Consumption Is a House Disease

By JOHN B. HUBER, A. M., M.D.

THE Sisters of Mercy at the Hospital for Consumptives in New York City come in contact with consumptives day and night, constantly. They dwell in the same rooms with them, make their beds, keep night vigils over them, prepare their meals, handle their clothing. Yet in thirty years--as far back as the record goes--not one of these noble women has died of consumption.

In the Trudeau Sanatorium at Saranac Lake all the dust in a room occupied by consumptive patients was gathered together, a culture made from it, and the serum injected into a guinea-pig. The creature's health continued unimpaired.

I cite these instances to prove that much of the fear of "catching consumption" among people generally is groundless, if those suffering from the affliction are cleanly. And the most important phase of this cleanliness is to hold a handkerchief before the face in coughing or sneezing, and properly to dispose of the sputum.

This advice applies to more persons than you would suppose. Cleanliness is not only an admirable but a necessary habit in all human beings, but it is particularly so with regard to tuberculosis: because every fourth person between fifteen and forty-five suffers in a degree from tuberculosis, whether they all know it or not. Tuberculosis is a house disease, contracted usually in workshops or dwellings where uncleanly tuberculous persons have dwelt.

Pity Him Hiccoughs

DON'T despise the dope fiend. Feel sorry for him and do what you can to help him. Too many of us have only contempt for him. Drug addiction is, in most cases, neither a crime nor a vice, but a disease contracted through weakness. It is an autointoxication that affects every part of its victim's make-up, will, intellect, and moral, physical, and spiritual being. The management of this disease should lie only in the hands of a competent physician. The seeming rule that all addicts are unprincipled and prone to deception is their misfortune, not their fault. A drug-taker too weak to sit in a chair can not be expected to exercise the will power or the sense of right and wrong of a John the Baptist.

EVERY once in a while some person hiccoughs to death. Doctors are called in and fail to stop the trouble or find the cause. If you hiccough habitually, it would be worth your while to consult a good physican about it. It may never give you serious trouble; then again it may. Hiccoughing in most cases is merely annoying; but if it attacks you frequently there is some underlying cause that ought to be removed. It is one of the most puzzling things doctors have to deal with--it may be caused by so many differeny things, and all of them hard to locate. Medical magazines frequently carry calls for help to the medical profession from some doctor who has been stumped by a case of hiccoughs.

Don't Tickle Baby

TICKLING a baby is equivalent to a hard day's work. "Should any one doubt the vast power that adequate stimulation of the deep ticklish regions of the chest and abdomen has in causing the discharge of energy," says Dr. Crile in Good Health, "let him be bound, hand and foot, and vigorously tickled for an hour. What would happen? He would be as completely exhausted as though he had experienced a major surgical operation or had run a Marathon."

It Many Not Be Paralysis at All

IF you're a hard worker and you wake up some morning with a stutter in your walk or talk, and certain muscles twitch and won't work, don't worry. You're not getting genuine paralysis, probably, though those are symptoms of the real thing. The chances are, you are siffering from exhaustion paralysis.

Dr. J. Ramsey Hunt found a lot of such cases among the drafted men soon after they got to camp. They had simply been under too sudden and protracted mental and physical strain in training, and they soon recovered. Many such cases crop up in civil life, but they are not serious. Unusually hard work of any kind may bring it on. The only sure cure for it is a good rest.

Why Babies Die

WE hear occasional laments because the big families of ancient days have passed out of style: but those who understand the laws of social progress do not join in the lament. The old-fashined family had a far larger birth record, but it also had a great and appalling death record. Science has been bending every effort to reduce the baby death rate: and by better milk, free ice district nurses, and free medical care has done a great deal.

If the battle is to be won, however, still another step must be taken. The report of the Children's Bureau recently tells of investigation proved very definitely that where a family has sufficient income, so that the mother can remain at home to nurse and care for her baby, the infant mortality is exceedingly low: where the mother must rush away to work in a factory, or devote her days to hard work in caring for borders, the baby survives only by good luck. The fight against the death of little ones will be won only by a social readjustment that will give to every family a comfortable living wage.

The Excellent Habit of Asking Yourself Questions

A FEW days ago I opened the morning mail to discover this interesting letter from a subscriber in Wakefield Massachusetts:

Dallas Lore Sharp, the naturalist and writer of Nature books, told me that hop-toads possess the homing instinct. "Take one away from the spot where it has always lived, and he will return, even though you have carried him ten miles," said Mr. Sharp.

I resolved then to try an experiment with Teddy, the big toad who has made his home in my garden in Wakefield for the past five years. Writing my name on a tag. I tied it to Teddy's hind leg, and took a train to Boston. There I transferred to an elevated train which carried me to Charlestown, on the outskirts of the city. At the corner od Perkins and Haverhill streets, Charlestown, near the B. &. M. signal tower where I am employed on night duty, I let Teddy out of the box. He blinked at the arc-lights a second or so, darted out his tongue and gobbled a few Charlestown mosquitoes, and began straightway to hop along the side of the street to Mystic Avenue. When he reached the corner, he made a bee-line for Wakefield, hopping off in the darkness at a lively pace.

It was just 11:15 P. M. when I went on duty at the tower, and 8:30 when I reached home the next morning. Imagine my surprise and pleasure when, on entering the yard, I sicovered Teddy, in his accustomed place, under the sill cock, against the side of the house, taking a bath--I presume--after his long, dry, and dusty hop of nine miles. The tag with my name was still tied to his leg.

I have preserved this letter, partly because of what it tells about the character of the hop-toad, which is interesting in itself, but chiefly because of what it tells about the man who wrote it.

If ever I am near Charlestown at night, I shall go out to the signal tower and meet him. For, humble though his job may be, he is in spirit a brother of Galileo and Columbus. There is within him something of the eagerness to experiment-- that divine curiosity that has conquered and civilized the world.

For the world moves forward, not steadily, as it moves around the sun, but by jerks. And the jerks are prompted by some man's curiosity, his insistence that he be shown.

Reading the letter of this railroad signalman, I thought of Samuel Morse, who wrote to his father from Yale in 1809:

Mr. Day's lectures are very interesting; they are upon electricity. He has given us some very fine experiments. The whole class, taking hold of hands, formed the circle of communication, and we all recieved the shock at the same moment. I never took the electric shock before; it felt as if some person had struck me a slight blow across the arms.

And of Elias Howe, who, watching his wife at night laboriously patching his worn garments, began to wonder if a machine might not be invented to relieve women of the toil of sewing forever.

There were thousands of young men in Samuel Morse's day who stood in circles and felt the electric shock travel through their arms.

Millions of men have sat and watched their wives busy with the needle at night.

But in the minds of Samuel Morse and Elias Howe these commonplace experiences set going questionings that did not cease until the telegraph and the sewing machine were added to the world's store of miracles.

It is in some ways a misfortune that our modern life provides so many easy means of answering questions. We have no need to put problems to ourselves and turn them over in our minds.

We find the answer immediately in a book, or write a letter to the editor, or ask a policeman.

The war has been a benefit in this respect: it has faced us with new conditions; it has forced us, willingly or unwillingly, to think--to write a question-mark behind every fact of life that formerly was settled and fixed.

And out of this universal questioning great things are bound to grow in the period when peace returns.

It will be a time of testing, of experimentation, of attempts to find new answers for problems as old as the world.

And the places of preeminence, I think, are likely to be filled by those men who have formed the good habit of finding the answer for their themselves.

Whether the problem be the advancement of Democracy or the homing instinct of the hop-toad.

Bruce Barton, Editor.

WAR INKLINGS

—By Oliver Herford

The Bird-Man

THE Bird-man does not chirp and sing
As Larks and Robins do in Spring,
He does not moult nor does he feed
On Earthworms or Canary-seed,
Nor does the Bird-man build a nest
In which his weary wings to rest;
At night, instead, when he goes home
To roost, he seeks and Aerodome.

Camouflage

IF you can stand upon one spot
And look like something you are not
And wouldn't if you could be—say
A Bean-bag or a Bale of Hay—
You'll find it quite a useful stunt
To practise on the Western Front;
This picture shows how Private Dunne,
Disguised as snow, deceived the Hun,
Who could not possibly see through
The Camouflage: no more can you!

The Sausage Balloon

I OFTEN wonder, when we fry
A Sausage, if its thoughts can fly
Across the billowy ocean wave
To where its namesake stern and brave
Floats like a Guardian Angel, high
Above our armies, in the sky,
Serene and stately as a cloud.
No wonder Sausages are proud!
No wonder Sausages when fried
Oft-times swell up and burst with pride!

The Horse

THE Horse, I don't mind telling you,
Is not an easy thing to do.
With Cats and Lions, I confess,
I've had a measure of success,
Likewise with Camels, Mice and Snails
And Frogs and Butterflies and Whales,
Eels and Rhinoc'ruses and Ants
And Porcupines and Elephants
And Bees and Yaks and Owls. But when
I try to draw a horse, my pen
Sputters and scares the high-strung steed,
Who gallops off at such a speed
You have to take the beast on trust—
You can not see him for the dust.

The Tank

THE Tank's a kind of cross between
An Agricultural Machine
And something fierce and Pliocene;
Over embankments, trees, and walls,
Trenches, barbed-wire, and forts it crawls;
Nothing can stay its course—the Tank
Has not the least respect for Rank
Or File; with equal joy it squashes
All things alike, men, beasts, and—Boches.

CAN A MAN STRENGTHEN HIS OWN WILL?

By BRUCE BARTON

"IN Spain," cried Napoleon, "I shall find the Pillars of Hercules, but not the limits of my power." And from the day when he first determined to make himself master of Paris until after Waterloo itself—when, defeated and overthrown, he could still write to his brother Joseph, "All is not lost"—his career is perhaps the most wonderful example in history of the potential power of the human will. Time does not detract from the wonder of it. In his determination to master the world, he made every department of his own life a slave to his ambition. He forced himself out of bed at two o'clock in the morning, and from that hour until late at night labored tirelessly.

"No detail was too insignificant for his interest," as Charles Whibley says. "He knew more of finance than his chancellor of the exchequer; more of crime than Fouche, his chief of police; and the astutest of his ambassadors received instructions from him in a proper spirit of humility. An expert in corn and cotton, a better theologian (so he claimed) than the whole College of Cardinals, a constant critic of the opera, he still found time to dictate articles for the journals and to sketch caricatures in ridicule of his enemies. He knew all things, and scarce a letter passed through the post without his cognizance."

Contrasted with the steady drive of his will toward the goal which he had marked out for himself, the average man's career seems a faltering and futile performance. How much of Napoleon's power was his by birth and inheritance? How much is beyond the reach of the ordinary man or woman? And to what extent could the ordinary will be strengthened, and made, like Napoleon's, a perfect instrument in the service of its owner?

As a matter of fact, most of us know very little about the will. We speak of a man "making up his mind," of his "deciding to do so and so," of his "determining to see the thing through"; and we are vaguely conscious that all this implies some spiritual quality, some discharge of spiritual energy. But just what happens when we make up our mind, how we are induced to do it, and what elements of our being are brought into play by the process—all this is a mystery to most of us.

Strong Wills and Weak Wills

WHAT we do know is that men are divided roughly into two classes—those who have strong wills and those whose wills are weak. All around are folks dawdling through life, forever hesitating between two opinions, taking up a paper from their desks only to lay it down again, letting their minds wander over a hundred questions unrelated to their work—frittering away their lives in ineffectiveness. And over against them a few men who seem to know exactly what they want to do, and who are possessed of that magic something which enables them to accomplish their ends easily and irresistibly. This magic something we call will power.

We know that a physical weakling can, by systematic exercise regularly persisted in, build himself up into vigorous strength. Are there any such exercises for the upbuilding of a weak and vacillating will? Can a man lift himself by his own boot-straps into will power?

An interesting answer to these questions is found in a recent book by Professor E. Boyd Barrett called "Strength of Will" (P. J. Kennedy & Sons). What is written in this article is largely a digest of this very well worth while book; and the exercises for developing will power are those that Professor Barrett worked out in his experiments at Louvain University.

The Impulsive, the Hesitant, and the Inert

WILLIAM JAMES, late professor of psychology at Harvard, classified weak or sick wills into two divisions—those wills whose tendency to act is excessive; and those wills in which inhibitory power is abnormally great. "The first class," he says, "is that of impulsive and impetuous wills: daredevils, firebrands, passionate, choleric men who throw all counsel of prudence to the

winds. In the other class are those of lethargic will, the over-cautious, the listless and indolent, whom no exhortation can provoke to action.

Carrying the classification a little farther, we recognize other common conditions of will-weakness.

There is the condition of Hesitation, in which one is forever on the fence between two opinions. Every environment abounds in people of this sort—unable to make up their minds, putting off decisions, hunting around for excuses, and finally falling weakly into any decision simply to be relieved of the necessity for a real exercise of the will.

"I couldn't decide," thy weakly protest. "Finally I just had to do something, and so I put on my hat and went; I wonder if I did right?"

There is the will-sickness that we call Impulsiveness. How many people there are whose lives are ruined by the inability to hold one object definitely before their eyes to the exclusion of all others! "I made up my mind to go to K. But when I was about half way there, I suddenly came to the road to X, and it came over me all at once that X was a better place to go to, and so I turned around and went." There is no relying on the victim of impulsiveness: he is filled to-day with a settled determination to avoid a certain line of conduct, and to-morrow we find him plunged in up to his neck.

Perhaps even more to he pitied than these are the victims of inactive will, pitiful sufferers who confess bitterly of themselves that they simply "can't." They carry out no resolution, pursue no end, make no sacrifice. The life of the will is unknown to them. They drive no plow across the field of life. They droop and drowse, indifferent. Debilitated and aimless, they are incapable of stimulating themselves. They pass across the stage, not actors, but only acted upon.

Daily Exercise for the Will

UNHAPPY folk they are—the impulsive, the hesitant, and the inert. Yet there is hope for them all. Will power can be built up.

It can not be done by proxy. One may pay money to a teacher and learn to play the fiddle or to talk French: but the creation of will power is an individual process which has to be done doggedly and alone, without a teacher's guidance.

And the first great principle is to have some regular exercise for the will every day. For instance, as Professor Forster points out, the next time you are out for a walk, and grow thirsty or tired, make a conscious effort to resist that feeling. You will be astonished at the satisfaction that such acts of self-conquest arouse.

"Such exercises as the following will be useful," he continues:

"Keeping things tidy, refraining from talking, bodily gymnastics, getting up early in the morning, fasting, doing disagreeable things, carefully speaking the truth, performing drudgery (such as energetically working at a new language) with exactitude. Thus a regeneration of will power becomes possible such as can hardly ever be achieved by direct effort in the direction of the greatest weakness, because here the tradition of failure has al-ready become too powerful."

"Keep the faculty of effort alive in you by a little gratuitous exercise every day," to quote from Professor James. "That is, be systematically heroic in little unnecessary points; do every day or two something for no other reason than its difficulty, so that when the hour of dire need draws nigh, it may not find you unnerved or untrained to stand the test. Asceticism of this sort is like the insurance which a man pays on his house and goods. The tax does him no good at the time, and possibly may never bring him a return. But if the fire does come, his having paid it will be his salvation from ruin. So with the man who has daily inured himself to habits of concentrated attention, energetic volition, and self-denial in unnecessary things. He will stand like a tower when everything rocks around him and his softer fellow mortals are winnowed like chaff in the blast."

It is a very alluring picture. Few of us indeed but

Concluded on page 22

An Invitation to Tea

By SINCLAIR LEWIS

Illustrations by Frank Snapp

IN New York, young Mr. Alexander Hamilton Carson felt just as much at home as a Maine deacon in Hong Kong. He couldn't understand the language, and he didn't know why all the people kept running about, the way they did. Carson was representing the Northernapolis Iron Filings Company; but most of his business was done by telephone, and he could not fall into easy friendship with the men he met, as he had done in Northernapolis. He had an office the size of a wardrobe trunk, but not so convenient, in the Zenith Building, where the only person he knew socially was the elevator starter.

When he arrived in New York he had a letter of introduction to a man who had lived in Northernapolis; but he found that the man's object in life now was to make people believe that he had been born in New York. He took Carson to dinner at the Gorilla Jungle, with five people from Harlem, and lugubriously left the table to dance every fox-trot. He said nine words to Carson, seven of them being disparaging to Northernapolis and the other two in praise of Broadway. After that Carson and he dropped each other simultaneously, though Carson always insists that he beat the other to it.

Somebody is always discovering what is "the trouble with New York." Carson's version was that New York is prejudiced against amateurs. If a man is a violinist, a stock-market investor, a suffragist, a wearer of novel ties, a social light, or a church-member, he must be a professional at it, and give up everything else to attend to it. Back home, an agreeable young business man like Carson had been accepted as something more than a business man. He had known the best people; he had gone to dinner at houses that had two maids and a two-car garage and a vacuum cleaner; he had taken the part of Beau Nash in the Little Theater plays, and met all of the Northernapolis Bohemian set.

One reason for his seeking the assignment to represent the Iron Filings Company in New York was that it would enable him to be broadened and widened and deepened intellectually. But New York was indifferent to both his intellect and the morning clothes he had bought immediately after his arrival. If he went to a symphony concert, and smiled at a girl, in ecstasy over the music, she looked at him in a way which hinted that she had mistaken him for a fly on the wall. If he said "Going to rain?" to a seat-mate on the Fifth Avenue 'bus, the man called the conductor and demanded Carson's arrest as a German spy prying into the mysteries of the New York climate.

AT the end of two months Carson had never taken his new morning clothes out of the closet. He did not know one human being intimately. He had his shoes shined daily because the Italian went so far in cordiality as to greet him, "Morning, Mr. Ummmmm." He felt like an outcast; he found himself becoming timorous, paralyzed, in creepy evenings of walking the streets alone.

But Carson was not easily crushed. If New York had to be prodded, he would prod it. He spent an afternoon when there were no calls from iron companies in thinking up ways of jarring the city into recognition of him.

He was meditatively waving his copy of the New York Morning Chronicle. He noticed that in a border on its back page it yelped: "You need something? Why not advertise for it?"

Carson placed the newspaper in his chair, stood off, and salaamed to it. "You're right, sire. I always did like your

comics. Swelp me, I'm grateful even to a two-cent paper that takes enough personal interest in me to make a suggestion."

He charged at his desk and began to scribble his want ad. asking for invitations to tea.

He felt that he was at last a part of New York as he scampered to the Chronicle office with his advertisement, though the young man who received it wasn't interested enough even to raise his eye-brows as he counted the words in this amazing request.

Carson sat chuckling at his table in the St. Valenciennes Temperance Cafe for an hour that evening, though the waitress removed everything in the vicinity except the floor under his chair.

"Nice fresh ad.—whimsical and original—sure to tickle unusual people," he was thinking. "I'll get a wad of amusing answers. Studios. Salons. Like that. I wouldn't mind knowing artists. If I were engaged to a pretty girl artist, I'd encourage her to go on with her art—"

Before he had actually reached his marriage to the pretty artist, the cafe was closed, and he went cheerfully on to the periodical room of the Public Library. He could scarcely sleep that night, so eager was he for the answers. There were none next day, and that day was as long to him as the travel film before the Douglas Fairbanks picture. But the morning after that the clerk at the Chronicle office gave him four responses. He raced to the quiet of his office to read them.

The first was a typed letter from the secretary of the Working Girls' Friendly Guardian and Anti-Beer Association; and it informed him:

It was the most interested attention New York had ever shown him.

Carson sneaked to the window and looked down on Thirty-fourth Street to see if there were any detectives on his trail. And across the way, in front of a waist-shop, he saw a man on watch, staring up at his office.

He was a truck-horse of a man, with a crafty and sinister derby, and a mustache altogether untrustworthy and intimidating. Anybody who had ever seen a detective would know him for one, and Carson had seen dozens of detectives—in the movies. He dragged to the window the screen that hid the stationary wash-stand, and through a crack he watched the dread shadow.

The shadow was doing his best to pretend that he wasn't spying on Carson. Now and then he turned his back and stared—apparently—at the wash-dresses in the shop-window. But Carson knew that it was a favorite trick of sleuths to use a shop-window as a mirror to reflect their prey. When the shadow turned about, he pretended to glance casually up and down the block, but always his look swept across the face of the Zenith Building, and past Carson's window.

THE bloodthirsty man-hound seemed to be signaling to some one in the shop. Then he trotted to the door of the shop, met a small woman with a pile of bundles, took the bundles, and followed his wife down the street out of sight, while Carson kicked over the screen, danced with the coat-tree as partner, and sat down to re-read J. Willoughby Squires's letter.

"Hum! That's a good tip. Gin in tea. I'll try it. That ought to have a wonderful kick. Thanks, J. Willoughby," he sang, as he reached for the second invitation to tea.

But it wasn't an invitation to tea. It was an invitation to subscribe to the Mattrimonial Good News Bureau:

Carson's third response was a circular badly printed in imitation of typewriting, and it announced:

"Wouldn't you know they'd unload that junk on New York? They haven't been able to sell that stuff in Northernapolis for ten years now," Carson grumbled. He listlessly picked up the fourth answer. He scarcely noted how delicate and distinguished was the writing upon the envelop, which contained a correspondence card:

The address was on East Seventy-second Street, just off the park—a region in which people use victories because $10,000 cars have become so common.

Carson seized his waste-basket and dumped its contents on the floor. He squatted down beside the pile, dug out the copy of the Chronicle that had first advised him to advertise, kissed it, and put it in his pocket.

"When Nina and I—and her dear, quaint old mother—are pals, I'll show her this paper that brought us together!" vowed Mr. Alexander Hamilton Carson.

CARSON was pink with shaving and steamy bathing as he hastened along Seventy-second Street on Sunday afternoon, and his morning coat looked as new and perfect as a box of candy before the ribbon is removed. He hoped that the address would prove to be an apartment-house, not a private residence. A flat would be more intimate as an introduction to his social and artistic life in New York.

"The lamplight shone softly on the rows of books in the low shelves, above which were the autographed photographs of famous authors, statesmen, and actors," he muttered; and: "Before the friendly log fire they sat, lightly chatting of books and music and other intellectual topics. He kissed her lily-like hand."

He was composing a story in which Mr. A. H. Carson was the sole and authorized hero.

He came up with a jolt before the house that Nina Brundage had given as address. It was as intimate as the Pennsylvania Station—a graystone Tudor, with mullioned windows and a grilled door whose plate glass and bronze bars did not suggest skipping in and lightly chatting of intellectual topics. He stared up past the door lanterns and the carved lintel to the great oriel window of the second floor, and was awkward and afraid. He fancied that a girl was standing up there, between the mulberry-colored curtains, laughing at him, and he rushed up and punched the button.

The butler was of bronze, like the door-grill.

On his card Carson wrote "X 27." He waited in a drawing-room that was very much like the fossil collection at the Natural History Museum. The exhibits were chairs and floor-candlesticks and a mirror and a table in Fourth Avenue

---

Spanish, with large gilt two-by-fours and faded damask upholstery, scattered over a floor that was like fifty marble tomb-stones. Carson sat on the throne of King Ferdinand the Uncomfortable, and contracted pneumonia while he waited.

Into this cold-storage luxury whirled a girl of twenty-two or -three, slim and tiny, petal-cheeked and costly, her black hair down over her forehead in a precise Marie Stuart point, and her thin arched eye-brows looking as if they had been plucked by an expensive maid. But she was eager. Her hand was out, and she was caroling: "We are so glad to have you. Do come up to the library, where we will be cozier, by the fire."

As he followed her slippers up the stone staircase, he spouted:

"I suppose it was nervy of me to advertise as I did; but I was getting so lonely in New York that I had to do something desperate to meet nice people."

"How do you know we're nice people, though?" she asked, with a sweet modesty that delighted him.

"I could tell, the moment I saw you."

She stopped in the doorway above, and gaily inquired: "What part of the world did you come from?"

As he approached the door he announced in his heartiest manner: "Why, from Northernapolis."

"Let's see; that's out West, isn't it?"

"It sure is—out in God's country. And it's a big place. Why, Northernapolis has more churches and more miles of pavement than Seattle, Kansas City, or—"

He realized that he was delivering his oration, not to Miss Brundage alone, but to several million people who filled the long room into which he was floundering. At least, they seemed like several million. He had expected to find only Nina's mother; but a shining group of frightfully well dressed plutocrats were listening to him and grinning.

HE was so occupied in wondering how loud he had been talking that he did not catch a single name when he was introduced: but he knew that the group was made up of Miss Nina Brundage, her mother, her fifteen-year-old brother, a girl friend of hers, and a superior young man with an inferior young mustache, probably a suitor. They stared at him as if they had been waiting for him—as if they expected him to stand on his head or drink out of his saucer. The suitor smiled, the girl friend giggled helplessly, and the kid brother clamored: "Oh, how do you do, Mr. X 27, old chap?"

But Miss Brundage's mother was not effusive. She didn't even bow; she merely dropped her head as if the sight of Carson hurt her eyes. Her expression said: "I shall have nothing to do with this ill-bred hazing, though I do think that you were a low person to advertise yourself."

Carson stared angrily at Miss Nina Brundage, and she looked back with the injured innocence of a cherub who has just heaved a stone at your top-hat. Carson saw her as heartless and idle, looking for sensations. He put his tea and sandwiches down untouched on a lacquer table.

The suitor was saying with exaggerated deference: "We heard you speaking of Northernapolis as you came in. Delightful place. Do tell us something about it."

Carson stoutly declared: "Well, sir, I suppose it would seem small to you, but we expect to have a million people by 1925—"

The girl friend giggled till she had to stuff her handkerchief into her mouth. Nina Brundage leaned forward with mock-attention, her little hand behind her small and wicked ear. The mother sniffed. The suitor interrupted:

"So interesting. A million! A great many people—almost as many as the present population of the Bronx. You have—uh—flivvers and plumbing and all sorts of metropolitan features there in some of the smarter houses, I should suppose?"

"We have!"

Here the small brother seemed entirely overpowered by mirth. He rushed to a small couch and buried his head in a pillow.

Nina glanced at him and tenderly inquired: "Why, Schuyler, have you a cold? Dear Mr. Carson, do tell us something more about the churches and the pavements."

Carson was warning himself: "They're going to have a pretty good chance to get my goat. Shall I tell them all to go to the devil now, or shall I try to hold on to my temper? Come here, temper. Stay with me. I'll need you later, if I have a chance to get my hands on the gilded suitor. Here's the way: I'll bore them."

He moved his chair a little, to be sure to include the giggler in his circle, settled down, and in tones as unctuous as Nina's he lectured:

"Northernapolis has a large stock-yard, also two hundred and forty thousand people." Giggles. "It is especially noted for its hospitality to strangers." Rather less giggling. "It is the wholesaling center for a large agricultural district, and the terminus of the Bangor and San Antonio Railroad, with large shops. Its bank-clearings last year—"

The kid brother shouldered in front of Carson, holding his mother's lorgnon to his eyes and reading from Carson's own advertisement:

"'Will discuss either poetry or motoring.' Come on, now, Mr. X 27; let's discuss the poetry."

Carson had to make a mental flying leap to get hold of his temper, this time. While everybody stared in the well-bred nastiness to which they had been so expensively educated, he solicitously inquired of the kid brother:

"Ah? Do you have poetry in school? I shouldn't have thought they would take it up so early as the fifth grade."

The brother immediately turned into a normal and indignant small boy, and roared:

"What d'you mean fifth grade? I'm in the second form of the Vincent School."

"Ah? About equal to what we Western barbarians call a sophomore in high school? Then you, sir,"—he turned to the superior suitor,—"I suppose you must have finished high school entirely?"

"Blam! Old X 27 is showing more speed than we thought he would! Come on, Monty; let him know about your university," chuckled the kid brother. "Then we'll all pass round the bier and take a squint at those clean nails and amusing conversation that X mentions in his ad."

"Schuyler, your slang is disgraceful," complained the mother.

"Yes, isn't it, Mrs. Brundage! A thoroughly disagreeable, overfed, under-worked child," said Carson, loving and loud. "Yet rather less deliberately vicious than his sister, don't you think? Now let me thank you all for that Eastern hospitality that is so different from our untutored ways. Good day!"

And he cheerfully marched out of the room.

Behind him were no giggles, but sounds of indignation, and the voice of Nina Brundage demanding of the suitor:

"Monty, are you going to let that—that—that clod-hopper insult us like that?"

"Whhhhhhy, no," Monty whimpered; and Carson could hear him coming, his neat little shoes making a pleasant clattering on the stone stairs.

Carson ran back to meet him, and, before Monty could say a word, Carson seized his collar, slapped him, liked the taste of it, slapped him again, and growled: "I didn't hope to have the chance to reason with you, but—" Slap. "Now, my little man, I don't want to be rough,"—slap,—"or get my clothes bloody, but I'll give you just one second to go back to Nina for protection; and if you don't—"

Monty was trying to fight. He was at least as dangerous as a mouse attacking a box-car. Carson handled him carefully. He merely ruined Monty's silk shirt and rumpled his hair. Then he fled, before the butler and the police should arrive. He caught up his hat and coat, rushed through the door, and down the street. He stopped in the middle of the block, and said.

"I oughtn't to have lost my temper like that. It was rotton of me."

THEN he stalked into Central Park, and sat on a bench near the Seventy-second Street gate.

He was ashamed of his outbreak; horribly lonely, now that his hope of a friendly refuge was gone; sick that he should have seemed to be a presumptuous fool. With a poisonous bitterness he hated Nina Brundage and the idlers she represented. He wanted to take the next train; to flee to the kindliness of Northernapolis; to see the people he knew and loved.

And once he said: "Darn it, I do wish I hadn't been so lofty and not taken any of their confounded food. That mulatto cake looked awfully good."

Cold with misery, he huddled on the bench, too gloomy to care whether the Brundages sent the police hunting for him.

He noticed a smartly dressed girl coming along Seventy-second, entering the par——but he noticed her only to object to her as one of Nina's class. She stopped, seemed worried, took a pencil and a small red note-book from the pocket of her cheviot suit, and began to make annotations.

"A little brainier than most of her class," Carson reflected.

He wanted to detest her; but he could not help approving of her energetic fitness, that hinted of cold baths and horseback-riding, her trimness of hat and gloves, her tall gracefulness, her calm gray eyes.

She was self-absorbed. Paying no attention whatever to Carson, she stopped at his bench, dropped down on it, and went on scribbling in her note-book. She closed the book decisively, slipped it into her pocket, and looked about. Her quiet glance went over Carson—past him.

"I," said Carson aloud, "am from Northernapolis. And it is not at all true, as Monty hinted, that we have only flivvers there. My own brother has a two-thousand-dollar car. You see, I have

just been to tea among some of the choicest spirits in New York. I was too mad to be able to say it to them; but to you, as another of the Fifth Avenuites, I desire to say that despite this beautiful new morning coat,—which cost me forty-five dollars and has a very interesting small pocket to hold change,—I am an anarchist, and have a little folding bomb that I am going to burl across the street. But you look like an amicable aristocrat, and I will give you time to make you will."

Her lips were still trembling with amazement, but she smiled back at his good-humored grin and observed: "Probably you are not to blame. Please do throw it. Though I am not an aristocrat. I am a poor working-girl."

"Nevaire! Not in a hat like that."

"Well, then, I'm—oh, I'm a business woman."

"I'm sorry. Your efforts to escape my anarchist wrath are in vain. I must caution you, thought that for a New Yorker like you to bee seen talking to a Middle-Westerner is bad form—oh, shocking! I've just learned why it is that we wild woods-men can never, never be real Easterners. It's the smart thing here to make fun of the humorous objects who actually dare to hunt for friendliness in this noble city."

AT first the girl had sat forward on the bench, like a bird poised for flight; but now she settled back and said sympathetically:

"Tell me about it—if you like. You needn't believe that I really am a—a business woman, if you don't wish; but do believe that I too have been—well, some people I know haven't been terribly nice to-day." Her silver voice became somber. "There probably are times when I feel as lonely, down in my heart, as you do. I never have dared to speak to a stranger, as you have done, but I'm not at all sure I disapprove."

"Look! Has anybody been rude to you? May I beat them up for you? Till four minutes past five this afternoon I thought it was rather cheap to pick fights; but I was wrong. I don't know of anything more delightful than reaching in and grabbing a clubman's shirt and-—zzzzzzzz! Yes, that is just what I have been doing, in one of the nicest houses on the East Side."

"Tell me about it.

He told. He ridiculed himself and

Continued on page 18

THE GLAMOUR OF THE FRONT

By THOMAS TIPLADY

ONE day, at the Front, I got a lift in a motor-wagon, and sat on a box by the side of one of the servants of the officers' mess. He was going into Doullens, a market town, to buy food and some little luxuries. Captain Ball, V. C., the prince of English fliers, was, up to the time of his death in the air, a member of that mess, and the servant was telling me how comfortable all the officers make their quarters. In a phrase he defined the glamour of the Front.

"One day," he said, "when we were helping him make his room comfortable, Captain Ball burst out into a merry laugh and chuckled, 'We haven't long to live, but we live well while we do live.'"

That is it. Life is concentrated. Death is near,—just round the corner,—so they make the most of their time and "live well." It has the same quality as "leave" at home. Our friends know it may be the last sight of us, and we know it may be our last sight of them. So the ten days of "leave" are just glorious.

Ruskin says that the full splendor of the sunset lasts but a second, and that Turner went out early in the evening and watched with rapt attention for that one second of supreme splendor and delight. He lived for sunsets; and, while others were balancing their accounts or taking tea, he went out to see the daily miracle.

The Kindest Place in the World

THE glamour of the Front is like that. It is the place where life sets, and the darkness of death draws on. The commonest soldier feels it, and with true instinct, not less true because unconscious, he describes death at the Front as "going West." t is the presence of death that gives the Front its glamour, and life its concentrated joy and fascination.

The immediate presence of death at the Front gives tone to every expression of life, and makes it the kindest place in the world. No one feels he can do too much for you, and there is nothing you would not do for another. Whether you are an officer or a private, you can get a lift on any road, in any vehicle, that has an inch of room in it. How often have I seen a dozen tired soldiers clambering up the back of an empty motor-lorry which has stopped, or slowed down, to let them get in. It is one of the merriest sights of the war and redounds to the credit of human nature. Cigarettes are passed round by those who have to those who have not, with a generosity that reminds one of nothing so much as that of the early Christians, who "had all things common; and sold their possessions and goods, and parted them to all men, as every man had need."

One wet night on the Somme I got lost in "Happy Valley" and could not find my regiment. Seeing a light in a tent, I made for it. It was a pioneers' tent, but they invited me to come in out of the storm and stay the night. They were at supper and had only a small supply of bully beef, biscuits, and strong tea; but they insisted on my sharing what they had. 1 was dripping with rain, and they gave me one of their blankets. One of them gave me a box to sleep on, while he shared his chum's. Some lost privates came in later, wet to the skin; and the pioneers gave them all the eatables left over from supper, and shared out their blankets and clothes. It was pure Christianity—whatever creeds they may think they believe.

It will be pretty hard for chaplains to go back to their churches after the war. They have been spoiled by too much kindness. How can they go back to the cold atmosphere of criticism and narrow judgments that prevail in so many churches—that is, unless the war has brought changes there also? And after preaching to dying men who listen as if their destiny depended upon their hearing, how can they go back to pulpits where large numbers in the congregations regard their messages as of less importance than dinner, and as merely supplying material for a more or less kindly criticism during that meal?

The Nobility of Common Men

MOST of all, perhaps, the glamour of the Front is found in the nobility to which common men rise. An artillery officer told me that he had in his battery a soldier who seemed utterly worthless. He was dirty in all his ways, and unreliable in character. In despair they made him sanitary orderly—the scavenger whose duty it is to remove all refuse.

One night the officer wanted a man to go on a perilous errand, and there were few men available. Instantly this lad volunteered. The officer looked at him in amazement, and with a reverence born on the instant. "No," he thought; "I will not let him go and get killed. I'll go myself." He told the lad so, and disappointment was plain on his features.

"But you'll let me come with you, sir?" he replied.

"Why should two risk their lives," asked the officer, "when one can do the job?"

"But you might get wounded, sir," was the quick response; and they went together.

An Irish officer told me of one man who seemed bad from top to toe. All the others had some redeeming feature, but this man appeared not to possess any. He used the filthiest language, and was dirty in his habits and dress. He was drunken and stole the officers' whisky out of the mess. Neither as man nor as soldier was there anything good to say of him.

The regiment was sent to France, and in due time took its place in the trenches; and then appeared in this man something that had never risen to the surface before. Wherever there were wounded and dying men he proved himself to be the bravest man in the regiment. When a man fell in No Man's Land, he was over the parapet in the twinkling of an eye to bring him in. No barrage could keep him away from the wounded. It was a sort of passion with him that nothing could restrain. To save others, he risked his life scores of times.

In rest billets he would revert to some of his evil ways, but in the trenches he was the Greatheart of the regiment; and, though he did not receive it, he earned the Victoria Cross over and over again.

There is a glamour at the Front that holds the heart with an irresistible grip. In the light of War's deathly fires the hearts of men are revealed and the black sheep often get their chance. Life is intense and deep, and men are drawn together by a common peril. They find the things that unite, and forget the things that separate.

TRIANGLE WOOD

By LEWIS HASTINGS

THERE was seven men went down the road
Behind Triangle Wood.
The polder mud was on their hands
And the dank mist in their blood;
And I should ha' been along of them,
Barring a chance I should.
There was Wally Pierce, of Palmer's End,
The best of us all—it's queer—
And Bob Merry and Cooper Joe,
Who joined with me first year:
But the corporal was a newish chap,
Straight out of Warwickshire.
They was coming away from a digging squad,
Marching along at ease,
With just the bit of a hustle up
Past those black stumps o' trees—
For the shrapnel comes that sudden like,
Hummin' above like bees.
I should ha' been there along of Wal—
The best of us all—the best!
I should ha' been there when the crump come,
And took it with the rest,
For me and Wal came out together.
Now he's gone West.
It was on those cobbles by the bridge
(That devil's drone in the sky!)
An' most were smashed upon the stones,
There was no cover nigh!
But Wally he reached the timber dump
'Fore he laid down to die.
There was seven men along that road
When the big shell come;
An' now the whole brigade is out,
An' it's Blighty leaf for some—
An'—I wish I'd been there along of him
Wally—my chum.

HOW STETTINIUS GOES ABOUT IT

IF some one were to offer you a job in which you would have nothing to do but spend money, the offer would probably sound very good to you. Yet there are few jobs in the world more difficult. The Allied nations have combed their great business organizations through to find men who could think in terms big enough to measure the present war: J. P. Morgan looked through this country to find a man who could spend the three billions that the Allies wanted to invest in munitions and supplies over here, and finally selected Edward R. Stettinius, who was at that time president of the Diamond Match Company.

Secretary Baker has now taken him from the Morgan firm and made him the purchasing agent of the War Department.

"How did you go about it to set America in motion as a munition producing country?" B. C. Forbes asked Mr. Stettinius. "Here was a country making peace articles exclusively: how did you solve the problem of getting our factories to turn out goods that they had no experience in manufacturing?

"In organizing for the production of war materials, we proceeded upon the theory, which we had no occasion subsequently to abandon, that 97 1/2 per cent of the efficiency of the plants lies in the men, and only 2 1/2 per cent in the bricks, mortar, and machinery that make up the plant," Mr. Stettinius answered, and his answer is printed in Forbes' Magazine. "Given the right stamp of men, we believed they would get there. We did not begin by studying the suitability of plants, but by studying the suitability of men. We went on the principle that a man who could successfully manufacture sewing machines or locomotives or railroad cars could successfully manufacture munitions, even though he might never have seen a shell in his life.

"Experience soon proved that this was the only workable system."

IT WAS A REVELATION TO HIM

Extract from the letter of Captain A. E. Allen, a Canadian soldier, written on reaching London.

POOR old London! She is the same, but in mourning. Dim street lights and very little traffic make the streets doleful. But the gloom of the evenings and nights is not reflected in the people. They are wonderful!

If only some people from every city, town, and village in the States could come over here and see and talk with these men and women, who have put in three years of war, every one having family losses and in all cases financial sacrifices that change their whole mode of life! Inconveniences of every kind, and real ones; and yet, every man and woman just as cheerful, bright, and determined as if the war was to start to-morrow. It makes one feel like going up to every one of them and giving them the V. C. Gentlewomen driving cars, running all the hotels, all the business offices—on the subways, in the restaurants, in the factories—everywhere setting an example to their poorer sisters of what real grit is, and as cheerful and with the same grace and politeness that they used to have in their own drawing-rooms. Every one has some definite work to do, and they start at about six years old! There is no such thing as the British army being at war; the British nation, down to the children and up to the old people, is at war; and it's the most wonderful and inspiring sight any man ever saw.

Of course, France, Germany, and the other European nations are the same; but it's a revelation to one from the other side of the water. Undoubtedly the United States would be the same if the occasion ever came, but I trust it never may.

The saying that the United States doesn't realize that it is at war is putting the fact too mildly, and we can only pray that the job will be finished before the necessity ever comes; but, on the other hand, the almost inhuman trials and sacrifices they are making over here are breeding a new race of men and women who are going to be head and shoulders over the last generation. Heaven only knows, I am a loyal Canadian, and I have always been more than proud of what Canada and Canadians have done in this war. But now I can almost blush at the thought. We don't know we are at war as compared with the English, take it any way you want. Men—every one—in some war work; not some—all. Women all working for the cause. Money—everybody giving, not their surplus, their all. You can not begin to realize what this nation has done, and I am afraid the world will not know it for years, because they do it so quietly—no talking, no boasting: it's all taken for granted, England needs them and all they possess, and of course they give it.

I could write on for hours, because this is all a revelation to me, and fascinates me.

ALWAYS SALUTE YOUNG OFFICERS

At Camp Sherman, one enlisted man happened to note that a comrade failed to salute General Edward Glenn, commander of the camp. "Say, bo, don't you know that that was General Glenn you just passed without saluting?" he asked the other.

The recruit admitted his error, and later went to General Glenn's head-quarters. "General, I pulled a boner a little while ago. I failed to salute you, and now I've come for my punishment. I'm sorry, but that don't excuse me for not saluting you," he explained.

General Glenn looked at him for a minute, and a smile wreathed his face. "That's all right this time," he remarked. "But for goodness sake don't fail to salute any of the young second lieutenants, or you'll get sent to the guard-house for life."

A MOTHER WRITES US FROM NORTH CAROLINA

BEFORE our President declared war, it had not seemed possible to me that our people could be drawn into it. I felt that it would be such a good thing to help them "over there" with money and food. To send our men seemed terrible to me.

When the papers began to publish the age limit as, probably, to be from nineteen to thirty, my heart sank. My oldest son would be twenty-one in March, and my second son would be nineteen in June. My anxiety was lessened only a little when it was finally decided not to take the nineteen-year-old boys.

Our oldest son was in his sophomore year in a Northern school, taking mechanical engineering. I wrote him every week, begging him not to volunteer. I hoped, if he were not called until toward the last, that he would be able to go to school at least one more year.

He did not volunteer at college, as so many of his friends did. I feel sure he would have but for my pleading. I shall always be thankful that he did not, for we had him at home with us all the beautiful summer-time.

When his name was drawn his number came, not in the first draft,—but early in the second. He passed the physical examination with flying colors. I was proud of this, but it seemed to me I was living my last days with him. I felt dazed.

I shall never forget the morning he left for the training camp. It had been the greatest effort of my life to be cheerful before him all these days, but I'm glad to feel now that I was, nearly always.

It was scarcely dawn when breakfast had been eaten, the last little thing put in his suit-case, even to a home lunch. I felt so brave when I first arose that morning—thought I could tell him "good-by" and not make his home-leaving sadder by my tears. When he put his arms around me I felt the rush of tears to my eyes, but with almost superhuman effort I pushed them back. I kissed him over and over again.

He went with his father and I sisters on to the train. I could not go, but turned and went back to the empty house. It seemed to me the emptiness of death. I felt that he would never come back to me, and this feeling possessed me until his first letter came from camp. It was so cheerful—the officers had been so nice to him. If he had any homesickness or troubles, he never wrote to us about them, but his letters were always full of the nice things people did for him—the funny, happenings in camp. So I have grown to feel that he will come back to me, God willing.

After months of grieving for my boy, and still longing for him as only a mother can, I gave grown to feel I can really give him to his country's service now.

I feel that a short life, well spent, given to the highest duty that calls, is far better than a long life ingloriously passed. Such I would consider my boy's life if he lived to be a hundred and shirked his duty now.

RAILROADING IN FLANDERS MUD

THE most wonderful engineering feats in the world have been achieved on the western front. Compared with them, the Suspension Bridge over Niagara and the great structure at Quebec sink to an insignificant plane.

No mixture of earth can behave like the mud of Flanders. The rail-ways built there to carry ammunition and supplies up to the front-line trenches are often nothing more than floating paths of timber and ties strung along like an imitation suspension bridge and held together by strips of rails that wind in and out and all about shell holes and craters. The passage of a heavy ammunition train will cause a hundred yards or more of this to disappear into the oozing, slimy ground; and engineers and their gangs must make haste then, before another train comes, to rebuild and reprop the disappearing section with whatever they have at hand: cement from German pill-boxes, battered steel helmets, old guns, broken-dowen motor-lorries, exploded shell cases, etc.

One Canadian railway officer contrived to turn a disabled tank into a bridge.

A rapid stream had been deflected by shell explosion from its natural bed, and

had taken its swollen course down an abandoned trench. The engineer dumped the tank into this ditch. He then put a great deal of time and thought—and mighty little material—into the trick of making a bridge out of the tank. He had road planks brought up, and nailed them to the top of the tank: upon these he laid rails to gee with the steel ribbons before and beyond the trench.

Three trainloads of heavy tractors and cars laden with tons of ammunition passed over the "bridge." The trains were followed by half a dozen tanks going for-ward into action—and their broken brother bore them up, too.

Two months later the line of railway had to be shifted to another section, and the tank-bridge was left settling in the mire.

GARBAGE PAILS WILL WIN THE WAR

TO the distractingly long list of influences and factors that will "win the war" add the humble dump and the garbage-pail. From waste at the camps of the British Army there have been obtained fats to furnish tallow for the entire needs of the army, says The Nation's Business, and "enough more to bring in $4,800,000 a year on account of soap sold to the public. Besides, these same fats yielded 1,800 tons of glycerine, or enough to make ammunition for 18,000,000 shells."

THE SOLDIERS OF SIX NATIONS

The New Hat

—By Anne Ueland Taylor

PETER was one of those men who had had the misfortune to fall in love only once in his life, and then to have married the object of his affections. At least, so thought Arabella. Indeed, she often considered it one of her own particular misfortunes that she had had no predecessors.

Peter took so much for granted: there was so much about women that he had never learned.

The day of their anniversary, when they had been two years married, Arabella bought herself a new hat. She had been low in her mind for some time, and finally diagnosed her case as resulting from the prolonged and joyless possession of a certain dark green velvet hat. Arabella was a pragmatist. She believed that a new hat could do more for one's state of mind than a new religion.

The one she found was an absurd and impudent affair that, considered coldly, resolved itself into a mere twist of black and gold satin. But placed on Arabella's mop of blond hair, slanted over her exquisite nose, it was like one of those transforming caps from the contes des fées. Arabella felt herself enchanted into a princess—not one of your languid or stately princesses, but one that was slightly mad, and capered.

So she arrived home rather late, and Peter was already there, reading the evening paper before the fire.

Arabella in her green velvet hat would have said: "Hello, Pete. You there?"

The new exalted Arabella entered on a high note.

"Bon soir, mon cher vieux!" she cried archly to Peter, and held out an affected hand.

He threw his cigarette into the fire and put her in her place with a husbandly embrace. She escaped, and made a pirouette.

"Well?" she challenged.

He regarded her indulgently. "What have you been up to?"

"What have I been up to?" Her eye-brows lifted haughtily. "But you see. I've been shopping."

"Oh, that's it!" He picked up his paper again.

"I've bought myself a hat," said Arabella.

"You did? Another? Good." But, as she continued to stare at him haughtily, he felt that perhaps he had been too casual. "It's about time you got a new one," he remarked: "I never did quite like this one."

"Oh, really?" said Arabella coldly.

"Not altogether. It always seemed just a bit—a—conspicuous."

"This one?"

"Yes. Not quite your style."

"This is my new one."

"Oh, Arabella—I'm sorry! How stupid. It is a nice one, now I look at it."

There was a formidable silence.

Arabella fixed him with accusing, scornful eyes.

"Let's go on for dinner," he said, attempting lightness. "We're going to dine at Jouven's, and I have tickets for `The Other Woman.'"

She was still silent.

"Why didn't you tell me?" he finally demanded.

His poor princess whirled away from him with a glitter of angry tears, and rushed from the room.

SHE returned after a bit, disenchanted and hatless. She sank into the couch by the fire and turned her back to Peter.

"Arabella darling," he said, leaning over her, "go put your pretty hat on again and let's have our little party."

"No," she murmured; "everything is spoiled."

"Oh, come—you mustn't make a tragedy over an old hat!"

"It's the first hat I've had for six months," she told him. "All this time I've been wearing a perfect carcass—an embryo—a kettle-cover—I don't know what! To be economical. Then, at last, I buy myself a real one—and feel for the first time—since I was a girl—a little gay and well dressed—and have a new-hat feeling. And I come home, and think how pleased

you'll be—And you don't even see! It simply means," she announced tragically, "that we've come to the end."

"The deuce!"

"We've been married too long. You no longer see me; that's what it comes to. Oh, you're fond of me still—in a calm, conjugal way. But as for being in love—It isn't just the hat I mind. It's everything. That hat—just opened my eyes."

"That's rot, Arabella. How can you say such silly things? Over nothing at all! It's you, not your hats, I'm in love with."

But she turned on him passionately.

"I'm different with every hat—that's what you can't understand. It's not me, it's just your wife you care about. You might have married any one else and felt just the same."

"I hardly think so," said Peter drily.

"For me, it's the end."

"Oh, don't go on that way, Arabella. You're crazy. For heaven's sake, come on out to dinner and forget it."

"Yes—dinner! That's really important. Oh—men!"

She brooded into the fire.

He lit a cigarette gloomily.

"Pleasant anniversary," he remarked after a moment.

Tears began to roll down Arabella's cheeks, and in a few seconds her pink handkerchief was a sop. Peter threw away his cigarette and took her resolutely in his arms.

"Don't—don't—" he begged.

SO presently things were as they should be—or as they shouldn't, whichever way you look at it—between them.

Only, of course, he had to say a word too much:

"It's been so long since you've had a new hat—I got out of the way of expecting them—"

She put her hand over his mouth. "Not another word."

Finally Arabella went back to her bed-room. She dabbed cold water on her eyes and powder on her nose, and smoothed her hair.

The new hat gleamed upon the bed where she had thrown it, but after a second's contemplation she let it lie there in its splendor.

She took the old green velvet hat and pulled it ruthlessly down over her fair hair. That stood for facts. The other was illusion.

When she came out, Peter regarded her affectionately.

"You look nice," he told her. "Come here to the light."

He tipped his head on one side and screwed his eyes half shut.

"Now I see it in the light, of course I see what a difference it makes," said he. "What a fool I was!"

"You see what it looks like," said Arabella.

"The prettiest hat you ever had," he declared. "Arabella, it's a beauty!"

Mother

—By Louise Forsyth

"MOTHER" stood on the little garlanded platform of Ravelli's restaurant, singing Tosti's "Good-by." She held her broad shoulders back and her ample chest high, and poured out the strident tones of a strong, overworked soprano, with here and there a note of thrilling sweetness that reminded old habitues of the days when she had dreamed of a grand opera career.

"Mother" knew her own voice as well as any of the diners at the crowded tables

around her. She had no illusions. Life had been tough, but she could still sing in French, German, and Italian, afternoons and evenings, and half the night, to the accompaniment of a worn-out piano and incessant knives and forks.

She was a big woman, with something maternal in her aspect that had won her the name by which she was known to the clientele of Ravelli's. Nearly everything about her, from her red-brown hair to the diamonds on her yellow satin gown, was imitation. Only her voice, such as it was, and her heart, such as it was, were genuine. And they were big, too.

THE restaurant was very lively on Saturday nights. The Italian waiters rushed to and fro under the pendant artificial foliage where red and yellow lights gleamed. The guests, of almost every nationality and social station, ate the excellent spaghetti and drank the via ordinaire and applauded the music with equal enthusiasm.

Wrapped in a drifting halo of cigar-smoke and waving her expressive arms, "Mother" wailed out her last "good-by—good-by."

There was the usual burst of appreciation. Just as she stepped off the platform, one or two people noticed a small blue-clad figure diving through the crowd in her direction, and one man near by saw her snatch a bit of yellow paper from the boy's hand. There was an instant's pause while the violinist who was going to play the Barcarolle from the "Tales of Hoff-man" got into tune with the piano. Then there was an interruption.

It was "Mother." Her face showed white in places where the lack of rouge exposed it.

"Play the Marseillaise, quick!" she said.

The accompanist stared open-mouthed at her, but something in her manner compelled him, and he began. To the great chords of the prelude, "Mother" walked to the front of the platform and raised her arms high.

"Allons, enfants de la patrie!" she burst out in her biggest voice.

People stared. One or two dropped their forks. Even the waiters stopped to regard "Mother." She had never sung like that before.

"Tremblez, tyrans! et vous, perfides—" It was her grand opera voice, the voice of her youth. In that moment they all saw and heard what she might have been. And first they paid the tribute of complete silence, and then, as one man, they rose to their feet.

Two Frenchmen in one corner could contain themselves no longer, and joined the chorus. Three Germans glared at them and prepared to quit the scene. The manager looked worried and moved to-ward the singer. "Mother's" voice was overwhelming.

"Liberte, liberte cherie—"

The place was in an uproar. All the light-haired people were leaving or getting ready to fight, and the French and Italians were shouting at the top of their lungs. Above the tumult the lines of the great song rose triumphant.

"Aux armes, citoyens!"

Suddenly, on the very highest note, "Mother's" voice broke, her head drooped slowly forward, and she sank in a huddled heap beside the piano.

Then the man who had seen the telegram took it gently from her clenched hand and spread it out flat. The accompanist leaned over him, while the violinist raised "Mother's" poor tawdry form in his arms.

Cable received. Jean killed in gallant action at Verdun.

There was no signature.

"Ach, du lieber Himmel," groaned the pianist, who was a good American but could speak only German in moments of emotion. "She had four sons, and Jean was the last."

IT PAYS TO ADVERTISE

SEE A PIN AND PICK IT UP

Photographs by the Press Illustrating Service

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WHO IS THE BUSIEST WOMAN?

Is Your Business Overburdened with System?

By J. R. SPRAGUE

I HAVE always felt that the efficiency writers of this country have a lot to answer for. From the security of an office where no bank runner ever comes in with a matured note or an employee ever holds out an expectant hand, the efficiency man tells us small merchants and business men just what to do to attain success.

Three years ago, George Murdock, Jeweler & Silversmith, opened a retail business next to my drug store on the main street of our town. Everything pointed to his success, for he was a good salesman and had a wide acquaintance with the local trade through several years' employment in our leading jewelry store.

He had a good location at fairly reasonable rental, the fittings of his store were in good taste, and his show windows were attractively trimmed. Mr. Murdock himself was a hard worker; passers-by often saw him in his office at midnight.

After a business career of exactly two years and a half, George Murdock failed. His creditors got thirty cents on the dollar.

The reasons given for his failure were diverse. The expert accountant called in to straighten out the books stated that it was absolutely impossible for any concern to fail whose books and office system were in such perfect condition as George Murdock's.

But the truth was that the efficiency writers had ruined him. George Murdock had fed system into his business until it simply foundered. He never thought of injecting a little personal atmosphere along with the system. If he had, he might not have failed.

As his next-door neighbor, I was on very friendly terms with Mr. Murdock, and I was in the habit of dropping into his store to talk. Ordinarily, when store-keepers get together, the conversation is about such topics as the rotten job of paving in the second ward, the unfairness of the rich people of the community who make their money at home and spend it in New York or Chicago, or the better business opportunities in other cities than our own.

But George Murdock cared for none of these topics. He would not even warm up over the subject of the exorbitant rents demanded by owners of business property. "Those things don't worry me a bit," he would say. "If a man runs his business efficiently all such problems will take care of themselves."

From his desk on an elevation in the back of his store, Murdock could overlook everything that went on. With their employer's eye continually upon them, there was little shirking on the part of his clerks. No customer ever had to ask to be waited on.

He paid four hundred dollars to have an accounting system installed, and every piece of merchandise in his stock was registered in a big book, while each night the articles sold were entered in another book, together with the cost and selling price. He could tell in five minutes at any time just how much merchandise there was in his store, how much he owed his wholesalers, and the exact amount owed him by customers.

After a talk with Mr. Murdock I would go back into my own store feeling very guilty about my slipshod methods, and resolved to do better.

Before he went into business for himself Murdock was drawing fifty dollars a week salary, and was worth it; he was one of the best retail salesmen in town. But in his own store his salesmanship did not count, because he spent all his time in his balcony office, attending to his system.

There is no doubt that he did have some good ideas. He wrote his own newspaper advertisements, and his ten-inch space on the last page of the paper every morning was a model of effectiveness. On one or two occasions when he pulled off a special sale in his store, the arrangements for

taking care of the crowds were so perfect that there was none of the confusion and uproar that usually attend such events.

His regular sales force consisted of two men and a girl, and he employed a girl stenographer. Each of the girls drew twelve dollars a week, and the men twenty-five dollars each. Mr. Murdock himself drew a fifty-dollar salary. The situation was, therefore, that the two office people drew exactly the same amount of money as the three sales-people.

But the office people were merely passengers; for, no matter how efficiently they worked, they did not actually produce anything.

George Murdock contended that the proprietor had no business to go behind the counter and fuss with little twenty-five-cent sales, when he could be devoting himself to the big problems of his enterprise.

I admit that it is irritating to get involved in the sale of a plated collar button ten minutes before three o'clock, when the banks close, especially if the deposit slip is not yet made out. Valuable minutes pass while the lady informs one that she is very particular about the collar button, because it is for the front of her husband's shirt, and the last one was so short that he had trouble in fastening his collar over it. But to listen sympathetically is just as much a part of the retail game as to trim the show windows.

One of the weak spots in Murdock's enterprise was that the atmosphere in his shop impressed one as impersonal. I sometimes noticed that customers, after making some purchase, would look around in a friendly way. Possibly they had known Murdock when he was a salesman, and wanted to let him know that they were with him in his venture. But there he would be, sitting in his balcony office, hard at work on his system; and the forty feet that separated merchant and customer might as well have been forty miles.

On the very day the suit that tipped him over was filed, I happened to be in Murdock's store, and saw one of the clerks showing a diamond ring to a prosperous-looking man who, plainly, was wavering between a desire to have the ring and the human instinct to hang on to good cash money.

At last I heard him ask whether the stone were guaranteed to be without flaws.

"Absolutely guaranteed," replied the clerk; "and it is the finest stone in Mr. Murdock's stock."

"You are not the proprietor, then?" asked the customer; and I knew the sale was off.

The customer asked a few more questions, and then said he believed he would think it over a few days longer, and went out.

One day, a few weeks after the business of George Murdock, Jeweler & Silversmith, had been decently buried, I met one of the clerks and asked him just what the matter was.

"Well, as near as I can describe it," he said, "Murdock was so darn stuck on being efficient, he forgot that the main business of a retail store is to sell merchandise."

"The expert accountant stated that it was absolutely impossible for a concern to fail whose books were in such perfect condition."

She Works with Dangerous Models

WHEN Anna Vaughn Hyatt was a baby she had a scrap-book full of pictures of famous race-horses, and it was the chief indoor sport of callers to cover the pictures, leaving exposed only a mane, tail, or hoof, and hear the youngster tell the name, pedigree, and records of every horse. To-day she sculps animals better than any other artist. She has modeled every sort of animal, from elephants to turtles, and has spent as much time in animal cages as an animal trainer.

Once, when she was modeling "Baby," Bostock's biggest elephant,—a big brute that has killed three men,—he suddenly flung his trunk at her, landing her about ten feet outside his stall and making kindling of her modeling stand. Of course, he didn't mean to do that—what he meant to do was to knock her down quite close and put his foot on her.

After that Miss Hyatt kept a respectful distance from "Baby," and his only further sign of contempt for art and artists was exhibited one day when he suddenly filled his mouth with saliva and sprayed her all over. This is a little way animals have, it seems; for another time a camel showered her with finely chewed cud.

At the Bronx Zoo Miss Hyatt was modeling a Bengal tiger who was apparently asleep. She was working inside the rail, and the guard had sauntered away. Without knowing why, the artist suddenly jumped back, and in the same second her stand went down and the clay model fell in small wads on the floor. The tiger had raised his paw and brought it down again—that was all.

Some summers ago Miss Hyatt discovered a very fine bull on a New Jersey farm, and got permission from its owner to model it. The old farmer sniggered as he said to his wife:

"That young woman thinks she ain't afeered to go into that pen where the bull is. Just watch her if he turns round to take a look at her."

They both watched, and the farmer got uneasy when he saw how absorbed she was in her work, for he knew bulls. When at last the bull wheeled round and made a dash at Miss Hyatt, tossing a hay-cock into the air to warm himself up, the farmer rushed between the artist and the bull, pitchfork in hand, yelling:

"Fer God's sake, woman, can't ye run? Drop that putty and skin the fence."

Miss Hyatt hadn't thought of running—it was a chance in a hundred to study a bull in action.

How I Made a Lodging-House Pay

ANY woman who is not afraid of hard work will find a wide field, and one in which she is fairly sure of succeeding, in the lodging-house business. I know, because I've done the drudgery and won the success.

Left a widow at twenty-six and with a child to support, I did not know where to turn. I had no special knowledge or training that I could put to use. By chance I learned that a friend of my mother was about to close out her lodging-house in Boston. I went to her and asked to be allowed to make the purchase on time.

Lodging-houses were not unknown to me, and I tried to think out why most of them were unsuccessful. As a result of my conclusions, I took the last $50 I had in the world, hired a furniture finisher, and with him set to work. With plenty of varnish, paint, soap, and hot water we made over the inside of that house. The white iron beds were freshly enameled, the oak furniture refinished, the upholstered chairs and couches newly covered with cretonne, velour, or leather picked up at bargains. The cost didn't exceed my $50, but the effect produced was as if many times that sum had been spent.

In a few weeks every room was rented, and I had a long waiting list, that grew longer as the word spread that there was one lodging-house that was clean and comfortable.

Two things, and two things only, I require of my lodgers. They must be orderly in their rooms, and must pay their rent in advance. And I stick to those rules. In return, each lodger has perfect freedom in his room, with no landlady dropping around unexpectedly to see if the gas is burning too brightly, or if he is using more than his share of hot water, or abusing such housekeeping privileges as are allowed.

Each room is supplied with plenty of clean towels, a change of bed linen and bureau scarfs once a week, and once every month is given a thorough cleaning, with clean curtains and bed-spread and freshly aired blankets. In eight months after I took over that house I had paid the last cent of indebtedness, besides earning a living for myself and my child. But it took the hardest kind of drudgery. I tended my own furnace, sifted the ashes, and did every bit of the laundry work for sixteen rooms, besides taking care of the rooms. Now, however, I was able to hire a man to do the heavy work, and, encouraged by my success, I took over another house, which I treated as I had the first, with similar results.

My days are crowded to the limit with work; but now, ten years after I made that first venture, I am buying and selling lodgng-houses on commission. And I never have to ask for time any more: I can write my check for whatever the amount calls for.

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

CUBIST ART IN OUR INSANE ASYLUMS

—By An Alienist

ACCORDING to the belief of Dr. Allan McLane Hamilton, writing in Scribner's Magazine, artists of futurist and cubist persuasion are most of them mentally unbalanced.

"To say that the 'Nude Descending the Stairway' or the 'King and Queen Surrounded by Nudes' reveals any meaning whatever, or recalls any previous impression or experience, is too much. It is therefore best to classify these people as impostors or actually insane."

Dr. Hamilton is a specialist in mental diseases, and he has made a close study of the kind of art turned out by patients in asylums. He finds it closely akin to so-called 'modern' art. By way of proof, he reproduces drawings by insane people which bear out his theory in startling detail.

Lunatics, for example, delight in drawings based on geometric designs. They are likely to ignore perspective and proportion. Their figures are often grotesque and tortured, and strangely incongruous elements are introduced into the same picture.

All these are characteristics common to the more extreme forms of modern art.

"Every asylum physician," says Dr. Hamilton, "may collect, if he chooses, a great quantity of pictorial productions by its inmates. The stuff is often meaningless; but there are exceptions, and I can recall the work of a patient of mine who had been a student under Gerome, and was himself a clever artist. As the result of overwork and privation he developed a religious insanity which led him to don a monk's robe and shave the top of his head.

"During his stay in Bloomingdale [a New York State hospital for the insane] he drew and colored the most marvelous mystic pictures, that were symbolic of religious subjects."

Cubist and futurist artists had better look to their laurels or Dr. Hamilton's patients may beat them at their own game.

THE POTATO-PLANTERS

IN 1758 one Parmentier, a Parisian chemist, was taken prisoner and sent to Hannover. Then, as now, the Germans were not noted as lavish hosts, and Parmentier was fed on potatoes, which were then grown only as food for animals. After five years in prison he returned to France, to find the grain crops a failure.

Parmentier immediately turned his prison experience to account, and wrote a book entitled "A Treatise on certain vegetables that in times of necessity can be substituted for ordinary food." Somebody sent a copy to the King, who saw to it that Parmentier was given a plot of ground with which to experiment. "The King," recounts Mr. Gilbert, author of "The Potato," "ordered the plot to be guarded with a cordon of troops, which excited the curiosity of the people. On August 24, the king's fete-day, he presented the King with a basket of the tubers and a bouquet of the blossoms. These were worn by the king and queen, who also ate the cooked tubers."

OUR HOME-MADE ELEPHANTS

EVERY available ton of shipping has been concentrated on the Atlantic; and this means that many of the articles that have been coming to us across the Pacific can not be transported until after the war—ivory, among the others.

What are we to do for ivory, since the useful elephant refuses to grow in our midst?

Science has answered that question, according to the Scientific American, by the production of a substitute of cotton chemically treated. It's as hard and shiny as the original, and will undoubtedly take the place permanently of ivory in many domestic uses.

Germany is not the only country where science is on the job.

PUNISHING SLACKERS

IN "Moore's Diary of the Revolution" is found the following, which was taken from the Pennsylvania Journal of July 16, 1777:

"We hear that the young ladies of Amelia County in Virginia, considering the situation of their county in particular, and that of the United States in general, have entered into a resolution not to permit the addresses of any person, be his circumstances or situation in life what they will, unless he has served in the American armies long enough to prove by his valor that he is deserving of their love."

THE DOG THAT BOUGHT A $1000 BOND

WHEN Geraldine Farrar mounted the steps of the. Public Library in New York City to sell Liberty Bonds to the gathered crowd, she was not alone. With her was Sniffles, her high born Pekinese.

While the traffic piled up and the crowd increased, Miss Farrarsang "The Star-Spangled Banner." Then the rush for bonds began.

In the very front of the line was Sniffles. So affected was he by his mistress's song that he insisted upon buying a $1000 bond. His name

was entered as Sniffles Tellegen, and after that Miss Farrar had to buy a $5000 bond herself.

Miss Farrar offered to hoist any man over the top who intended to buy a bond. She pulled several prospective buyers up by the arms. It was strenuous work, and a gentleman from South Carolina administered a rebuke to the crowd of outstretched hands by leaping up all alone. He also bought a thousand dollars' worth of bonds, and by way of payment Miss Farrar led him to the piano, where she sang for him alone.

IN EIGHT MONTHS EVERY GERMAN BOAT WAS REPAIRED

IT must be a bitter thought to the Germans that the soldiers who are being carried across to oppose them on the western front are being transported in German ships, built by German money, and relied upon by German capitalists to give Germany command of foreign markets after the war.

Documents that were found by the American authorities prove that the damage done to the prove ships in American harbors was ordered from Berlin; and that it was confidently expected that they would be out of business for at least eighteen months. Instead of which, the Bureau of Steam Engineering of the Navy Department had them ready for service in less than eight months.

"The time spent was chargeable less to the actual repair work than to the task of dismantling machinery to eliminate every chance of overlooking concealed mutilation," says the Iron Age. "Instances of pipe plugging, of concealing steel nuts and bolts in the cylinders, of depositing ground glass in oil pipes and bearings, of changing indicators, and of filling fire extinguishers with gasolene were common. There was no boiler that was not threaded through every pipe for evidence of plugging."

The German order to damage the ships was issued about February first: the last ship took her sea test and was ordered into service as a Thanksgiving gift for the nation.

HOW DO THEY DO IT?

A MAN who had had luncheon with Sir Douglas Haig at his headquarters was in our office recently. When the luncheon was over, Sir Douglas took his visitor into a room where the battle line was shown on maps covering four sides of the room.

"Here are located the troops of Genneral So-and-So," said Sir Douglas Haig, pointing to a spot in the enemy's lines. "He is a good commander, but he hates casualties, and we are not likely to have much trouble on that sector while he is holding it.

"And here is General So-and-So—a martinet. His men hate him, but he cares little for their opinion, and will sacrifice them ruthlessly if there is any advantage to be gained by doing so.

"Over here General So-and-So was replaced a couple of hours ago by General von—"

Despite the vigorous suppression of spies, every move on either side of No Man's Land is known almost as quickly as it takes place. The British know what German troops are facing them at every point, and the changes in the line; and the Germans have information just as accurate.

The story is told about an English regiment known popularly as the Bantams being sent into the line. Even the regiment to be relieved did not know what regiment was coming in.

But the Germans knew. The Bantams had hardly taken their place in the line before there sounded, in strong German accents: "Cock-a-doodle doo!"

---

TOO BIG

THE DIFFERENCE IN GENERALS

HINDENBURG and Ludendorff are reported to have said that they have 500,000 men to sacrifice on the western front. They talk of the lives of half a million men as if they were nothing.

It is not always so with generals. The men who commanded in our Civil War were sometimes brought almost to nervous collapse at the thought of the losses incurred under their leadership—insignificant as those losses seem in comparison with the casualties of to-day. At Gettysburg, when Lee had determined to attack, Longstreet remonstrated.

"Great God!" said Longstreet. "Look, General Lee, at the insurmountable difficulties between our line and that of the Yankees: look at the ground we'll have to charge over—nearly a mile of that open ground there under the ram of their canister and shrapnel."

"The enemy is there, General Longstreet, and I am going to attack him," was Lee's answer, as quoted in James Ford Rhodes's History of the Civil War (Macmillan Company).

The thought of the coming sacrifice preyed upon Longstreet. Pickett, who was to lead the charge, came to him in the afternoon for orders. "I found him," Pickett writes, like a lion at bay. I have never seen him so grave and troubled. For several minutes after I had saluted him he looked at me without speaking. Then in an agonized voice he said: 'I am being crucified at the thought of the sacrifice of life which this attack will make. I have instructed Alexander to watch the effect of our fire upon the enemy, and when it begins to tell he must take the responsibility and give you orders, for I can't.'"

Alexander, who had confidence in the attack because Lee had ordered it, was in charge of the Confederate artillery. When his ammunition began to run low, he sent a note to Pickett: "For God's sake come quick. Come quick or my ammunition will not let me support you properly." Pickett read it, handed it to Longstreet, and asked, "Shall I obey and go forward?" Longstreet, so Pickett wrote, "looked at me a moment, and then held out his hand. Presently, clasping his other hand over mine and, without speaking, he bowed his head upon his breast. I shall never forget the look on his face, nor the clasp of his hand when I said: 'Then, General, I shall lead my division on.'"

HOW ROCHESTER IS WINNING THE WAR

WHY have the war preparations gone ahead so much more rapidly and smoothly in some cities than in others? Why, for instance, is every factory in Rochester, which has a war contract, on time with its work; while yards and factories in other cities are lagging far behind?

The answer—according to Edward A. Filene, who writes in The Nation's Business—is that "the manufacturers of Rochester recognized that the government was not making its demands upon one munitions manufacturer alone, but upon Rochester as a manufacturing community."

As soon as the war broke out, the business men of Rochester got together and pledged themselves as a body to the success of Rochester's war work. Knowing that labor would be hard to get, they hired an expert employment manager, paying him $16,000. Through his effort, not only were hundreds of workers brought in from outside, but in many cases the manufacturers gave up from their own organizations first-class men so that there might be no lack in the war plants. To take care of the added workers, new houses were built and recreations provided.

"The immediate result," says Mr. Filene, "was that nearly 2,000 additional first-class workmen were furnished to one munitions plant, and more than 1,000 to others, in the first three months; and from that time to this they have kept up the supply so perfectly that, according to government report, the munitions plants have never been short a single workman."

In another city noted by Mr. Filene, there was a troublesome grade crossing which delayed the progress of workers in a shipyard on their way to and from work. The business men of the city took hold of the situation, and threw a bridge above the tracks in record time.

In other words, the war program is making most progress in the cities where business men recognize that it is the collective responsibliity of all, and not the responsibility of any one manufacturer.

THE ENGLISH ARISTOCRAT AND HIS JOKES

THE every-day life of aristocratic Englishmen, how they act and talk and feel, will never be completely understood by ordinary Americans. Some of it is explained in Winnowed Memories (Cassell & Company), in which Field Marshal Sir Evelyn Wood has strung together a thousand and more unconnected anecdotes of his life.

All in all, from the book it would appear that aristocrats live long, pleasant lives full of dangerous adventures, hunting, banquets, and leadership. From our point of view, however, they are remarkably unkind people.

Of his visit at one gentleman's country house he writes:

We were playing "family coach," the chairs being arranged in the hall into which three or four of the reception-rooms led. The library door was open, and I was chasing my hostess, When she felt that I was very near she sprinted for the dining-room, the door of which was open. By arrangement, my host was lying flat on his face in the doorway, and as she stepped lightly over him, he, with excellent timing, hunched his back with, to them, the desired result; for I went headlong into the dining-room about eight feet.

This same family, the Edward Saundersons, never overcame their liking for practical jokes. Saunderson was an influential landowner in Ireland, and fiercely opposed to Home Rule:

Many years afterwards an Englishman opposed to Edward Saunderson in politics was orating in the House of Commons on Ireland, about which he evidently knew but little. When they met after the debate, he, resenting Saunderson's masterly exposure of his ignorance, observed that he had never been in Ireland; and my friend, greatly given to hospitality, said: "Would you like to come over? I'll show you every side of it I can." The man said somewhat insolently: "Will you turn the pigs out of your home before I come?" "Certainly. We'll have them all out."

He went over to Ireland; and when the carriage drove up to the front door, Edward Saunderson and his wife were in a room over-looking it. There was a butler and two foot-men on the door-step who had been carefully instructed to jump aside as they threw open the folding doors. Saunderson had crammed the hall with pigs as tight as it would hold, who, sweeping out, knocked down the gentleman, running over him, to the great detriment of his clothing. His host from the upper window shouted to him: "See, I am keeping my promise. They are all out now."

THE FARMER

A Song from a Chinese Opera

As he walks he sings—

A LIFE of ease is not my lot,
Dig, dig, dig.
The weeds grow fast, the weeds climb high,
Big, big, big.
A gentleman rides in his chair,
Swing, swing, swing.
A lady sips tea in her silken room,
Sing, sing, sing.
The merchant piles his silver high,
Rich, rich, rich.
The tailor sits on his table smooth,
Stitch, stitch, stitch.
My back is turned to rain or shine,
Bare, bare, bare.
My prayer must turn the weather-vane
Fair, fair, fair.
My pigs grow thin, my debts grow large,
Sigh, sigh, sigh.
My children, cold, beg me for food,
Cry, cry, cry.
My wife is old before her time,
Old, old, old.
My hair is thin, my hands are hard,
Cold, cold, cold.

FOR RENT—PARADISE: $25 A MONTH

IF you are tired of the high cost of living, distracted over the servant problem, hungering for a comfortable home amid beautiful scenery, where winter never pokes its snowy, frost-bitten head in and the weather never gets too abominably warm, just pack up your troubles, throw them out the kitchen window, and go to Kuala Lumpor, Federated Malay States.

There, in that town whose name is pronounced Quala Lumpo, you will live under the reign of the Sultan of Selangor—who, it is said, gets his exercise by standing in his front door and jumping over the equator. British officers recently returned from there say it is architecturally one of the most beautiful little cities they have ever seen.

But, best of all, you can get a splendid modern house for yourself and your family, an unbelievable variety of good things to eat, and unlimited and efficient native help of all kinds, for from twenty to twenty-five dollars a month. Clothing is cheap, too.

And if you are an unmarried young woman you are promised no fewer than five proposals of marriage a month from the young Englishmen who work there for their government. And who fears marriage under such promising conditions?

There is only one drawback to this delightful place. Entertainment costs like fury. It costs a dollar and a half to go to the movies. Pianos are almost unattainable luxuries, and gramophone records sell for small fortunes. Then, too, it takes about sixty-five days from the port of New York to reach this place. But where else can you rent Paradise for twenty-five dollars a month?

IF THE GERMANS CUT THE CABLES

SUPPOSE a German raider were somehow to succeed in cutting the cables that unite this country with Europe, what would happen? How could our armies and navies operate cut off from quick communication with the home base? What rumors of disaster would fill the air to depress the public while it waited for ships to bring their slow reports?

This contingency has been foreseen and guarded against. The Navy Department is constructing in France a wireless station at a cost of $2,250,000, says the Wireless Age. It will be taken over by the French after the war: but during the war it will be in communication with the big new station now being completed at Annapolis. At present about 30,000 words daily are possible across the Atlantic by wireless: and the completion of these great sending and receiving stations will add another 50,000 words, or enough to take care of all the really necessary military and news despatches.

"An Invitation to Tea,"

by Sinclair Lewis

—continued from page 7

Northernapolis; bitterly ridiculed his loneliness and his naive supposition that he could have friendship for the asking. She listened with little sounds of comfort, and commented:

"Oh, I am sorry—so, so sorry! I needn't say how beastly I think they were. But do believe that not all rich New Yorkers are like that restless set."

"And I haven't even had any tea at my tea!"

"Neither have I!"

"Then come and have tea with me."

She merely smiled, and he insisted:

"I know all that you're going to say. It isn't proper, and you don't know me. But you do! You're the only person in New York, except my pet Italian bootblack, who has shown enough interest in me to listen to me. Come! If you are going to insist that you are a business woman, then you must be independent enough not to be afraid of a man who isn't introduced to you. And, as a business woman, you must know those new test stunts by which an employer can judge a man immediately by the shape of his head or the way he wears his ears."

"Yes. Your head is rather round. What does that show?"

"Well, according to one system, that it's solid ivory. But I prefer the rule laid down in Professor Yachowitz's book—remember? on page 163?—where it says: 'Round headed men from Northernapolis are always prominent members of the Y. M. C. A., and are not to be confused with bench-bunnies, as they invariably indulge in the most improving Sabbath conversation at tea.' Also, it is five and seven-elevenths inches from the center of my chin to my ear; that shows I would talk French to the waiter at the tea-room, and so get the cake that the cook was saving up to take home to her husband, who is a German baron."

"It sounds like a nice system. Let's see; my nose is about one and a quarter inches long."

"Yes! Yes! And that proves absolutely that you would do well in the newspaper business, that you play pirate, and that you know a lonely small boy even when he tries to act like a grown-up person, and you aren't angry when he comes bawling to you on a park bench."

"Yes. Perhaps!" She leaned toward him again, and, while he dared not move, she examined his eyes. "Your eyes are blue. What does that mean in the system?"

"Well, all authorities agree that it means my eyes are blue. But, personally, I think, and I find that all large employers of labor agree with me, it shows that if you went to tea with me, I would choose fat, shiny, hot English muffins."

"With a great deal of butter?" she said dreamily.

"Quantities! Come!"

SHE rose, still in the dream. As they left the park and turned down Fifth Avenue, she glanced curiously at him, and shook her head. He promptly observed:

"Now you are about to say: 'I really oughtn't to be doing this. I don't know anything about this person, except that he is what he would call fresh, and if I met any of my friends—'"

"I wasn't going to say anything of the kind. I was going to say that I am hungry! If I meet any one I know, I shall be defiant. There!"

There is no music at the Ramidan. Its tea-room is for lovers, who can make music enough for themselves. And there are no stolid tables with gilt chairs, but settees and deep lounge chairs in secluded corners. Round about is the laughter of men and girls in riding clothes or flannels, back from a day at Scarsdale or Mount Kisco. The guardian spirit of the room is a head waiter with a face like a Christmas pudding, who always makes you at home by remembering you—particularly if he has never seen you before.

In the half-dimness Carson watched his companion; saw her eyes soften to content. The crowd thinned; the room seemed larger and more public; but he obstinately kept from suggesting that she ought to go, till she glanced at her watch and exlaimed: "I didn't know it was so late! I must hurry."

"Has it been a happy tea?"

"Very happy."

"Will you come with me again?"

She was hesitant, and he begged:

"Don't think I want to intrude on your life. I don't know your name; I don't care—much—if I never do. But, if you really have liked playing with me, come and play again. I'm a lost soul here. But, if you want, you can find out all about me: I'm the representative of the Iron Filings Company that I spoke of, and the first vice-president of the Oil National Bank here knows something' about my reliability—"

"Reliability! What do you know about my reliability? Why, I may be a shop-lifter! Yes, I have been happy with you, and I will come to tea with you next Sunday, if you like."

He spontaneously held out his hand. Hers came to meet it; he felt the firm warmth of her fingers.

But she wouldn't let him call for her; didn't tell him who she was or where she lived; merely promised to meet him at that same bench in Central Park a week from that day. Then she was gone, and he watched her taking a 'bus. Her quick, clean tallness made him dream, not of 'buses, but of banners and gray walls and bright dawns of riding over heath and windy hill.

NEXT Sunday he was waiting for her not more than half an hour before the time, and she was not more than ten minutes late, and she came up smiling, and so they had a divine and quite senseless argument as to whether, in view of the fact that they certainly may be possessed by the devil, motor-cars have souls. Also they had a divine and rather expensive tea at the Pomponian Hotel, for which Carson had to make up by taking his meals at lunch-counters for the next two days.

Five Sundays in succession they met, after that. Their friendship carried Carson through the barren weeks.

THEN, one Sunday when they were to have met, she was missing; and the world was turned upside down, and he was in a frightful temper. He did not know her name, her address; he had no way of learning whether he was ever to see her again. But he went to the trysting-place the Sunday after that, hoping that she might appear. And at last, with his heart doing hand-springs, he saw her hurrying toward him, looking for him with a wistful intentness that was very sweet to him.

She waved to him. She approached him, not like a stranger now, and implored: "Have you forgiven me? I couldn't possibly get here last Sunday, and I'd forgotten the name of your company, so I couldn't call you up, and—"

"Did you hope that I'd be here to-day?"

"Well—"

"Did you, a little?" He took her arms at the elbows.

She turned her head and admitted: "Yes, I did."

"It's time you told me your name. I've—I've got to have something to call you by."

"Oh, call me Charlotte. Isn't that enough?"

"Yes; but then you'd have to call me Alec, and the last man that did that isn't out of the hospital yet. You might call me Bill. That's what most people I know do."

"No; it can't be done. And now, if you will give my elbows back to me,—you see, I really need them for playing the piano and doing my hair,—we will go ravening after our tea."

But she called him "William," "Billy," "Bill," and a very light and uninfectious case of "My dear," before they finished that tea, which turned into supper and wound up in a concert at Carnegie Hall. He went home tingling. But he knew nothing more about her than before. And he must know, he meditated. From her talk she might be almost anything: business woman, or daughter of a million dollars, or both; maid or wife or widow. Till he knew on what terms he might have the future, he could go no further; and he remembered hungrily the moment at the concert when he had tucked her hand under his arm, where she had let it confidingly remain.

At the end of their next party he asked cunningly: "Are you going to another concert to-night?"

They were almost alone in a tea-room of brown velvet and cat-footed French waiters, just off Fifth Avenue.

She mused wearily: "No; I think I shall go home and get a little rested."

He touched her wrist with his fingers, and suddenly, sharply, demanded:

"Are you married?"

"Why—why, no."

"Are you engaged?"

"Why, why, Billy—"

"Are you engaged to be married?"—savagely.

"Does it—"

"Are you? Oh, honey, you must tell me. Please!"

"No, I am not."

"What is your last name?"

"Dear, you haven't any right to catechize me like this. One of the perfect things about our running off together is that we've been something of a puzzle to each other. I've never looked you up in any way, and I enjoy the anonymity of being nothing or anything."

"I have every right. Happiness is the rarest thing in the world; and we've been happy together, and so we mustn't lose each other, ever, no matter how or what we are. Now you're going to let me take you home, and going to let me come calling on you. What is your name?"

"It's Kirk."

SHE seemed unhappy, frightened. He wondered what scandal, what fear, enveloped her.

She gave as her address a small apartment hotel in the East Thirties—a rather dingy place for one of her radiance, her taste in clothes, yet not unsuitable for the business woman she asserted herself to be. But when he had taken her there, when she had left him in the lobby and gone to the desk to get her key, he was suddenly sure that she did not live there at all, that she wasn't even known.

The clerk did not reach for a key at her approach. She went up to him, murmured something to him. He pushed the register forward. Again she murmured, and he looked over a rack of cards, selected a key, gave it to her. As she walked toward the elevator, she glanced shyly back at the entrance hall. But she did not see Carson: he was watching from behind a tall chair. And there he stood stupidly for two minutes after she had gone up in the elevator.

She certainly did not live there. She had merely taken a room for the night. She was deliberately deceiving him as to her residence. Why?

That "why?" mocked him through an evening of savage walking in which he discovered a whole new city of barren and endless uptown avenues, with miles of gloomy flats, and roaring main cross-streets, at which he stopped for coffee and crullers and lengthy talk with waiters about nothing at all, that he might for-get the suspicion that there was some-thing sinister connected with Charlotte.

Was it something threatening her? Whatever it might be, was it something from which he might protect her?

At seven next morning Carson was pa-

You Can Teach Children Almost Anything

PUBLIC schools are beginning to realize that not all children are usual.

The one deaf child, for instance, does not fit in with the ninety-nine who have normal hearing. So New York has devoted an entire school building to the hard of hearing. In a class of about forty, which I visited, only one child had ever heard.

When children of five and six years come to school, they are undisciplined, grimacing, gesticulating little animals. The first and perhaps hardest thing they learn is to keep their hands folded, and to realize, even vaguely, that there is another medium of communication. Because of lack of use, these children have little control of their lips and almost none of their tongues. By vibration and imitation they are taught the mysteries of speech and lip-reading. The child puts one hand on the teacher's throat and the other on his own throat. Then he says ba-ba-ba, at first only with his lips, later with a little voice, and finally until he feels the same vibration in his own throat as in his teacher's.

Gradually he learns many sounds—oo, for instance, which later becomes m—oo, and finally m—oo—n. Then the children are shown a picture of the moon, and they learn to speak and later to write it. K and the hard c are extremely difficult to master: so when a deaf child says proudly, "I see a cow," the teacher feels she has indeed achieved a triumph.

Of course, the first verbs a deaf child is taught are words of action, such as jump, skip, fall, throw. All these can be illustrated. The nouns are objects of which the child is shown the original or a picture. In the lip-reading class the children are given picture books. "I see a man and a dog," says the teacher. Hastily the children thumb their books. There is a moment of tense silence. Then the teacher exhibits a picture of an old man and a fat dachshund, and all the children who have read her lips successfully exhibit gleefully a corresponding picture. Then they go to the board and write, with the scrawling earnestness of any first-grader, the startling legend: "I see a man and a dog."

Since the deaf child never hears music, he has no sense of rhythm and he speaks with a nerve-racking monotony. To overcome this, primitive folk-dances, with a simple but definite accent, are taught to the children, and their bodies soon learn to respond. They are later taught to repeat phrases in varying tempos, and the effect of these exercises is soon noticeable in their speech.

Mrs. Nitchie, of the New York School for the Hard of Hearing, says that perhaps only three people in every hundred have perfect hearing, and that the number of the very deaf is much larger than is commonly supposed. "No class of afflicted people," she says, "are so moody or despondent. They feel that they are set apart from the rest of the world, and that there is no bridge for them to cross on." Lip-reading, of course, builds the bridge. The deaf child, especially, should never be made to feel that he is peculiar or lacking.

BERNICE BROWN.

"An Invitation to Tea"

—Continued from page 18

trolling the street of the hotel at which she was staying. At eight-fifteen, after a million eons, or a couple of centuries, or at least an hour and a quarter, of waiting, he saw Charlotte emerge from the hotel and hurry toward Madison Avenue. She seemed crisp and preoccupied, innocent of anxiety. She took a north-bound Madison Avenue car, toward the section of malefactors.

IN all the detective stories Carson had read, people always signaled taxis, gave the chauffeurs great quantities of money, and bade them follow the escaping car. Carson intended to follow these historic examples. Only—there wasn't any taxi in sight. So he ran wildly after her trolley, caught it at the next corner, and took a seat by the door, shielding his face with his morning paper. He could see Charlotte in the front of the car.

She left the car at Seventy-second Street, he at the next corner. He trotted back, and saw her hurrying along Seventy-second toward the park. He followed her at a distance, but not so great a distance that he failed to see her turn in at a Tudor house—the house of Nina Brundage.

His first remark was: "What a fool I've been! Why, she was coming right along this block the very first time I ever laid an eye on her."

That morning the Northernapolis Iron Filings Company was totally unrepresented in New York. Carson sat for hours in the park—not on the familiar bench near the gate, but in the cloistered shelter of a group of trees. He was desperately giving up the hope of seeing Charlotte Kirk again—of ever rising again to the pride of companionship with her.

Whether she was a relative of Nina Brundage or merely a friend, she was enmeshed in that vicious set. Though she herself might have kept clean of their idle unkindliness, they would never let him enter; they would not welcome Mr. Alexander Hamilton Carson, with his twenty-five hundred a year income, as a very desirable matrimonial candidate.

Very well, then; he would become rich.

When Carson at last went to his office, he decided that he would need at least the president's salary of eighteen thousand a year to present himself to the Brundages as anything except a pauper.

Aside from the sales-manager, aged thirty-seven, the purchasing agent, aged forty-four, the general manager, aged fifty, the inheriting vice-president, aged thirty, and the president, aged sixty-seven and distressingly healthy, there were only about five ambitious rivals of Carson's own age whom he had to pass to become president. He ought to have an excellent chance to be president by the time he was sixty. He might not have to wait for Charlotte more than twenty-eight years. With which Carson firmly put on his hat, went out, and ate a belated lunch. He also made up for his recent hopes by scoffing at himself as a fool.

For two days he lived in drifting blackness.

He was on the job; he sold an excellent order; he answered telephone calls in a self-possessed voice—and the very coldness of that self-possession showed how the gaiety he had borrowed from Charlotte had gone out of him.

He knew one thing definitely—he could not see her again. Soon he didn't know even that. And at two of an afternoon he was calling up the Brundage house. Then he was asking some one where he could reach Miss Charlotte Kirk, and the some one was saying, "I'll call her," and Charlotte herself was talking to him. It occurred to him that she knew nothing of all his agony. She was merely surprised, and perhaps a little uneasy that he should have known where to find her.

"You must come out to tea with me this afternoon!"

"Must?"

"I mean—I mean I must see you. I—well, don't you see, I must!"

"I can't possibly, not this afternoon."

"Then for dinner to-night."

"Well, I'll try. If I can, I'll meet you at the same place. But I can't come till seven-thirty."

He had intended by a manner of stately disapproval to rebuke her for daring to be too rich for him; but he had been too grateful to be disapproving. So he set himself at the task of making cheerful young Mr. Carson into a man of granite, with an iron will, icy eyes, and manganese jaws. He was willing to compromise a little. He wouldn't finally and cruelly re-fuse to marry her because she was rich; but he would make her understand how poor he was, and what it meant to be poor—a thing no intimate of the Brundage house could comprehend. He would take her to a cheap restaurant for supper; give her breaded veal cutlet with spaghetti a la can, and bread pudding. He would be stern and plain-faced with her.

But when, in an autumn dusk, he saw her coming to meet him,—saw that she had put on a dinner frock and a cloak,—he entirely forgot about being stern. He wanted to kneel to her—and then take her to Sandoval's for dinner! He desperately clutched at his remnant of severity, and walked with her down to the Hygiene Lunch on Columbus Circle. They avoided all seriousness; they tried to make talk about polo—in regard to which Carson knew that it was a form of croquet played either on horseback or in motor-cars.

SHE seemed mildly astonished when he led her to the glaring, tiled, rackety Hygiene Lunch; but she followed him in. He did take her to the back of the restaurant, lest one of her friends happen to go by and see her there. But he stuck to his high moral principles about ordering breaded veal cutlets.

She managed to eat her cutlet without comment. He admired her pluck, and suddenly he was talking about himself as he had never done: telling her of his boy-hood, the magic days in Northernapolis Central High School, and his triumphs on the basket-ball team. The restaurant was almost empty. They were alone, across the long table from each other, in those end seats next to the wall which are the private dining-rooms of the poor. She seemed to be revolving vast hidden thoughts; yet she listened intently, leaning on her round bare elbows, her neck glowing in the glare of the Hygiene arc lights, her soft coloring making the clashing tiles as blatant as bass-horns.

He had slipped into telling her of his ambitions:

"I sha'n't ever be a magnate; but the company does like my work, and I'll probably be sales-manager, or even general manager, some day. I'll have a fairly decent house in the Forest Park district of Northernapolis, and belong to the country club, and play tennis every evening; and in winter we'll—I'll get up a group of jolly young married couples and go out for the winter sports—skiing and tobogganing: lots of red knitted caps and blanket coats, and everybody rosy-checked and hollering like a lot of children; and then at dusk we'll shoot into the country club for coffee and sandwiches by the big fire. People that like you, easy and friendly—and some responsibility in the community. Person counts for something there; not lost, as one is here. But—"

Into his voice had crept a misty warmth of memory, which vanished as he complained:

"But what is all that to you? Our games there would seem frightfully provincial to you. Charlotte, why did you fool me? You don't live at that hotel you went to the other night."

"Why—no, I don't."

"You'd never been there before."

"No."

"I knew it, but I've kept on hoping that

---

perhaps I was wrong. Well, I can't afford to play with you. I make just twenty-five hundred a year, and I save eight hundred to a thousand of that. From your standpoint, I'm a pauper. I know now that you are sure enough one of the Brundage set. Of course I knew it all the time; it was obvious that you were fairly well-to-do. But I had persuaded myself that maybe you weren't so—oh, so brutally rich as they are. Of course I was a fool. Isn't it filthy to talk of money like this! But it's forced on me by my memory of that gilded tea at the Brundages'. I've thought of us hitherto as a man and a woman—honey, it's been terribly sweet to think of us that way; to touch your hand at that concert. But of course we aren't just a man and a woman; I'm a bumptious outsider, nad you're of Nina's own court circle."

"Billy, I haven't ever intended to see you again!"

Now, Billy's hadn't intended to see her again, either; but that ws different, and he wailed: "Why? When we've been such wonderful—"

"No, not ever again. That's why I went to that hotel. I deliberately planned to lose you. I don't know how you found I'm at the Brundages'; I didn't mean you to."

"Wh-hy?"

"Because I knew we were getting fond of each other; getting to depend on each other—"

He reached forward to cup her hand in his. She evaded him, and hastened on:

"—and I thought you were too rich for me!"

"You thought I was too what?"

"Too rich! I thought—you see, I too have this Brundage-New York disease of supposing that money makes a difference. I thought you could never take a very, very poor young person like myself seriously! How could I tell about you? You are the New York manager of something or other. You—you really do, Billy—you dress very nicely. You took the haunts of gilded muffins quite casually. How could I tell?" She was racing on now, panting a little, looking at him eagerly. So close, so intimate were they, a tropic island in this glemaing sea of tiles. "You were right; I don't live at the hotel. But I don't live at the Brundages' either. I have a perfectly miserable furnished room. I have to spend nearly all I make for clothes, to keep my job. Yes, job—not business, or anything so lofty. I go to the Brundages' to teach Nina's little sister her music, and to play for Nina's tea-dances, and to act as Nina's social secretary, and to stand her abuse when she is bored. And she's bored pretty often, and really a very capable abuser."

"Oh, I know, I know! I've seen her at it."

"And this is the best meal I've ever had for two days. I'm isolated between the masters and the servants at the Brundages' and don't get as good meals as either. And—and—I want to cry!"

Tears were in her eyes, but Carson's hands were about hers. Then he saw that the Hygiene head waitress, who looked, and apparently felt, exactly like a cathedral gargoyle after a bombardment, was watching them disapprovingly. He straightened up—tried to think of ways of making a kiss invisible.

BESIDE him towered their brawny Irish waitress. She bent over and muttered; "Don't mind that old devil of a head waitress. If yez wants to kiss the lady, go ahead, and I'll make a screen for ye. I always knew there was some reason why I was made so fat."

The waitress revolved her bulk between them and the world, and stood with folded arms. Behind her, Carson looked sharply at Charlotte, then leaned across and kissed her wet cheek.

"And," wailed Charlotte—"and I'm going to be a baby. I'm going to get all the sympathy I can! I've held it in so long. Will you believe me? I didn't really have such a bad family, even if I am a kind of musical scullery-maid—"

"Oh, hang families! Of course you had a bully one. Can't I see—"

"And to-night Nina wanted me to stay to play for a little dance, and I had to promise to be back at nine-thirty, and she scolded me frightfully for going out at all, while Monty sat there and grinned; and now I must go back—"

"You must go nothing! We'll take this chance of getting a tiny bit even with Nina, anyway, and then we're going to forget this breaded cutlet in a real party."

He dragged Charlotte into the dim telephone-booth behind the cashier's desk.

"Miss Brundage? Miss Nina Brundage? Oh, Miss Brundage, this is Mr. X 27....Yes, that 'unspeakable man.'...Why, I dare call you up because I wanted to say that you'd better have Monty run the phonograph for your dance to-night. It's work that he's perfectly suited for. You see, Miss Kirk won't be able to play for you, because she and I are having our private engagement dinner and kitchen-shower. We're to be married in a couple of days. I know you'll be overjoyed to hear that if you hadn't invited me to tea I'd never have been up on Seventy-second and met her. Good-by, Nina."

"Well—I—Really—" worried Charlotte.

But the telephone-booth proved too small an inclosure for worried discussion, though exactly the right size for him to be inspired to hold her very close.

He's Hoover to the Ducks

WHEN Clyde Terrel was a small boy, folks used to shake their heads and say he'd better be putting in his time in some more useful way than hanging about the lake marsh, spying on the wild ducks. But Clyde kept right on making friends with the ducks, and before he was in his teens he could tell who was who in the duckdom of central Wisconsin by the bird calls, knew what they ate, how they ate, and all about their feeding time.

He knew, too, of the efforts, mostly futile, that had been made to attract the wild fowl to places where they would be safe from indiscriminate slaughter, and he got an idea of how to put all his knowledge to work. He had noticed that wild rice was the favorite food of march ducks such as mallards, teal, and pintails, while wild celery was the choice of the deep-water fowl, canvasbacks, redheads, blue-bills, and the like. As he planned to be the Hoover of the ducks, he began to study the gathering, storing, shipping, and planting of seeds. Failures had been many because the seeds would not germinate; but Terrel learned to keep them alive by placing them in damp bags on ice.

He went into the business of selling food for wild fowl, and found a demand for his services in advinsing State preserves, game clubs, and individuals what plants to introduce into lakes and streams as attractions for wild ducks and geese. He has planted wild celery and rice all over the United States and Canada. His work has been so successful that places once deserted by the birds have become, under his care, happy hunting grounds for great flocks. Last year his business amounted to several thousand dollars, and it is growing rapidly. Although he is only twenty-one, Terrel is recognized as an authority on the feeding habits of wild fowl, and his work has been indorces by the Department of Agriculture as having an important influence on the propagation and conversation of valuable food birds.

This is His Week

HE was one of those people who won't stay put—the pioneers, the path-finders of the world. Jacques Marquette was born in a village in Picardy, June 1, 1637, not very many years after the establishment of the first French colony in Canada. When he came of age he was ordained a priest. But he was consumed with a desire to go to the new Canadian colonies with the Word of God. He went to Quebec, and found it already a flourishing outpost of civilization. So he plunged into the trackless places of the west, traveling until he struck a spot that was wild enough for even his adventurous soul—the Strait of Mackinaw. Here he established a mission, and lived for years, teaching the way of the white man to the red man.

Accompanied by a trapper named Joliet, Marquette set out in May, 1673, traveling in canoes along the northern shore of Lake Michigan. Everywhere he met Indians who begged him not to attempt it. It could not be done, they said. It was true that there was such a river, but in the river dwelt a demon whose roar could be heard for miles around. "I have never seen a demon," said Marquette; "I should like to encounter one." They reached the banks of the Mississippi, and followed it for a thousand miles; after which Marquette returned, and died in 1675 with a contented mind.

Can a Man Strengthen His Own Will?

Concluded from page 5

would like to think of ourselves as "standing like a tower when everything rocks" around us. If that sort of stability is really possible through regular exercises, what kind of exercises must they be?

How to Do It

FIRST of all, they must be varied, Professor Barrett answers. It is essential that they should not grow too monotonous: the interest must not be allowed to flag. Yet they must be so trivial in character as to insure the necessity for some exercise of will to keep them going. Merely to set one's self to reading a few passages a day in a book, for example, would hardly do. The swing of the reading itself would shortly eliminate any necessity for the exercise of will power. To stand absolutely still for a time would be a far better exercise. And, finally, the application of these exercises must be continuous.

"During the five or ten minutes devoted to them," he says, "the tasks should go on without interruption. If a break occurs, the task should be begun again. If we suppose, for instance, that the task is to drop, slowly and deliberately, one by one, fifty matches into a box each day for ten days; and one is interrupted after the twentieth match, then, when the interruption has been removed the task should be begun all over again and completed.

"Similarly, if on the fifth day one forgets the task entirely, then on the following day the whole set of ten tasks should be begun again, and the four already completed be canceled."

"It's dogged that does it," say the British. And that is the secret of will-power development.

Here is a typical exercise as noted in a patient's book. And, by the way, the exercise determined upon ought always to be written down somewhere. Let it be a written compact with yourself: give your will power that much added brace, and yourself the satisfaction of reading the record at a later date.

"Resolution, August 11, 1913.

"Each day for the next seven days I will stand on a chair, here in my room, for ten consecutive minutes, and I will try to do so contentedly."

Here is the report for the first day, entered in the patient's diary:

"Exercise a little strange and unnatural. Had to smile, or cross my arms and stand akimbo, in order to feel contented. Time went quickly and pleasantly. Found it hard keeping 'willingly contented' and doing nothing. Of course, I had distracting thoughts, such as 'What would this experiment lead to?' 'Would any one come in?' etc. The ticking of my watch was annoying;"

And the second day's report was the following:

"Task passed easily and not unpleasantly. Had feeling of contentment and even a kind of pride or manfulness in fulfilling my will. I felt, too, braced up, not merely in my mind, but also physically by the mere exercise of willing and fulfilling my resolution. At one moment I feared interruption (hearing a step outside my room), but was very glad when it passed by. Had distractions and felt a little unnatural."

The final report was this:

"Task passed quietly and fairly quickly. Some distractions and less 'exciting.' I felt satisfaction, not so much sensible as mental, in fulfilling my resolution. Also I experienced a modest sense of strength and power in having been as good as my word. The feeling of being 'braced up' was much less marked—the effort at 'contentment' came easier. There was no feeling of ennui or monotony."

The next ten days were devoted by this individual to another exercise; the following ten to still a third. And gradually, little by little, this man—who had fallen into a condition where positive, persistent action seemed impossible to him—built back in himself the power to will and to do.

Why Not Gymnastics for the Will?

IT is strange, when you think of it, that we should devote so much of the education of our lives to our mere Intelligence, and so little to the strengthening of the one greatest source of pure power within us. Perhaps we are on the threshold of a new day in that respect. The exercises of the gymnasium are in themselves curious enough; but we have become accustomed to them: we know their value and accept them as a matter of course. May it not happen, in time, that every practical life will include, along with its daily ten minutes of physical upbuilding, another ten of will development?

Such exercises as Professor Barrett indicates strike us as trivial and strange enough: but familiarity with them would soon rob them of their strangeness. And that they do, if properly persisted in, produce real results, his experiments have proved beyond a doubt.

THE EDITOR ANSWERS

"We hear," according to the New York Evening Post, "of knapsacks glued together and falling to pieces after the first day's use; of uniform coats which are torn to pieces with a slight pull of the fingers; of blankets too small if they were good, and too poor stuff to be useful if they were of the proper size; shoes, caps, trousers, coats-- all too often of such poor material that before a soldier is ready for service he must be clothed anew."

Very discouraging, isn't it? But, vefore you give way to gloom, let me hasten to add that the quotation is not from a current number, but from an issue of June, 1862--and relates to the Civil War, which was fought in the good old days when every one was efficient and unselfish.

Probably our present administration is pretty bad in spots; but one reason why I have not adopted the universal Pastime of muchracking is that I have read a good deal about our previous wars. And I feel pretty certain that--with all the failures--this war is being run a good deal better than any opther we have ever been mixed up in.

Settled at Last

Dear Sir:

As a rule you print some pretty good stuff: but how could you have allowed those "Experiences that Can Not be Explained" to get by you? The writers speak of them as "super-natural." There is no supernatural. Everything in the universe is natural. Can we Dis-cover that God has been influenced, either way, by the billions of prayers that have been sent up to Him by all concerned in this great war? Why delude your readers with talk of God and the supernatural?

K. G. L., Pennsylvania.

Of course, folks have been puzzling over these matters for centuries, K. G. L. And even such scientific gentlemen as Sir Oliver Lodge and John Fiske, And even such more or less eminent gentlemen as Glad-stone and Lincoln, have been mislead with the idea that there is a God. We are glad to have this direct authoritative letter from you, settling the matter once for all.

A Pat on the Head for Us

Dear Sir:

EVERY WEEK is like our neighbor's child to me. I've known it since the day of its birth; and I have liked the sensation of going to the news-stand to buy it. I've enjoyed asking for it where I knew it wasn't kept, and then later finding it displayed there.

F. W., New York.

We're trying to make this magazine a good child, and agreeable to all of you who are its neighbors. But the time is coming, we fear, when it will no longer be a child. There are evidences that it is going to be bigger: we wouldn't wonder if about next year you'd be exclaiming: "Can that be our little one? Gracious, how he has changed!"

We Make These Mistakes So as to Attract Letter from Folks Like You

Dear Sir:

In these days of war, I should think there were enough people making us worry without you starting in. Why didn't you publish the name of the lady you described in last week's issue under the heading "Who is She?" I guessed the name, but nobody in the office agreed with me; and when the magazine came this morning, you should have seen the dive for it.

I waited for the verdict, and discovered, to my honor, that the discussion would last, not only for another week, but--if you don't publish the answer next week--perhaps for ever.

Now, sir, when you ask yourself to-night. "Have I tried to do my best to-day; have I tried to uplift the working classes?"--remember that there is one woiking-goil who awaits your next issue anxiously. It is very hard to have the office-boy look at one scornfully and insist that he knew that there "ain't no such goil--they only put it in for fun," and not be able to prove the lordly one wrong.

I've read your magazine ever since it came out; so I feel that you and I are very good friends; and I want to ask you to please have an article about Greenwich Village. I want to know why is a Bohemian; and how do those fellows who drink so much coffee, and look so soulful, live.

I. F. D., New York.

Well, I. F. D., the lady's name has long since been printed, of course. We had her scheduled in the proper issue; but at the last moment along came an extra advertisement and knocked her out.

Just a little example of the tragedy of American life--business first always, and the neglected wife and sweetheart having come along afterwards.

Put the Other Ninety Cents into W.S.S.

Old Pal--Dear Bruce:

That's the way I feel like addressing you every time I pick up a copy of EVERY WEEK. There is so much of real information and help in its short articles. How do you crowd so much into such little space? I feel, when I finish a copy, as if I had received about one dollar's worth. Keep up the good work, and may you cross the million mark soon.

G. A. C., Naval Training Station, Newport.

If we can contribute a little pep to fellows like you, G. A. C., and you can use it in strafing the Kaiser, we'll feel a little less discontented back here in our safe, warm homes. And maybe we'll be with you yet over there. Who knows?

One of a Big Family

THIS boy with the shin-ing morning face is Lewis Curtis, of Chicago. He is getting a business training, and hopes to pay for a college course, by selling EVERY WEEK. When the superintendent of a large concern told Lewis that boys weren't allowed to sell things there, Lewis that boys weren't allowed to sell things there, Lewis said he was sorry, and gave him a compliment of EVERY WEEK with his compliments. Next week he went back and asked the man how he liked the magazine. The superintendent said, "Bully," and presented Lewis with the freedom of the shop. He landed fifty customers.

At another factory the superintendent looked at EVERY WEEK and said: "I'm not sure that this is the highest form of literature."

Said Lewis: "Neither am I, but I guess it's a heap better than anything you've been reading lately." A man with the superintendend laughed and bought a copy; then he introduced Lewis to the heads of the departments as "Mr. Curtis, of the personal representative of EVERY WEEK," and Lewis got another lot of customers.

He says that any live boy can do as well as he has.