every now and then. And, curiously enough, these celebrations very often ended in tears. The polished dazzle of those silver curves was only too apt to suggest to Elaine's radiant little beauty-loving heart other handsome wares she would like to have, or unlucky comparisons of the relative beauty of the wedding presents sent by her friends and his; or Harry would make some blunt remark about his not being able to give her all that some other husband might have.

Alas! Something of the sardonic spirit of the black-browed Aubrey seemed to radiate from his urn. Can a coffee-urn hypnotize? Grotesque as it appears, little by little they realized that the innocent piece of silver was marring many an otherwise happy hour.

ALL the way to town in the smoking car, Harry's mind rotated savagely about their absurd tiff.

Let's see, how was it? He had said: "I'm sorry, dearest; I shall have to be rather late to-night. The head of my department is away, and I've got an extra lot of work to do." She said: "Oh, dear—oh, dear! Then we sha'n't be able to go to the theater, shall we?" He said: "We can go next week, Brownie." She said: "Something horrid always happens when we have this coffee-urn on the table."

(N. B. Right here, when the danger topic was introduced, he should have put on an extra soft pedal. But did he? Not a bit. As soon as the urn was mentioned his eyes began to flash.)

"Well," he said, "don't let's have it on so often!" She said: "Any one might think you were jealous of it. It's the only handsome piece of silver I've got."

Here he did make one honest effort to steer away from danger:

"I'm awfully sorry about to-night, honey, but the work's just got to be done." She said: "Why didn't you let me know sooner you were going to work late? I could have arranged to go and see mother." He said: "Oh, well, everything I do is always wrong, anyway! I suppose if I could buy you a roomful of silver like that old tureen you wouldn't mind."

And after that it was not far to the deluge. All conducted according to the recognized technique of quarreling, passing through the seven stages of repartee outlined by Touchstone, which should never be forgotten by those happily married:

1 The retort courteous
2 The quip modest
3 The reply churlish
4 The reproof valiant
5 The counter-check quarrelsome
6 The lie with circumstance
7 The lie direct

ALL day both Mr. and Mrs. Bennett were unpleasantly conscious of their undigested altercation lying black and gloomy in the back of their minds. At lunch-time he tried to call her on the telephone; but the wire did not answer. Indeed, she had gone to spend the day in town with friends, and was to go to dinner and the theater with them. She left no message for Harry, and gave the cook permission to go out overnight.

About nine o'clock he got home, tired and eager to resume their usual blissful companionship. The house was dark and untenanted. In a rage, he threw away the box of candy he had brought, and got himself some bread and cheese from the ice-box.

In the dining-room his eye fell upon the coffee-urn. He swore at it. Just then Elaine called him up, and in a cool, distant voice told him that she had decided to spend the night in town with her mother.

The next morning Elaine came home about ten o'clock, humming a merry little air as she walked down the quiet suburban street. She and Harry had patched things up over the telephone at breakfast-time.

The sun was shining brightly, and she was planning a specially nice dinner for poor Harry that evening. After all, it wasn't the dear boy's fault that he had to work so hard. It was horrible of her to run off and desert him that way. To-night she would show him how much she loved him. They would have ice cream with hot chocolate sauce, and méringues, and chicken salad, and she would buy him a cigar and hide it in his napkin. And the old coffee-urn should go back in the glass cabinet.

THE cook, with a very grave face, opened the front door.

"Heavens, Emily, what's the matter?" cried Mrs. Bennett.

"Burgled!" said Emily tragically. "Some one's been an' bruk in the dining-room winder. Footpads, I guess."

Mrs. Bennett gave a little shriek of dismay. She ran to the dining-room.

One window stood an inch or two open, and one of the panes was broken. She glanced round the room. Nothing was disarranged, but her glance fell on the side-board.

The coffee-urn was gone!

"Well," she said, "that's very extraordinary. Mr. Bennett slept here last night, and he's a light sleeper. He always locks the windows before he goes to bed. Is anything else missing?"

"'The apple pie's gone out o' the ice-box," said Emily.

"Oh, well, that's Mr. Bennett, I'm sure," said Elaine. "I'll call up the police right away, and see if they can do anything. My nice coffee-urn! Why, it's the finest thing we had in the whole house."

Before the police arrived, Mrs. Bennett herself took a careful look round the outside of the house. She found nothing unusual except a cigar butt lying on the ground near the broken window. She picked it up gingerly. A section of the gilt band still adhered to the wrapper. She could read the name, Florona. She carried the fragment into the cellar and threw it into the ash-can.

Two policemen arrived shortly, examined everything, and asked innumerable questions. Mrs. Bennett gave them a careful description of the coffee-urn. They departed, promising to do everything possible to trace it. They said that a piece of silver so large and unusual would not be hard to locate with the aid of the pawn-brokers.

Then Mrs. Bennett went upstairs to think.

It seemed very strange that the thieves should take the urn and nothing else, when there were other pieces of silver beside it on the sideboard. She called up Harry, who was horrified to learn of the loss. He had slept right through the night without hearing a sound. He offered to come home if he could do anything to help; but she would not hear of it.

That night Mrs. Bennett had a special little dinner waiting for her husband: his favorite soup, a tender steak, fried potatoes, ice cream with hot chocolate sauce. And after dinner they discussed the theft of the urn.

"I don't understand how it was that you didn't hear anything," said Elaine. "You generally sleep so lightly. Did you sit up late?"

"No," he said; "I sat in the dining-room until about ten, eating cheese and apple pie, and smoking a cigar. Then I went to bed—"

"Oh, you just reminded me!" cried Elaine. "I bought you a nice cigar to smoke after your dinner, and I forgot to give it to you."

From the mantelpiece she gave him a cigar with a Florona band.

"Why, isn't that nice!" said he. "That's the kind I always smoke. I didn't think you knew one brand from the other."

"I know more than you think, honey," she said.

When Harry came home the next night, he brought a bulky parcel with him.

"I'm awfully sorry about the urn, Brownie," he said. "I went to see the detectives to-day, and they think there's very little chance of getting it back; so I brought you this to take its place."

She opened the package. It was a big china coffee-jug of rose-and-white porcelain, flagrantly out of harmony with her silver-and-blue china.

"Honey," she said, "I think it's just lovely. It's ever and ever so much nicer than that old urn."

A WEEK later, in the afternoon, the local chief of police called up Mrs. Bennett.

"Come down here to the police station," he said. "We've found your coffee-pot. The most extraordinary thing you ever heard of. We found it buried in a haystack, back of Webster's barn. Why any one should leave it there is more than I know. The thief must have been frightened and hid it. Will you come down and identify it?"

Mrs. Bennett hastened down to the police station. There on the sergeant's table stood the famous urn, the pride of her heart. There was no doubt about it: the initials were there—it was hers. Tarnished and spotted by exposure, it was still the handsomest piece of silver she had ever seen. Involuntarily she gave a cry of delight. Then she hesitated. After all, compared to Harry's happiness and hers, what was a silver urn?

"Oh, captain," she said, "I'm so disappointed. That's not mine! It's very much like it, but it isn't mine."

RED-HEADS

WHAT BECOMES OF SALOONKEEPERS?

---

MAGICIANS

THEY FOUND LIFE WORTH LIVING, AFTER ALL

Beating Back to Prosperity

I WAS working for a corporation at a salary of $170 a month. I was happily married, and thought I saw my way clear to a successful future. Then, one day, the secretary of the company called me into his private office and told me that, on account of a dull season ahead, the pay-roll must be cut and that a few of the higher salaried men, I among them, would have to go.

Up to this time we had saved nothing. We had not lived extravagantly, yet we had always managed to spend all

of my salary before the end of the month. I thought it would be only a few days until I could find another position, but weeks passed and I found nothing. I was getting desperate when I called on a banker and told him my troubles. The best he could offer was a place as a uniformed attendant in the lobby—that is, directing customers to the various departments. The salary was $60 a month.

I took the place, but I didn't tell my wife exactly where I was working or what my duties were. If she had ever come into that bank and seen me in brass buttons, the shock would have proved fatal.

When our lease was up we moved to a cheaper place. At first we had a hard time getting along on $110 a month less than we had been spending. I decided that the only way to beat back was to save money. We found that, by strict economy, we could spare two dollars each pay-day—four dollars a month. It seemed almost too small to bother with. The bank did not allow employees to carry accounts there, so we fitted up a home bank.

A year passed, and I was still at the same place: I was about ready to give up hope when I overheard a stockman talking to our vice-president. He was telling him he had a stock farm in another State and wanted a good man to look after it.

I called at his home that evening, and, thanks to my having been raised on a farm, secured the place. But his next remark left me speechless with disappointment: "I never advance money to a man of your age for railroad fare. If he hasn't saved up enough for that small item, I don't care to have him try to manage a farm for me."

Then I thought of the little bank at home.

G. A. L.

Take Your Broom and Drill

WHEN I went to my doctor for a remedy for sleeplessness, he said: "Get out of bed and exercise." He prescribed a small punching-bag to be hung in my room. I asked him to teach me to use it, but he said: "That bag swings back and forth. If you hit it and don't get out of the way, it will hit you. If you miss it you're likely to fall on your face. Teach yourself to keep out of its way: that will do you more good than you'd get from a course of lessons."

I put an old pair of gloves by my bed, and was ready. Time and again I got up and pounded that bag until I was dripping with perspiration. Then I bathed and returned to bed.

It was about a week before I noticed any benefit; but at the end of the second week I awoke one morning to find that I had overslept and had missed my exercise. I changed my "fighting hour" until just before I retired, and soon had the blessing of sound sleep.

Later, after my children came, I found that at certain hours of the day I became very irritable. I found myself snapping at the children, speaking crossly to my husband, and slighting my friends.

I consulted the doctor who had prescribed the punching-bag. He told me that my trouble was irregular circulation, and added:

"You have a brother in the militia. Why don't you have him teach you to drill with a broom-stick?"

Brother brought his rifle home, and I armed myself with a broom and set to work. Soon I was as expert as he in the drill. Now, when I feel depressed, I pick up my broom and drill until my circulation has been restored and I can smile and speak pleasantly again.

Helping Hoover

WHEN my wife and I discovered that we had only one pound of butter to last us until pay-day, ten days away, we wondered how it would be possible to "spread" it that far, considering that a pound usually lasted us five or six days.

We decided to cut it into ten pieces and use no more than one piece each day. We followed out this idea, and at the end of ten days we finished the last piece and were not aware that we had "skimped."

We liked the plan so well that we told a neighbor, and she immediately tried the experiment; and at the end of the first week she reported that, instead of the three pounds that she usually consumed in that time, she had used only one. This plan has saved us $2 a month and our neighbor $4.

H. M. N.

Here's a Great Man Who is Proud to Wear Overalls

YOU are probably unacquainted with this man. He runs an electrical shop in Greeley, Colorado. I saw him first when he came to our house to mend a light switch, just from a wiring job, and wearing blue overalls. An acquaintance remarked to me, when he came in:

"That man is a member of the Russian Committee of Honor for Comte Lobachefsky. He went to Russia a few years ago as a special guest from America."

Inquiries developed that Dr. Halsted, mender of light-switches, is a few other things on the side:

Omitting college titles, he is a member of the London Mathematical Society; of the Société Mathématique of France; of the Circulo Matematico di Palermo. He can also afford to admit that he belongs to the Deutschen Mathematiker-Vereinigung, since he has three sons fighting for the Allies.

France has always been his staunch admirer. The French savants, not long ago, issued, as a special compliment to him, an edition de luxe of his important work on modern geometry.

He is named in reviews as the man who gave to the world those theories of modern mathematics on which much of our practical American science is based.

Why, then, the electrical shop?

He explains that himself.

"No," said Dr. Halsted; "I am not hoping to discover new applications of electricity, like Edison. My bent is to mathematical theory; any person accepting my premises is as able as I to handle the force of electricity. I am an electrician for a living.

"Americans are pragmatists. They pay the inventor of useful things, but not the discoverer of principles. I shall not complain—every nation has its particular genius. Besides, the most honorable thing is to give services for which one is not paid."

M. Gauss.

Do You Deal in Misfit Kindness?

THE prayer, "We can take care of our enemies, but from our well meaning friends deliver us, O Lord!" can be said with especial fervor by invalids.

If you have never been an invalid yourself, you have probably known some and sympathized with them. You sympathized with them for the pain and discomfort they suffered, for their life of inactivity in this active world, for their dependence on others for service.

But these are not the worst of their troubles. The very worst are the good people around them who are over-eager to be helpful.

I know: for I am an invalid confined to a wheel-chair. Not only am I unable to stand, but my arms are drawn and comparatively incapacitated. My reach is necessarily much shortened; but my tidy neighbor, though she calls often, never realizes this fact. She always glances around before leaving to see what she can straighten up; and unless I am very alert I find, when she has gone, that she has put beyond my reach some needed article. That is the trouble—the well meaning ones go ahead blindly conferring benefits without readjusting their own standards of pleasure and capability.

One can grow used to life in a wheel-chair. As remarked the small boy who had lost his legs in an accident, and who was wearied by the constant expressions of sympathy he heard: "Aw, g'wan! There's lots of sittin'-down fun." The real trouble comes when you have to smile and be grateful to some one who is actually pestering you.

Take, for instance, the matter of food. The appetite of an active person is no gauge for that of an invalid. Our elementary physiology taught us that "persons of sedentary habits do not require so much food"—and what could be more sedentary than living in a wheel-chair? If, with a fairly comfortable appetite, you dispose of your fairly comfortable meals in a fairly comfortable fashion, you are not likely to feel hungry between-times. But if, in an unguarded moment, you gush over the memory of a long past feast or grow enthusiastic over the description of a present dish, you will likely soon find yourself confronted by a mountain of that delectable, while your kind friend the donor watches with a fatuous smile to see you devour it.

What can you do? It represents trouble, thoughtfulness, and perhaps even sacrifice. You must either choke it down with

simulated appreciation, especially if it is a perishable dainty, or else you must find some excuse to put off the eating till your friend has gone; then it is an easy matter to find some one with an active appetite who really will enjoy it.

Some of my callers come to see me from a sense of duty. One of them is a good old prosy soul with a delightful Irish brogue. On a rainy day, when I tell myself I can revel in solitude, she is likely to drop in "to chare me up a bit, as I moight foind the weather depressin'." I know the usual length of her calls, and we both watch the clock furtively; but, because she is such a good old soul, I can not let her know that I don't need her visits. My confidential friend said I was morbid and mistaken in saying her visits were inspired by a sense of duty until she overheard her say, "Well, I must go now an' see that other poor crachure; it's lo-ong since I be'n there."

My worst experience, I believe, was with a clergyman's wife who singled me out for her philanthropies, though I was at first unconscious of her intentions. I thought she was accustomed to having people do things for her; so, when she came to me for little services, I fell in line and complied, at considerable trouble to myself.

I figured out and made copies of questions for a contest for an entertainment she was going to give the convalescents in a sanatorium. And then she brought me other chores to do, until I began to look forward to her departure, so I could take a vacation.

Finally she came in with a silk banner on which was printed the Lord's Prayer. She had a piece of pale blue surah, and asked me if I would try to type the prayer on it.

It was a mighty troublesome job getting the sleazy silk into the typewriter, but I finally achieved it by building up a frame with paste and paper strips. I felt proud of my accomplishment when I handed it to her, and was surprised when she purred:

"That's nice. I only wanted to see if you could do it. Now, you see, you can put in your spare time typing on ribbon mottoes and things for gifts for your friends."

Spare time! I never have any. I thought how I had chafed at her encroachment on my occupations, and I murmured: "Why, thank you, but all my time is amply and comfortably filled."

She never heard beyond the "Thank you," and replied: "Oh, don't mention it. All my life I have tried to do good. It's a pleasure to me to be able to help the unfortunate."

Verily, a strong enemy, listing and hateful, is much simpler to cope with than a benefactor whose benefactions are a misfit.

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

IN DARKEST AMERICA

IF "hundred per cent Americanism" in its literal sense is to be found anywhere in this country of foreigners, it is among the mountaineers of the South. They came to this country at so early a period that scientists dispute whether their ancestors were all English or partly Scotch and Irish. They are more illiterate than any other native group in the country, but their speech is rich in phrases that date back as far as Chaucer and have long since fallen into disuse here and in England.

If the mountaineer has some vices that do not fit well into modern civilization, he has many virtues that civilized people might well copy. John Fox, Jr., in Scribner's Magazine, tells of his boundless hospitality:

"A belated traveler asked to stay all night at a cabin. The mountaineer answered that his wife was sick and they were sorter out o' fixin's to eat, but he reckoned he mought step over to a neighbor's and borrow some. He did step over, and he was gone three hours. He brought back a little bag of meal, and they had corn bread and potatoes for supper and for breakfast, cooked by the mountaineer. The stranger asked how far away his next neighbor lived. 'A little the rise o' six miles, I reckon,' was the answer.

"'Which way?'

"'Oh, jes' over the mountain thar.'

"He had stepped six miles over the mountain and back for that little bag of meal, and he would allow his guest to pay nothing the next morning.

"I have slept with nine others in a single room. The host gave up his bed to two of our party, and he and his wife slept with the rest of us on the floor. He gave us supper, kept us all night, sent us away the next morning with a parting draught of moonshine apple-jack,—of his own brewing, by the way,—and would suffer no one to pay a cent for his entertainment. That man was a desperado, an outlaw, a moonshiner, and was running from the sheriff at that time."

The mountaineers of Kentucky still believe in witches, and have them. They are haunted by all manner of omens and superstitions. They observe the old Christmas on January 6, that used to be celebrated in England in Shakespeare's time. On that day at midnight the elder-bushes are supposed to burst into bloom, and the cows and oxen kneel, lowing, in their stalls in honor of Christ's birth.

ANOTHER POPULAR IDEA GONE

HAVE you ever had the "feeling that some one was staring at you," and turned to discover that some one was staring indeed? Have you ever sat behind a person in a train, and, fixing your eyes and mind steadily upon him, sought to make him turn around by the power of your own thoughts?

Of course you have. Well, you will be sorry then to learn that there is nothing in the idea; that it is all imagination.

Out in Stanford University the psychological department has been conducting a series of experiments in having folks stare steadily at other folks.

"They tried it on skeptics and on those who were firmly convinced of their ability to stare or feel a stare," says the Independent. "They tried it on men and on women. They tried it singly and in batteries of twenty-four eyes trained on one cranium."

In half of the cases the folks who were stared at turned around; and in the other half they went on entirely oblivious. It's pure chance, say the psychologists.

THREE YEARS IN THE WILDERNESS

IT is the Eskimo's creed that a man never talks about difficulties and dangers, but overcomes them; and if he fails he is not a real man. So the grit, perseverance, and silent courage that Christian Leden showed in battling his way to them through the barren reaches of the Arctic Circle to find out how they live and what they think of life may explain the kindly reception accorded him by the hitherto unknown tribes of the north.

"I went alone," says Leden, telling of his three-year pilgrimage in the Scandinavian-American Review, "for I dared not take a white companion into a country so full of perils and empty of comforts."

Three hundred miles from civilization, after the gray sail that brought him sank into the blue of the southern horizon, he tramped off to Churchill, a clump of shacks misnamed a town, to organize his party.

"We made a queer-looking group,—I with my outfit and provisions, the Eskimos with their skin tents, seal oil, wives, children, and dogs,—all setting sail in an open boat for the unknown north.

"After a fortnight of slow and rough sailing, with hungry dogs, seasick women, and squalling children all making their presence felt in the little open craft, our trip came to a disastrous end. A fearful northeast snow-storm came upon us in a dangerous place. We could see nothing and do nothing against the terrible gale. On the second night the boat was forced by the raging waters over the reefs, and beached. Everything but our lives and a few tents was swept away.

"I could not take my clothes off, and they frosted on the inside. At night I would crawl into my sleeping-bag and thaw them out. So I was wet all night, frozen all day, and hungry. This lasted six weeks, until the snow was hard enough to build houses from. There was plenty of deer, but the Eskimos thought it a sin to cut their hides.

One night, after my tent blew down and could not be gotten together again, I had to get up and shake the snow off me every half hour to keep from being choked. My clothing and sleeping-bag froze together. Our dogs lay outside, shrieking with cold and hunger like human beings in pain. They would try to break into the other tents and eat the little food left inside. I made my will, as I did not believe I would get away alive from that place."

But in November the party did make its escape from the blizzard-swept beach, and Leden went on into the frozen wilderness, where he stayed three years.

"And even now," says Leden, "as [ sit here in this restless city and look back on my experiences, I feel the call to return."

THE SCHOOL AS FOSTER-MOTHER

IN a recent number of EVERY WEEK it was stated that out of 1,000,000 children in the New York public schools, 216,000, or more than 21 per cent, are seriously undernourished; and 110,000 of these are in a condition so acute as to require immediate medical care; 611,000, or almost 62 per cent, are below the normal standard of nutrition; while 173,000, or only 17 per cent, are sufficiently nourished.

What is true in New York is true all over the country, and this problem of badly nourished children is becoming more menacing every year. In 1914, when the war started, only 5 per cent of New York school children were undernourished. By November, 1917, according to the Bureau of Child Hygiene of the Department of Health, this had increased to 21.6 per cent.

One way of combating this evil, which threatens to weaken seriously the physical fiber of the whole country, is to instal scientific school lunches, administered by the city, which children can buy at a low cost.

Malnutrition does not necessarily mean underfeeding; it may mean foolish feeding. A child whose diet is largely composed of coffee, tea, white bread, and meats, and whose appetite is blunted by sweets between meals, will be undernourished as surely as the child who suffers from lack of food.

The organizations in New York which combined to carry out an experiment in scientific school feeding choose twenty-five "Food Scouts" from a public school. Boys were selected who had no physical defects other than malnutrition. For ten weeks these boys were fed balanced lunches intended to furnish the greatest amount of food value at the lowest possible cost.

The menu was varied from day to day. Little meat was given; soups were frequent; whole-wheat bread entirely replaced white; plenty of fruits and

vegetables were served; and cocoa and water were the drinks. Here are two sample menus:

Cream of cabbage soup, carrots and peas, peanut butter sandwich, rice and dates. Creamed fresh codfish, potatoes, whole wheat bread and nut butter, cocoa, banana.

In the ten weeks the twenty-five boys made an average gain of one pound seven ounces apiece. Not one boy lost weight.

The experience of the Food Scouts has had a long train of results. Not only have their own families changed their methods of buying food and preparing it, but the Department of the Interior, through the National Bureau of Education, has sent out 300,000 letters to school superintendents all over the country, calling their attention to the New York experiment; the Federal Public Health Bureau has started a campaign to arouse interest in the proper feeding of school children; and the National Council of Defense is doing the same thing.

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WHAT THEY ATE IN THE SIEGE OF PARIS

DESPITE the scarcity of food in all countries, so far no nation has been forced to use its menagerie to secure meat, nor to make roasts of its domesticated animals. But forty-six years ago, when the Prussians surrounded Paris, the French, gourmands and gourmets, lived through more strenuous days than we do to-day and survived a siege such as we have not had to endure.

Henry Labouchere, proprietor of the London Daily News, found himself in Paris in the first days of the siege, and, welcoming the adventure, be persuaded the regular correspondent to try to make his way to England, while he, Labouchere, took his place.

"As time wore on, writes Labouchere's biographer, Algar Thorold in his Life of Labouchere, "the question of meals in the city became one of absorbing interest."

I went [says I Labouchere on December 21] to see what was going on in the house of a friend of mine, in the Avenue de L'Imperatrice, who has left Paris. The servant who was in charge told me they had not been able to obtain bread for three days, and that the last time he had presented his ticket, he had been given about half an inch of cheese. "How do you live, then?" I asked. After looking mysteriously around to see that no one was watching us, he took me down into the cellar, and pointed to some meat in a barrel. "It is half a horse," he said, in the tone of a man who is showing some one the corpse of his murdered victim. "A neighboring coachman killed him, and we salted him down, and divided him." Then he opened a closet in which sat a huge cat. "I am fattening her up for Christmas day; we mean to serve her up with mice, like sausages," he observed.

On January 6 Labouchere notes:

Yesterday I had a slice of Pollux for dinner. Pollux and his brother Castor are two elephants which have been killed. It was tough, coarse, and oily, and I do not recommend English families to eat elephant as long as they can get beef or mutton. Many of the restaurants are closed, owing to want of fuel. They are recommended to use lamps; but although French cooks can do wonders with very poor material, when they are called upon to cook an elephant. with a spirit-lamp the thing is almost beyond their ingenuity. Castor and Pollux's trunks sold for forty-five francs a pound; the other parts of the interesting twins fetched about ten francs a pound.

Donkey apparently was his favorite dish. This is what he said on the subject:

A donkey is infinitely better eating than beef or mutton; indeed, I do not know any meat which is better. This was so soon discovered by the French during the siege of Paris, that donkey meat was about five times the price of horse meat.

And remarked Labouchere later: "I think I have eaten now of every animal which Noah had in his ark."

MODERN AMAZONS

MILL OR MONTESSORI?

JAMES MILL was an English philosopher and historian who lived from 1773 to 1836, and when his first son, John Stuart Mill, was born, he resolved that, whatever else the boy lacked, he should not suffer from want of a good education.

The story of that amazing education has been often told. Charles Franklin Thwing, in his book Education (Platt & Peck), quotes it again from the author's own words.

"I have no recollection of the time when I began to learn Greek," says the younger Mill in his autobiography. "I have been told it was when I was three."

By the time he was eight he had read the whole of Herodotus and of Zenophon's Cyclopædia and Memorials of Socrates, besides lives of philosophers and the first six dialogues from Plato.

History the young Mill studied in the following manner: From the time he was four until he was eight the family were living in a rural neighborhood, and as his father's health required constant exercise, father and son "walked together in the green lanes." During these rambles the young Mill repeated from notes what he had read the day before—his reading consisting of the histories of Hume, Robertson, Gibbon, Plutarch, and many others. "Of children's books, any more than of playthings, I possessed scarcely any," he mentions—perhaps needlessly.

In his eighth year he began learning Latin—"with a younger sister, to whom I taught it as I went on, and who afterwards repeated the lessons to my father; and from this time, other sisters and brothers being successively added as pupils, a considerable part of my day's work consisted of this preparatory teaching.

"Given such teachers as James Mill, such students as John Stuart Mill would more frequently be made," comments the author of Education.

THE DUKHOBORS

THE terror may rage in Russia, but out in western Canada live a group of Russian people who are safe forever from violence and persecution. These are the Dukhobors. In 1785 the Russian government issued the following succinct order:

"Gather all Dukhobors together and burn them alive."

To the regret of many orthodox Russians, that punishment was softened, because Dukhobors found defenders among people who knew their pure life and their kindness to their neighbors. So the whole sect was exiled to Siberia: they were sentenced to be frozen instead of burned.

But those uneducated peasants of Russia succeeded even among the wild forests of northern Asia. Very soon their villages became well arranged, even rich from a modest Siberian point of view, and their religion spread.

Then the government began to exile the Dukhobors to Caucasus. But their ideas spread rapidly among the Caucasians.

For a long time the Russian government persecuted these thousands of poor peasants. At last, owing to the efforts of Leo Tolstoy and the English Quakers, the Dukhobors were kindly invited to Canada.

Eighteen years ago about 7,500 of them arrived in the New World. The exiles were received heartily by Canadian Quakers. Land was given to them on very easy terms. At first they had trouble with the English officials. The latter could not understand why Dukhobors refused to buy their homesteads.

Interesting letters were exchanged between the "pure Christians," and the "civilians." Said the Dukhobors: "There is no excuse for a man who, knowing the law of God, still appropriates as his own something that is not the fruit of his labor, but created by God for everybody!"

They are sure that the legalization of marriage is a sacrilege, too; they believe laws to be an insult to love. They abstain from liquor, are vegetarians, and do not smoke.

"We believe that the real legalization of marriage union is when it is brought about freely, as a result of pure feeling. Such marriage is legal before God, although it is not registered and other people do not recognize its legality."

About divorce, for a century and a half Dukhobors have been as "advanced" as Ibsen, Shaw, or Jesse Lynch Williams.

"No one, nor any human institution, can make a divorce either legal or illegal. It is a matter only for the consciences of the divorced themselves."

You may imagine that it was pretty hard to live anywhere with such principles. But the Canadian land, the new "little mother soil," seems to keep for them an especially warm corner of her heart.

THE UNMARRIED MOTHER

THE conscience of society is beginning to awaken to the deep injustice and the social waste that result from its attitude toward illegitimate children. Whatever may be the moral responsibility of the parents, the burden of it at least should not rest upon their offspring. But the children do pay a heavy price. This is proved by statistics printed in The Unmarried Mother by Percy Gamble Kammerer (Little, Brown & Company), which is published under the auspices of the American Institute of Criminal Law and Criminology. In Germany during the year 1910, 15.2% of legitimate children died as compared with 25.7% of illegitimate children. In England the situation has been the same. A survey of Brighton in 1908 showed that out of every thousand births 97 legitimate and 202 illegitimate children died.

This high death rate among the children of unmarried mothers is due not in any perceptible degree to inherited weakness, but almost wholly to the environment into which their illegitimacy throws them. Children born in these circumstances almost never grow up in normal circumstances. The disgrace visited upon the mother and the difficulty with which she can earn an honest living make it a common practice for her to dispose of her child as soon as possible. She leaves it at an institution or boards it out with people of her own station, who naturally do not share even such a mother's interest in its welfare. The ease with which the father escapes all responsibility for his act leaves the child without adequate support. Consequently, even if it survives it has small chance to grow up to lead a decent life. Illegitimate children are far more likely than legitimate ones of the same social group to develop into criminals and prostitutes.

Gradually people are coming to see that the State can not afford to let thousands of its children die of neglect or live to be a social menace. The policy of disgracing the mother and ignoring the father has done nothing to lessen the amount of illegitimacy. It is evident that the State must take a hand. Social conditions must he improved so that young girls have a better chance to keep straight. Education in matters of sex must be increased. Mentally abnormal women must be segregated during child-bearing age. Society must change its attitude to make it possible for unmarried mothers to earn a decent living. Illegitimate children must come under public care, and the State itself must in each case find out the father and place upon him a fair share of the responsibility for his child's welfare.

THIS IS HER WEEK

SOPHIA AUGUSTA FREDERICKA, Princess of Anhalt-Zerbst, was born on May 2, 1729, at Stettin in Prussia. She grew up to be a high-nosed, imperious, undisciplined young woman. In 1745 the Empress of Russia secured her in marriage for her worthless nephew Prince Peter, who, futile as he was, could scarcely have deserved so unhappy a fate. Seven years later this prince became Emperor Peter III, on the death of his aunt, and his wife dropped her sonorous and illustrious titles to become Catharine II, Empress of Russia.

Things went smoothly enough for a little while, but the Prussian wife of the Russian king desired to reign alone on the throne of the Romanoffs. Catharine was one of those super-women who usually get what they want in life, and in that highly moral and virtuous assemblage, the court of Petersburg, there were any number who, discerning in what direction their bread was buttered, did their best to aid and abet her. Peter had luck for a time, in spite of swords that dropped on his head, pits that yawned for his footfalls, and ragouts with arsenic gravy.

Catharine left her husband in bed the morning of the coronation, and, rushing to the cathedral before he waked up, managed to get herself crowned alone. After that she had the army at her command and the capital at her feet, for she understood the gift of popularity.

She gave out that her husband was insane, and his abdication was requested by the state. He abdicated and died obligingly—or not so obligingly, some histories say. At any rate, he died; and his wife, who had no more right to the throne than the poorest subject in the realm, became Great Catharine, and reigned for thirty-three years.

Great Catharine spent with a recklessness to exceed which we must go back to the days of Caligula and Heliogabalus. During her reign she squandered a sum equal to $100,000,000 on her favorites alone. "She gave diamonds by handfuls and made gold and silver common as pebbles." By a word, by a stroke of her pen, she who called her people her children and by her royal clemency had substituted the word "subject" for "slave," gave away tens of thousands of serfs, transferring them from one proprietor to another like cattle. People lay groveling in the earth when her carriage passed, and whole villages were exiled to Siberia at her pleasure.

She was a born organizer, however, and desired to shine in Europe as an

enlightened ruler. So she reformed institutions, established hospitals, encouraged internal betterment, founded schools and colleges, and erected arsenals and factories. She doubled the resources and revenues of her country by making war on Turkey and throwing open the Mediterranean, and more than once averted disaster by quick judgments and crafty intrigue.

Her private life shocked even eighteenth-century Europe—than which one need say no more.

She was preparing all the resources of her Empire for war—war on everything and everybody; but, before she pulled this, death came and she fell like a sorceress suffocated by her own poisons.

This is her week because we hope to make the world so safe that no one like her can ever have a week to herself—or himself—again.

The Son of One-Horse Jack—

Continued from page 8

mountains, but it seemed to One-Horse Jack that they had unusual luck that day. A lady's hack was what they were after, and Ruth Adam wore her riding habit. Curiously, Sullivan had never thought about her directly; but in her short-skirted coat and stiff white stock she looked unexpectedly slender and trim.

"Did you notice," asked Ruth, when at last they were on their way home, "that that man at the stock farm kept calling me 'Madame'?"

"No," replied Sullivan innocently; "I didn't notice it."

Then slowly it dawned on him, and his honest face flushed.

"Are you cold?" he asked gruffly.

He tucked the motor robe around her, and found himself excited at the sudden proximity. Seemingly for the first time he realized that things were exciting when there were only two of them there. Leaning back in his corner of the great tonneau, and with Ruth leaning back in hers, life seemed wonderfully luxurious and wonderfully simple.

"What if—?" he thought, then refused to allow himself to think.

"You blame fool, you blame fool," was the way in which he framed, in his mind, his own self-reproaches. But when they reached the old Wendall place, and Ruth asked him, in complete casualness, "You are coming in to dinner, aren't you?" One-Horse Jack would have been disappointed if she had not asked him.

HE had dined a great many times at the old Wendall place in these weeks, but this time it was different. Mrs. Adam was away with her husband. Ruth Adam, changed into an evening gown, presided over the diminished table, and until almost midnight they sat in front of the fire, their faces, burned from the autumn wind, tingling stiffly in the firelight.

The next day and the next week, when Sullivan went up to try the newly bought hack, old Adam was still away; but at last slow-minded Jack Sullivan knew that it made no difference.

Nights, now, when he went back to his own simple home, he took to sitting late in front of his fire; and days when he did not go to the Wendall place he found long and irksome. Three days during which Ruth was away he found almost unbearable. Another man would have bombarded her with letters; but men like One-Horse Jack do not write letters.

JACK SULLIVAN was no fool. He knew well enough where he was drifting; but that any one else might know never crossed his simple mind until it was brought home to him like a blow.

Tod Hurlburt, a man with a lively wit but the tact of a navvy, was the instrument of his awakening.

"Hey, old blighter," he said one day, with a dig in the ribs, "what's this I hear about you and the fair Jessica?"

One-Horse Jack had never heard of Shylock's daughter, but he caught the point. He blushed to the color of brick, and Hurlburt roared.

"Go to it, boy. Go to it," he repeated. "There's five million there for somebody. You might as well have it as any one else."

If that had happened in ancient days there might have been a blow and a challenge, but this was not ancient days. Hurlburt roared all unhindered and went away, leaving One-Horse Jack in a tumult. He was not particularly angry—or, if he was, he was angry at himself. Brutal as he had been, Hurlburt had stated a truth

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that Sullivan was too much a man among men not to appreciate. At least, he wondered whether it were not a truth. It was not so much what people might think as what, from now on, Jack Sullivan must think of himself.

NOT models of all the virtues, men like Jack Sullivan have at least one virtue which they seldom allow to be tarnished—a fierce independence, a fierce self-respect. And now the poison of a single sentence, the glimpse of how his attentions to the heiress of the outlawed millionaire would appear to other men like himself, had put the gall in the first love that lonely Jack Sullivan had ever known.

He showed it in the transparent, child-like way in which he must have shown it. On his next visit to the Wendall place he was stiff and embarrassed, and after that he stayed away for a week. Old Adam noticed it, and it saddened him pitifully; for, although he did not know the immediate cause, he knew only too well the general cause—that same general cause which lay as a curse over all his happiness in Wessex. Even Ruth suspected, but she dared do what her father had not. She rode deliberately by Sullivan's gate one day, and signaled him to her.

"Jack," she said,—for before the crash it had gone that far,—"Jack, have we done anything to offend you?"

Instinctively he put his hand on her horse's neck, but his eyes turned to the ground.

"No," he said, nor did he pretend not to know what she meant. "No. It's me that ought to be ashamed of myself."

He looked up at her then, and her pulse gave a leap; for, being Jack Sullivan, everything in his heart was written in his face. But he did consent to come. He came fairly often, yet always with elaborate pretenses that this horse must be looked after and that horse worked.

When the two could forget themselves they were happy, happier, probably, than either ever had been. Every time that he saw the appealing eyes and the slender figure of the wistful-looking little girl, One-Horse Jack had to fight harder against the impulse to take her into his arms; while Ruth, accustomed only to blue-serge men who talked of buying and selling, knew that no such cavalier had ever before come into her life or ever would come again. Yet always, when they became too happy, back would come that restraint.

It was a cruel little tragedy—the more cruel because it was so unnecessary. A man more gallant would have explained it away in one sentence, and taken the credit for it; but Jack Sullivan never had opened his heart to men, much less to women. Not even in his own mind was it wholly straight. He merely knew that he could not let himself love Ruth Adam, because he could never free himself from the suspicion that it might be her horses, her motors, and the great Wendall place that he loved. And what made it so cruel was that all the time she believed, as her kind old father believed, that he could not let himself love her because of her race.

Fortunately, excuses for seeing each other were frequent, and became more frequent as autumn ripened, for posters were up for the Hunt Club show. With the appearance of the first of them One-Horse Jack was ecstatic. He had done well with old Adam's stable.

It will be a cinch," he exclaimed. "You'll simply walk away with them all!"

But then, as his mind went back to accustomed channels, he thought more coldly, with the precision of his own profession.

"Well, not everything," he qualified. "But you stand a good chance. In the heavy harness class you probably couldn't get better than red. Your horses are matched in conformation, but they are not perfectly matched in color, and yet they are not cross-matched. In the gig-horse class you have got a walk-away. There isn't a horse in the East can touch Rawdon Crawley. For tandems you haven't got anything. For weight-carriers, with Brighton Boss, you stand an even chance; it is all up to the judges. Ruth's mare I wouldn't enter unless she wants the fun of showing; but on high jumping, if The Lizard can't do six feet six, and if any other horse in Wessex can do five six, I'll eat my hat."

Old Adam heard him through, smiling, and then said quietly:

"I think it rather doubtful if I enter anything at all."

One-Horse Jack looked at him open-mouthed, as if he had listened to sacrilege.

"Not enter Rawdon Crawley and The Lizard?" he gasped.

Marc Adam shook his head.

"I know, my boy, that you have got me some very fine horses, but still I do not think that I will show."

He paused a moment, and then explained simply:

"You know that I am a newcomer in Wessex."

IT was a harmless phrase, but, from the way that he said it, One-Horse Jack knew exactly what he meant. He was completely silenced. Because, to him, the glory of winning horses was the one glory on earth, so much the more did he realize what the old merchant had sacrificed to his tact. At last was he able to appreciate how completely Marc Adam was conscious of the ostracism in which he was placed, and with what dignity his sensitive nature received it.

With that simple explanation whole visions came to One-Horse Jack. It left him limp. He was only partially restored when Marc Adam qualified his own words.

"I don't want to show my horses," he repeated slowly, "except on one condition. I will enter The Lizard in the jumping class, if you will ride him."

"I'd be glad to do that," replied Sullivan, but he said it listlessly. He took it absently, but he might not have taken it absently had he known that that moment had been deliberately planned two months before. It had even been planned the very first day that Marc Adam had seen a good horseman breaking his heart over a bad horse.

But now Jack Sullivan was lost in a struggle far greater than any jumping event, which up to a month ago would have been to him the greatest contest in life. Practically every event of that month had been enlisting him, all unconsciously, in that same struggle; but that single sentence had committed him definitely. All day long, in his own house and stable, his brooding went on and slowly crystallized into that almost fighting fierceness into which any strong emotion must ultimately grow in a man of Jack Sullivan's stamp.

To any Irishman, hut especially to an Irishman like One-Horse Jack, the final appeal is the appeal of the outlaw side; and to that outlaw side he had already been three quarters won. If he had been determined to win that jumping event before, he was resolved to kill himself and the horse in doing it now.

THUS it was that, on the day of the Hunt Club show, One-Horse Jack stood beside Marc Adam in the paddock with a nervousness new to his usual dashing nature, while, within the ring, one event after another went off almost without his notice.

---

Only when the gig-horse ribbon went to a mediocre animal did he express any regret.

"Rawdon Crawley should have won that, Mr. Adam," he said quietly.

The high-jumping class, as the most spectacular, was, as usual, the last on the card, and as the other events were disposed of One-Horse Jack felt his hands tremble and his mouth growing dry. He had purposely ordered that The Lizard should not be brought to the grounds until half an hour before the event was due; but, a full hour before, he began walking nervously to the gate and anxiously glancing at his watch, only to find the hands just where they had been when he had looked before.

HALF an hour before the event, The Lizard was led in, head down and nonchalant under his gray cooling sheet.

There were still twenty minutes before the first call, but, as if the call had come, One-horse Jack rushed to Adam's motor and came back with his hunting saddle. He felt the girths with his fingers, mounted, and galloped once or twice around the paddock.

Once in the saddle, his nervousness was gone. At first touch of the reins, a weight slipped off his mind; for, whatever a thoroughbred person may be, a thoroughbred horse is as uncertain from day to day as an opera singer, and Sullivan had needed to mount to see how temperament lay. Completely reassured, he went back to Adam.

"We've got it cold," he exclaimed; and for the first time that afternoon he watched the events on the track with interest.

A fussy little ring steward with a card and a pencil came into the paddock and distributed numbers, which the riders fastened on the hacks of their coat collars. The steward came back and called out importantly:

"Class Number Ten. Jumping for height! Ten minutes!"

All over the inclosure went a ripple of excitement. Blankets were pulled off horses, and, as Jack mounted to the gray back of The Lizard, similar figures went up in other parts of the paddock, like a cavalry troop ordered to the saddle. Secure in his seat, Jack waited placidly, when suddenly his eyes opened wide and he straightened with interest. At the extreme far corner of the paddock a strange rider had just mounted a dark brown horse with a very small neck and very large ears and had ridden away. With a sudden clutch of his hands, Sullivan looked at the spot he had left, and saw the grooms of old Anthony Bartlett, one of the Wessex nabobs, standing with blankets in their hands and watching the horse they had just stripped.

One-Horse Jack knew intimately every groom in Wessex, and, quivering with anger, he rode to the spot. He asked of the nearest:

"What horse is that?"

The man looked away, shamefaced.

"Axel, they call him."

One-Horse Jack laughed in his face, and, riding back to Marc Adam's groom, slipped to the ground.

Old Adam looked at him in astonishment.

"What's the matter?" he asked, but, without reply, Sullivan ran off, vaulted the rail into the ring, and approached the judges, all of them old friends of his.

"Look here," he demanded. "I protest that Axel horse. It's not Axel at all. It's Barnaby Rudge."

The judge looked down at the ground unhappily.

"It's entered as Axel," he replied. "We have nothing to do with the entries. That's up to the show committee, not us."

One-Horse Jack looked at him in contempt.

"Is the horse owned in Wessex?" he asked; for, in order to keep out dealers, an inflexible rule of the Wessex shows was that all horses entered must be owned in the township.

"That I can answer," replied the judge. "Yes, he is."

"He wasn't a week ago," retorted Sullivan.

"Jack," replied the judge, his voice kindly but his eye as ashamed as that of the groom, "I'm sorry, but there is nothing we can do."

Without a word, Sullivan turned and went back to the paddock. He knew that the cards had been stacked. With his own eyes he had seen Barnaby Rudge jump six feet eleven in Madison Square Garden, and at the last minute he knew what every man in the ring had already known—that the brown horse had been imported especially to beat Marc Adam.

The jumping was started at four feet six, and then went to five feet; but even this height eliminated two of the six entries, for all the horses in the event, except the ringer, were qualified hunters rather than high-jumping specialists, and, until this year, the event had not been very pretentious. Five feet six put out two more, and then the event settled into what every one on the rounds knew to be the real struggle. The Lizard was handling like a violin, but at his best he was only an exceptional hunter, while Barnaby Rudge, alias Axel, was one of those freak horses good for extreme high jumping and nothing else. His rider was obviously a professional; but, at the first jump, One-Horse Jack saw that he was new to his horse and that his only advantage was ten pounds less weight. Both horses cleared five six with ease, but at six feet Barnaby Rudge took two of the three permitted tries and The Lizard took them all to get over.

The work was getting now out of the province of hunting and into the province of pure high jumping, and Sullivan changed his style. Instead of the long runs which allowed the horse to take the bar in its stride, he shortened the distance and drove for it. There was no use in trying to make the horse believe now that the hounds were on the other side.

As both cleared six feet the judges held a short consultation, and one of them approached the two riders, both of whom were sitting stolidly on their horses and neither of whom had addressed the other.

"How will you have it put up?" he asked. "Six inches at once or two inches at a time?"

The professional looked insolently at Jack.

"All the same to me," he answered.

"Me too," retorted Jack viciously.

The bar was placed at six feet six, the attendants standing on chairs to do it. It was the highest jump ever attempted at a Wessex show, and the onlookers along the rail gazed up at it in amazement.

The professional rode his horse on to the track and faced him away from the jump. Then, suddenly whirling, he galloped at the barrier easily. Seemingly straight in the air, the brown horse went up, and came down on the other side like a cat jumping from a fence, while a spontaneous burst of applause came from the sidelines.

The Lizard, however, was no such trick horse. Awaiting, head on, he reared and plunged, then tore at the barrier, jumping six feet farther on either side than the other had done.

The crowd roared with excitement, but Jack was subdued. The Lizard could take that height by sheer strength, but he had never taken another inch more.

By agreement again, the bar went to seven feet. It was more than either horse had ever done, and a dead silence settled down over the field. Barnaby Rudge, for all the show work, knocked off not only the top bar, but the second. The Lizard, with a terrific effort, almost cleared; but after he had fully landed, the top bar trembled and fell, while a groan went up from the crowd.

Again the brown horse was wheeled and put at it; but, a dozen feet from the jump, he hesitated almost imperceptibly, and Sullivan, watching him, smiled.

The horse balked cold. For the first time his rider showed any emotion. Slashing him with his whip, he plunged to

---

the infield, while again The Lizard went out.

But The Lizard was exhausted. He did worse than before.

The silence was now almost painful; for if both horses failed on this third attempt the event was a tie, and few of the onlookers believed that either was up to it.

Wiping first one hand and then the other on his breeches, and with his face twitching with excitement, the professional rode on to the track. Painfully, almost superstitiously, he went through all his preparations. The horse wheeled, his rider lashed him; but long before he leaped the most careless onlooker knew that he had failed.

A tie, in fact, was what the event promised to be; for even Jack Sullivan had little confidence that the flighty Lizard could clear that terrific height. It would be a fluke if he did, but, above all, Sullivan knew the thoroughbred's temperament, and the one thing he feared to do was upset him.

Almost uncertain in his anxiety, he held his mount facing the barrier and rising in little rears, exactly as Marc Adam had seen Sullivan's own mare do on that first day. Every face in the grounds was toward him, and still Jack sat there, judging his moment. Then suddenly, out of the silence around him, with the unbelievable distinctness of tense moments, Sullivan heard a voice—a casual voice:

"And who does this one belong to?"

With that same terrible distinctness came the answer:

"Oh, it belongs to that damn Jew."

JACK SULLIVAN heard it, and at that single word his face went livid. Forgetting himself utterly, he turned with a look that made the speaker shrink into the crowd. At the same minute down came his whip on the horse's flank with all the pent-up anger of weeks. It was a blow that he would never have dared to strike the nervous thoroughbred, and the animal went forward like a shot out of a gun.

Five yards from the barrier, he catapulted into the air; and if there had been a shout from the crowd before, this time it rose to a scream, for the long gray shape went hurtling over the bar with a foot to spare. It threatened, as well, to go over the paddock fence—but One-Horse Jack, straining and tugging, turned the maddened horse and pulled him down.

AT the paddock gate old Adam himself came rushing out, and One-Horse Jack slipped from his saddle; but, at the same time, the fussy ring steward came bustling up.

"Stay on, stay on," he ordered. "Go get your ribbon."

But, unhearing, One-Horse Jack tossed the reins to a groom and plunged into the crowd.

The first person he met was Ruth Adam, white and trembling. With one look at his face, she asked, frightened:

"Jack, where are you going?"

"I'm going back there to look for a man," he said hoarsely. He tried to push on, but for once Ruth was determined. She did not know the cause, but she knew what that look must mean. She held his arm tightly and almost commanded:

"You are going to do nothing of the kind. You are going to get your ribbon and then come to dinner with us."

Suddenly ashamed, One-Horse Jack obeyed—obeyed both commands. But after dinner, when he and Ruth had been a long time on the terrace in the chill autumn air, Marc Adam's wife exclaimed:

"Those children ought to come in. They will catch their death of cold."

Marc Adam laughed.

"Leave them alone. They're all right."

His wife went hack to her knitting; but between stitches she said thoughtfully:

"There is only one thing I don't like about this afternoon. People will be absolutely sure that we are trying to force ourselves into notice."

Old Adam made no answer, and his wife went on:

"I wonder why we are always supposed to be scheming and plotting."

Two muffled figures just then passed the window. Marc Adam saw them, and looked thoughtfully at his cigar.

"Perhaps because we are," he said, smiling.

"Here, Chick, Chick!"

THE EDITOR ANSWERS

"NEVER be on time," said Mark Twain. "You waste so much of your life waiting for the other fellow." Being not a genius, like Mark Twain, but just an ordinary fellow, I try to be on time; and yesterday I was kept waiting quite a while in a railroad station. But it did not fret me a bit. I wondered about the people. Where are they going? And why? What messages have called them out of their homes to these trains? Who are these who are seeing them off, and who will meet them at the other end?

If some one would pay my bills at home, I could spend the rest of my life hanging around railroad stations. Just wondering.

Dear Sir:

Just a line to say what I think of your magazine. I get a good many magazines, but when I receive EVERY WEEK the others are shoved aside. Your editorial of February 23 was great. I am postmaster here, and I read it to the boys; and by so doing I sold forty dollars' worth of thrift stamps. Keep the good work going, and more power to you.

JAMES S. CARLIN, Pennsylvania.

Thank you, Mr. Carlin. We're printing the picture of your post-office and the boys who chipped in the forty dollars. We like the looks of those boys: it would be interesting to see what would happen if some one were to stop in front of them and speak of "our enemies—if they are that."

Consider Them Shot

Hey! Mr. Please Pass the Liberty Bonds Editor:

Please, in your EVERY WEEK and with your able pen, shoot at sunrise the following:

Partizan Senators
Editorial writers
Para-grafters

Who, when Woodrow Wilson (God bless him) speaks, immediately begin to bark at his heels. I ask you to do this because, when I try to express my thoughts on paper, said thoughts begin to crowd; said crowding makes me ramble; said rambling never gets me anywhere.

Thanks.

H. P., Philadelphia.

Consider them shot, H. P. And don't let them worry you any more. We saw W. W. recently: and, you can take it from us, he is not letting them worry him.

The Way We Want You to Feel

Dear Sir:

When my copy of EVERY WEEK comes, I don't feel as if I were receiving a magazine. I feel as if a personal friend had dropped in for an informal chat. And when I get through I say, "Well, so long, old fellow. See you next week." Why is it that other magazines just seem like magazines; and this little fellow of yours seems so much like a good old pal?

J. T. G., Michigan.

Maybe the reason you feel that way is because that's the way we want to have you feel, J. T. G. Editors, like kings, have hidden behind that "we" for a long time, and thrown a sort of veil of mystery around themselves.

There are no veils around us. We're just common, garden-variety folks. You have to work all the week; but we have been specially favored by the gods. We don't have to work at all. We have all the week just to look around in the books and magazines, and to meet interesting people and collect gossip and new information. Then, at the end of the week, we come bursting in on you and pour it all out.

Who is He?

HE runs a great plant in which 32,000 men are employed.

One of his employees made a million dollars last year in the profit-sharing plan which he inaugurated. The humblest employee in the shops could have done the same thing if he had had the brains. Any short cuts a man may devise or any unusual energy he may show are immediately capitalized not only into profit for the employer but for the employee. For this is one millionaire's idea of a square deal.

When, some years ago, he took over the great steel works of which he is now the brains and energy, he decided to train up his own managers as if they were boys. He watched everybody in the plant—there were about 20,000 then—and ended by picking out a dozen. Then he set out to build up his organization.

Last year a group of capitalists offered him an astounding sum to sell out. The income on the sum alone would have amounted to $3,000,000 a year. He talked the matter over with his wife. "And what would you do if you had nothing to do?" asked his wife. "I don't know," said the man, and refused the offer.

He started life a bare-foot boy. Nine out of ten American millionaires do, we are told. This is perhaps due to the fact that forty years ago in America a boy who didn't take off his shoes whenever he could was held to be a little queer. He grew up in western Pennsylvania, and his first job was driving stakes for the railroad. Twenty years later he was president of the steel plant that supplied the same railroad.

In addition to everything, he is an optimist. He tells us that all the great fortunes in America have not been made; in fact, that fortunes like his will seem small in comparison with what men are going to make in the next twenty years. He believes that he and Morgan and Rockefeller and Carnegie are only pioneers, and that "millionaires as is millionaires" will occupy their places after the war. Who is he?

How Lincoln Earned His First Dollar

THE first money a boy earns usually makes a deep impression on him. A study of the "first dollar" experiences of most great or rich men shows that the event helped more than a little to make them thrifty, or to make them think. It is pretty safe to say that the man who can't remember how he made his first dollar hasn't many of them, nor much appreciation of their value.

President Lincoln remembered his first dollar very well. Talking to his Cabinet associate Seward one day, according to Abraham Lincoln, His Life and Public Services, the Rail-Splitter told him the story:

"I was about eighteen years of age, and belonged to what they called down South 'the Scrubs'—people who did not own land or slaves. I had constructed a flat-boat to take the family produce down the river for sale. I was contemplating my new boat, thinking how I could make it stronger, when two men with trunks came down in carriages, and selected my boat to take them out to the steamer. I supposed that both of them would give me about a quarter.

"Trunks and passengers were loaded on, and I sculled them out to the steamer and lifted the trunks on deck. The steamer was about to go head when I called out, 'You have forgotten to pay me.' Each of them took from his pocket a silver half dollar and threw it on the bottom of my boat. I could scarcely believe my eyes when I picked up the money. You may think it was a very little thing, but it was a most important incident in my life. I could scarcely credit that I, the poor boy, had earned a dollar in less than a day; that by honest work I had earned a dollar. I was a more hopeful and thoughtful boy from that time."

Do your dollars make you think or are they merely dollars?

Why Women Used to be Afraid of Banks

ANOTHER sign that bankers are waking up to their opportunities is their changed attitude toward women. They used to lock themselves up in gloomy rock palaces and scowl pompously through iron bars, wondering why women were so nervous and stupid and hesitant about doing business with them. They made such mysteries of themselves, it's a wonder women did any business with them at all.

The State Trust Company of Plainfield, New Jersey, was one of the first banks to prove that a little encouragement and a little explanation makes a first-class bank customer of any woman. It began in 1911 to invite their trade—put in a rest room and business office for them, hired a teller and a cashier and a man to explain things to them, with the result that its deposits have jumped in seven years from $312,000 to $1,688,000, more than half of which came from new women customers.

"We realized," President Feickert told the Bankers' Monthly, "that much of the commuters' business is transacted by their women, and that it was good business to cater to their comfort, so it would be a pleasure for them to transact business that is ordinarily burdensome to them.

"Women do about 8o per cent. of the average family's money-handling. They encourage the children to open savings accounts, and their good will means their men's good will."

Feickert's reply to the complaint that women can't handle a bank account intelligently—that they overdraw their deposits and pay no attention to requests to pay up, even drawing checks after that in some cases—is that a personal word of explanation will stop such troubles.

"By taking pains to explain in person we find that nuisance has been almost entirely abated."

There are still a few banks where this idea hasn't jimmied its way in; but they are few, and getting fewer, and we're glad of it. To paraphrase the 'phone card, "the bank with the smile wins."

Making Family Spirit Pay Dividends

EVER notice how often what at first sight looks like misfortune turns out to be good fortune? That's the way it was with the Selz family. Of the eight children, five had good jobs in as many different cities; and Minnie and the small boys stayed at home on the little farm, where Papa Selz dug a good living from the ground. Then Papa Selz died, and the family faced the problem of selling the farm or having one of the bread-winners return to the farm.

Henry, as the only man in the family, felt it was up to him, although he was earning the best pay of all. He said that he would turn farmer. That left his four sisters free to go back to the city.

But next morning the four appeared, dressed, not for travel, but for work. The whole family had come back to the farm, and they had brought progressive ideas with them. They decided to start a canning factory, and the "Selz Company" was founded then and there.

A canning outfit cost them $l00, and more of their slender capital went into attractive labels for the cans. Then the Selz family went to work, even the small boys being pressed into service, picking fruit, berries, peas, and beans, and "silking" corn.

As soon as samples could be put up, Miss Blanche started out on the road. She developed rapidly into a first-class saleswoman, and in no time the Seizes had more orders than they could fill. That year they sold $2,665 worth of canned products and $100 worth of fresh fruit. They got most of their food and all of their fuel from the farm. Last year they rented more ground and made additions to their factory. They cleared close to $5,000, and the Selzes are still marching on.

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.

E. M. FULLER & COMPANY, members Consolidated Stock Exchange of New York, have issued a new ten-page booklet described 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.

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