How Do You Stand Bad News? That is the Test

ON the most critical day that this war has seen, I have been reading a little about the darkest period in our last great war.

To call it a dark hour would be misleading. It extended over a period of months and culminated in teh news of Hooker's withdrawal across the Rappahannock. It was then, amid the crumbling of all his hopes, that Lincoln's soul met its severest trial:

"About three o'clock in the afternoon," says Noah Brooks, "the door opened and Lincoln came into the room. I shall never forget that picture of despair. He held a telegram in his hand, and in a voice trembling with emotion said, 'Read it—news from the army.' The appearance of the President as I read aloud those fateful words was piteous. Never, as long as I knew him, did he seem to be so broken up, so dispirited, and so ghostlike. Clasping his hands behind his back, he walked up and down the room, saying, 'My God, my God, what will the country say! What will the country say!'"

"Yet," says Ida M. Tarbell, "this consternation was soon mastered. Lincoln's amost superhuman faculty of putting disaster behind him and turning his whole force to the needs of the moment came to his aid."

Other men of that period failed miserably in self-mastery. Greeley burst into two columns of bitter criticism and reproach entitled "The Prayer of the 20,000,000."

Men who ought to have known better added to the general confusion by leaving their work and spending their hours in futile discussion and complaint.

But Lincoln, in a single hour, was master of himself again: calmed and restored by that agency to which all strong men turn for calmness and restoration—the vigorous tackling of the job in hand.

We are living again, as this nation twice before has lived, through the tiems that try men's souls.

The past few weeks have been a veritable day of judgement, in which the hidden character of men has stood forth naked where every man might see.

I have seen a famous writer, whose name is known throughout the country, wringing his hands and complaining that he could not work, that he could do nothing but talk aimlessly about the war.

I have seen a great business man falter from one error to another because he could not calm himself long enough to think.

Men like these, whose self-possession breaks and flies under the impact of bad news, are almost as dangerous at home as they would be on the firing line.

It is our solemn duty in hard hours to keep ourselves out of that class—with quiet fortitude to go ahead, doing each his own daily job, holding the processes of the national life normal in so far as lies within our power.

No trial is likely to be laid on us in this war more bitter than that through which Lincoln passed.

It is our part to acquit ourselves like men—to draw from the example of his courage fresh stores of power and resolve.

And, mot of all fresh stores of faith—of deep-seated confidence that the nation in which we live has a missino to perform so true and so infinitely important that God can not suffer our cause to fail.

I know of no more inspiring reading for these days than the pages of that sturdy old gentleman, the prophet Ezekiel, who saw his city destroyed, his people taken captive, and still in teh darkest period of the captivity could write with full faith of the great and better city that was to come.

Or Isaiah, who reports that:

"They helped every one his neighbor; and every one said to his brother, Be of good courage.

"So the carpenter encouraged the goldsmith, and he that smootheth with the nammer him that smote the anvil."

Bruce Barton, Editor

WHAT WOULD YOU DO IF YOU HAD BUT ONE MORE DAY TO LIVE?

SAID John Wesley, "I preached as one who ne'er should preach again; and as a dying man to dying men." From which we gather that if John had known that but one day of life remained to him, he would have held the regular services just as usual. What would you do if you knew that only one day of life remained for you? Personally, we think we'd spend the time in saying good-by to a few of the folks who have made things so pleasant around these parts.

WHAT I THINK OF MY PARENTS

By THE READERS OF EVERY WEEK

The Prize Letter

I CONSIDER my father a tragic failure, though I thoroughly appreciate his influence in my life. I thank him for the love of good literature he instilled in my baby mind; for the start in music that he gave me; for my religious convictions; and for the solid foundation of morality and uprightness woven into the very fiber of my being by his stern and Puritanical ideals.

He was a man of great intellectual possibilities which he never developed, and a solid rock of respectability in his community; and yet, he missed the most vital necessity in the life of a man of family—the love and respect of his children.

And for this I consider him a sad failure.

Disappointed (so he thought) in a love affair, he married hastily and in a spirit of revenge a simple country girl whose beauty of face and form attracted him.

Though she was naturally intelligent, her education had been neglected in favor of the boys of the family, and my father soon found himself wedded to a companion whose tastes were wholly uncultivated. Instead of giving her the loving encouragement that might in the course of time have opened up the world of books and music to her, he chose to make her the butt of all the sarcasm of which he was past master.

Financial reverses embittered him; and in time nothing ever happened, whether it were a broken board in the fence or a sick child, but that she was in some way to blame for it. I can see her yet, sitting helpless and mute, the tears streaming down her face, while he withered her soul with words that almost seared the flesh.

Her life would have been hard enough without this; for the babies came faster than the dollars, and she paid the price in ceaseless toil. When her last child was out from "under foot," the whole financial burden was shifted to her shoulders, and in middle age she was forced to make the most of the living, while scarcely a day passed without its quota of harsh words.

No man ever mistreats a good mother and gets by with it. To-day, though not one of his many children would see him suffer, my father has utterly lost their love and respect.

And why did my mother endure all this? I don't know where she got the pride that scorned to quarrel in the presence of her children or shrank from disgracing them with divorce.

Though father grew more and more abusive until death claimed her, she seemed scarcely to hear him, always going about with a serene countenance, and I believe thoroughly glad to be free from him financially.

Her life is an inspiration to me. If I am ever tempted to repeat a bit of gossip, it comes upon me suddenly that mother never said a damaging word against any one.

If at times I am determined to take up the cudgel against a neighbor who has proved trying, I am reminded of the "riff-raff" among whom my mother was compelled to live, because of our poverty; yet she was always reverenced and respected by even the most quarrelsome.

Though keeping her own brood clean and respectable, she was never too busy to bathe a poor, neglected baby, or to solicit food and clothing for the unfortunate.

In her home she was quiet and ladylike. She seldom ever condemned, but gave her sympathetic help in anything that her children aspired to. Her self-sacrifice was unbelievable; and, though she went to her grave before her children could better her material life, the memory of her sweetness, her patience and simple pride is a star unto our pathway.

Ours was the privilege accorded to few—we were in daily contact with a spirit truly great.

J. G. D.

Six Thousand Miles to an Education

MY mother was of German parentage. Circumstances and a lack or parental sympathy prevented her satisfying a craving for books. She gathered what she could of learning, and it has always been a wonder to me that she acquired so much.

At nineteen she married a man thirteen years her senior. From the time I came to her, she planned to procure for me the advantages she had missed. She knew nothing of Froebel, but she played with me and taught me as we played. At four and a half years I walked a mile to school. She put a little bright red coat on me, so she could stand at the old picket gate and watch her baby as far as possible down the road to learning.

I remember telling my teacher on the first day that sometime I, too, meant to be a teacher. And I remember yet how she slipped her arm about me and put her cheek on my hair and said: "You tiny tot! You don't know what you will be sometime!" But she was not counting on mother.

Ours was a district school, overcrowded, open only during the very cold months, when I was too frail to fight snowbanks. At ten I was sent to a real graded school seven miles away.

I wonder yet how mother overcame my father's objections to educating girls. He contended that they might much better learn to milk cows and tend chickens and make gardens. But every Sunday after dinner my basket was packed with food to last five days, and, rain or shine, good roads or bad, my mother and old Tip made the fourteen-mile trip to take me to B—. And every Friday it was repeated to give me a weekend at home. This lasted through five and a half school years—fifty-five months, four hundred and forty trips, or six thousand one hundred and sixty miles!

Does any one remember what winters were twenty years ago? Or what "good roads" meant in southern Michigan? To this day I never face a blinding snow without seeing mother, wrapped like a bundle and almost snowed under in the old top buggy! And I never see the mud roll up on a wheel-rim without remembering the debates as to which might be the best road—and at times the best road proved to have lost a culvert and we plodded and splashed an extra mile or two.

Thanks be, she never had cause to be ashamed of me in school. That much, at least, I did for her satisfaction. At sixteen I had completed two courses in a university listed high school. In two more years I had my "life certificate." Since then I have been a successful teacher, a fair housekeeper, a good wife, and a very humble, well meaning mother.

I have two girls. Unless times grow better for near-poor folks, educating them will not be easy. But can I ever find anything too difficult? My mother worked against opposition. I shall have the help and encouragement of a loving husband and father. And so my mother's patience and energy enriched my life. I shall pass on what I can to my girls.

C. A. P.

In Spite of His Parents

THE most I owe my parents is the fact of my existence. This is said, not bitterly, but truthfully. I have attained a fair measure of success: I pay an income tax; I have a good home; I have a lovely wife and children. Yet for none of these can my parents claim any credit. My mother was ever indifferent to my childhood training and education. My father always followed the course of least resistance.

My boyhood home was ill kept and slovenly; dirt was the predominating feature. In school, which I was compelled by law to attend, I envied the boys whose

Continued on page 17

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

EVERY DAY IS MEATLESS TO BERNARD SHAW

"IT is my patriotic boast that from the day the war broke out I have abstained rigidly from consuming flesh, fish, fowl, alcohol, and tobacco." Thus says Mr. Bernard Shaw in the Boston Transcript. And he advises the rest of the world to follow his example.

"There is so much misinformation spread nowadays under the cover of education," he continued, "that many carefully taught people—doctors, for example—think they must starve unless they eat meat. They probably attribute my own survival to a regrettable miracle. They are so ignorant of how the world lives that they do not know that the British people are now trading on the vitality they have inherited from generations of men and women who did not eat meat, for the conclusive reason that they could not afford it, and lived on bread and cheese, or potatoes and buttermilk, with an occasional scrap of bacon by way of relish.

"Cæsar's soldiers had no bully beef. The meat eaters have not conquered the world, nor peopled it.

"The real secret of meat is that it is two thirds water, and not very clean water at that. If, instead of serving you a steak, they gave you the water in a tumbler and the nitrogen on a plate, you would not only refuse to eat it on its palatable merits—you would absolutely refuse to believe it a sufficient meal for an adult.

"One general caution is important. If you are accustomed to eat or drink any particular substance, whether it be meat, potatoes, beef, brandy, or morphia, you will find, when you first discontinue it, that you will miss it, and that you will mistake the sensation of unfulfilment for hunger. You must therefore ration yourself, and live by faith until you get used to the new dietary; for if you go on eating until you feel you have had enough you will burst."

Not only does a vegetable diet adequately nourish the body, Mr. Shaw contends, but it "seems to produce a peculiar ferocity, which is perhaps why all the great conquerors of antiquity worked with meatless soldiers. And it is the worst form of ferocity; that is, virtuous indignation.

"Think of the fierce energy concentrated in an acorn! You bury it in the ground, and it explodes into a giant oak. Bury a sheep and nothing happens but decay. If the Government, instead of leaving the English people to bury sheep in their insides, compels them to bury beans, I will not answer for the consequences. The vegetarian of to-day may be the Bolsheviki of to-morrow."

ACCIDENTS WILL HAPPEN

"WHEN the Zapatistas took possession of the City of Mexico, it was perfectly lawless," says Major E. S. O'Reilly in his book, Roving and Fighting (Century Company). "Murders and robberies occurred on every street. Zapata proceeded to restore order by executing the criminals.

"One day I chanced to pass the Fourth Comisario, or police station. Three bodies were exposed for public view. Written signs above the bodies announced the reasons for the executions. One sign read, 'This man was killed for being a thief.' Another read, 'This man was killed for printing counterfeit money.' The third stated, 'This man was killed by mistake'!"

JOHN BURROUGHS

SOMEDAY ALL DISPUTES WILL BE SETTLED LIKE THIS

WHILE the war has been crowding everything else out of the papers, an international boundary dispute has been settled—as quietly and decently as if it were a question of deciding the ownership of a shipment of goods.

The United States has ceded to Canada the town of Harding, Minnesota, says the Boston Transcript, together with a few square miles of wood and water, including Echo, Crane, and Sand Pit lakes. For forty miles, between Minnesota and Ontario, the exact location of the boundary line has been long in dispute. And now, in the friendliest fashion, the whole question has been reëxamined, a survey made, and the decision arrived at.

Civilization is on its way.

HOW FAR STATESMEN SEE AHEAD

YOU look back to the weeks and the years before the great war, and wonder why statesmen did not do something to avert it: but if you have read much of history you realize that statesmen seldom do see far enough ahead to avert the world's troubles. The difference that separates the great man from the ordinary man is pretty small; and the mistakes of the multitude are most often shared by its rulers.

The Civil War broke out with the firing on Fort Sumter on April 12, 1861. Less than a month before that, on March 18, a conflict had arisen in Texas between Governor Sam Houston and the Southern party in the State, and Mr. Lincoln wished to get a secret message to Governor Houston. He called in as a messenger Mr. G. H. Giddings, who had been carrying the mails on a Western route under government contract. Mr. Giddings's story is told in Ida M. Tarbell's Life of Lincoln (Macmillan Company).

He was shown into the Cabinet room, where the members were seated about the President. Mr. Lincoln explained the importance of the mission, and Mr. Giddings agreed to undertake it.

"I remained there until midnight," says Mr. Giddings. "The question of war or no war was discussed by different members of the Cabinet. Mr. Seward said there would be no war. The President said he hoped and prayed that there would not be a war. I said to Mr. Seward that, as he knew, Congress had extended my overland mail contract one contract term and doubled the service; and to put the increased service in operation would cost me over $50,000, which would be lost in case of war; and I asked him what I had better do.

"'There will be no war,' Mr. Seward said; 'go ahead and put on the increased service. You will run no risk in doing so.'

THE "STRONG PEOPLE" OF SPAIN

SPAIN is looked upon by the modern world as a country sadly down at the heels; it is noted chiefly for bullfights and fleas and beggars and illiteracy and laziness. But, if this view holds for most of Spain, it certainly does not fit the pleasant northern province of Catalonia. This is almost a model commonwealth, the home of liberalism, education, hardiness, and enterprise.

It is true that Catalonia is also the home of revolutions, and that the cry of "Down with Spain" has often rung through the streets of Barcelona. But Havelock Ellis, in The Soul of Spain (Houghton Mifflin Company), says that "even under martial law it has not been other than agreeable to live in." Catalonia's opposition to Spain arises from the natural irritation which an efficient, energetic people must feel under the thumb of a corrupt, slack government.

Havelock Ellis gives an interesting description of the Catalonian character which seems destined, eventually, to dominate the politics of Spain, as it now dominates its business: "The Catalonians are a sturdy and vigorous people who from old have been planted firmly astride the eastern portion of the Pyrenees. An indomitable strength of fiber has enabled them to preserve a high degree of independence. They have never bowed willingly—to-day less than ever—to the dictates of Madrid, nor have they ever hesitated to accept radical theories. The Catalonian language is a characteristic creation of a rough and vigorous race, somewhat careless of beauty. It might have been invented by a people whose mouths were habitually full. They are businesslike, strictly honest even in dealing with the most helpless foreigners.

"To the foreigner who approaches Barcelona it may seem sometimes that there is a somewhat insensitive coarseness of fiber in the Catalonian. That impression disappears, however, when we realize that the fundamental Catalonian characteristic is a humanity which is not always timidly seeking to guard itself from hostile approaches. In a beautiful and exquisitely tempered climate, a robustly clear-eyed and independent population has here freely expanded itself, loving work and loving play. We are accustomed to look upon Spain as a country which has fallen behind in the race of civilization. But civilization is largely a matter of beautiful and humane urban development under industrial conditions; and in Barcelona, in many respects, this has been attained in a degree which elsewhere we are still vainly toiling to attain."

---

GETTING WELL MORE DANGEROUS THAN BEING SICK

IN every acute germ disease, from grippe to diphtheria, poisons are spread all through the body. They get into the blood-stream, and until they are eliminated have a constant depressing and paralyzing effect on the muscular tissue of the heart.

Convalescence is often more dangerous than acute illness. When a patient is unmistakably ill he has a healthy respect for the doctor's orders, and consequently lies quiet and puts little strain on his heart. When he feels better and his fever is gone, then the doctor's cautions seem unnecessary and absurd.

He gets up before he should, tries to work or play—and, sometimes, he gets well anyway; for the heart is a brave, sturdy organ, and, even when weakened by its fight with poison, it tries to go on with the work of building up decayed tissues.

But sometimes he doesn't get well.

The doctor told the parents of a little child just recovering from diphtheria that it should remain in bed and be kept very quiet. The parents, seeing the child was doing well, put it on the nursery floor and let it play with toys as long as it liked. Almost without warning, the child died.

A man who had fairly well recovered from pneumonia was cautioned to lie quietly in bed until, under the influence of rest and an extra-nutritious diet, he should become stronger. But the patient was finding that sort of thing irksome; so he sat up in bed and played cards with his wife, until suddenly he fell back dead.

A grippe convalescent, an elderly gentleman, testily observed: "Such a fussy lot, these doctors. Keep making their calls, running up their bills, giving you advice after you're well. My doctor tells me I ought at the least to stay indoors. Bosh! Besides, an old horse that once lies down never gets up." So he put on his coat and went to a directors' meeting, from which he returned that afternoon in a collapse, and died next day.

This list of examples is enough to show the danger of taking the law of health into one's own hands. Doctors realize well, although the patient and his family so often do not, the meaning of the danger signals—the continuing though slight fever, the weak and uncertain pulse, the shortness of breath after a small exertion, the blue lips, the pale face, the distended vessels on the neck.

When your doctor tells you to stay in bed, the chances are he does not do it to annoy you.

JOHN H. HUBER, M.D.

ROYAL PALMS

HARD DAYS FOR PREACHERS

WAR prosperity touches only the top and the bottom. It has made money for the millionaire manufacturer, and increased the wages of the unskilled laborer. But in between is the great middle class of folk whose expenses are higher, while their incomes remain fixed.

And preachers have suffered perhaps as much as any other class.

"I have resigned my pulpit, owing to the high cost of living," writes one Presbyterian minister to the Continent. "With eight children under eighteen years of age, and an aged mother to care for as well as wife and myself; with books, papers, etc., to buy; with the necessity of giving to Red Cross, Y. M. C. A., etc., as well as the claims of our church, I found that $1,500 and house would not stretch over the field. I have accepted a business position paying $3,000 a year, with a fair promise of more as a share in the net profits. I hope to earn enough to clear up my obligations, arrange for the education of my children, and then return to the active pastorate. I am thirty-eight years of age, in rugged health, and considered a good preacher. Is there anything wrong with our system?"

THE GOLDEN LIFE OF THE RUSSIAN PEASANT

GREGORY RASPUTIN—for many years the real ruler of Russia, through his sinister influence over the court and the royal family—sprang from the humblest peasant stock. In his youth he was apparently a sincere, ignorant, religious fanatic. From his own account, "The Life of an Experienced Pilgrim," quoted in The Mad Monk of Russia, Iliodor (Century Company), Rasputin's early life was one of strange superstitions and obsessions.

"I drove, I fished, I plowed, and my life was fairly easy for a peasant, though many sorrows fell to my lot.

"Often I had to go hungry. More than once I wandered from Tobolsk without changing my underclothing for half a year and without touching my flesh with my hands. This I did for the sake of experience and trial.

"Oh, how crafty the enemy [the devil] is, how shyly he hunts those who are seeking salvation! Once while on a ride in winter-time, when it was very cold, the enemy whispered to me, 'Take off your hat and pray, for those who do shall succeed in what they attempt.' I took off my hat and began to pray until it seemed to me that I beheld God very near me. And what was the outcome? I caught a cold in my head, and then I was taken seriously ill and had a high fever. I went through an ordeal, and when I got over it I fasted and prayed to atone for my transgression. One may pray in the open, but not remove one's hat when the air is freezing.

"I used to plow during summer nights, and I did not drive away the gadflies. I let them bite my flesh and suck the bad blood, saying to myself, 'They, too, are God's creatures, just as I am. Had not God created the summer there would have been no gnats.' What a golden life the peasant has, feeding even the gnats for God's sake!"

WHY KING GEORGE DOESN'T GIVE HIS PALACES TO THE RED CROSS

WHY, asks the democratic American, doesn't the King of England let the nation have a few of his palaces for hospitals and convalescent homes? Surely they're big enough—and he can't live in more than one at a time!

Why indeed? Because of several good, plain reasons, "notably the absence of effective drainage systems."

Not enough bath-rooms, to be exact; no running water to speak of. A Park Avenue apartment in New York City wouldn't find a tenant if it had as few bath-rooms as are in all the British royal palaces put together, and no American earning $5000 a year would live in a flat with the sewerage system and the antiquated bath-room fixtures of Buckingham Palace, St. James's Palace, et al.

In August, 1914, King George offered Kensington Palace, where all his relatives live, and St. James's Palace to the Red Cross; but both castles were found to be "unsuitable for hospital purposes."

Perhaps that isn't to be wondered at! Henry VIII rebuilt St. James's out of what had been a hospital for "leprous maidens," and Kensington Palace is between two hundred and two hundred and fifty years old.

In 1916 Balmoral in Scotland was offered by the royal family, first as a hospital and then as a convalescent home; but its hundred-foot feudal tower and its superb view couldn't keep it from being "too unsanitary for such purposes"!

At the beginning of 1916 the state rooms at Buckingham Palace were held out on a gold platter to the Red Cross; but the Red Cross just sniffed, "Drains," and refused. Buckingham was built in 1705.

So poor King George V must live in his own castles. He gave nearly $50,000 to the Red Cross last year—perhaps to show that he forgave them for turning up their noses at his palaces—and the money wasn't unsanitary!

MAKE YOURSELF A GOOD BED WHEN YOU GO CAMPING

IT is only the tenderfoot who is willing to sleep in a poor bed when he goes on a camping trip, says C. P. Fordyce in Touring Afoot. The seasoned campaigner prides himself on the comfort of his bed, and men who live out of doors all the time on the range or forest trails are likely to be the ones who are most particular about how they sleep. A man can not stand up to hard tramping during the day if he wakes in the morning with his muscles stiff and sore and his powers unrefreshed.

For the man who carries his outfit on his back and changes camp frequently the author recommends the "browse-bag" as weighing little and taking up little space in the pack.

"It is preferably made of waterproof balloon silk or paraffined muslin (a rubber blanket or poncho is too heavy), size by 2½ by 6½ feet and weight one pound. It is opened at the foot end, and at each camp is stuffed with hay, grass, leaves, or other browse, dry or wet. The bag weighs but little, takes up small compass when rolled for the pack, and is useful in packing. It is quickly made into an acceptable bed mattress each night and emptied each morning."

It is a good plan to warm the ground where you are to sleep by building a fire there and afterward raking away the embers. The browse-bag is then filled and flattened over the heated spot. One blanket in ordinary summer weather, two when the temperature is under thirty-two degrees, are enough for covering.

"The blanket had best be all wool of the domestic lamb variety. In buying blankets beware that many of those offered you may be humbug. See to it that you get an article made up of curly wool fibers and not 'adulterated' by the straight cotton kind—a differentiation easily determined by the aid of a small magnifying glass.

"Also see to it that the weight is in the thickness and not in the size. In this country the regulation army blanket is to be depended upon. However, if they can be secured, a person will certainly make no mistake in getting a genuine Hudson Bay or Mackinaw. The proper weight is about five pounds per blanket and size seventy-two by seventy-eight is about right."

IN A GERMAN PRISON

KULTUR, as established in German war prisons, provides for a bath once a month for captured officers. How much bathing is considered proper for privates is not mentioned by the anonymous author of Wounded and a Prisoner of War (George H. Doran Company). The officer who wrote the book was in a German fortress, partially paralyzed as the result of his injuries. His request for more frequent bathing brought from the Rittmeister, or commander of the fortress, an indignant refusal. He "told the doctor to say to 'dem Manne' that the monthly bath, graciously allowed to officers, according to the wise German regulations posted up in every room, for the purpose of personal cleanliness, quite sufficient was.

"The food supplied by the authorities was, on the whole, of bad quality, badly cooked, and insufficient.

"Breakfast at 7 A. M.—A roll of potato bread, and a cup of tea, coffee, or milk.

"Lunch at 12.30—Soup, which varied from day to day in color but not in taste.

"One dish of meat with cabbage and a potato. The meat was always pork, disguised in strange manner. Once a week we had 'beef,' very tough and quite uneatable. Probably horse-flesh.

"Dinner—Cold pork and cabbage, sometimes varied by scrambled eggs and salad."

"ALL RIGHT, MOTHER"

By J. FRANK DAVIS

Illustrations by W. C. Dexter

THE Brigadier-General said Harold had better not go out in the sailboat, because it looked like rain and he might get wet, and you know, my boy, how weak your throat is.

When the Brigadier-General said things, everybody listened, and practically everybody obeyed. Especially Harold. The Brigadier was short and stout and terribly impressive, with a voice that carried easily from one end of the hotel piazza to the other.

It was tacitly understood that whatever debate got started on the piazza of the Ocean View Inn came to a definite end when the Brigadier-General, having listened and weighed, spoke the phrase of authority. The eight-foot tides that rose at the foot of the cliff in Little Good Harbor were not more positive and unalterable than the Brigadier's verdicts. The swish of the surf that came up from the rocks was not more immutable, of an evening, than the swish of the Brigadier's skirts as she came from the dining-room and proceeded to the best chair, in the most sheltered corner of the piazza, where through the open door could be had the most satisfying view of the young people who danced in the hotel ball-room.

Nobody else ever thought of taking that chair. It was her chair. It always had been her chair. She had been coming to the Ocean View Inn ever since the hotel was built. The other guests might not like her taking it. They might resent her assumption that she was entitled to the privilege of having reserved for her the best seat in the place. They might even mutter—when she was not present—that she paid no more than the rest of them and not so much as some. But they had to admit that their sole remedy lay in going to some other summer resort. Even the hotel management did not cross the Brigadier-General.

So, when she told Harold he couldn't go out in the Henley boys' catboat that lowering July forenoon, Harold merely said: "All right, mother."

The Brigadier-General was five feet three inches tall, and weighed— Well, she once confessed to a Boston woman of approximately her own age and heft that she "got up to a hundred and sixty-seven last winter, but had taken off quite a lot since"; but she never went near the penny scales in the office when any one was looking. Harold was five feet ten and a half inches tall, and weighed about the same. He was a mighty good-looking boy, but he didn't talk much. Mostly he said, "All right, mother." Presuming that he began to talk coherently at the age of two, he had been saying "All right, mother," for about twenty-three years.

That was all there was to the matter of the sailing party. The Henley boys went down to their boat, which presently edged out through the channel, and Harold got a magazine and settled down to be as comfortable as mother would allow. It wasn't very exciting around the hotel, so I found Maryle, who was madly counting rows in a khaki sweater, and told her I thought I'd find out how the cunners were biting. She registered interest but not concern, merely remarking that lunch was at twelve. I got my fish-pole, a basket, and a bottle of oil of citronella, and went down on the rocks.

They bit great. I forgot to look at my watch, and arrived at the hotel at one twenty-six. When I came out of the dining-room, where I ate alone and received kept-warm food and reproachful looks, everybody was on the piazza, and everybody was reading names out of the newspapers and interfering with everybody else's attempt to read them. The Boston morning papers had arrived, and they had the numbers that had come out in the selective draft, and some of the names.

I gathered, almost immediately, that Harold's name had not been drawn. One might have thought, from the comment, that nobody in the hotel except the Brigadier had a male relative between the ages of twenty-one and thirty-one. I didn't mention, did I, that the Brigadier has scads of wealth?

"Isn't it just beautiful?" one woman was exclaiming. "I should think, Mrs. Dyer, that you would be deliriously happy."

The Brigadier looked up over her nose-glasses, and went to knitting again. Then, "Humph!" she said.

"And you will still have him all to yourself. Isn't that wonderful?" sighed Mrs. Greathouse.

Mrs. Greathouse was a grass widow, aged twenty-something, who habitually wore black with little red stripes—black, I gathered, because she was a widow, and red because she was glad of it. There were those among the porch lizards who whispered that Mrs. Greathouse would be willing to take Harold, Brigadier and all.

"Oh, the suspense must have been awful!" cried another woman.

Mrs. Dyer looked up from her knitting.

"For heaven's sake, talk about something else!" she snapped. "You make me nervous."

So at once, of course, they talked of something else.

Harold, all this time, was sitting just inside the big living-room door. He couldn't help hearing it, but he gave no sign that he did. At that, nobody seemed to think it necessary to congratulate him; they congratulated the head of the family.

THERE was more or less talk all the afternoon about the draft, but nobody spoke again to the Brigadier-General about it—or to Harold. Neither of them introduced the subject. At five-thirty the old lady stuffed her yarn and needles into her bag, and looked across to where the boy stood watching the Flirtthat's the Henleys' catboat—beating into the harbor.

"Harold," she called, "it's time to change for dinner. You'll want to wear your white trousers to-night, I think."

"All right, mother," said Harold.

He and she went off toward the stairway together.

I happened to be standing over near Maryle.

"Wonderful discipline!" I remarked. "Who'll decide his actions after she is dead, I wonder? Not he."

"Do you know, Willie, I think he will—and I don't think he'll wait until she's dead."

When Maryle calls me Willie, which she thinks plagues me, and smiles like that, it isn't any use to ask her what she means. She didn't give me a chance, anyway, but changed the subject.

"I hope Maude Gresham looks her prettiest to-night," she said.

"Huh? Why?"

"Oh, because she's decorative. Don't you like to see pretty girls look their prettiest?"

This gave me a chance to make a remark about Maryle that squared me some for the late lunch. It was true, too. So she laughed and we went up to dress, because it was broiled live lobster night in the dining-room and nobody is ever late if he can help it.

WE were sitting out on the piazza again, waiting for the bell, when the Brigadier-General and Harold came down and sailed up to the door of the dining-room, passing all the rest. I remembered that thing old Homer said—or was it Horace?—and whispered the quotation to Maryle:

"The first at banquets, but the last in fight."

She let her eyes, sort of narrowed, rest on Harold.

"I wonder," she said.

Summer dancing at the Ocean View begins at eight; there was more than a half hour to wait after dinner before it started, and it was too pleasant a night to wait indoors: the storm the Brigadier had feared would come up and wet Harold had failed to materialize. The piazza was already crowded when the old lady came out and marched to her chair, Harold trailing in her wake.

The Brigadier seated herself, smoothed her skirts, took her knitting bag from Harold, and entered into conversation with that Professor Winterhaven who wrote the book about uplifting the poor by means of the best literature.

He was a little, prissy man, with a sixty-year-old face and forty-year-old hair, brown and thick on the top, and sharply shading into gray and thin at the back and sides.

It seems he had gone to Harvard at about the same time as the Brigadier-General's husband, who sought peace on the other side of the grave in the middle nineties, and they found many important things to talk about—the Endicotts, and the Saltonstalls, and the Peabodys, and what ever became of that niece of Mrs. Cabot who married the Spaniard, and why Doctor Bryant's third boy gave up being a missionary after ten years' trial of it and came back from India to enter the importing business with his uncle.

Oh, it was quite thrilling, indeed, and a little knot of male and female old ladies sat around them and occasionally put in their oar to prove they had at least heard of the people that were mentioned.

Harold, I noticed, wasn't there.

It didn't take my eyes long to find him. He was in the ball-room,—not far from where the violinist was tuning up and the trap-player was setting up his drums and other noise-props,—between two girls. As near as I could make out, he was trying to be equally attentive to both.

One was Mrs. Greathouse, and the other was a tall, sweet girl all in white. Her name was Gresham—the girl that Maryle said she hoped would look her prettiest. As near as I could make out, she did.

You probably know those Gresham folks better than I do. Old New England family and all that. This Maude was the granddaughter of the late General Gresham.

AS I guess I intimated, Harold wasn't what you could call a plain and fancy talker. He never was especially voluble with one girl; it was plain to be seen that with two he was distinctly unhappy. He looked sort of uneasy when Mrs. Greathouse was talking, and sort of relieved when Maude spelled her, if you know what I mean. I hadn't ever noticed that the boy paid any more attention to one young woman than to any of the others, but I had a sudden hunch that maybe he wasn't altogether crazy about the widow.

I mentioned it to Maryle while we were hopping through the first dance.

"Has it occurred to you that the Greathouse person is getting on All Right Mother's nerves?" I whispered. "He's shying at her like a four-year-old at a piece of paper. Maybe mother has told him to avoid the snares of the charmer."

"I doubt it," Maryle said. "She's too old and calculating."

"At that," I remarked, "the widow is no fool. She might make something of him. But inside of ten years her face will stop a clock."

"Ten years! Are you trying to be considerate or conservative?"

"He was turning to your little Gresham friend in sheer self-defense."

Maryle patted me on the arm. "Billy," she said, "you get more observant every day."

The T. P. Fannings were talking to the Brigadier-General when I went out, a little later, to catch my breath. They were the people from Uniontown, Michigan, who had dashed into our midst the week before with six wardrobe and three steamer trunks. Fanning, as I understood it, was a small laundry proprietor who sneaked nine hundred dollars out of the savings bank without telling his wife, and bought Fabricated Munitions on a tip when the price was 8½. The man who gave him the tip didn't have confidence enough in it to buy a cent's worth himself. Fanning's guardian angel took him by the hand when F. M. hit 720, and he sold out just before the market went off two hundred points. Since then, of course, he has been an authority on speculation and war.

Mrs. Fanning was at least as old as he, and dyed her own hair at home,—in two shades,—because, while she had money enough, it wouldn't be respectable to have it done at a beauty parlor.

Fanning hadn't heard, evidently, that the Brigadier-General had tabooed draft talk, on the ground that it made her nervous, or perhaps he hadn't been there long enough to know that her nerves were the levers that controlled piazza conversation. At any rate, he was making remarks to the general effect that an embattled citizenry ought to rush to the colors in any real emergency without

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waiting to be drafted, but that he wasn't entirely sure this was an emergency, and he was firmly convinced it was contrary to the Constitution to send Americans to France. I gathered his idea was that it would be nicer to fight Germans in the United States than in Europe—Uniontown, Michigan, being quite a distance from the seaboard. He wanted to make it perfectly plain, however, that he was no coward, and intensely American. He said so twice. Mrs. Fanning added, sighing, that she thanked heaven their son was thirty-three years old.

"Oh, isn't that wonderful!" cried the red-and-black widow, who had come out and snuggled up as close to the Brigadier-General as the breadth of the rocking-chair arms would allow. "I think it is just sinful to take our boys. And I read, only yesterday, that they will not receive the same salary, or the same food, as the officers—or anything."

"Privates usually don't," old Mrs. Dyer said shortly.

"But it could be arranged—somehow," Mrs. Fanning said. "It is bad enough to make them go to war, and carry all those packs on their backs, and things, without making them endure hardships. Don't you think so?"

The Brigadier stopped her knitting and peered over her glasses at Mrs. Fanning's top hair. Her right hand patted, just for a moment, the little brooch she was wearing—that round blue spinning-wheel with a distaff stuck through it that means the wearer belongs to the Daughters of the American Revolution.

"Some of my people have gone to war, at one time and another," she said sharply, "and they weren't all officers. I never heard that the other ones protested about it."

"Why, of course they wouldn't," gurgled Mrs. Greathouse. "The idea!"

"Harold!" called the Brigadier. He was standing in the doorway with Miss Gresham. "Don't cool off too suddenly. Remember your throat."

"All right, mother," he said. "I just came out to remind Mrs. Greathouse that we were to have this trot."

"Mrs. Greathouse will excuse you—won't you? I wish, Harold, you would go up and get mother's shawl. It is getting just a trifle chilly."

As Harold obediently departed, I saw a more or less great light. The Brigadier didn't propose to have him pay too much attention to either one of them.

WE went to our room just before eleven, when the dance still had a few minutes to run. But it wasn't any use for me to go to bed, and I knew it. Worse, I had to confess it to Maryle, with the reason.

I seriously question whether broiled live lobster, cucumbers, succotash, blueberry pudding, apple pie, and cheese, with two large cups of coffee, ever constitute an ideal dinner for a middle-aged man of sedentary habits. I thought if I went out and walked around, smoking, perhaps I would feel better. Maryle agreed with me, and did not even mention that if I hadn't missed most of my lunch I probably wouldn't have been so hungry at dinner-time. One of Maryle's best points is that she lets things drop.

The dance had stopped and people were heading for their rooms as I went out through the office. The piazza was practically deserted.

I went down the walk that leads past the fishermen's houses to the steamboat wharf. The cigar didn't taste right,—perhaps because it was the fourth one since dinner,—so I threw it away and ate some digestive tablets. I loafed on the dock a few minutes, and then strolled back again, and finally I went over to the summer-house that stands up close to the cliff jumping-off place, and sat on the steps that face the ocean side.

When I heard footsteps and voices, there was no reason for me to show myself, because I supposed they would pass on. When Harold and Maude Gresham stopped right at the other side of the summer-house, not twenty-five feet from me, it was too late for me to let them know I was among those present, because I had already heard enough to make it embarrassing for all of us. Besides, I knew they couldn't stay long: the Brigadier might discover it, and there were the conventions to consider.

"Not another day, sweetheart," were the first words I heard. "I'm going to tell her to-morrow."

Maude replied: "Oh, you dearest boy!"

This seemed, from the way he took it, to constitute a logical and entirely relevant answer.

WHAT both of them said then was quite personal, and made me terribly uncomfortable at being a listener, and worse afraid I'd be caught at it. Boiled down into the shortest possible description, the gist of their next fifteen or twenty sentences was that they didn't hate each other a particle.

"And now, dearest, I must really go," she said. "You may kiss me just six times more, and then—"

"But I haven't told you what I brought you out here to tell you yet," he said.

"You haven't? Why, I thought—"

Harold's idea of how many constitute six would make him a valuable buyer but a rotten seller.

"When I went down to Boston Thursday," he said, after they had temporarily discontinued their mathematics, "I went to see the best doctor in the city."

She gave a little suppressed shriek. "Oh, Harry!" she cried. "Are you—"

"No," he said; "I am not. I went to the toughest old insurance examiner in town. I weigh just what I ought to weigh for my height, and I'm as sound as a dollar from the top of my head to the soles of my feet. There isn't even a trace of that throat weakness I had when I was a boy, that mother always talks about. And I—"

She was so pleased over this that quite a delay ensued.

He went on after a bit:

"And I'm not going to let other fellows do what I ought to do. I am going to enlist."

She gasped, but did not interrupt again.

"I've thought it over and thought it over," he said. "Mother— It will shock her terribly, of course, but—I haven't been much use so far. With mother's money and her coddling,—God bless her for how well she means it!—I don't see that I ever would be much use. But, whether she is willing or not, I'm going."

I could tell by his voice how desperately he dreaded having to make an issue of it with the old lady.

"I hoped I'd be drafted," he went on. "I hoped I'd find my number in the list. Then I wouldn't have had to declare myself at all. But luck didn't break right. A lot of fellows who don't see the necessity of it as I do are drawn, and want to get out of it. I want to get into it, and my number didn't come out. So—I've got to make the plunge myself."

The girl cried a little, but she did not reproach him.

"My brave, brave boy!" she said softly, and if he had faced a whizz-bang shell in the trenches the next minute, I guess he would have thought it was worth it.

"I'm sorry about—us," he said, after a little. "And I'm sorry about mother. I've never done a thing to worry her. It was drilled into me from the first. Father died, you know, when I was only four, and the circumstances— Mother thought a great deal of him, and she was in the accident too. It was very terrible, and her nerves went smash. She had prostration. It was years before she got even fair control of herself. So, always, from the time I can remember, I mustn't do anything to get mother nervous. It has always been mother. Now—" He drew a long breath. "It has just got to be somebody else part of the time. You. And myself. And the thing that I've got to do, or hate myself."

"My brave, brave boy! she said again. He didn't seem to mind the fact that she couldn't seem to think of anything new to say—not any at all.

Presently they drifted up toward the hotel, and I cautiously kicked my left leg awake.

Through the summer-house I could see him standing alone on the piazza after she had gone in—considering the conventions again, of course. And then he turned toward the door, stopped, threw up his head, and went in on the dead run.

I must have seen the glare at just about the same minute he did, and I went across the lawn, uphill, at the rate of about a hundred yards in eighteen flat, which is going some for my age and weight.

Above the hotel and off to the right the sky was pink, and getting pinker every second. I didn't need to run around the building to see what caused it: I knew. The garage.

By the time I got in through the main door the house was beginning to seethe. Harold and the night clerk had run up the stairs, and I could hear them knocking on the doors and telling people the fire was not in the hotel, but please not to delay. The Ocean View is a frame building, four stories high, and it has no elevator. Neither, for that matter, does it have access to any fire department, or any water pressure to speak of.

MARYLE, almost completely dressed, because she decided to read after I went out to get the air, was putting her jewel-box into a hand-bag as I arrived. Our room, being on the second floor, in the front corner, didn't give her any view of the flames, but we could see the reflection on the lawn in front growing brighter every minute.

"It's the garage, May," I said, going

after my check-books and such few papers of value as I happened to have with me, "and if the wind is what it was the last time I noticed—"

"All right, Billy, I'm ready," she said. "I wish I had time to get out one trunk."

"Get enough clothes for to-morrow and let it go at that," I advised. "Carry them out on your arm if there isn't room in that little grip. I'll take this suit-case, just as it stands. And perhaps we'd better hurry. It hasn't rained lately; the roof must be like tinder. Got all your rings and money?"

THEY were pouring down the stairways as we hurried along the hall. Fairly near the head of the procession we came upon the Brigadier-General, with a morocco-leather toilet case in one hand and her knitting bag in the other. Harold, holding her arm, had a suit-case.

She was speaking calmly:

"It is fortunate I had not undressed; but I heard you go out of your room, and I thought I would wait up—you might be ill. Where were you?"

Maude Gresham came in sight at that minute, escorting an old lady from her corridor whose husband came up from Boston only for the week-ends. I wondered if the Brigadier would observe that Maude, also, was fully dressed.

Harold did not reply to his mother's question. Seeing that she and Maude were both safe on the lawn where everybody was gathering, he trotted around the corner toward the garage with some of the

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rest of us. As we started the Brigadier called:

"Don't get into danger, Harold!"

"All right, mother," he answered, and ran to help the hotel manager, who was alternately falling into a ladder and crawling out of it.

We dragged it past the heat of the fire, put it up against the one-story kitchen L, and went up on the roof. We were a good seventy feet from the blaze, but it was hot. Hose appeared from somewhere,—garden size,—and after a hit somebody hitched the other end of it to a tap in the kitchen, and we got enough of a stream to wet down the roof and walls.

"How much water does that tank on top of the hotel hold?" I asked the manager, as he scrambled up beside us.

"One week's supply," he panted. "When it runs out we ought still to get a little direct from the windmill. What started it?"

NOBODY ever knew, so I suppose nobody tried to tell him; but I'm not sure, because my attention got divided at about this time between trying to make that stream of water carry three feet farther than the laws of gravity and friction would allow, and a sudden figure that seized the foreground of the picture, and held it, screaming.

It was Professor Winterhaven, and he was standing in the full blaze of light at the side of the hotel facing the garage, and yawping, "Fire! Fire! Fire!" at the top of his cracked voice. He was jauntily attired in an old-fashioned night-shirt, tucked into his trousers, which he held up with both hands because he had overlooked his belt. He was hatless, and his head shone in the glare like a pale and oval moon. Professor Winterhaven's toupee, you will gather, was one of those that you take off nights and stick on again in the morning with shellac.

"How's the wind, Mr. Hardin?" asked Harold, at my elbow. He was standing at the top of the ladder, passing pails of water. "Feels as if it was rising."

"I think that's the draught from the fire," I told him. "If we have luck, it looks as if the garage and the cars might be the only loss. That is, of course, if the water holds out."

"Hey, you!" yells Harold disrespectfully at Professor Winterhaven. "Stop hollering, and get some shoes on instead of those bath slippers, and come pass water."

The professor was so astonished that he stopped shouting, looked himself over, came to a sudden realization of what a spectacle he was in the eyes of gods and men, and went scuttling into the house. Inside of five minutes he was back, belted and haired, and darned if he didn't go to handling pails like a good one!

Then the little pindling stream of water from the nozzle I was holding petered out. The tank on top of the building was empty, and the windmill, after such a dry spell, wasn't equal to the necessities of the occasion.

"No baths for a week," I said, and dropped the nozzle. There wasn't any more water for the pails, either, short of the harbor, which was either half a mile away or ninety feet down—either one impracticable for a bucket brigade with seven buckets.

"What can we do?" cried Harold.

"Nothing," I said. "And, thank goodness, I guess we don't need to. She's pretty wet all along this side now—and, if I'm not mistaken, the wind has changed."

It had. The danger, unless it changed back very soon, was over.

I WENT down the ladder a lot slower than I had gone up, and hurried around to make sure that Maryle was all right. The folks were going back on the piazza, and just as I got there Mrs. Greathouse gushed up to the Brigadier, who had seated herself in her usual chair and mechanically gone to knitting.

"Oh, Mrs. Dyer!" she cried. "Isn't it terrible! And to think that Harold saved the hotel. Did you see him up there on the ladder? He was wonderful! Weren't you distracted about him? I was. Isn't he a dear?"

The Brigadier looked coldly and sternly at the young widow,—not so young-looking, at that, as usual,—and said very distinctly:

"You have on one white stocking and one tan stocking, and electric curlers are not becoming to you."

The widow fled. Then I found Maryle, and we had turned into the doorway, when there was a small diversion.

Down the stairs—I suppose he and his wife were sound sleepers and that their room had been overlooked, somehow, in the first alarm—came Mr. Fanning of Uniontown, Michigan. He came down very fast indeed. He was dragging a small steamer trunk, and just as he arrived at the turn of the staircase it got away, knocked his legs from under him, and he arrived in the lower hall coasting on it.

He rolled off, struggled madly to his feet, and yelled:

"For God's sake, save my wife!"

Mrs. Fanning's face and two-shaded hair appeared over the railing at the bend in the stairs. She spoke frigidly.

"Theodore!" she said. "Theodore! You come back upstairs this minute and get your pants."

I grabbed somebody's shawl off the hat-tree beside the main door and tossed it to him. It was a bright shawl. As he returned hastily up the stairs, he looked like a trench view of a Highlander going over the top.

WHEN Maryle, at my elbow, got through giggling, she remarked that the fire seemed to have burned itself out about as quickly as it had started, and that Harold and one or two of the other younger men were watching it to see that it didn't threaten anything again. She suggested I would be more comfortable if I got out of my bedraggled clothes, and prettier if I washed my face.

"It can't be done," I said. "Not for seven days."

But I went along, and of course by now there was a little water coming into the tank from the windmill, and I cleaned up, and we put out the light in our room and sat down to cool off and let our nerves steady down.

The house was still a-murmur with excitement. People were touring through the corridors, making calls, telling one another what they were doing or dreaming when it broke out, and just how they felt, and exactly what they said, and why they did what they did.

It was quite surprising, heard as you couldn't help hearing it in a thin-walled summer hotel like that, what complete presence of mind had been shown by one and all.

I DIDN'T realize that the Brigadier-General had stayed out on the piazza all alone to wait for Harold until he came up the steps from the walk and spoke to her. It seems the youngsters had decided it wasn't necessary for but one of them to watch the ruins any longer, and they had matched dimes to see who should be the goat, and it was the other boy.

Our window is in the corner, just above the Brigadier's chair, and we could hear the conversation as plainly as if we were right on the piazza.

"You must be very wet and tired, Harold," she said. "I'll fix you up a drink to keep you from catching cold, and—"

I suppose he had been thinking about it all the time he was at work with the pails, and afterward while he was guarding the smoldering remains. He had decided to take the first opportunity, and there aren't many chances for casual confidential conversations in one of those summer places.

"Mother," he said,—and his voice showed how difficult it was,—"I have something I want to tell you. Sit down again, will you, please? It—it isn't easy to tell it."

She went back to her chair without a word. I put my mouth close to Maryle's ear.

"I haven't had a chance to tell you before," I said. "He's engaged to the Gresham girl."

"I knew he was or was going to be," Maryle said.

"You did? How?"

"I used my eyes," she said. "Sh-h-h!"

But I wouldn't let her cheat me out of telling the rest of the news:

"And he wants to enlist."

"I could see that from the way he looked when they were congratulating his mother."

"But, May, if you thought so, why didn't you say something when I—"

She put her hand around my neck and over my mouth.

"He's going to tell her now," she whispered. "I told you all along he was a dear boy."

She never had; but what's the use?

"Mother," Harold said, "there are two things. They are both pretty important. One of them is going to make you feel badly, I'm afraid. Please try to see it my way—will you, mother? Please."

"Go on; don't beat about the bush that way." Her voice was low but sharp. "What is it?"

"First, I want to marry Maude Gresham. Very soon. I—I love her very much, mother."

He stopped. We could hear the old lady catch her breath.

"What's the other thing?" she demanded.

"Mother," he said, "I want to— It will seem terrible to you, I know, but—" There was no way to soften it; he blurted it hurriedly, baldly. "I want you to let me enlist in the army. I've been thinking of it a long time. The doctors say I'm in perfect health. I want to do my bit, mother."

"And if I say I don't want you to go?"

There was a coldness in her voice that made me shiver. A woman with a voice like that, I thought, would disinherit a boy for anything.

"Then— Don't say you won't consent, mother. Don't, please. Because— You don't know how I hate to say it, but it has got so it is a matter of what I ought to do; and when it's that way—"

The Brigaider stood up and faced him. He rose, too, and she looked up into his face.

"Harold," she said, "as to the first—well, I had hoped you wouldn't want to marry for a long time. Maude Gresham isn't good enough for you, but she's better than the average: I suppose you could go farther and fare worse. As to the—the other"

HE DIDN'T speak, and she paused for a moment. Maryle, on the arm of my chair, was hugging me so tight I had to edge her hand away with my chin. The Brigadier-General went on, in the same voice:

"You had six ancestors in the Revolution, Harold—four on my side and two on your father's. Your father was too young to go to the Civil War, but my mother's two youngest brothers went. One of them—died, at Petersburg. Now there's a fire. Everything that's worth while in the world seems to be threatened. Somebody has to get up and pass the water to put it out. Well, neither the Dyers nor the Olneys have ever asked others to do their share of the country's work." She stopped. "Oh, my boy—"

Her voice broke. She reached down to the arm of the chair and picked up her knitting-bag with a hand that trembled. But when, a second later, she went on talking, her voice was as hard as ever—harder than ever. It was harsh, unsympathetic, almost metallic. In that minute I understood for the first time in my life the meaning of the word "repression" as the real New Englanders have had it ever since the Puritans.

"I think," she said, "that when I see you go away it will break my heart. But if you don't go I shall be ashamed of you to the last day of my life. It's time we went to bed, Harold."

"Dire and beyond all healing is the hate
When hearts that loved are turned to enmity."—Euripides.

POOR Medea! A stranger in her husband's land, with horrid, catty in-laws laughing behind their hands at her free and natural ways and calling her "barbarian." A perfectly horrid position for any woman of spirit, let alone a Princess of Colchis. But she could have stood it all—the homesickness for her lost Black Sea, the snippy Greek matrons—if her husband Jason had still loved her as he said he did when he sailed so jauntily into her life in quest of the Golden Fleece. For Jason's sake Medea had committed "sweet treason" against her native land, and thought to hold his love forever with the wondrous fleece they carried off together. But, back in Corinth, Jason's fickle heart went wandering after the home-town girls, and finally he planned a second marriage with one of them, quite as if the Princess Medea and her fleece had never existed.

It is at this point in poor Medea's history that Euripides began his tragedy about her that thrilled New York this spring when Margaret Anglin revived it just as much as it thrilled the audiences of ancient Greece more than two thousand years ago. Miss Anglin, as Medea, in this picture has just rolled up her bracelets prepatory to killing her children with a dagger, despatching a poisoned robe to her husband's bride as a wedding gift, and departing in her special express and no stops chariot, remarking with some satisfaction:

"Call me what thing thou please,
My claws have gripped thine heart."

HAUNTED HOUSES

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DEAR OLD DOBBINS

IN APRIL

By BERNICE BROWN

Illustrations by W. T. Benda

JUDGE HADLEY stretched out his legs and unexpectedly kicked over the wicker waste-basket under his desk. Then he drew in his legs and peered down with annoyance at the litter of torn papers sprinkled over the dusty hollow where lived his feet and his waste-basket in inimicable proximity. Instinctively he bent over to pick up the débris. Then he felt suddenly rather stout and middle-aged and irritable.

"Hasn't been emptied for a week," he grumbled.

"What, sir?" asked the clerk, a Spanish-American war veteran who chewed tobacco and had a limp and friends in politics.

"This waste-basket."

Judge Hadley felt an unaccountable rage toward this clerk, toward the janitor (an individual he had never seen and whom, judging from his administrations, he believed to be mythical), toward the grimy mahogany-veneered pomposity of the court-room with its dirty windows, its mud-tracked marble floors, its torn expensive window-blinds, which followed your hand down yieldingly, but which even the most adroit coaxing could not persuade to ascend. Perhaps because the mackerel and coffee and fried potatoes he had eaten for lunch had not agreed with him, or perhaps because it was four o'clock and April with a touch of May in the air—if indeed one could imagine spring in that court-room—Judge Hadley felt tired and disillusioned.

"Hurry up that last case, Fred," he said, without looking at the Spanish war veteran.

"They're lookin' for an interpreter, your honor." Fred expectorated adroitly. "Even Si Wyatt can't understand him."

"A pretty time to work up his defense," Judge Hadley grumbled.

He shut his eyes and for a few minutes didn't think of anything. Then he remembered vaguely the days he had wanted to be a judge, the days when he had clerked day-times in Jim Conklin's hardware store and read law nights. He was mildly amazed at the whipping enthusiasm that had kept his eyes open over the tattered Blackstone he had borrowed from Sam Bellows. As if it were another person, he looked hack on the struggling months after he had passed his bar examinations. It was in that very room he had pleaded his first case—and won it.

He supposed he must have felt very exhilarated and triumphant, but it seemed a long time ago. It had been then, too, that he had planned to marry Clarissa and be a judge. And, someway, linked with the vision of Clarissa was the dream to be a judge the State would be proud of, a judge with heart and insight as well as intellect. But Clarissa had died the first spring after their marriage, and that same year he had mounted the first round on the ladder of politics.

Judge Hadley yawned and opened his eyes. He wished he didn't have a headache every afternoon now. He knew drearily that he needed exercise. He ate too much. Suddenly he jerked forward in his swivel-chair.

"I can't wait here all day," he snapped. "Have that case called now, Fred. I have an engagement." Judge Hadley had decided to play golf.

He watched the Spanish-American war veteran slouch across the room and bawl out his inarticulate orders. Judge Hadley was suddenly filled with disgust for his clerk, for his job, for the ugliness of life. He loathed being a police judge and being forty-five. Then he remembered suddenly that it was April out on the golf links.

As the room filled slowly he stared at his calendar. He didn't have to look at the people then, and, besides, he had discovered that it produced a kind of respect for his dignity in the minds of his watchers. He had himself photographed that way once—only he had been looking at a book of bare-foot dancers, instead, which had been supplied by the photographer, who had exhorted him not to look as if he were enjoying himself too much. Judge Hadley had always been prejudiced against that photographer.

"The case of the State versus Stefan Povala for illegal sale of spirituous liquors to United States soldiers," bawled the Spanish-American war veteran.

Judge Hadley scanned the faces around the two tables before him. Povala was probably the one at the end of the table on the left. He sat quietly, slightly bent forward.

Despite the fact that facilities for improving one's personal appearance were not abundant in the city "lock-up," Judge Hadley realized that the man had made an awkward attempt at neatness. With his fingers, perhaps, Povala had combed back from his broad forehead the sun-bleached strands of course straw-colored hair. Without analyzing it, Judge Hadley knew that the prisoner's skin and eye-brows, of the same shade as his hair, were a strangely effective background for his eyes, which were deep blue and curiously bright.

For an instant he had caught the fellow's attention; then he took refuge again in his calendar. Povala wasn't the usual type of "bootlegger." Judge Hadley had observed the Slavic face before, but instead of the usual stolid fatalism there was something curiously child-like and pleading in Povala's expression.

Judge Hadley shook himself mentally and turned toward the secret service man who was to testify against the prisoner. He shouldn't let this man hypnotize him—besides, he'd made rather a name for himself cleaning out bootleggers.

"McNeil and I was in khaki, ye understand, and we met him there at the Walnut Street bridge," the secret service man was saying. "It was about five-thirty but growin' dark already. 'Can ye get us a drink, ho?' says I. He looked sort of startled and pretended like he didn't understand—but he did all right."

"Tell only what happened," interrupted Judge Hadley. "Never mind your observations."

Donovan of the secret service winked the eye away from Judge Hadley, and the Spanish-American war veteran grinned. His Honor's ill humor tempered the whole court-room.

"'We got money,' says I, and I flashes a dollar bill before him. He sort of cowered, but he begins to take notice, and I knows we're on the right track. 'I no sell,' he says in his lingo. 'Take this,' says I, 'and get us a drink,' and I stuffs the money into his pocket. 'We'll be waiting here,' I says, 'and in fifteen minutes it'll be darker.'"

Judge Hadley stole another look at the prisoner. He was straining to watch the man testifying against him. Evidently the language puzzled him, and he cupped a thick-fingered hand around his ear, believing that if he could hear more plainly he could understand. He seemed to be quite without resentment. He was just waiting. Discouraged at last, he dropped his hand to the edge of the table, and his eyes rested on it. He had given up trying to understand.

"Well, he brought us back the booze all right," the secret service man continued, "and some change beside. It was not bad whisky, either—from the smell." This comment did not pass unappreciated.

THE case for the defense progressed haltingly. Si Wyatt's interest in his client was frankly half-hearted—besides, it was a clear case against him, and Si Wyatt was anxious to get home to his garden; he had hired a man to help him dig the sweet-pea trench that afternoon. Moreover, Povala was about as difficult to handle as a sheep that has been dazed by a thunder-storm. It apparently had not penetrated to him that Si Wyatt was paid by the county to use his talents to defend him and others as unfortunate. Besides, Povala's limited command of English seemed to have deserted him entirely.

It was evident he understood nothing of the reason for his imprisonment or for his trial. This country was difficult to understand—even as Poland had been difficult. Nevertheless Si Wyatt droned through the form of a defense markedly similar to pleas he had made on a dozen like occasions. Indeed, Judge Hadley could have prompted him if at any moment the words had failed. Then he sat down and yawned.

And the case for the defense was ended.

For a moment the court-room was silent. Then an unexpected thing happened to Judge Hadley. He looked down from his desk directly into the eyes of the prisoner. Suddenly he had a curious sense of isolation; it was as if they two were alone in the court-room.

"To byli soldate," said Povala.

Then he stopped, dazed, like a child who is blindfolded in a school game. He caught suddenly at the sleeve of the interpreter. Even in Polish he spoke with an effort.

"He says they were soldiers," explained the interpreter. "He did not want to get the drink for them, but he thought he had to. In Poland, he says, one obeys a soldier or, pouf! one receives a beating, or perhaps one's cow is driven off and the children are hungry."

Povala again looked up at Judge Hadley.

"Bo to byli soldate," he repeated. Then he smiled apologetically and made a deprecating gesture with his great hands. After all, when one is understood, language is a futile thing.

The simplicity of the man's appeal was disarming, irresistible. Judge Hadley felt a strange elation. Here was one man who trusted him, even as a child trusts his parents—a devoted, inarticulate sort of trust.

With an insight Judge Hadley did not believe he possessed, he grasped the somber background of Povala's existence. As if he had been there, he saw the low-roofed Polish village on the muddy high-road along which the oxen labored. He could hear the troopers of the Czar gallop into the tiny square in front of the church and give their orders. There are many faces like Povala's in that little group of peasants—dumb, accepting faces. Yes, in Poland one obeyed a soldier. Judge Hadley was amazed at the vividness of this picture. Surely Povala had needed no lawyer for the defense. For this once, Judge Hadley became the judge he had intended to be back in the long evenings when he had thumbed Sam Bellows' Blackstone, back in the days when he had been engaged to Clarissa.

THE approach to number seven on the Fairview Golf links was a steep one. Judge Hadley had always rather dreaded it, because each time it had convinced him that he was short of breath and forty-five and weary. Now he took it like a school-boy. With steady fingers he molded the little pyramid of damp sand and topped it with a "glory dimple," ivory white and glistening. Then, for a minute, he looked westward over the sloping meadows, curiously lovely with the yellow green of April.

"Strange place—Poland," he observed; "or, at least, it used to be."

Sam Bellows was still puffing from the ascent.

"It's nothing to boast of now. Still, I guess some people have got a genius for suffering, for being misunderstood." He dropped down on the wooden bench next to the sand-box. "Go ahead—it's your honor."

Slowly Judge Hadley drew a stick from his bag.

"Anyway, there's America for some of them, and a betting chance of meeting a Yankee who understands."

Judge Hadley drew his club back for a full swing, and clean from his driver the ball curved upward, then down, and he watched it go bounding along the hillside.

THE NEWEST BRANCH OF THE SERVICE

WHAT is now the fully equipped and organized Camouflage Department of the United States army was started as a volunteer organization of nineteen men, less than a year ago, by Barry Faulkner, a New York artist, and Sherry Fry, a New York sculptor. The first training camp was a studio in Greenwich Village, New York City.

Shortly after General Pershing got to France he began to cable back for a company of camoufleurs. The harassed War Department had its hands full licking the draft plan into shape, and pretended not to hear. But Pershing kept on cabling, "I want camoufleurs," until the war office was almost distracted.

At this point Faulkner and Fry and their nineteen men presented themselves to Secretary Baker. Here was a nucleus for a camouflage branch ready made, merely waiting to be used. The war office "accepted with pleasure."

Evarts Tracy, a New York architect with Plattsburg training, was appointed Major; recruiting was started at once; and before long morning roll-call sounded like a reading of the catalogue of the Paris Salon or a Fifth Avenue art exhibit.

Company A., U. S. Camouflage, was attached provisionally to the 25th U. S. Engineers at Fort Meyer, near Washington. Straightway the camoufleur cadets set about building themselves a camp. Tents were pitched, and a mess shack and arsenals were put up after the conformed pattern; but at that point all resemblance to the ordinary training camp ceased.

Changing a Tent to a Shrub

THE first job the cadets attacked was the business of camouflaging their camp so that it could not be seen at a height of 3,000 feet from the ground. They painted the roof of their mess shack so that it looked like a bird's-eye view of a tree; they deadened all high-lights and angles on the place; they transformed their tents into flowering shrubs, and turned the out-buildings into hay-mounds. A close-up view of the camp was startling; but when the testers went up in an aëroplane and looked down upon the habitat of Company A from a distance of 3,000 feet, what had been the camp appeared to be only a peaceful rolling country.

The aspect of the camp grew stranger as weeks rolled on. The casual visitor happening upon it could well be excused if he thought he had run into an outdoor theatrical workshop with cubist leanings. One of the problems the camoufleurs attacked was that of getting rid of the troublesome high light on the gun-barrel so liable to betray a marching army. Some one discovered that black and white applied in blotches would neutralize itself to any background within a very few hundred feet. So Fort Meyer was treated to the spectacle of a hundred cadet camoufleurs marching with zebra-looking guns, while airmen hovered in the sky, trying to spot high lights. Not a light flashed during the march.

The camoufleurs of America have to their credit also the discovery that a ship splotched with ultramarine, gray, crimson, pink, and vivid yellow will lose itself against the horizon at a distance of two miles, with nothing to betray it to enemy craft save the smoke from its funnel. This they proved by means of a dummy ship set afloat in a little lake that is a part of the camouflage training field. They proved also that a moving train could be made indistinguishable to enemy air scouts by the simple expedient of decorating the cars with green, blue, yellow, and gray paint, applied irregularly—the color ingredients of any landscape.

"Our Camouflage" works entirely upon the theory that "protective coloration is the first great tactic of defense," and they take their lessons directly from nature, the great mistress of camouflage.

Inventions of American Artists

THE new game of war is "hide and strike—strike and hide." To be seen is to be lost. Neither side can mass men, guns, or supplies behind the lines unnoticed by enemy air scouts without the aid of disguise. So the rooky camoufleur learns how to turn a death-dealing gun into a peaceful rock, how to conceal a moving wagon train beneath a waving mattress of leaves, how to construct immense dummy cannon for the purpose of drawing the enemy's fire, how to change a whole camp into a field of hay-stacks, and a thousand other things of similar nature. He must learn to see everything with a bird's-eye view; and to the degree that he can do this he is a success or a failure.

Homer Saint-Gaudens, son of the great sculptor, is a first lieutenant in the company, and he has to his credit the invention of a machine that will turn old newspapers into grass blankets, under cover of which a squad of men can walk right up to the front-line trenches without being seen. Lieutenant Wilfred Conrow has invented an "invisible helmet." Artists Salza, Tubesing, Deaver, Nell, Sanger, Foster, Comstock, and Thrasher, all names known widely in the art world, have sworn off painting magazine-cover girls and millionaires' wives for the duration of the war, and are busy concocting new color schemes to make something look like what it isn't.

A COOTIE COMRADE

MUCH has been heard of the hostility of the "cooties" (body-lice) and of the hardships they inflict on soldiers in the trenches. All the more reason that he should get credit when credit is due. Here is a classical story of service rendered, for which Corporal Holmes is responsible in his book, A Yankee in the Trenches (Little Brown and Company):

"A soldier was going over the top when a cootie friend bit him in the calf. The soldier bent and captured the biter. As he did so, there came a shell whizzing over the spot where his head would otherwise have been. Holding the captive between thumb and finger, Tommy thus apostrophized him 'Old feller, I cawn't give yer the Victoria Cross—but I can put yer back.' And he did!"

THERE MAY BE A BLANKET IN THAT OLD GOLD RING

"I CAN'T buy a single Liberty Bond— even the smallest one: there isn't enough remaining out of my little competence to provide even a war savings stamp. But I am sending you this gold ring. It was my mother's wedding-ring. Will it help our boys over there?"

The letter was on the cheapest kind of paper: it had been mailed at a country post-office in the heart of Nebraska. The writing trembled unevenly across the sheet, as if the writer were very old; and the stationery proclaimed that she must be very poor. The plain gold band was doubtless the only piece of jewelry that she owned. And she wanted it to go "over there."

It went. Not as a gold ring, of course. This is a war in which a gold ring more or less on either side does very little good. No; the ring was melted up—and produced a pair of good warm blankets. And the blankets went across to make life warmer and more secure for one of the flying sons of America.

A lot of the good ideas in this war have been born in the heads of women. There is, for instance, the Thimble Fund in England, to which women send their gold thimbles. Brass thimbles are good enough for war-time, and the gold can buy comforts for men at the front. It was the Thimble Fund that gave Mrs. William Allen Bartlett, of New York, her idea for the Treasure and Trinket Fund.

"It's going to be an air war more and more," said Mrs. Bartlett. "Of course, the government furnishes the general equipment to our airmen; but not blankets, and not any of the little comforts that make a soldier really happy. The women of America will furnish those—and they'll do it out of their jewelry-boxes, with the treasures and trinkets of other days."

So the fund began, and from thousands of women all over the country the treasures and trinkets have poured in: coins, thimbles, an old silver cornet; the top of a gold-headed cane and a half dozen pairs of gold spectacle-rims; watch chains and silver compote dishes; a gold fountain-pen and some pieces of crude gold quartz; silver trays and baby cups; candlesticks and bracelets—all kinds of things. The fund is the finest proof in the world that love is never lost. Imprison it in a gold ring or a gold bracelet, and it still lives. And in the hour of need it may be set free again, to do its service in another place.

The Treasure and Trinket Fund is only in its infancy. It wants treasures and trinkets of all kinds—thousands of them. And no one need hesitate for fear his treasure may be too poor. The address is 259 Fifth Avenue, New York City; or contributions sent to the office of this magazine will be acknowledged and delivered to the fund.

WHAT I THINK OF MY PARENTS—By THE READERS OF EVERY WEEK

—Continued from page 5

mothers knew how to wear clothes and comb their hair.

It was not poverty that made my mother slovenly. I knew boys whose parents had less, in actual means, than my own. Yet their mothers could appear anywhere—and those boys could be proud of them. Oft-times, as a lad, I cried and prayed all night, begging God to make my mother and father more neat, more tidy, and our home more clean: but the prayer was never answered!

Then I became determined to help myself. How I got that determination I do not know; it has ever been an unsolved riddle to me. I found I could get my lessons as easily as any other pupils. So I began boning my books hard. I compelled attention by winning in every possible contest. But the questions I asked my teachers, when they gave me the much-desired heart-to-heart talks, were not about literary matters, but about clothes and clean finger-nails. So I learned the things I could not learn at home.

I went to college, working my way through. This was against the wishes of my parents, who were amazed that I would give up a ten-dollar-a-week job. I selected a military school purposely, for the reason that all the young men were compelled to wear uniforms. Yet I found myself handicapped by a lack of training in manners and in speech. The biggest thing I had to fight was a natural moral turpitude. Many, many times was I tempted to do things that would have put me down into the muck and mire. But I steeled myself—saying over and over that it was my fight—my fight! And I must win!

In college, while a senior (of which class I was president), I met the sweet, fine girl who was to become my life companion. And it was her sweetness, her purity, her womanliness that drove all vileness out of me. I knew that to win her I must be clean: to win her, and be worthy of her, I must be a man!

The trying time came when I had to take her to my home—to meet my slovenly mother and father. I had already met hers—and I feared for the outcome. But she made herself blind to the dirt and the untidiness—and saw only me: God bless her noble heart!

So it is for her—and for our children—that I am striving to win. I do not want our boys to be held down by a life-long handicap. I want them to be proud of me, as I know they are proud of their mother. I may never be rich, never be famous; but I can be their devoted chum and companion—their adviser and friend. As their father I am most responsible for their existence. Therefore it is my duty to make life a cheerful, happily busy, and worth-while place for them.

G. I.

This Father Was Feared and Disliked

MY child is not born yet, though it will be in a few months if all goes well with its mother.

If it lives, and grows up to call me father, I intend to be to it what my father was not to me—a companion and a confidant, not a harsh being to inspire fear and dislike.

I intend to remember that a child must have interests of its own; that it must be a child in its own way, if it is to develop into all that is best, not into all that is worst.

When my father came home from work, we children did not whoop with joy and run to meet him. Rather, we dreaded his coming; for we knew from experience that we must suppress our chatter and play and sit in the house like so many mummies while he read some blood-and-thunder novel.

"Keep still, can't you!" he would thunder at us, if we forgot ourselves during some exciting passage in the story and began to whisper to each other, as children will.

With mother we could talk and laugh or sing as we pleased, for she was full of youthful spirits; but to the day of father's death—and he lived until I was nearly thirty-five years of age—we never acquired the habit of freely expressing ourselves in his presence.

In the last years of his life, when he could not see to read as in years past, I know that the days and evenings were long for him; but, because he suppressed us in our early years, we simply could not talk to him in a companionable way, as I know he longed to have us do. His was a lonely old age.

He never gave us spending money; never encouraged us in sports; and if he disliked any boy's father, that boy, I soon found, was not welcome in our home.

I never went anywhere that I was not ashamed of my baggy, ill-fitting clothes; these he selected himself, on the theory that a boy outgrows his clothes.

Though we children liked music, we were never given the opportunity to learn to play any kind of instrument.

In short, father gave us "all work and no play." He dwarfed our souls, or the next thing to it. God grant I may not do this to my child. At least, it shall not be afraid to smile at me or to snuggle in my arms and call me daddy!

H. H.

From a Croatian Girl

I WAS an only child of my parents. We are foreigners come from Croatia, little but dear and beautiful province of the cruel and tyrant Austria.

I was little over fifteen years when we first came to America. My parents were wealthy people over there. My father was very popular in the city of Zayreb. Zayreb is not a small town, it counts 100,000 population. It is a clean and beautiful city.

My father would give his life for his dear Austria and his Emperor. I was different; I hated Austria, but I loved Slavs.

Year 1913 all the boys and girls from high school quit school and went on strike to fight for our own rights. The reason was a strict order that all the schools got to learn and speak German and Hungarian.

We all refused, and want our dear old language back, and three months later we won. During those three months we collected over five thousand khrouns for Croatian schools and poor children. One day the students took me on the balcony of the university to say a few words to give more courage to our young Slavs. I was the leader for all the young girls.

It happened that my father passed by and saw me up there, and heard me the way I spoke. When I got home, for the first time in my life I got such a whipping, I remember yet. Before that happened my father thought the world of me, their daughter Mira. The school started again in May, and my father went to America in June. Three months later mother and I come to America—to country of liberty. Here my father told me that it was on account of me we are here. When I asked the reason, his answer was, he will never forgive me for the thing I did in Zayreb. If he had anything with him when he saw me on the balcony he would kill me; and since then I was not his dear little Mira and he was not that dear old father; he hated me.

For three years I did not hear a nice word from him. Every one of my meals were tears mixed in them. I was not allowed to go out; not make any friends with no girls or boys; not go to any of our dances, entertainments; not bring the company up to the house. If I was not home just on time from work or church, I did get a licking. If I start to sing, he told me to shut up. If I was sober or sad, he would ask me in the most meanest way what is wrong with me; am I lovesick? Did I fall in love with the balcony on the university? The worst thing was, I was not supposed to answer yes or no.

My dear mother knew that all that was not right, but she could not say anything. Oh, it was so many times that I was going to leave home; go away forever, but my dear, generous mother stopped me. I knew that if I am going away, she would have to stand and listen to all the misery.

One day I could not get up and go to work. I had a pain all over my body. Mother call a doctor. He come look at me, and he talk to my mother. I don't know what he said, but later I saw my dear mother was crying. Father got home that night; he was very cross; said he ain't going to pay doctor bills for such a daughter like me. Mother took such a good care of me—I wish she didn't. I wanted to die so bad, I wish she gave me the poison, not the medicine. When I was able to walk, she took me out, and there was some girls took walks together. Mother and I went to show; several times she took me to our Croatian entertainment. I thought the world of my mother. That was for the first time that I was happy.

Later was more trouble: I fall in love with one of our boys. He was a young man about twenty-four years old, very intelligent. Mother like him, but we knew that father was going to hate him—why? Because he loved our country and hate Austria. However, father let us get married, and we live happy, but in a different city. I was home to visit my parents, but my father is the same as he was; he would hardly talk to me. Mother is just lovely. If we ever is going to have children, we surely would not be so mean, and go wrong with them as my father did with me.

M. S.

Smile for Your Children

WHEN I read your announcement of this contest, it seemed to me I have been wanting all my life to pour out just this story.

To-day there is a great deal of love in my heart for my parents. I doubt if they know it—I did not, until recent years. I am thirty years old, and mother of three children. My great hope is that my babies may always think of me as a smiling mother. Mine was not, and I may say the lack of it was her great fault and my great sorrow.

I wonder if there are others who can know what that meant to me through the earlier years of my life? I remember no "pet names" from my mother's lips. Unsmiling lips can not form them. In the morning it was a stern, "Get up, girl!" It started the whole day wrong. My breakfast, daintily prepared and plentiful, was often choked down. My dresses were the prettiest among my friends', but I was always aware that they had caused mother much trouble to make.

An aunt, who had more children, more work, and less money, was always smiling and patient, and she was my ideal—though her housekeeping was far from good, as was mother's. How I loved to visit her—though I was stung with the thought that mother was glad to be rid of me. My father was as docile as I was, and I used to wonder at him, and my respect for him suffered.

When I was fourteen years old I was at death's door with a dreadful fever, and I was astonished to see my mother cry. I had firmly believed she did not love me. Only then could I begin to see how conscientiously my mother worked and cared for me and my father, how she sacrificed everything for me.

But it was too late. I lacked all confidence in myself. I had been impatiently called a dullard too long. I merely made my school grades, I was so painfully timid. This awful timidity has clung to me all my life. I make few friends—am so awkward with strangers, so fearful of criticism. I love humanity, but do not know how to show it. I never could tell my mother I loved her.

Whatever I do or don't do, I shall smile for my children.

A. B. C.

They Did the Best They Could

I FEEL grateful to my parents because they did their utmost for their children always, as far as their circumstances would permit.

I feel resentment toward them because, when in their circumstances they might possibly have reared two children in just common decency, they had fourteen, ten of whom are living. I am the oldest, and in all my childhood I never knew what it was to meet another child as an equal. I never had a home that I was not ashamed

Continued on page 21

Fire-Fighters with Wings

WHEN the alarm rings for a water-front fire in San Diego, Aërial Truck No. 1 takes wing at once. Its crew and driver don't have to dodge the eternal small boy; old ladies bewildered at street crossings are not on its line of goat-getters; and the well known shortest distance between two points is at its service.

Aërial Truck No. 1 is a hydro-aëroplane, and when it gets within striking distance of the flames it settles down right in the midst of the water supply—which, being a chemical, it disdains to use—and gets busy. It has already proved its worth. All the company needs now is a water spaniel for a mascot.

"Benny Havens, Oh!"

May the Army be augmented, promotion be less slow;
May our Country in the hour of need be ready for the foe;
May we find a soldier's resting-place beneath a soldier's blow,
With room enough beside our graves for Benny Havens, Oh!

SOMEWHERE in France to-night West Pointers are singing "Benny Havens, Oh!" The men who led Scott's intrepid invaders sang it as they fought their way to the heart of Montezuma's kingdom; it was sung around the camp-fires in the rugged days of the '60's; it has echoed on the plains, in the Cuban swamps, in the Philippine jungles.

Wherever Duty called they went, their steps were never slow—
With Alma Mater on their lips, and "Benny Havens, Oh!"

"Benny Havens, Oh!" is not a battlesong, but West Pointers have died singing it. Go to Gettysburg. A stone's toss from the high-water mark of the Confederacy you will find where brave Cushing fell—fell, his comrades tell us, with the song on his lips. It is the epic of West Point, commemorating the deeds of her sons who have "gone West for their God and their country."

In 1824—the year Robert E. Lee entered the Academy—there came to West Point Benny Havens, genial of soul, generous of heart, and broad of girth. He was permitted to occupy a small hut on the northern edge of the Post, and a warm friendship soon sprang up between him and the cadets.

It was not long before the West Point authorities declared Benny's home "off limits." In 1827 Benny was banished from the Post, and took up his abode on the edge of the Hudson, about a mile below West Point, where he lived until his death in 1877 at the age of ninety.

Benny Havens now lies in a small cemetery near Fort Montgomery, overlooking the Hudson, but his spirit goes marching on.

Through the snow and ice of fifty winters West Pointers made their way to Benny's. More than one great soldier paid the penalty for being caught there after taps, when he was supposed to be sleeping peacefully in his quarters. Such chieftains as Grant, Sherman, Fitzhugh Lee, Custer, and others ate Benny's griddle cakes, laughed at his wit, and sang with him before his fire.

And here, one snowy night in 1838, were composed the first three verses of West Point's epic. The composers were Ripley A. Arnold, who distinguished himself in the Mexican War; Thomas Metcalfe, who, graduating in 1841, turned from soldiering to medicine and became a famous surgeon; and Lieutenant Lucius O'Brien, of the then Eighth United States Infantry, who was killed in the Seminole campaign in Florida in 1841. At Benny Havens's suggestion, the verses were set to the tune of "The Wearing of the Green."

Verse after verse was added by the soldier poets, until to-day there are fifty-odd verses. Some of them have been lost, others forgotten. To-day West Point sings the first three verses with heads bared.

As poetry "Benny Havens, Oh!" is crude, but it breathes the spirit of the men who have led our armies in the past and who are leading them to-day. In the words of a distinguished West Pointer: "It teaches us to keep brightly burnished the shield whereon West Point's record is written. It makes us aware that in keeping faith with our dead we have kept faith with ourselves, with the corps, with our country, and with God."

Here are the original three verses of "Benny Havens, Oh!":

Come, fill your glasses, fellows, and stand up in a row,
To singing sentimentally we're going for to go.
In the Army there's sobriety, promotion's very slow,
So we'll sing our reminiscences of Benny Havens, Oh!
To our kind old Alma Mater, our rock-bound highland home,
We'll cast back many a fond regret as o'er life's sea we roam;
Until on our last battlefield the lights of heaven shall glow
We'll never fail to drink to her and Benny Havens, Oh!
May the Army be augmented, promotion be less slow,
May our Country in the hour of need be ready for the foe;
May we find a soldier's resting-place beneath a soldier's blow,
With room enough beside our graves for Benny Havens, Oh!"

No Wonder Eggs Are High

THE most expensive chicken-yard (potentially) in the country is atop the Waldorf-Astoria. The fowl that inhabit it can't scratch for worms, because no worm ever climbed that high in its life; but they live well on scraps from the hotel kitchen, and are a credit to their owner, Erza Bingham, who has been chief engineer at the Waldorf-Astoria for twenty years.

They are modest hens, and when they lay they omit the cut-cut-ca-da-cut of the barn-yard breed. They are three stories above any guest room, but they seem to sense that to retain their position they must be ladylike in deportment. It goes to show what environment will do.

Perhaps it has nothing to do with the price of eggs, but it may be interesting to recall that Mr. Bingham's hens strut about the roof of a property that is assessed at $11,650,000.

He Heads the World's Biggest Trust

DOWN in Washington, with his office in what was intended to be one of the city's newest apartment-houses, is a man who controls more money and property than John D. Rockefeller and the house of Morgan together. How much he controls, no man can say. He is at the head of the largest trust company in the world. Six months ago it did not exist; but since its creation it has grown with such rapidity that each day has seen

an increase larger than the full growth of many trust companies.

The Alien Property Custodian—such is the rather misleading title conferred upon the head of this trust company by act of Congress—is A. Mitchell Palmer of Pennsylvania, ex-Congressman and one of the men who helped elect President Wilson. In his custody is all the property in the United States owned by residents of Germany or her allies, or by persons trading with Germany, or by such other persons as the President may see fit to designate as enemies of our country.

Entire corporations—some of them among the most prosperous in the country, and the majority of whose stockholders have been found to be Germans—have passed into the hands of Mr. Palmer, and he in turn has appointed as directors of these corporations some of the biggest and most loyal men in the country. Accumulated dividends on German-owned stock since war was declared aggregate millions.

Some of the Americans who have chosen to remain in Germany, and who are therefore for the purposes of this act of Congress "enemies," were formerly among our wealthiest citizens, in many cases widows or daughters of rich Americans who have married German or Austrian titles. The German and Austrian governments themselves, some of their high officials, members of enemy royal families, the great German banks and commercial houses, German inventors and patent-holders, all held big interests here before the war.

All this comes now to the Alien Property Custodian, to hold in trust for the enemy. Actual cash coming into his possession is converted into Liberty bonds, and thus the Kaiser helps to finance our side of the war against him.

The Alien Property Custodian collects bills from Americans in debt to Germans, manages estates of which Germans are heirs, votes more stock in more companies than any other man in the world, manages businesses large and small, collects interest on mortgages and rents on real estates, and does a thousand and one other things that thousands of Germans and their agents were doing before the war.

Along with all this, he uncovers stores of cotton, wheat, and other commodities hidden away here by German interests, and has his agents working all through the country finding out just who some of our enemies are and just what property they have in this country.

All of which is "some job"; but Mr. Palmer—the A. P. C., as his employees and assistants call him—is "some man," and German property under his management is likely to pile up more profits than it ever did before—all of which means more Liberty bond subscriptions on the books of the United States to the credit of the Kaiser and his followers.

Discovering a Violinist

SEVEN years ago no one had heard of Max Rosen. To-day he bids fair to take his place among the great violinists of his time.

Seven years ago Max, a ten-year-old boy in no way to he distinguished from his fellows, was playing on the sidewalks of New York's East Side and practising the violin in the back room of his father's dingy barber shop on Rivington Street. One day a newspaper man happened in. He listened to Max's playing while the barber ran the razor over his face.

"That boy has talent," he said. "He ought to go abroad to study. Who taught him?"

The barber shrugged his shoulders. "I taught him; I had no one else. I can not afford to hire a teacher; I make but a bare living."

The newspaper man was one of those rare individuals who stick to things. He interested some settlement workers in Max, and they sought a patron for him. A wealthy woman was found who promised to give him a hearing.

"It was after dinner," she says, telling of the meeting, "and a ragged little boy with a beautiful face came into the room hugging his violin. It was bitter cold, and the first thing he did was to warm his hands. Then he said he was ready to play anything I wished to hear.

"'Anything?' I laughed. 'Can you play the Mendelssohn concerto like Mischa Elman?'

"'I can't play as well as Elman now,' he answered, 'but I may be able to some day. However, I'll play the concerto for you.'

"And how he played it! There were tears in my eyes when he had finished. I asked him where he had learned it, knowing that his father could not have bought him the music, and he said:

"'I remember things very well. There is a man over in Second Avenue who has a phonograph store, and he lets me play violin records. Then I go home and play what I have heard. That's how I learned the concerto.'"

The woman promised that Max should have his chance. Kathleen Parlow, Zimbalist, and Elman heard him play, and confirmed the belief that he had genius. A fund was raised to send him to study in Europe under Professor Auer, the greatest violin teacher living.

When the boy reached the village where Auer lived he was obsessed with the fear that he might not be worth the master's attention, and he began to practise ceaselessly, going without his meals and deaf to his father's pleading. In that village all noise is forbidden after ten o'clock at night, but Max practised on. There came a knock at the door. "It's the police," gasped the landlady. But when the door opened it was Professor Auer who came in.

"Who is playing the violin so wonderfully?" he asked. "I have been listening for an hour. This is a great talent."

When matters were explained, he said:

"Tell him to rest now. I will take him as my pupil. I predict a great future for him."

Ignorance = Failure: Knowledge = Success

WHEN settlers from the East moved in and founded the town of Raymer in Colorado thirty years ago, they tried to farm as they had back home.

They did their best, but nothing would grow. It was starve or leave; and presently the only inhabitants were prairie-dogs, while the bleaching bones of cattle gave emphasis to the desert.

Then came H. S. Youtsey, with faith born of his knowledge of "dry farming." He drove out the prairie-dogs and sowed wheat. It wasn't just a dry year—it was a dryer year: yet he raised a fine crop.

"Come back and see," was his message to the departed farmers. They came—not the same ones, but others just like them.

That was five years ago. To-day trains load at the elevators of New Raymer, and the farmers leave home at midnight to get ahead of the rush. You can leave your car at any one of three garages, borrow money at the New Raymer Bank to buy a tractor, go to church and the movies, and any Monday morning at nine o'clock see eleven motor-buses unload the sons and daughters of the farmers at the door of a $40,000 school-house.

The town was built and the school was built, not by money the settlers brought with them, for they didn't bring any, but by money they took out of the land that men and cattle had starved on. It is all in knowing how.

A War-Time $1 Idea

I WORK in an office, and only occasionally can I afford to lunch at a restaurant. On other days my lunch is put up for me at home. When I go out for my noon-time airing I always stop at the post-office and buy a 25-cent war saving stamp, which represents what I might have spent in a lunch-room. On my return home I give the stamp to the lady who prepared my lunch. Every one gains by this arrangement. I get a more nourishing meal than I could have purchased, the lady gets a perfectly good W. S. S., and the government is benefited.

C. L. B.

P. S. If you must carry your lunch genteelly, smuggle it into the office in your manuscript bag, as the writer does.

How to Release a Woman to Make Munitions

WASH-LADIES must live. But so, forsooth, must ladies who never washed before, but who find the high cost of living and the high cost of laundresses a combination to drive them to the tub.

The situation is happy in having a patriotic side. Your laundress is strong enough to work in a munitions. factory. You are not strong enough to fill in the gaps there, but by doing your own weekly wash you may release a woman to make munitions. So say members of the House-wives' League for Doing Your Own Laundry, which started in Bridgeport, Connecticut, in August, 1917. "I find it as much sport as tennis or skiing," says the least experienced of the housewife members. "Of course, one uses one's brains at it!"

"My clothes are ready to iron at noon," says the skiing young matron. "I have raised my ironing-board to three feet, and sit over it on a bookkeeper's stool; I use an electric iron, and have my bars so I only have to put out my hand to touch them. I am all done by five o'clock."

And the League has pledged itself to put every cent saved into government bonds.

"Formerly I paid a woman $2.20 a day two days a week to do what I can now get done in a day—and her price was advancing," said another member. "Now she makes heaps more than that in the factory, while I save $4.40 a week, or $228.80 a year—enough money, with interest, to buy several Liberty bonds."

Who is She?

WHAT interesting things she has done in the last fifty years would fill the Enclycopedia Britannica. For more than half a century she has fascinated the public of two continents. And her dramatic flame is burning still; if it has gone out, then by some subtle process the reflection has been preserved.

One sees her now through the blur of the romantic years, the woman of legends. Something to gaze upon with a little awe; chill, aloof, imperial, melodious; a voice still plaintively sweet, speaking the most beautiful French in the world.

She began life as a tattered Jewish girl in a Paris slum. Before she was seventeen she had begun to manipulate life to her own ends; and now, threescore and ten and more, she is one who truly, in her own fashion, has greatly lived. She has made fortunes and spent them; no woman in the world to-day has seen more of the pomp, circumstance, and vanity of the world than she. View her from ten rows back, and there is still little of age written upon her: lips like poinsettia shreds, an tawny coiffure framing two shadowy eyes, a pale face as innocent of detail as a rare print from the Japanese; arms like white ribbons.

Who is she?

What I Think of My Parents

—Continued from page 17

of. I never had an entire outfit of new clothes at once. If my hat was new, there were holes in my shoes. I do not believe in large families. We were all obliged to leave school at a very early age. Neither do I believe that a hard, sorrowful childhood makes a better adult. Does any one really believe that Lincoln would have been less great if he could have had a comfortable chair to sit in and a lamp on the table while he was studying?

My mother is to me a miracle, the wonder of which grows as I grow older. She was born sixty-one years ago, fifteen miles from any town, of absolutely illiterate parentage. Her father died in her infancy, and her public school attendance consisted of a few months each year for a few years. She walked a mile in all weathers to the school-house, and earned her "keep" by tending a barn. Yet she uses almost perfect English.

She married at eighteen. She has three sons with the Allied forces, and if she were to learn to-day that all of her children had passed away she could not say, "I wish I had done thus or so for any one of them," because always, whether it was rising to give one of us a drink when she was ill and we were not, or standing by one while he passed through hell, she has done it, kindly and without a murmur, often without thanks. I remember how bitterly she wept the first day I left home for work instead of school.

My father Is a very hard working man; never drank liquor, and, I suppose, did his best always; but he had no start. He is a very profane man, and was often brutally vulgar to my mother. He lacks absolutely all the graces and refinements of life, which has been to him one long struggle with little reward.

E. H.

Her Parents Put Her to Work in a Cotton-Field

YOU asked for the absolute truth, and here it is, plain and unvarnished.

Let me preface my remarks by saying my parents did the very best they could, considering their education, or the lack of it, the times in which they lived, and the conditions against which they struggled. And I want to say that I am not writing this with the slightest degree of disloyalty or disrespect. But I am not bringing up my little girls as I was reared, and indeed I would not cheat them of their happy childhood and girlhood and let them suffer the heartaches and humiliations that I endured.

My parents were members of prominent families, and they both emerged from the scourges of the Civil War without a penny, their the education cut short before they reached their teens, and no ability (which they never seemed to acquire in later years) to manage and make the best of bad conditions.

They married young and came to Texas. As their ancestors had always owned large plantations, they bought a farm (the poorest land in the poorest part of a partly civilized State instead of buying the rich black land that cost no more at that time), knowing as much about farming as an Eskimo.

Year after year they planted only corn and cotton, always selling when the market was lowest. No hands could be hired, and all the work had to be done by the family.

My oldest sister was my mother's helper in the house, my younger too delicate to work; and, as there was no need for me in the house, I was put to work in the field with my two brothers, to hoe and pick cotton and thin and husk corn—and this when I was scarcely six years old.

How pitilessly hot the sun was, how my arms ached from chopping with a large hoe, and my back throbbed with pain from dragging a heavy cotton-sack, my fingers bleeding from picking the cotton from the sharp cotton bolls. Yet I do not believe my parents meant to be cruel.

I had a few books, and went to school only when there was no work to be done in the field. When I was fourteen I begged my parents to let me go away to school; and, with a little help from them, I worked my way through a preparatory school and then through a State university, later teaching in a high school.

At first my crude, ill bred ways and impossible clothes humiliated me beyond endurance; but I learned quickly, and now I know that in my manner and speech there is no hint of the hard, crude life of my childhood.

D. E. M.

His Mother

FOR my initial chance to make a success in life I owe a great deal to my parents. In a coal-mining town in Indiana where I was raised, opportunities for employment outside the mines were very limited. The usual thing was for fathers to start their boys in the mines when they reached the age of fourteen. Fortunately for me, my father and mother had a bigger vision for my future. They scrimped and saved to give me an education.

After I finished my school work I landed a job in Arizona, and for the sake of my future my parents allowed me to go without a murmur.

When I returned home after three years' absence, I felt disappointed in my folks. They seemed embarrassed in my presence, and would answer me, "Yes," "No," "Well, well," "How strange." It seemed to me that they were old-fashioned and hung on to old traditions and old prejudices. I felt that I had outgrown my parents—that they weren't my kind any more. I suppose I made myself obnoxious with my egotism about the wide, open spaces of Arizona, and my condescending pity for the people who lived in my home town with its cramped quarters and everlasting pall of smoke.

One cold winter afternoon I was in the

---

sitting-room, enjoying the warmth of the fireplace. My mother was in the kitchen, busy with her housework. An old woman came to the back door, shivering, wrinkled, broken with hard work and poverty. My mother asked her in, gave her a warm seat by the kitchen stove, put on the coffee-pot and prepared a meal. The old woman told about her daughter, sick in bed and suffering from the cold. Without a word, my mother went to her room and came back with a blanket. I learned later that my mother was always helping some unfortunate creature.

It awakened me. I felt then that climate, landscapes, and sunsets are little things in comparison with the human heart, and that my mother's life in this drab mining town was greater than mine in the sunny uplands of Arizona. There I could see the majesty of God. Here, surely, I was looking on the heart of God.

I am glad my knowledge is broader than my parents', and I believe this knowledge will help me with my children; but I sincerely hope that I can show them just the every-day goodness my mother showed me.

J. B.

Her Father Told Her to "Get Out"

I AM the youngest of seven children, and being the youngest I had more opportunities than the others. These came almost entirely through my mother's efforts. Her dreams for herself never matured, but she tried her best to give the best to us.

Father always preached about educacation; but when the common-school course was finished and high school spoken of, he was opposed. The four elder children had not much chance. High school never opened its doors to them; but we three younger children, through their efforts and mother's, reached the goal and graduated.

All this meant sacrifice; it meant constant grumbling from the head of the house. But mother didn't care. She could stand this, if we could have our chance.

Our clothes were shabby and worn, but again mother helped us to know that inward beauty only counted. For her sake we tried not to care, when we realized what she was doing for us. So, daily in all kinds of weather, we walked to town, five miles, to high school, making a ten-mile trip daily. In the summer months we picked berries and pulled weeds for neighbors, and carefully hoarded our savings to help pay expenses. The elder children, staying home to work on the farm, made it possible for us to do this outside work. Mother kept chickens to help pay expenses.

So I went to high school. In the beginning of my fall term as a senior, father, displeased because he wished me to work on the farm instead, told me to "get out." For mother's sake, I would have stayed; but at just that time a position opened to me where I could do housework, get three dollars a week, and still go to school.

My work took all my time outside of school, so that I had to get all my lessons at night. Often it was 3 or 4 A. M. when I got to bed. It was only the thought of mother and what it would mean to her that kept me up, together with a little stubborn streak to show father that I would not fail.

So I worked all year, and graduated. The next year I stayed out of school and worked, and saved what I thought would be enough to take me through Normal. I had to borrow before I finished, but I knew I could easily pay it back soon.

So to-day I am a public school teacher. My field of labor lies, not in the city, where children have such splendid schools and libraries to help them, but in the country. Strange as it may seem, there are still fathers, and sometimes mothers too, who think more of what can be done by the child at home to save hired help than they do of education. So it is my joy to give freely of all I can to the boys and girls who come to me. I want my teaching to be wider and deeper than books, and mixed in with it all a great deal of the law of "helping the other fellow."

The road was hard. I am not sorry. Yet mother never mentions what she did for us, while father always tells about the fine education he gave us. We wisely keep still. He is our father. I do not wish to blame him. He was not made of the stuff to see things the right way.

And mother—I only wish all girls had a mother like mine. She is the best mother in the world, and I hope I am making her happy.

M. O. M.

This is Her Week

THE Crimean war has almost passed from memory as a war of yesterday, unimportant in its bearing on to-day; but the work that Florence Nightingale alone understood at that time and carried through in her hospital at Scutari has outlasted the signing of that peace.

England had gone unprepared into this war with Russia.

In 1850 the London Times printed this message: "France has sent forth her sisters of charity unsparingly, and even now they are at the bedsides of the dying. Are no daughters of England at this extreme hour ready for such a work of mercy?"

One was—and only one. She was a squire's daughter, but she had never been in accord with the Victorian theory of cloistered women. Under Elizabeth Fry, the Quakeress, she had taken a full course in hospital nursing, and she knew what she was about when she volunteered to go to Scutari, where English soldiers, herded in unsanitary camps, were dying like flies of cholera and dysentery. Hundreds of others volunteered, but they lacked training and power of organization. Miss Nightingale chose thirty-five of the most likely nurses and set sail.

She found a nightmare awaiting her in the barrack hospital at Scutari. It was a place of horrors, ravaged by rats and vermin, filled with a thousand men with undressed wounds. Her first action on entering the place, we are told, was to dislodge a nest of rats with the point of her practical British umbrella. By working without rest, day and night, for two weeks, Miss Nightingale brought great order to that place of chaos.

She remained at Scutari during the entire war, averaging three hours' sleep a night for a year, during which time, as she later told a British general: "More dead and dying have passed through my hands than I hope you will ever see during the whole of your military career."

Lincoln's Advice to War Critics

LINCOLN was no enemy of worth-while criticism. But when a man told him something was wrong, he wanted that man to tell him also how to make it right. He did object to criticism that was merely objection—the criticism of the professional grouch (of which we have plenty in the present war, just as he had in the Civil War); and here is what he said to such critics:

"Gentlemen, suppose all the property you were worth was in gold, and you had put it in the hands of Blondin, tight-rope walker, to carry across the

Niagara River on a Rope. Would you shake the cable and keep shouting out to him: 'Blondin, stand up a little straighter—Blondin, stoop a little more—go a little faster—lean a little more to the north—lean a little more to the south?' No; you would hold your breath as well as your tongue, and keep your hands off until he was safe over.

"The government is carrying an immense weight in this war. Untold treasures are in its hands. It is doing the very best it can. Don't badger it. Keep silence, and we'll get you safe across."

He Made a Fortune in Tips

JOHNNIE HIRST, of the Hotel St. Francis in San Francisco, California, has been a bell-hop for more than twenty-five years. His salary has never been more than $20 a month. But he is worth more than $60,000 in actual cash and Liberty Bonds, owns his home in one of the city's best residential districts, and has sent a daughter through college.

He made practically every cent he owns through tips, and he sees nothing undignified in accepting gratuities.

"A tip is simply an appreciation of especially good service," he says. "As long as you do your work well and the guest wants to show you his recognition, I don't see why a gentleman can't accept tips. Tips are as much of an American institution as the telephone and the streetcars. We don't like them, but we have to have them."

Johnnie Hirst's first job was that of a silk weaver in Easton, Pennsylvania. Then he got the New York fever, and lived for six weeks on free lunch. His first hotel job was in the Waldorf-Astoria. From he Waldorf he went to the Martinique and then to the Belmont.

Just after the San Francisco earthquake he went to Califormia, and has

been with the Hotel St. Francis ever since.

Thrift, enthusiasm, industry, and a good wife are Johnnie Hirst's sign-posts to success.

How Your Income Fools You

YOU know a lot of fellows, don't you, who are just as hard up, now that they're earning $50 a week, as they were when they earned only $25? And you've noticed, haven't you, that no matter how much our income grows, it always seems too little for the things we want—that there never is quite enough?

We can remember when we earned $10 a week, and, looking back on it now, it doesn't seem that we got any less out of life than we get to-day. We had plenty to eat, decent things to wear, quite as many friends, and a comfortable place to live in. We even managed to save a dollar now and then.

Back in those days we looked forward to our present rate of pay as wealth to be dreamed of. But, now that we've got it, it doesn't seem so much.

The point that we want to make is that what you earn has very little to do with what you possess.

If you do not learn to be thrifty and saving on $10 a week, you will probably be poor at $1000 a week. Getting rich is more a state of mind than a question of income.

"A negro boy arriving at Camp Dodge from an Alabama plantation," says Henry C. Newell in Association Men, "asked a white soldier when pay-day was coming and how much they would get.

"'Thirty dollars a month.'

"'Thuhty dollahs, sah?'

"'Yes, thirty dollars.'

"'Ehvry month?'

"'Sure; thirty dollars every month.'

"'Phew-ee!'

"Fifteen dollars a month was the most he had ever earned on the plantation, and double that amount in the army, besides board and clothing, seemed enormous."

Now, if that colored boy who had lived on $15 a month on the plantation, can keep his mind on its $15-a-month schedule and save the other $15, he will have the right idea.

Why Speculation Doesn't Pay

THE man who spends his life trying to get something for nothing usually gets nothing.

That is true not only of money, but of everything we do. The man who doesn't put any knowledge into his head can't get much out of it; and the man who seeks to make money without putting time and money and eneergy and thought into the effort usually doesn't make much.

"In an investigation of 4,000 brokerage accounts spread over a period of ten years," says R.W. Pearson in the Bankers' Monthly, "it was found that 80 per cent of the accounts showed final losses."

In other words, 80 out of every 100 of those 4,000 persons who speculated lost in the long run. Pearson then tells the best methods of speculation for the untutored lamb. But in conclusion he adds:

"Of course there are those who will say that the best way to speculate is not to speculate at all."